In this video you'll learn why you might blame yourself for everything, how this can be a trauma response from your childhood, and how to stop doing it. And we're going to use Batman as an example. I'm Batman.
But first, have you ever taken a shortcut even though you weren't really supposed to? I mean, it seems like way too much effort to walk around this, so of course I'm going to take the shortcut too. No big deal.
Here's the thing: your brain does this all the time. It takes these little shortcuts to save on time and energy. And while cutting across the grass causes a little bit of harm, there are some types of brain shortcuts that can cause a lot of harm, especially in the way you process trauma.
So let me give you an example. Let's say you're a little kid. You spill the milk.
Your dad blows up at you and yells, "What's the matter with you? Why'd you do that? " Which one's easier for a kid to think?
Hmm, my parent doesn't seem safe. I wonder about the difficulties of being an adult and the nuances of simultaneously being a good person while also making a bunch of mistakes, or thinking, "Ah, it's all my fault. " It's clear to see how taking the mental shortcut of "it's all my fault" is actually a much easier route than the emotional gymnastics of figuring out why people do bad things.
But if we keep blaming ourselves, over time we can end up feeling guilty, ashamed, depressed, or angry. So in this video we'll explore this common cognitive distortion of self-blame, and we'll look at some practical ways to replace it with more helpful thinking. Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of what's happening in the world, but the brain's interpretation is not always correct.
It takes these cognitive shortcuts that aren't completely accurate. These are called automatic thoughts. And we don't usually notice them.
But we can learn to be more aware of them. One type of automatic thought is to assume the worst. So does this sound familiar?
"If I get a bad grade I'm going to fail and never get a good job. " Or we might see things in extremes. "Nothing good ever happens to me.
" The first one is called catastrophizing, and the second one is called overgeneralizing. Blaming ourselves for things that aren't our fault is another common automatic thought. It might look like, "If I hadn't made him mad, he wouldn't have hit me.
" So will a bad grade mean you'll never get a good job? No. Does nothing good ever happen to you?
No. Good stuff happens every day; we just have to notice it. And do you have control over the physical actions of another person?
Was was it your fault that you were hit? No. But we believe these thoughts all the time.
And self- blame is one of the most common forms of cognitive distortions. Aaron Beck, one of the first scientists to describe cognitive distortions, tells the story of a depressed woman who blamed herself when their picnic was ruined by a thunderstorm. Obviously no one controls the weather, right, but a person in the mental rout of self-blaming will take on guilt over things that went wrong, even when those things were out of her control.
There are three common ways people blame themselves. Number one: they take full responsibility for every situation, as in, "It's my fault my parents got divorced" or "It's my fault my brother died. " Number two: they believe that they should have seen it coming.
"I should have known that it would rain on my wedding day. " Or three: they make it about their own personal deficiencies. "I'm just so [fill in the blank] lazy, stupid, inconsiderate, idiotic, clumsy," right?
It can be surprisingly easy to fill in that blank. Do you see how often and how easily we can slip into self-blame? Now, thankfully, just because you think something doesn't mean it's true.
So if we take an honest look at ourselves, we only repeat behaviors that are somehow rewarding in some way. So why the heck would we like to blame ourselves? Let's dive deeper into how our brains work, especially when we have a trauma response.
In Batman Begins, young Bruce Wayne got scared and asked his parents to leave the theater, but then they were killed in the alleyway. Recognizing young Bruce's trauma is not difficult. He witnessed the murder of both of his parents, and this led to brooding over what could have been done to prevent their deaths.
This 10-year-old's brain needed to make some explanation for why his parents died, and so Bruce did what is so common in real life: he blamed himself. And he held on to that wrong story long into adulthood. Alfred.
Yes, Master Bruce. It was my fault, Alfred. I made them leave the theater.
No, no, no. How does trauma lead to self-blame? Trauma is essentially when a situation overwhelms our capacity to manage it.
Because trauma floods our emotional centers with fear or anger, we don't have the capacity to make nuanced assignments of accountability. So this is where the brain takes that easy shortcut to self-blame. We are much more likely to blame ourselves when the stress is high or our resources are diminished.
