It's not your fault

I have struggled with this sentence for a very long time. I don't know when it started or how. I've read and heard that it could be both genetic and environmental, in my case my family, but whatever the source, it's been the core of my 20s, and it probably started earlier than that.

What am I talking about? Taking the blame for things that happen to me. Pointing the finger straight at myself the moment something goes wrong. It could be anything. A low score on an exam, a bad showing in a presentation, or worst of all, failing at my relationship.

Don't get me wrong. You could be bad at those things, and it could actually be your fault. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about taking that feeling and morphing it into something ugly, sharpening it into a sword, and then stabbing yourself with it, constantly. Not once. Not to learn something and move on. Constantly.

And you know this better than anyone, that when something isn't even near your domain of responsibility, you still reach out and absorb it, as if it were your job to make everything okay, your job to carry whatever went wrong in the room.

Let me tell you where this one cost me the most. In a normal situation, you decide something is your fault. Fine. Now make that a hundred times harder, because the person across from you is the love of your life. The key to a healthy relationship isn't avoiding the argument. It's having a proper one, and then repairing. But if you walk into the argument already convinced that all of it is yours, there's no repair waiting on the other side. Your partner never gets to be heard, because you've already convicted yourself before they finished speaking. They never learn your side of it, because you never offered one. So the repair doesn't happen, and you feel little, and the next time it's a little worse. This happened to me more times than I want to count.

And here's what it actually feels like, the part I usually skip. My stomach turns. The voices in my head go berserk, every insecurity I have gets louder at once. I do apologize, but the apology isn't real. I already know it's my fault, so the sorry comes out hollow, and a hollow sorry can't repair anything. That's the cruelest part of the loop. The self-blame doesn't even buy you a genuine apology. It just buys you a smaller version of yourself.

There's a concept that helped me name all this: locus of control. It can be internal or external. If your locus of control is internal, you tend to believe that success and failure are the direct result of your own decisions, abilities, and effort. If it's external, you believe life is governed mostly by outside forces: luck, circumstance, fate, the decisions of people more powerful than you. Read into it and you'll find that people with an internal locus are described as more empowered, better at learning from failure, better at moving forward. And that's true. Just not for us.

Here's the part the textbooks skip. There's a difference between owning the cause of something and handing yourself a verdict for it. You can look at a thing that went wrong, see clearly the part you played in it, and still refuse to turn that into a sentence about who you are. The cause is information. The verdict is the sword. People like us collapse the two into one, so every mistake doesn't just tell us what happened, it tells us what we are. That's the move I want you to learn to stop making.

There's a name for what I'm describing, and finding it was a relief, because it meant I hadn't just invented it to feel better. The psychologist Paul Gilbert, who built a whole therapy around how we treat ourselves, draws a hard line between two things that feel identical from the inside: self-correction and self-attack. Self-correction looks at the behavior. It says, that didn't work, I'd do it differently next time. Self-attack looks at the self. It says, I am the kind of person who fails. Same event, two completely different verdicts. There's an older distinction underneath it, between guilt and shame. Guilt is about something you did. Shame is about something you are. People like us don't feel guilt for the thing that went wrong, we feel shame for being the person it went wrong around. And shame is the one that does the damage, because you can repair a behavior, but you can't repair being yourself. You just carry it.

Like most things, this isn't binary. It isn't 0 or 1. Picture a line, with "everything is my fault" at one end and "nothing is ever my fault" at the other. Healthy people live somewhere in the middle. That's where I'd tell you to aim too. But here's the part that matters for us: you're not starting in the middle. You're starting jammed up against the "it's all mine" end, and you've been there so long it feels like the middle. So when you try to "find the balance," you barely move, because your sense of fair is already miles off. Balanced, to you, still means taking most of the blame. Even Rotter, who came up with locus of control, warned people not to treat it as two boxes you pick between. He called it a continuum, and he noticed that someone stuck at one end can still act from the other in the specific corners of life where they learned they actually had control. That's the part worth holding onto. The pull isn't fixed, and it isn't spread evenly. It's jammed into places it doesn't belong.

That's why aiming for the middle doesn't work. You have to aim past it. You have to lean toward "not mine" harder than feels fair, harder than feels right, for a while. It will feel like you're overdoing it. You're not. You're correcting for a lifetime of standing at the wrong end. Do it long enough and the old pull back toward self-blame meets you partway, and you settle somewhere you can actually live.

Because ask yourself what the alternative actually buys you. If you believe everything is your fault, what good does it do? You might think it gives you control, a chance to fix it. But imagine everything being your fault. All of it. Every bad moment, yours to answer for. Overwhelmed yet? That's the point. There's no energy left to pick yourself up and improve when you're spending all of it standing trial.

And so much of it isn't yours. So much of it, honestly, never was. Someone cuts you off in line. You get sick the week of the exam. You're frayed because you just moved and your whole life is in boxes. You fight with your partner and maybe, this time, it's them. If you're anything like me, you have to learn to push these back out, to say the thing that doesn't come naturally.

It's not my fault, it's the situation.

It's not my fault, it's the other person this time.

It's not my fault, it's the way I was raised. That one is harder to say, and it took me longest, because it asks you to stop defending the people who taught you to hold the sword in the first place. You can love them and still set that one down.

This is not what most of the world will tell you. For obvious reasons. Said out loud, it sounds like permission to be arrogant, irresponsible, avoidant. And for someone who never blames themselves, it would be poison. But this isn't written for them. It's written for the person who only blames themselves, the people pleaser, the one who walks out of every room replaying what they did wrong. For you, this isn't an excuse. It's a life raft, the thing that keeps you from going under into something joyless and gray and hard to climb back out of.

So again, for the hundredth time: it's not your fault.