Victim Blaming vs Personal Responsability

When do you switch from "You were mistreated." to "You should own up to being an idiot and learn from it."?

around the third beating :lol:

it depends upon the circumstances...sometimes you really were mistreated, sometimes you were an idiot...usually we don't figure out which circumstance it was until well after the fact...in either case (mistreated or being an idiot) there is something to be learned...

every failing is an opportunity to learn.

Perhaps neither are ideal.

"You were mistreated" apportions blame. Whilst things sometimes really are someone else's fault, the blame-game can still be an unhealthy path to walk. Which isn't to say that one should take personal responsibility for something that wasn't their fault, but perhaps that the starting point is "It didn't work out this time."

Personal responsibility - whenever I try to take personal responsibility for things I get told that I was only doing what my past experiences have enabled/led me to do. :whistle: We are always behaving in accordance with what we have learnt in the past, even if we or others don't think it was what we should have learnt. Unless it's actually intentional, one can't help being an idiot a lot of the time...it just kinda happens before you realize you've been an idiot.

Whether I'm telling it to myself or to someone else, I'd suggest that if it's a continuum, with the two perspectives at either end, I would usually want to be somewhere in-between rather than at the extremes.

life is hard
people die
tragedy abounds
no one has an easy way of things
and there really are no free rides
the most efficient path i see to an empowered life is to accept that i alone am responsible for very single thing that happens to me

if i get struck by lightenning it will be during the course of some or other decision i have made for myself

if i give my money over to a hustler or mugger it is my choice to give my money away

if i am hit by a car that i never see coming it is because i wasnt looking at the car which was heading straight at me.

the mugger deserves the rewards which the choices of his life will inevitabley bring him and the drunk driver and the hustler and all the rest of us create the lives we have by our attitudes and decisions

even most of the unforseeable random acts of chance imo are a matter of our internal power interacting with the multiverse but while we may say that in some cases we are not in control of what happens outside of ourselves we are always the ones who choose how we react to our circumstances

i understand how difficult it can be to act in the way i know i should but no matter what anyone says or does it is my responsibility to take responsibility for every decision and circumstance of my life

---
EDIT
this is not to say that a victim is at fault

if somone hurts you or manipulates you it is not your FAULT

what i encourage is to allow yourself to understand that your power cannot really be taken away by anyone

but someone may convince you and themselves that it has been

the way to get it back is to accept that you still have it
its not your fault
you didnt do anything wrong and you didnt deserve it or "have it coming"
you just didnt have the resources to handle the moment

and no one ever has those resources until they deliberately cultivate them

sometimes even if you do everything right and make all the right choices things still go wrong...the universe does what is needed. while we are responsible for most of what happens in our life, there are some things completely out of our control.

the easiest way to avoid the blame game of either assigning or accepting blame is to simply acknowledge that sometimes $#1t happens, learn from it and move on...because dwelling on it does no good...

Tricky.

If someone breaks into my car, am I responsible for parking my car where they could happen upon it and decide to break in?

yes

is their decision your fault?
no
they are resoonsible for their decision and it is just as appropriate for them to face the consequences of breaking the law as anyone faces for any decision

you are responsible for where you parked your car and the contents that were in it

th

responsibility is not the same thing as blame
blame is a "good/bad" judgement which gets tied up into issues of personal worth or merit or "deserving"

to say that we are deserving of everythinv that happens as a result of our decisions is a misplacement and misappropriation of our emotional energy

it makes us into a hero or a villian based on something external to our actual motives and intentions

to be responsible means that we accept that our existence is precarious
that we are in the midst of a world which can be utterly unforgiving and impersonal
and that it is our responsibility to empower ourselves to handle the implications of that

OB1Shinobi wrote: is their decision your fault?
no
they are resoonsible for their decision

This is as far as I think it needs to go.

OB1Shinobi wrote: to be responsible means that we accept that our existence is precarious
that we are in the midst of a world which can be utterly unforgiving and impersonal
and that it is our responsibility to empower ourselves to handle the implications of that

i feel like this is the important part
ive had my car broken in to
ive had my belongings stolen
i was homeless and the police cut my tent to shreds in the middle of winter one time
in fact it was a RAINY winter

im not gonna go all sob story but i understand real well how it feels to get dumped on

i still maintain responsibility is the empowering option

I think that the important thing, victim or not, is your attitude afterwards. I know someone who was hurt in a way I cannot imagine, it was not her fault, but afterwards she refused to feel like a victim, because if she lived like one the perpetrator was still winning.