Why is it such a human trait that when a mistake is made by someone, they often go into the negative process of beating themselves up afterwards? I often asked myself this question for a number of years because I too was one on those who liked to self-flagellate by mentally and emotionally beating myself up when I thought I made any mistake. Through many sessions of therapy, meditation, prayer, and work surrounding my recovery from addictions, I discovered that my metaphorical process of picking a bat up and beating myself senseless when I thought I did something wrong, all stemmed from growing up in a dysfunctional family where I usually took the blame for everything.
Some of the most painful memories from my childhood are of my parents suffering from their own alcoholism and mental imbalances. In many dysfunctional homes where the parents are sick from any disease of addiction, the children often get blamed for anything that goes wrong, regardless of whether it was their fault or not. Most that suffer from addictions don’t like to look in the mirror and see that they are the cause of their own misery. It’s easier to put that blame on someone else and make them as miserable as they are. In the case of my own family, this often proved to be true. My sister and I were often the blame for the slightest of things that in most healthy homes would never have even been an issue. Both of us were punished quite a bit for even the slightest of mistakes that we did make. And unfortunately, the two of us spent much of our childhood years apologizing for every single little thing that went wrong in our parents lives. Sadly, that pattern continued even after we left home to venture out into the real world on our own.
When one is beaten down with regularity on any level, whether it be mentally, emotionally, or physically, it becomes very easy to start doing that same pattern to themselves when they encounter a triggering situation. One example of that could simply be when a person makes a similar mistake as to one they made during their childhood which resulted in them being punished. I once found it was much easier to put myself down long before someone else got the chance to scream and yell or seriously discipline me from an apparent mistake I made.
It’s taken some seriously hard core work to understand that there are a lot of things in life that aren’t ever my fault. It really is sad that people have a tendency to just place the blame on someone else because they can’t face it within themselves. I’ve gotten much stronger now to see many of those times when that’s happening so that I don’t go into the process of picking that bat up and beating myself up for something that’s not my fault.
On the other side of the coin, there are also those times when I really have made a mistake that affected myself or others negatively. But I’ve come to realize that I don’t have to beat myself up in those situations either. Everyone makes mistakes. EVERYONE. And when I make them, I try to love myself now through it, instead of beating myself up mentally. God has helped me to see that all of that punishing my parents did to me as a kid for those mistakes I really did make, never really helped me to become a healthier person. In fact, it did just the opposite. So for all of those times I spent beating myself up in my adult years, it was only reinforcing the same negativity I experienced as a kid when my parents were doing that to me.
I find that many people in recovery meetings seem to do a lot of this pattern of beating themselves up. There, they speak of how they have been a scumbag or a loser or use some other terribly negative word to describe themselves with how their addiction took over their lives. And they talk about how bad of a person they got to be. But what they don’t realize is that the only thing they are doing at that moment is hurting themselves even more when they are saying those words. Deep inside each of them is a little kid who from the start, only ever wanted to be loved and cared for, and is still waiting for that. But for many of them, like it was in my sister’s and my life, this never happened. Instead we became punching bags for our sick parents and then when they were no longer in control of us, we became our own punching bags by continuing to beat ourselves up, which only kept ourselves sick and miserable.
The process of beating ourselves up over any mistake, whether it really was our fault or not, is seriously unhealthy for each of our souls. It doesn’t help us to grow and it won’t increase our levels of love and light within us. So the next time you make a mistake that is your fault or find yourself being in receipt of someone else’s mistake, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and remember that you don’t have to beat yourself up in either case.
For those situations that really were your mistake, try practicing forgiveness for yourself and all others who were affected as that is the most loving action to do. And for those situations that weren’t your fault, stop taking ownership of them by asking God for the strength to deflect that negative energy being aimed at you. Send love instead to those sick people who refuse to look in the mirror at their own problems.
In either case, you’ll find in following these simple suggestions, that you’ll be beating yourself up a lot less until you no longer want to ever do it again.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson