Why we blame, complain, and make excuses? And how to overcome.
Most of us book readers know that blaming, complaining, and making excuses are harmful habits that can prevent us from reaching a healthy life. However, it is equally harmful to try to stop these habits prematurely by force.
For example, when you find yourself complaining about something, you might hit your head and force yourself to stop complaining. This is suppression, and it is not healthy. Complaining is a symptom. The wound lies elsewhere. Forcing yourself to stop complaining is like taking paracetamol to suppress the pain while ignoring the need to heal the underlying wound.
I will use my usual Emotion Astral Map to show you where the wound is located.
Blaming
Blaming is an attempt to retain our fixation on an ideal. So the correct way to stop blaming is to learn to accept losing the ideal.
Excuse
Making excuses is an indulgence, yielding to the temptation to degrade your reasoning in order to avoid pain.
Complaining
Complaining is an avoidance of pain. It usually comes after avoiding a challenge due to fear of loss. When the reality of loss cannot be escaped, we have no choice but to submit to it, but with an inherent resistance in the form of seeking validation from other people. Complaining is a form of seeking validation to avoid pain.
Wisdom
As emphasized in the Map’s article, we cannot discard certain emotions and behaviors without changing the entire orbital cycle. We cannot stop our behaviors of complaining, making excuses, and blaming by force. We have to redirect our karma of ideal fixation, avoidance, and indulgence toward the healthy emotional cycle by mixing the color of acceptance into it.
However, acceptance is not knowledge; it is wisdom: the emotional moves. We obtain wisdom only through real-life experiences. This means our behaviors of complaining, making excuses, and blaming are not useless; they are the experiments needed to obtain wisdom.
The reason most people get stuck in the endless cycle of these behaviors is that they try to suppress them. I received this advice from my teacher, and it is the most valuable advice in my life that helped me break through my emotional struggles.
When you are angry, you must learn from your anger. Try to “go all the way,” and there’s no need to suppress your emotions. At the door of death, you will find wisdom.
We have to keep conducting failed experiments to gain enough wisdom to break through the wall of stubbornness. It is only at that time when blaming is replaced by respect, excuses become relaxation, and complaining is replaced by kindness to yourself.
Respecting
We respect people’s chances and choices that hurt us without blaming them because we learn the wisdom of responsibility to handle our own ideal fixation.
Kindness
We are kind to ourselves because we learn the wisdom of self-compassion to embrace ourselves amidst the pain, and thereby, we no longer need any complaints to relieve the pain.
Relaxation
When our ideal is out of reach, we relax and establish a foundation so that we can continue to strive forward. The difference between making excuses and relaxation is that the latter truly releases our hold on the ideal, while the former involves lying to ourselves while still holding tightly to the ideal.
