From Blame To Conscious Anger
In modern culture we use to avoid responsibility in exchange for blaming.
If you use your anger unconsciously and you feel “right” about being angry at people, institutions, laws, politics, your addictions, your friends etc. you are probably serving the world of blaming. Blaming is a conscious or unconscious use of anger with the purpose to avoid responsibility. It put’s the power of your anger onto other people, any made up reasons, causes, ideas and justifications. ‘It’s their fault, they should have done better, if people would only give me more attention, money or time, then I would not suffer now! If they didn’t expect so much from me, I would be fine!’. These are very typical words of blaming. Check yourself if you find voices like these somewhere inside of you. They belong to a part of yourself. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have these voices in you.
Humans have many parts and each part has it’s own voice. For example the voices you were just looking for came from one of your parts. This particular part of you might want to avoid responsibility. But having no responsibility is an illusion. Let me show with an example:
I used to unconsciously use my anger with voices like this. ‘My parents didn’t give me what I needed, they didn’t care for me, so I also cannot care’ or even ‘I cannot be loving and generous because I didn’t get the resources I needed to healthily evolve. I was treated in an unfair way!’.
Consciously I spoke these words in myself for about two years, and unconsciously probably even since 26 years. I had never questioned them before. I was used to having a ‘reason’ or a ‘cause’ why I cannot become who I want to be. I stayed on the island of blame and felt at home (even though it was constantly painful to not evolve beyond the reasons and causes I stated).
But eventually there was another pain that helped me to get off that island. The conflicting pain to that I felt right, was the pain of being alone. I was alone with my strongly protected idea of being right with this blame. Feeling the pain of what I had created out of that by avoiding responsibility at all costs turned into a wake-up-call. I had created messes in relationship by not having been honest and by having forgotten agreements that were made. I was dishonest and had forgotten my agreements, because I believed in the story of ‘I cannot be loving and caretaking. I did not get enough resources to be generous. I have to look after myself and this justifies that I don’t take care of you. My parents didn’t take care of me, so why should I take care of you now? I cannot!’.
There was a point at which this story was no longer bearable for me. I had just created too much new pain in the relationships of my present tense. The others didn’t accept my story anymore as a reason why I am not honest to them, why I forget about our agreements and by that don’t care about our way of relating. These boundaries helped me to listen to the wake-up-call. I coulnd’t believe myself the story anymore. And by cracking open, I realized, that with my blame I had constantly fought my emotions of feeling left alone by my parents. These emotions were not accusing and judging. I felt anger to push that old blame-story away, and sadness bringing me into connection with my own vulnerability. Out of that I spoke: ‘I was not treated in an unfair way. I would have just needed something else.’ . Then I wept and wept, for what had gone missing when I was a child.
Somehow this one sentence re-established my integrity. I was clear about that I would have needed something else. This was my conscious anger speaking. And I was generous with myself and my parents to ackowledge the pain of the sadness because of what I missed. There was no fighting in me anymore. I finally could be with the reality. I had taken away my expectations about what my parents should have done better. I managed to consciously feel the emotions I hadn’t felt and been heard with in the past. All the years before, by blaming I was denying the emotional pain of my past.
But what was there to solve? — We humans experience all sorts of traumas. And traumas cannot be undone once they happened. They leave scars. And scars heal when we actually are paying attention to them. When we are truly being with. In this particular case, my anger served me to clearly name what was, and then to hold a space for myself safe enough so that I could feel my sadness and weep. There was nothing of the past to be solved. But by authentically and responsibly being with my pain, I re-established my integrity. Regarding this particular emotion, I was now able to stand with vulnerability and clarity in my history as history and in my presence as presence.
Coming back to the intro, I think what I just wrote shows that having no responsibility is an illusion. Having gone through the emotions of anger and sadness made the story of blame disappear. I think it is tangible, that it was my responsibility to consciously feel my own pain so the story would disappear. I got what I needed by consciously feeling the pain of what I didn’t get during my childhood. No one could have done that for me. And this is, where my blaming was irresponsible, and my irresponsibility an illusion.
What next? — Having re-established integrity in this specific part of myself, I have less baggage, less blame-stories in me, less fighting against the past. This gives me new resources. I feel liberated anger now for wanting to create the life I want to live. And that is a totally different purpose to use my anger than I had before.
Now I even create workshops about conscious anger work, called Rage Club’s. Or I write this article also using my anger, because I want people to know about the distinction of irresponsible and responsible use of the anger energy. How can we make the world a space which is less in the hands of unconscious and conscious blaming? I think only by transforming, each their own, the blaming-stragegies for avoiding responsibility.
Here is an experiment: List 50 of your blaming sentences on a sheet of paper that you have towards yourself and others. Be fiercful and honest. Don’t stop before 50 even though if you think you’d never have 50. Then pick one and go for the research. What is the purpose of that specific blame-sentence? And what are you trying to avoid to feel and express? Only be with one sentence at a time. This shadow-work needs your full attention and care so that it reveals your hidden purposes of blame, justification, shaming, pretending to be irresponsible,etc. This is your chance to feel the pain of your stories, for you make gold from your healing.
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Author & Contact: Markus Bork — markusbork(at)posteo.de or www.markusbork.org or SignUpToNewsletter
Distinctions:
Blame = You send your anger outwards and with it the responsibility for your situation. Blame happens out of the illusion of being irresponsible.
Responsible use of anger = You make use of this energy for change and creation and it’s information to serve for what you want to be existing.
More to read:
http://integrity.mystrikingly.com
http://radicalresponsibility.mystrikingly.com
http://purposesniffer.mystrikingly.com
http://yourgremlin.mystrikingly.com
http://shadowprinciples.mystrikingly.com
http://radicalresponsibility.mystrikingly.com
http://purposesniffer.mystrikingly.com