There’s nothing quite like the realization that you were the problem the whole time. It hits you like a ton of bricks, usually at a time when things are raw and sensitive. Personally, I know my revelations came with my bipolar-depression diagnosis just after I lost yet another job, and a relationship was in the process of ending.
Overall, not a great time. I do not recommend. However, there is good news! The good news is that this revelation meant I was able to start making some real progress. As painful as it is, realizing and accepting that you’re the problem is a good thing because it means you’re now open to these kinds of positive outcomes.
1. You experience greater emotional development and maturity.
A big part of the reason that we get so stuck when trying to make progress is that we avoid responsibility for our choices. I know that when I was younger, I used to blame a lot of people for my mistakes, or what I felt other people “made” me do. I took other people’s bad actions, or actions I didn’t like, as permission to indulge the uglier parts of my personality. After all, if they can behave badly, why can’t I respond in kind?
What goes around comes around, I’d say. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
But that’s not a wise way to live because you’re surrendering control of your reactions and emotional landscape to the whims of others. You’re giving away your power. Why does anyone deserve to have that much control over your emotions and actions? People take “standing up for yourself” to mean you should retaliate, and that isn’t necessarily the case.
Sometimes, standing up for yourself is choosing to exit a bad relationship or situation where you are not being respected. It’s choosing to act with maturity rather than acting badly and then blaming the other person for making you do it.
2. You develop healthier, deeper relationships.
All of your relationships will change once you start focusing more on your own responses to other people’s actions. Once you accept that the way you communicate with them may be a big part of the problem.
This is reflected in a common piece of advice in conflict resolution, where we’re told to use ‘I’ statements to express how we feel rather than accusing. That’s because accusing shuts people down and is more likely to cause a fight, as Dr. Marina Rosenthal explains.
Of course, there are certainly situations where that doesn’t apply. Sometimes another person does you wrong for no reason at all, and they need to be told that. It happens. However, there are a lot of times when an accusation is unhelpfully thrown, feelings get hurt, and what could have been a civil discussion degenerates into anger.
There’s a significant shift in the dynamic when you can say something like, “Your choice to go out with your friends hurt my feelings because we don’t get much time due to our work schedules,” instead of “You never want to spend time with me!” The former is simply explaining how you feel and is far more likely to get you to a positive resolution than the latter. The latter is inflammatory, and probably untrue, and will only get the other person’s back up.
3. You reduce the drama in your life and create more peace.
As Psychology Today shares, there is a difference between a reaction and a response. What’s the difference? Well, a reaction implies an emotional response. You say something rude to me, I get angry, and I say something rude back to you. A response, however, is not driven by emotion as much.
A response is an intellectual choice that is not necessarily spurred by your emotional reaction. Just because you feel a certain kind of way doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to act on it. Prior to therapy and anger management, I would have responded rudely. And that made me the problem. Nowadays? I mostly just feel sympathetic for that person.
Like, yeah, they said something rude, but why would they do that? What do they have going on in their life that makes them that way? What experiences brought them to this point? It’s kind of hard to want to indulge in it when you realize that happy, healthy people don’t typically start stuff with strangers for no reason.
I don’t want to make either of our lives any harder than they need to be. Less drama is less stress. And that can only be a good thing.
4. You start developing freedom from repeated mistakes.
There’s an old saying that goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.” That saying is touching on the reality of people who don’t think about their lives and experiences critically. What it’s saying is that the problem is going to keep following you if you are unaware that you are the problem. It doesn’t matter if you change the scenery. You can’t outrun your bad habits or behaviors.
I remember when I was in my late teens and into my twenties. I burned through dozens of jobs. I’d get hired and fired, hired and fired, hired and quit, and repeat the cycle. At the time, I had no idea I had a serious mental illness.
I had an impossible time with consistency because my brain was not consistent, and it periodically cropped up a bunch of seething anger and rage, which would boil over. I blamed other people for this lack of consistency, but it was me, and my undiagnosed mental illness, that were the problem the whole time.
It was only after I was diagnosed and went through treatment that I was able to start maintaining my life consistently. I was able to stop repeating the same mistakes over and over.
5. You can develop self-confidence that isn’t fragile.
Self-confidence is such an important quality to develop because it informs what you will and won’t accept. People who don’t have strong self-confidence struggle with the idea of it, and often use the reasoning that they don’t want to be arrogant. But there is a simple way to tell the difference.
Arrogance elevates you at the expense of other people. Self-confidence is knowing you are valuable regardless of what others think or do. Arrogance can’t admit when it makes mistakes, because it is afraid of being seen as weak, fragile, or unintelligent. Arrogance makes everyone else the problem. Self-confidence, on the other hand, can admit when it’s made a mistake, because it knows that there are times it will be weak, fragile, or unintelligent.
That’s the truth for everyone, so why is it so hard? Well, because you have to be okay with other people thinking that you’re lacking in something. You have to be ok with being the problem every now and then.
6. You can set yourself free from shame.
There’s an interesting paradox that occurs when you embrace and admit your flaws. On the surface, it would appear that it would increase your shame because other people are finding out about problems you have or wrongs you have committed. However, if you can learn to sit with that discomfort, you will find that the opposite is true.
I have no problem admitting when I screw up because I know that most people just want the truth. They want to know what went wrong so it can be fixed or the mistake won’t be repeated. I don’t feel ashamed that I didn’t know better or that I made a mistake. I can’t know everything. That’s unreasonable.
What is reasonable is a willingness to apologize for messing up, to change behavior, and to fix the issue. Other people appreciate that a lot, because they know I’ll be straight with them even if I didn’t do the right thing at first. That also means I need to be able to take responsibility for my actions, which again, is a trait that I value in myself and that other people value in me.
Avoiding responsibility for the dumb things I’ve done in my life has never led me to a healthy or successful resolution. Usually, it just makes problems worse in the long run and fuels shame rather than avoiding it.
Final thoughts…
I was, in fact, the problem. I made a lot of impulsive, bad decisions from irrational emotions stemming from untreated mental illness and not knowing any better. However, once I started therapy and developing myself further, I found that the peace in my life grew exponentially. Not only did I create peace with other people, but also for myself.
We all deserve to have peace of mind. Life is hard, and it’s much harder when it’s your own habits and behaviors undermining your success, peace, and happiness. The good news is that change is certainly possible. And that starts with accepting when it’s you that’s the problem.
