Releasing Blame: Choosing Honesty, Responsibility, and Healing to Recover Your Soul

This year’s theme is Acceptance as a Path to Peace, and in this episode I return to a topic that quietly keeps so many of us stuck: blame.

Blame can feel justified when life has been painful. When relationships are complicated. When we’ve felt hurt, abandoned, or misunderstood. But over time, blame keeps our attention focused outward, tying our sense of peace to other people’s choices and behavior.

In this episode, I share honestly from my own life, my marriage, my recovery journey, and what I’ve witnessed walking alongside hundreds of people on their healing path. For me, blame often showed up as “trying to help,” “pointing things out,” or wishing someone else would change and how spiritual practice helped me see what was really happening underneath.

We explore how releasing blame doesn’t mean minimizing your pain or pretending things didn’t matter. It means becoming willing to be honest with yourself, to turn inward, and to stop giving your power away.

When we choose responsibility ov

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This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Blame Drains Our Power
• 3:34 Recovery Roots And Spiritual Framing
• 7:43 Soul Circles And Community Healing
• 13:13 Rigorous Honesty Over Resentment
• 18:49 Powerlessness And Taking Back Agency
• 23:39 Couples Conflict Without Attack
• 29:57 Curiosity Instead Of Self-Blame
• 35:47 Collective Conditioning And Choice

Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:48

Have you ever noticed how much energy it takes to blame? Blaming your partner, our parents, our kids, our past, the world, and even ourselves. It's exhausting to carry that around. In today's episode, I want to talk about why blame keeps us stuck and how releasing it is one of the most powerful steps to take in healing and awakening. Not because what happened didn't matter, but because tying your peace to someone else's behavior costs us that power. In today's conversation, we're going to be talking about how to be honest with yourself, stop giving your energy away, and how to shift from resentment to responsibility with compassion. We are here healing from codependency, people pleasing, and feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions. But we're going to learn how to take the blame off the table and choose ourselves instead. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul podcasting community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recover your soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our inner change and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recovery Your Soul Podcast. It's Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for choosing in to spend your time on learning more about spirituality, learning more about how to recover your soul, how to take this very complicated world that we live in, this very sticky, interesting experience, this wild ride of a life of a journey that we are in, and how to really step into being your most authentic, healed whole self. This year, our theme is acceptance as a path to peace. And so I wanted to revisit blame because it's been a while since I've talked about blame specifically as an episode topic. And one of the reasons why I want to use this is because I am now leading something called soul circles. And these are small group coaching experiences. I've been doing personal coaching and spiritual coaching for years now, and the gift of being an honor and a gift to be present in hundreds of people's lives and help them to, whether it's just one time or walk it all the way through the nine steps, it doesn't matter to me. I just, if I can be of service, I want to be of service. And it became really clear, especially with the once-a-month free support group that's on the first Monday of every month, how we have people that are in groups. So you have people who have adult children and they're learning how to navigate through that process of learning in their life. We have people who have partners, maybe family members who might be going through addiction or life crisis or complexity, and they're learning how to use the recovery soul process to heal from those complicated enmeshed relationships. And then I wanted to have a group because I do retreats every year. And then I have people who've worked the process. And then I wanted people who could come in and continue to really integrate and connect on those paths that they've been on. Because just because you've done the nine steps doesn't mean that all of a sudden life is easy peasy and you have rainbows and butterflies and you don't have any complexity. That's not how that works. So the challenges continue to come, but you have more resources and more capacity to be with what's complicated. And so I have these three what I call soul circles, and we meet either once a month or every other week to connect with each other and use this process. So the reason why blame came up is because in one of those groups, one of the community members in that group was saying that it was after listening to one of my podcasts on Blame that something shifted in her. And she was able in her Al-Anon work to really dig into the fourth step in a way that she had been reluctant to do so because she'd been stuck in the blame. She couldn't move to the part that in Al-Anon is the fourth step, which is taking a fearless, searching, fearless moral inventory, which is the same in AA in the 12 steps. And in recover your soul, it's the third step. It's looking at what are your beliefs, patterns, and stories? What is this recurring subconscious system that's underneath that can keep us hooked in repetitive and unhealthy behaviors that we don't align with anymore. They don't work for us anymore. I often say that it's really our four-year-olds' operating system that we're living from. And when you recognize that you're living from a four-year-old's operating system, and then you start realizing, like, oh, this is why I'm bumping up against people, it only makes sense. You can give yourself more compassion for the fact that when we're in fight or flight or when we're in this highly