When you're feeling fresh and energetic you might take the longer sidewalk, but when you're exhausted or carrying a huge backpack, you'll be more likely to take the grassy shortcut. Same thing with trauma. Instead of learning about the various villains who killed his family, Bruce Wayne took the shortcut and blamed himself.
He was just a little kid. He was all alone. He didn't have the contextual awareness to understand the complicated causes behind crime and violence.
Victims often resort first to self-blame, and then they hang on to that thinking, even in the case of crime, victimization, or accidents. And so blaming ourselves is a shortcut to make sense of the world when we're overwhelmed or traumatized. There's a few more reasons why self-blame can feel rewarding in the short term, even though it hurts us in the long run.
Self-blame can give us a sense of control. It might be scary to think that our own choices can't fully protect us from bad things happening, so by believing that things would have been better if we'd done something different, we try to gain a sense of power over an unwanted outcome, and that can make us feel secure. One woman described it this way: "I used to get harassed on dating apps, which I now realize I had no control over, but at the time I would just fret about what tiny adjustments I could make to my dating profile so that the disturbing comments would stop.
" Do you see how instead of holding others accountable, she created a false sense of control by blaming herself? Here's another one: taking blame can protect the peace in relationships that we're dependent upon. So just think about a time when you were a kid coming home late from curfew.
Maybe your your friends were being irresponsible. You arrive home, and your mom's angry. She waited up for you.
If you said, "I'm sorry, Mom, it's all my fault that we were late," that probably helped your mom calm down. You took the blame to keep the peace. Now, at an extreme level, putting blame on ourselves might feel safer or be safer than blaming a dangerous person.
So if you're in an abusive relationship, your survival response, the fawn response, might override logic and take the blame in order to prevent retaliation. When we're young we simply don't have the capacity to see the flaws and wounds of our caregivers, so we make sense of things by blaming ourselves. This also maintains our sense of security by believing that our parents are capable of protecting us.
But too often we carry that idea of "It must be my fault" with us into adulthood. And this can show up as beliefs like, "I'm never good enough. " Blaming ourselves is also easier than taking action to address someone else's wrongdoing.
So for example, if the government is not doing its job, then I would need to go protest or call my senator or take some other energy-sucking action. And lastly, sometimes blaming ourselves is just a habit that we learned, whether it's from our victim-blaming society or our family of origin. But the king is dead, and if it weren't for you, he'd still be alive.
It's my fault. It's my fault. The good news is, if we learned it, we can unlearn it.
Hey, everyone if you are looking for a comprehensive therapeutic training to help you manage tough emotions, check out my membership. It includes access to all of my courses, bonus videos and content, plus a live monthly Q&A where you can ask me your questions directly. If a membership isn't for you, you can also purchase each of my courses individually with a one-time payment.
But if self-blame is something you're dealing with, I'd recommend the How to Process Your Emotions course. In it we tackle issues like self-blame by identifying distorted thoughts and building healthier coping strategies. This course is included in the membership, but it's also available as a one-time purchase.
And I've had so many students call this course lifechanging. One of them even said that she started singing again and dancing and smiling after years of struggle. Now, I have lots of free content here on YouTube, but again, if you're looking for something more structured and actionable with steps in a workbook, this might be worth considering.
Okay. Check it out. Link's in the description.
And um back to the video. Okay. So blaming ourselves is a mental shortcut that our brain takes when we're overwhelmed.
It's super common, but it also hurts us. So what do we do instead? We've got to get out of autopilot and manually choose to process through trauma in a more honest and helpful way.
So we're going to identify our distorted thinking, we're going to question it, and we're going to replace it with something more helpful. Okay. So number one: let's recognize our distorted thinking.
Okay. So just because we think something doesn't mean it's true. The easiest way to recognize distortions is to ask yourself, "Would I treat a friend this way?
Would I blame them for what happened? " If the answer is no, you're using emotional reasoning, an illogical approach that's unfair to yourself. So let's try to catch ourselves in these thoughts.
