By Phil Rosenbaum
Do you find yourself blaming others for many of the problems in your life? If so, you are not alone. Our culture supports the idea that others are to blame for our problems. Just listen to some of the common complaints we often hear: “you hurt my feelings,” or “he or she makes me sick,” or “you’re embarrassing me,” or “you made a fool out of me in front of others,” etc. All of these statements put the blame outside of you and onto someone else. In other words, how you feel has nothing to do with you but with someone or something outside of yourself.
More accurate beliefs might be “I made myself feel bad,” “I decided to be angry because it gives me a feeling of power over others,” or “I make myself sick.” The point is that we are responsible for how we feel, not some outside force.
The problem with blaming others is that we are giving away our power to change. If someone else is causing us to feel bad, we cannot feel good unless the other person changes. Jack Canfield, author, and psychologist, would often ask the audience when giving a talk, “How many of you, when you first got married, thought you would be able to change your spouse?” Most of the hands went up. He would then ask, “How many of you have successfully changed your spouse?” Practically nobody in the audience raised their hands in response to this question. In other words, if you are waiting for the other person to change, you may be waiting a very long time. In the meantime, you are not going to be very happy.
However, the good news is that you do not need the other person to change. The person you need to change is yourself. You are not a victim. You have a great deal more power than you realize. If you are blaming others, you are not taking responsibility for yourself.
Although people are responsible for how they feel, many resist accepting this truth. For example, why are so many Americans overweight? As one author stated, it is not “Sara Lee’s” fault we’re overweight. If we actually believed that, we would never lose weight. Obviously, we cannot blame others for our weight problem. The same principle applies to excess drinking. There was a funny line in the Alcoholics Anonymous book. The writer stated, “if you had a wife like mine, you’d drink too.” How can we hope to change if we blame another person for our drinking? Assuming responsibility for our thoughts and behaviors is not easy, but it is essential if we wish to change.
Change requires work and risk-taking, which is often accompanied by an anxiety that the risk will not be successful. If you take a risk and it doesn’t lead to success, the result may not be pleasant, but it is not likely to be fatal. If you are not happy, you owe it to yourself to make some lasting changes.
Hypnotherapy can help you make the change you need to make to have a happier, more fulfilling life. Often the problems lie in our subconscious mind, and hypnotherapy, which deals with the subconscious mind, can help you find out what subconscious beliefs are causing the problems.
If you want to learn more about hypnotherapy, please call Phil Rosenbaum at 248-688-6469. As Henry David Thoreau stated in his book Walden, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Let us not be one of them.