protective mechanism around ourselves, it can be really hard to get close to people, to let people in. And it is about personal responsibility. It's about being rigorously honest with yourself. My son Bodhi's in town, and we went to an AA meeting together the other night. And it's been a long time actually since I've been to either an AA or Al-Anon meeting. I needed those meetings. I've said this before. I needed those meetings desperately when I first got sober and when I first started realizing the amount of codependency I had. Those rooms were invaluable to me and saved my life and the community that was uh offered to me in those experiences where you can just go in and people get you. You're not crazy. There's nothing wrong with you. You can talk fully and openly about everything that's happening in your life and how painful and difficult it is. And those experiences changed me forever and were such a huge part of my healing process. And I think that it's important that everybody's on their own journey and does what's right for them because I think there are people who've been in the rooms for, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And if that continues to be their resource, I think you should go to where your resources are. I don't think there's anything that's one that's better than the other. What I love, love, love about all this opportunity that we have now with all the people that are sharing different modalities is there's more choice. There's more choice. There didn't used to be that much choice. If you want to get sober, you went to an AA room. If you wanted to, if you love someone who was an addict, you went to an Al-Anon room. So now that there's more choice, it's really about us aligning and connecting with what really lights us up. What are the words? What are the what's the languaging? What's the energy around it that really fills us up? Anyway, going back to the AA meeting. So we're in this AA meeting and they were reading step one from the 12 and 12. I remembered how powerful those words for me and rigorous honesty is such a big piece. And AA talks about how you can heal from addiction if you are willing to be rigorously honest. And I think that that is an incredibly powerful statement in healing altogether. You have to be willing to be rigorously honest about yourself, which is why I think blame is such a powerful topic. Because when we're in our most wounded space, when we're in the place where, man, I've been there, where you're in your marriage and it's it's painful or difficult, or you're in a situation, a work environment that does not feel good or feel healthy, where you're in a relationship where somebody's um toxic and you're feel trapped in a relationship, whether it's a romantic relationship or a friendship relationship, there's a lot of very real complex situations that are happening. But we can get caught up in blaming them and blaming them and continuing to wrap around in our mind. And this is the piece where step two in recover your soul, admitting that you're powerless over every single thing outside of yourself, and that the only control that you have is within yourself and your peace and your well-being lies within you to take rigorous honesty and responsibility for yourself instead of thinking that you can control the world around you. But this piece of blame is that we aren't looking at ourselves in general. We're looking at everybody else and everybody else's situations, which might be a mess. And they might be doing things that are unhealthy and they might be saying things that don't feel good. It isn't about dismissing that those things are happening. It's about actually saying if your full attention is on blaming them, on having grievance of them, of having judgment of them, you're giving your power away. You're giving your power away and saying, I need you to be a certain way for me to be a certain way. And we're blaming them for how we feel. I know I've told so many of these stories over and over, but I only have this one life to share with you this time around. And I think about those years with Rich and I, and we used to go to couples counseling. And I think that sometimes couples counseling can be a place where at least there's a mediator to hear both sides. But for me, it just felt like I never could get him to understand how upset I was and how hard I was and how lonely I was and how um abandoned I felt. But I didn't know at that time how to use the words that were from I statements. I only know how to use the words that were attacking statements. And attack is interesting because in the Course of Miracles, it talks about how attack is not the big energy. It isn't the huge raging fight. It is, but it's more subtle than that. And I never thought of myself as being attacking. I always thought I was trying to come at it from such a gentle place, or I was trying to come at it from such a can't you see what's happening? Can't you see how I feel? Can't you see what's wrong here? I didn't see that as attack. And it wasn't until I really started studying the Course in Miracles and I had this opportunity to have rigorous self-honesty and to see that every time I went into one of those couples counseling sessions, and I was trying to get Rich to see my pain and how he was instigating that pain to me. That it was his fault, that he was to blame for my pain. And I wasn't taking responsibility for my operating system underneath that had the big buttons that he was pushing, that had my own self-worth issues, that had my own hating to get in trouble, my own four-year-old operating system underneath, that I picked him as a spiritual partner to mirror for me these experiences so that I could learn more about myself. I didn't understand that at the time. I had this vision of what a beautiful, perfect marriage and family was going to look like, and it didn't look like that. One of the things that I think is so interesting about really deepening into our spiritual practice is, and this is another really powerful thing in the spiritual world that's talked about is don't blame yourself either. This isn't about finding fault. This is about opening with curiosity, about understanding more of what's going on