"Am I Being Punished?": The Roots of The Thought Process

Recently, I’ve been working on a series of posts on the common-if-contrary human tendency to blame ourselves for “bad things”, especially “bad things” which we logically have little or no part in creating.

Some of us carry the process out so far that we punish ourselves for them… others assume the bad things are a punishment from God, the Universe, or Karmic Balance.

The final two entries are about correcting that thought process in ourselves, and offering help and comfort to others who are stuck in it. (Which brings it nicely full circle to Jackie’s original post).

What lies beneath: Understanding the roots of self-blame.

Just understanding the roots of the belief in self-fault and divine punishment scenarios can make the thoughts start to fall apart.

In part two, I talked about the basic desire to feel in control (or at least to feel that the world is not out of control) being underneath the self blaming/divine punishment scenario. So that’s one root - the need for control.

Another contributing factor is the very human tendency to search for patterns of cause and effect — our minds are so tuned into these patterns that we’ll see them where they don’t exist. If we don’t understand why something happened, our mind will connect otherwise unrelated dots - So that’s another root - the need to know what led to this point, the need to understand the causes.

We also have a need for pain and loss to have have meaning. Pain and difficulty is much easier to bear if it has a purpose - if we’re sparing someone else pain, if we can see it as part of a higher good, or the wages of our sins, or as a lesson we need to learn for the future, or we can believe we’re serving as an example. That’s a third root - the need for tragedy to mean something, to serve a purpose.

These are universal, basic human desires; they don’t even require a belief in an Authoritarian God. People see the laws of nature as the ruling force, for example, and the good of the planet as the “higher purpose”.

Other reinforcing factors exist, too — fertilizer, of a sort.

A conscious or unconscious belief in a punishing god increases the likelihood that someone will consider bad things as a punishment.

So might a history with abusive authority figures, who punished unpredictably, perhaps unfairly, or blamed inappropriate things on a child, like a job loss or a spouse leaving.

Growing up around an abused parent can contribute, too -victims of spousal or child abuse often learn to accept blame as a peacemaking tactic, and they model this behavior for their own children, teaching it.

Some personalities are prone to playing the peacemaker, even without a history of abuse — they’re very likely to take extra blame onto themselves, in order to try and stop conflicts.

Workaholic personalities often try to carry responsibilities that aren’t appropriately their own.

Just considering these factors, and others that might have contributed, can help to take apart the process of self-blame, and they also help us to be more compassionate to those who are stuck in it.

In the next (and hopefully final!) post of this series, I’ll offer a few specific techniques that should break the process more thoroughly — but understanding the roots is crucial to both your own healing process, and offering comfort to others.

MindTWEAK: Sometimes a topic grabs you, and wont let go - and you don’t know why.
It’s really rather annoying, being held hostage by your own blog.