Today I made a choice to give my power away and I suffered because of it. I want to discuss why and how we give our power away, and how by doing so we make ourselves miserable.

We give our power away anytime we blame or accuse someone else for what we are experiencing. You are the only person in your life responsible for where you end up. You are the only person in your life who can make choices for you. People doing things to you does not change that. Sometimes your choices feel more limited because of what other people do. But the power of choice, even the power to surrender to limits, is always yours.

Giving your power away is claiming that you actually do not make choices for yourself. It’s lying to yourself. It’s acting as if you are still an infant who cannot speak or barely move. And by the way, even infants have choices (cry, laugh, smile, remain expressionless). Even babies, the most helpless form of human, have a degree of autonomy. You, an adult human who can walk, talk, learn, grow, consume, create, and procreate, have exponentially more autonomy and therefore expansive power of choice.

Why do we do it? Why would we rather blame others than accept responsibility for our actions? The answer is, it’s far more comfortable. Accepting responsibility for ourselves requires that we face ourselves, in our pain, our grief, our regret, our sorrow and self-pity. But there is a deep, long time price to pay when we reject responsibility and cast blame. The price is the burden of self abandonment. To ignore your part in self-harming behaviors is to reinforce self-harm. To say “they made me do it” when no one else can ever make you do anything against your conscious will is an immature lie.

In my personal exercise in giving away my power, I said yes to something I really wanted to say no to. Actually, I did say no, and then I chose to change that no into a yes because I decided that it was more important to please the other person than to fulfill my own needs. I was so angry at myself for self-abandoning, that my initial thought was to direct all my anger to the other person. How could he do this to me? But as soon as I let the words pass through me, I knew what I was doing. I was abandoning my anger and projecting it onto him. I was pretending it wasn’t all my fault.

Giving away our power is a sign that we are running away from our pain. Our ability to process pain is a power on its own. When we deprive ourselves of using that power, we create the feeling of powerlessness that is then trapped in our bodies. It has nowhere to go, so it decides that if we don’t feel that we have any power, it is because other people have all of it. Blame and deflecting responsibility are born of powerlessness.

The way to stop blaming others is to confront your own pain and powerlessness. What caused it? Where did it come from, and what does it need to be released? When the smoke clears, you will have no desire to blame anyone else for anything. You may still feel anger and pain, but you will know that everything that happens next is your choice.