inside, where the patterns are set up, where they might be set up ancestrally, where they might be set up that as families, this is just this is the definition of what love is. This is how this works, this is what we do here, this is how what we say. And we've just been following suit for all these years. And, you know, we've been gaining momentum, we've been having awakenings, we've been understanding more, but it wasn't that long ago. I mean, I continue just to be mind-boggled when I watch shows and it's like the 1880s or the 1920s, and you think that was forever ago. It's not that long ago. I mean, there's people who are 100 years old. One of my best friends is in New Mexico right now celebrating her mom's 90th birthday, right? We know people who are 90 years old. That wasn't that long ago. And so you think about how our systems were in terms of who you could talk to and what we said and how little really power we had in our own lives. We we were giving our power away as a standard practice for eons, especially women. And so when you look at how far we've come in such a short period of time, you can see that these operating systems that are not just your own personal operating system, but have been the collective's agreement with each other. This is the four agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, is one of the most impactful tiny little books that you'll ever read. And he talks about how we're domesticated. We're domesticated, we're trained, we're taught. And now we're being given an opportunity to step outside of that domestication and to be able to look around on a larger, on a larger scale. And and you know, it used to say, like the in the church, you couldn't have a conversation with God. The priest had the conversation with God. You had to have the relationship with the priest, and the priest had the conversation with God, and that's all going away. Only the mystics could talk through the Akashic records, only the mystics could see. That's all gone. There is a truth that's coming out right now in the Great Awakening and in this incredible shift that's happening that is, you know, in the super woo, which is a place where I am, where I listen to and watch and read all this stuff that's pretty far out there. You don't have to go that far if you don't want to go that far. And if you if you're interested in going that far, go. It's it's pretty amazing, it's pretty interesting. But what it's offering is it's saying that the guardrails are off, that this um this protection somehow around who had access or what we thought we had access to is gone. And the truth is that each one of us, if we're willing to take blame out of our lives and quit looking at everyone and everything else, including politics, including what's happening around the world, including what's happening in your family, including what's happening in your marriage and with your kids, and saying, I need all of this to be okay for me to be okay. Because your soul is eternal. Your soul came here on purpose to have this wild riot of an experience in this body as you, this time, and this lifetime is incredibly important for you and for the collective. If you adjust, if you adjust, if you adjust, you can't get well. Same thing in addiction. When you listen to the principles and AA and Al-Anon, you might think that it's about alcohol or addictive substances or codependency, and it's not. It's actually talking about what's under the iceberg, under the ocean, that little tea teeny top that's that's poking out of the top of the water is what we've spent all of this energy around, which is behaviors that you can see on the outside. And I think of this yesterday, Bodhi and I recorded a whole podcast for an hour and the microphone was muted. So we'll have to do another one. But one of the things that we talked about was if I spend all my energy worrying about him as an addict and his usage and my other sons, right? And all I'm talking about or thinking about is what they're using. I'm missing the whole part underneath, which is who are you as a soul? Who are you as a human being? What are the healings that you're here to have? What are the awarenesses? What is the growth opportunity for you? How is this suffering that you're experiencing part of what you need to be doing going forward? And that's the pace place that I'm much more interested in connecting with them around. Would I love for them to not use? Of course I would. Do I want them to do it sooner than I did? Absolutely, I do. But I had to go through everything I had to go through to get to where I am today, to get to this place where I recognize and see myself in a way that's totally different. I don't think I could go. I mean, Rich and I wouldn't need counseling at this point, but I I can't even imagine going into a room and just berating him and blaming him for every single thing that was something that I felt and in the way that I did, because I had so little ability to see what I was feeling, maybe to understand that it was really these undercurrent beliefs and stories that I was continuing to repetitively look at. It's so hard to describe because it's been seven years. It's eight years, I'm coming up on eight years of sobriety, but it's really seven years of sort of soul recovery work that I've been working on. And I really mark it when I started the Course in Miracles. Doing 12-step was so powerful. But as soon as I added metaphysics into the 12-step more diligently, that's when like my whole heart opened. And the release of blame and attack was a huge piece of it because I wasn't being honest that I was blaming or I was attacking. I thought I was helping. I thought I was pointing out important things to fix. I thought I was being a good solver of problems. And I saw some problems. And it isn't that there aren't things to work on, it's that I was expending all of my energy blaming and putting all the energy on everybody else's need to change instead of mine. And it's not that we need changing, it's not that we need fixing because there's something wrong with us, because we're broken, because that's not it either. It's about curiosity and about self-compassion and about understanding how we all come here into