Blaming Wounds The Soul

#14 IN MY CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER JOURNEY THROUGH ROBERT MCGEE’S BEST-SELLING BOOK, THE SEARCH FOR SIGNIFICANCE.

Some of us have a tendency to perceive Jesus as our friend and God as a harsh disciplinarian. Yet the author of Hebrews described Jesus as “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3). Studying passages like these and spending time with compassionate, forgiving Christians will enable us to reshape our perception of God.

Blaming Can Be Detrimental

Both assuming and assigning blame for failure can have a number of detrimental consequences. Research has found that blame is the core of most emotional disturbances. The answer is for each of us to stop blaming ourselves and others and learn to accept ourselves in spite of our imperfections. Christ’s death is the complete payment for sin, and we can claim His complete forgiveness and acceptance daily. There is no way we can shoulder such a heavy burden. Our guilt will overpower us, and the weight of our failures will break us.

A number of emotional problems are rooted in the false belief that we must meet certain standards to be acceptable and that the only way to deal with inadequacies is to punish ourselves or others for them.

The false belief that says “Those we fail (including myself) are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished” is at the root of our fear of the perceived consequences of failure, leading us to become very controlling of ourselves and others. Because we often perceive those closest to us as a reflection of ourselves and are consequently threatened by their failures, we are likely to try to control their behaviors as well. If we have also determined that those who fail deserve to be punished, we will tend to victimize ourselves and/or others for virtually any wrongdoing.

Common Human Responses to Failure

Each of us tends to land in one of these common responses to failure:

1. Because of our insecurity, some of us are so self-protective that we are rarely able to perceive ourselves as being in the wrong. We may be quick to pinpoint — and condemn — the weakness of others, but in our own sel-evaluation, we may be effectually blind to our own faults and failures.
2. Some of us may fall on the other end of the spectrum. We may be so absorbed in our performance and so demanding of ourselves that when failure enters our circumstances, we believe taht we are solely responsible. Rather than laying blame on someone else, our tendency it to inflict punishment (shaming ourselves, negative self-talk) and protect those who have hurt us by explaining and justifying their deficiencies. If we have a tendency to punish ourselves for failures, we may believe that we must feel remorse for a certain length of time before we can experience peace and joy again. In a twisted form of self-motivation, we may think that if we condemn ourselves enough, then perhaps we won’t fail again.
3. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum are those of us who are so hard on ourselves that we project our self-condemning attitude onto others. Passing judgment on others may be a response to our great need for consistency and justice. We believe that if we’re going to punish failure in ourselves, we must be consistent and punish failure in others. Insisting on justice, we may also take it upon ourselves to be God’s instrument of corrections. We normally don’t like to see others getting away with something that we believe they should be punished for.
4. Finally, there are those of us who determine taht because punishment is inevitable, we may as well “live it up” and enjoy our sin before judgement eventually comes.

In my next posting, I’ll summarize what Robert McGee says are common problems taht often result from the deception (denial) that we struggle with the fear of punishment and the propensity to punish others.

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