Here's six signs that you're blaming yourself. Number one: feeling guilty, helpless, or worthless. Number two: thinking or saying "It's all my fault.
" Notice that "all. " That's exaggerated. Number three: you apologize too much.
Number four: you downplay other people's responsibility. Number five: you believe that you're irreparably flawed, like "Oh, I'm just never good enough. " Or number six: you think that you should be able to see the future.
When you catch yourself doing these things, say out loud, "I'm self- blaming again. " And this is called decentering or cognitive defusion. It's stepping outside your thoughts and noticing your thinking, and that can allow you to kind of detach from that belief.
We don't want to get caught in a struggle of like arguing with our thoughts, like "Is it my fault? It's not my fault. Yes, it is my fault.
No, it's not my fault," right? That distracts us from our life purpose, our values, our goals in life. Instead, we just want to separate from them, notice them - "Oh, hello, thought.
There is that blaming thought again" - and then redirect our attention to the kind of life we want to live. Okay. So that's number one - noticing our thoughts, noticing our self-blaming thoughts.
Number two: the next thing we can do is get clear on taking responsibility. There are plenty of times we mess up, and we can learn to do better next time by taking responsibility for our actions. The key is to know what we're actually responsible for - that is, what was actually in our control.
So to get clear on this I would recommend asking yourself, what are all the factors that led to this event happening? And we're going to write them down and assign responsibility with a pie chart. So when you get this all out on paper, you can see that Bruce couldn't have prevented his parents' deaths because the man who was responsible was the man who pulled the trigger.
There were also societal factors that were pretty overpowering. You didn't. It was him and him alone.
If Simba were to do a pie chart at the end of Lion King, he could honestly say that it was Scar's fault. I killed Mufasa. So if you tend to blame yourself too much, I challenge you to do this pie chart exercise.
I would love to see in the comments what percentage you are realistically responsible for. Okay. Number three: you might be asking, but how can I tell if it was my fault?
And I would say that's a question to stop asking. Um here's the thing with blame: blame just isn't helpful. You you can blame yourself for something bad you did, or you can blame someone else, but blame doesn't solve anything.
It doesn't change what happened. If you did make a mistake, then the better question to ask is, is there a practical step I can take now to make repairs or to learn from the experience, to prevent it from happening in the future? Blame is like a rocking chair.
It's the endless rumination. It's like rocking and rocking, but it does not get you anywhere. So blame is simply just not helpful.
Responsibility is like walking. It's hard work, but you actually get somewhere. So in the end we have to ask ourselves: does blaming myself help me to live the kind of life that I value?
Does it make my life rich and meaningful? Does it help me take action to be the person I want to be? I think sometimes we mistakenly believe or especially like emotionally feel that blaming ourselves will keep us from making the same mistake in the future, but it can be helpful to look at the costs.
Self-blame makes you feel bad, guilty, and worthless. It actually demotivates you. It's not honest.
So we're going to shift our attention from blame to value-based actions. So that's what step three is: it's choosing helpful, value-based action. What kind of person do you want to be?
What actions would you take today to move one inch closer to that? I mean, Batman could still fight crime, but he doesn't have to do it from a place of like beating himself up, right? If you believe in being kind, helpful, confident, courageous, these are things you can act on today.
Um if you don't know how to clarify your values, you can download my free my free download on my website. Um it's a values clarification exercise. I'll try and remember to link it in the description.
So what what this all really comes down to is this: can you see past the emotional reasoning and lies that come with the mental shortcut of self-blaming? Uh can you look at the big picture, and can you allow others to be responsible for their part? Can you take an honest look at your responsibility, and can you allow some things to be out of your control?
Good, honest boundaries are healing. If it's my responsibility, it's mine, and if it's not, then it's not. When we get more truthful about our responsibilities we can take back our sense of self and our own personal power.
When you let go of self-blame you can feel empowered to accept the things you cannot change and have the courage to change the things you can. Okay. Thanks for being here.
Take care.