these experiences and we are harmed because we're fallible and the world hurts. And parents who we look up to and idolize as children are just human beings doing the best that they can. And often it's not that great. But it wasn't for the most part. There are people who are less well at different times in their lives who who definitely instill more harm than others. And this is really complicated. And again, you know, I look more deeply at it from a if we can rise above just enough to look at these experiences from this ego view, this spiritual view, and say, Isn't it interesting if you came from a family where there was heavy abuse or heavy, you know, some of the heavy stuff that we go through? Instead of blaming and saying, this happened to me and that's why I'm like this, what if we switched it and we said, interesting that this is the experience that my soul chose to experience? And I know this is a big push for some people because there's a lot of difficult things we go through. Why would we choose? But just stay with me for a second. So if we were to empower ourselves to say, on some level, I choose and have been aware of everything. And I choose and I'm aware of everything that I experience and how I choose to see it and what I choose to learn from it. When I look at the situations in my life that I went through and going into those rooms, one of the things that, you know, it's kind of interesting. It's kind of hard for me to even remember what I was so mad at. Um, Rich was hard on the boys. He had an intensity that he didn't see. And I think it's interesting. I think I shared in a recent podcast that in one of our morning coffee talks, he said, I did, I this was in a recent one. He said, I thought a level three frustration on my end was not that bad. And you guys saw a level seven anger. And I mentioned that to Bodhi the other day, and he said, Yeah, definitely, that's how we experienced it. Because he had come from his own upbringing, where for him that was a level three frustration, which is the example of how when we're constantly relating to the past and creating blame for instead of curiosity for now, we lose the ability to have that higher vision to recognize that at every moment you get to decide how it is going to feel for you. And that is including and important to feel the feelings that you feel. So the sadness and the abandonment and the fear that I felt, very real feelings. Rich was never like physically violent, and I don't think he ever actually intended to be as intense as we felt. If I can look at it now from an entirely different perspective. And the more that I turn the attention to myself using the recover your soul process of rigorous honesty and curiosity, not in judgment, and like without judgment, of just like, hmm, what is that about? How does that feel? Why is that hitting so hard? How can I still have such a fear of getting in trouble? I am still terrified of getting in trouble on any level. It's still there. That four-year-old had that experience of getting in trouble from her parents, and she still doesn't like to get in trouble. And on some level, I think all of this is an example of how we create story, and at each moment we get the opportunity to look at the story from a more neutral perspective. And the blame starts to come off. Like, what if you take the blame off and you exchange it for curiosity and you exchange it for honesty in yourself? And more than that, you exchange it for permission to feel how you feel. Because what we're really saying in blame is we're like, if you would change, if you would, if you would admit that you did this to me, then I could validate the feelings that I have. You are entitled to the feelings that you have, regardless of how you're seeing it. Because each experience that you're in is part of your learning. So even if somebody's in a high state of victimhood, the world is crappy to me, nothing ever happens right to me. I don't like this. This person is always mean to me. I never get good men, I never have good jobs, nothing ever works out for me. Those are all belief systems being offered to you to take a look at. Where can you go underneath and dig down to find why you think no one's ever kind to you, why you don't think you're deserving of a loving relationship, why you don't think everything works out for you. There's information in that to uncover for your own soul's healing. And then when we take responsibility for our well-being, for how we see it, and you start recognizing our parents just did the best that they could, but it doesn't diminish the feelings that you felt and allow yourself to feel. I know personally for myself and so many other people, I feel um reluctant to feel those feelings that I couldn't feel when I was a child. Something in me knew very early on, just to be good, to not make a scene, to not have a tantrum. I'm sometimes I'm jealous of those people that could totally throw a tantrum and just really let it all out. I have visions of myself even as an adult, like wishing I just could go outside and stomp my feet and scream and yell. And maybe I should. Maybe I should give myself permission to go out and really feel those feelings. The minister that used to give Rich and I coaching, he had a bat in his office. And if people were really feeling agitated, he encouraged him to beat the crap out of the sofa. It's not bad to let the feelings out in a healthy way, especially when you're just feeling the feelings and you're not blaming the energy that we spend on blaming somebody else and making it somebody else's fault is just judgment. And judgment is an attempt to protect ourselves and to validate how we feel. What if you could let go of that and validate how you feel and allow yourself to have those feelings give you information? And in it, you can start to have more awareness of what is really going on for you. Because if we're powerless over everything and everyone around us, if you're with somebody who has behaviors or shows up in your life that is not healthy, in ekhartle, accept it, change it or leave it. And we've learned that the only thing that's changeable is here. It's the same thing serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, everything else to change the things I can, me, and the wisdom to know the difference. I swear to you the first time that I heard that prayer, that is not how I heard it. I heard it. