The Blame Game

When your life situation is not going the direction you want it to be going, what do you tend to do? Is it someone else’s fault? Only if they did one thing or another you’d be happy?

 I want to tell you a story about my patient and his wife. 

 When we were talking to them, we realized that they did not have any children of their own. Think about it: 52 years of marriage with no children. Although this is not too atypical, the one thing that is atypical is the fact that they said they specifically decided not to find out if either one of them had infertility issues. They did not want to know which one was to be blamed for the fact that they could not conceive. 

 Isn’t that beautiful?

 What if we lived in a life that we did not jump to conclusions to blame those around us?

 Blame the other person when the marriage ends.

 Blame our coworkers when things don’t go the way we wanted our days to go. Blame the boss for being too demanding, blame the colleagues for being too lazy so we have to end up picking up more work, blaming the ER for dumping the admissions on us, blaming the hospitalists for consulting us inappropriately, as a hospitalist blaming the specialist for throwing us under the bus for a lawsuit even though they recommended us to do one thing or the other, blaming the work, the system, the hospital, the medical group, on and on. 

 I think it is so easy to point fingers at what is wrong in our lives. I can tell you all the ways that my life could be better, and you’d laugh. Cry me a river, you live in Hawaii. 

 But I promise you that if I asked you to sit down and tell me how others are making your life miserable this minute, you’d write non-stop for 10-15 minutes. 

 It’s a fact of life. We want a better situation and a better relationship. What we often don’t think about is that our “relationship” with any one or any thing is 100 percent the result of our thoughts about that person. You can have an amazing relationship with someone who’s hard to love and you can have a terrible relationship with someone who others find irresistible. How is that possible?

 When I was coaching a client of mine, I showed her my water bottle. I said, I love this water bottle and it has done nothing to deserve my love. I can also hate a mug that has done nothing to upset me on any level.

 What if you could simply choose to love all the people around you? That you had no agenda for them to act a certain way toward you or say a certain thing to you so that you could feel more love. What if they just showed up in their life as who they are, infertile and all, and you got to love them and not wonder if they are or are not infertile. 

Could you love them exactly the same no matter what? I think you can. 

 What if you had just the right amount of love already. 

 Without a need to blame others?

If you couldn’t conceive in a relationship, would you try to find out who’s ‘problem’ this is? Or would you just decide to take one for the team and say:

“We are not going to blame one another.”

I remember recently reading about the Dalai Lama. He was talking about the love we have for the world. He talked about that at any given time, we unconsciously put people in three different buckets. One bucket is assigned to people we love, one for those we dislike and the last one for people we feel neutral toward. Then he suggested, what if we were to put all those people in the same bucket? The bucket with love.

When we deny others the love we can have for them, the person who suffers from not experiencing the love is not them, it's us. 

So, my offer to you is to stop blaming people around you and to lean in with love and curiosity. What would love do? How would you feel if your people were simply piled up in one bucket. How would your life shape up today?

Try it. Nothing has gone wrong. Limitless love is available to you. Always. 

Try living your life like that a little bit every day. It is truly life changing. 

With so much love and Aloha to you all,

Faryal