photo credit: Eddi van W.
The observer self is that neutral inner space that allows us to recognize that people tend to automatically react from their own unconscious patterns of belief, rather than because of us. This knowledge makes it possible for us to stop making their reactivity about us.
This means we can stop taking the doings and sayings (and all the reactions) of others, so personal! We do not have to make their choices, and reactions towards us, about us.
None the less many of us do personalize the behavior of others. We assume people do what they do “at” or “to” us, and that’s where the trouble begins.
Rather than observing that people are miserable because they believe their own unhappy thoughts about themselves, and the world, we, like them, tend to blame external factors, outside situations, and other people, for the misery we feel, and that we witness in them. This search for an external cause makes it easy to fall prey to a “witch hunt” (victim) mentality in an effort to find who or what is to blame for the misery we see and experience.
The simple truth is that as long as we think there is an external cause for our own (and their) misery, we will have no choice BUT to go on seeking something/someone else to blame for the unhappiness we see.
The blame game is one of finding external causes for pain, rather than to understand that all misery originates in the mind of the one who is miserable. Always. No exceptions. Yes, sad, traumatic, painful things happen in life, to all of us. But even our emotional responses to things such as these are created by what we tell ourselves about them, and not the events in and of themselves.
This need to find something outside ourselves to blame is a primary characteristic of victim consciousness. Taking personal responsibility is equated with self-blame when we are operating in victim consciousness, and that HURTS too much! So for most of us in victim consciousness, it is far more preferable to blame someone else for our pain than to experience the debilitating pain and self-degradation that blaming ourself causes! And who can blame us?
Blaming is what those of us caught up in victim consciousness do. This is because no one ever taught us that it is our thinking and not outside events that cause our pain. Therefore when we are unhappy, we look for something “out there” to blame for it. Blaming others becomes a way to protect ourselves from being blamed: blaming outside people and events becomes our default setting for self-preservation.
But there is another alternative besides the “blame game.”
Our perception and response to life changes dramatically when we learn to look for the underlying belief pattern that is the true culprit that causes our unhappiness.
Rather than to engage in a victim strategy that requires us to defend our innocence by, in turn, blaming others, we can instead learn to sidestep the accusations others hurl our way in their attempts to protect themselves, and, like an Aikido master who skillfully steps aside, we learn to allow the negative energy force of blame to go by us observed, but unheeded. This side-stepping motion allows us to step aside into an observer space, to remain calm and detached (rather than to personalize the attack), and so allows something totally new and more positive to transpire instead.
I recommend my book, Guiding Principles for Life Beyond Victim Consciousness, as a step by step guide in learning more about how to access observer consciousness, and sidestep blame.
Blessings, Lynne