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Okay, can't change some things, the courage to change the things I can. I'm giving myself, I'm putting my bootstraps on so I can go and blame and change them. I swear to you, I heard that the first time. When I understood what they were really saying, I remember like, oh my God, I am so wanting to blame and change everything around me so that I can be okay. And the wisdom to know the difference. The internal wisdom to give yourself grace and recognize that if you're blaming, you're giving your power away. Instead of blaming, feel. Instead of blaming, have curiosity, instead of blaming, look more deeply at what are those trigger points, what are those pain points, what are those beliefs and stories, what is actually happening underneath, because all of those things have validity and are important to process and to understand and to learn from. That's why you're here. And then you are empowered to realize nobody makes you feel anything. And as you heal those beliefs, patterns, and stories and that four-year-old operating system, that operating system, and that's what the recovery steps are, right? Eventually you get to the step where you're releasing what no longer serves you and you're updating your operating system so that for the most part, a 56-year-old woman's operating system is in my body. Sometimes when I'm in pain, or sometimes when something hurts a lot, I can watch myself fall down into those pain points. And instead of blaming even myself, you look more deeply at what is this showing me? How can I go in even more? How can I open even more to this understanding? Because the more work you do in this experience, in this body, in this soul's journey, the more you benefit your soul down the road, and the more you benefit the collective of all of us in our higher consciousness together as one, anyway. So doing this work here, and I also like to just remind us that if you're having a lifetime that is filled with challenge, you're doing graduate level work. Instead of blaming and saying, why can't it be different? What if you looked at it and said, hmm, I've got some deep work to do and I get to do it. That's step one and recover your soul, ready for awakening. Ah, this is about me. I'm gonna take responsibility for my own life. I'm going to make a decision to heal and awaken myself. I am going to make a decision to follow a spiritual path. I am going to make a decision to be happy and healthy. And nobody else, nobody else is at fault for us not making that decision for ourselves. We attracted, we asked for, we're in relationship with these people. And as you switch and as you heal and as you change yourself, God grant me the surroundings to accept the things that cannot change. And you let a lot of those things go. And sometimes it's a hard choice that you have to make to let go of some very important relationships because they've given you what they needed to teach you what you were supposed to learn from them. But it doesn't always mean that you stay in that experience. Sometimes the learning is to let go of those relationships to align with your more healed self and then to take what you learned from them, releasing all blame, all judgment, all grievance, all he was an ass, or that was terrible. And just looking at it from this more awakened state that says, this is what I went through. And it was intense. And here's what I learned. And here's how I allowed myself to be treated. Here's how I allowed myself to feel. Here's how I chose to have that experience. And now I'm choosing something different. That's empowerment. So releasing blame is actually one of the most powerful things that you can do because you're letting go of the need for somebody else to be okay for you to be okay, which is a foundational promise that we're making in Recover Your Soul. If you do this work, if you turn the attention to yourself, if you choose spiritual tools and principles in which to live your life, you will be relieved of the burden of self. You will be relieved of the burden of other people's lives determining whether you're safe or not. You are safe. You are whole. You are enough, just as you are. And if you're here, you are ready, you are aligned with these words that I use to choose yourself in a way that you've never done before and to stop blaming anybody and to take responsibility for your own healing and your own wholeness. Because it's time. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and being part of the Recover Your Soul community. If today's episode spoke to you and you'd like to connect with the community even more, I invite you to join us on the first Monday of every month for the free online support group on Zoom. It's from 6 to 7 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, where I share a little bit more on the Recover Your Soul journey and then we break into small groups. You can register at recoveryoursoul.net, and if you've registered in the past, be on the lookout in your promotions folder for the reminder email and link. I'd also love to invite you to listen to the Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast every Friday, either as an Apple Podcast subscriber or as a Patreon member. On Patreon, you can become a free member and have access to new episodes for the first week, or you can support this community with the tier that you choose. You can also follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, and join the private Facebook group for more connection with this amazing community. I hope you'll visit the website recoveryoursul.net and you can sign up for emails so that you can be up to date with everything that's going on and maybe even join me for a retreat someday. Lastly, I thank you for sharing this podcasting community with anyone that you think might enjoy or learn from it. I also thank you for giving me five stars on any platform that you listen to and writing a review so that others can find the Recover Your Soul community too. Until next time, Namaste.