Why do I always think everything’s my fault?

If you start feeling guilty when someone around you is angry, if you trace back the reasons behind some thing’s breaking to something you’ve done a long time ago (even though many people might have used it through all that time), and if through all that you realize that those feelings and suspicions aren’t rational, you are very likely either an over-responsible person, trying to fix problems in everyone’s lives and feeling guilty when things go wrong, or you are trying to escape personal responsibility, and use self-blame and other negative self-talk to prevent yourself from taking productive action and growing.

Different reasons behind such counterproductive and often destructive thinking include childhood trauma, underlying anxiety disorder (can be genetic), depression (might be caused by relatively recent traumatic experience). Oftentimes self-blame could be a mechanism of protection from taking personal responsibility (instead of blame) for whatever needs fixing or improving, and actually doing something productive about it (changing – going against the status quo).

Ways of getting rid of such a dangerous habit include realizing that other people also have their share of responsibility in any situation, learning to reasonably estimate everyone’s share of responsibility, fighting against your default mode (desire to stay the same and avoid changing).

Why do I blame myself for everything?

There are several possible connected conditions, which may be the underlying cause of the excessive self-blame, or make you vulnerable to this condition:

1. anxiety
2. major depressive disorder
3. childhood trauma
4. fear to go against the status quo
5. unconscious narcissistic way of getting power over others

1. Anxiety link

Overthinking, worrying and, imagining worst-case scenarios are the common sign of general anxiety disorder (GAD). Consider a person with anxiety, who has a friend going on an out-of-town trip. Being away and unable to help their friend during travels in any way, habitually, this anxious person will resort to their worrying routine, as a way of “supporting” their friend.

Problem is, subconsciously people form a connection between worrying about something and the probability of it happening. And in case something does go wrong on that trip for their friend, the anxious person will extend the guilt to themselves, for worrying about a potential accident.

2. Major depressive disorder (MDD) link

MDD is characterized by a persistent feeling of sadness and a lack of interest in pretty much everything.

Study into symptom-free people with a history of MDD was conducted, where participants were read sentences that were designed to cause guild or outrage, featuring their best friends. For example, “Joe” might read a sentence like, “Joe acts greedily toward Tony,” to elicit guilt. The sentence “Tony acts greedily toward Joe” would trigger outrage. At this time participants were under functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – a brain scan that shows blood flow to active areas of the brain.

The study showed, that for the feelings of guilt, brains of people with a history of MDD failed to sync up properly – there was a significant difference from how brains of the healthy people functioned. For the outrage, there was no noticeable difference. Interestingly, those participants didn’t report feeling any different during reading guild and outrage sentences. This means that disfunction in brain communication is not consciously perceived.

3. Childhood trauma link

There are some distinct types of adverse childhood experiences, which can lead to excessive self-blame later in life

• someone who has been told, that everything is their fault, and the world would have been a better place, have they not been born, are quite clearly and explicitly at risk of developing a habit of assigning all the blame to themselves
• children from households with at least one under-responsible adult are at risk of developing over-responsibility – they start planning to schedule and orchestrating lives of everyone around them, doing others’ chores, and every time those overwhelming attempts at large-scale life-management inevitably fail, they start blaming themselves, because it’s their attempts to fix everyone and make everyone happy have failed.

4. Fear of change and the status quo link

In my previous article, I’ve touched on how humans are heavily invested in staying in the default mode. We don’t want to change, even if we feel miserable. Any attempts at growth and improvement are met with resistance, and your success at overcoming it depends on your confidence and motivation.

And self-blame is a very clever mechanism of keeping any attempts to change at bay. People, who feel guilty about everything bad happening around them use a kind of reverse-projection. Normally, projection is used to assign the negative qualities, which we afraid to see in ourselves, to others. Self-blamer, on the contrary, will assign the best qualities to the surrounding people, while assigning himself all the worst, dirtiest and lowest anti-qualities, which lead to all the disasters, which happened in their lives.

And of course, if there is nothing good about you, no possible spark of capability and worthiness, bothering to put any attempts at fixing the situation, or improving themselves would be just a waste of time. So they never bother to dedicate any effort to growth, fixing, improvement.

It is a very cunning mechanism at protecting yourself from responsibility for our contribution to our problems and trying to do something productive about it.

5. Subtle narcissism and the power play link

To understand why you keep this negative self-talk of assigning the guilt for everything to yourself, think about what benefits are you receiving from it, even outside of the aforementioned maintaining the status quo.

• you get to feel sorry for yourself and play the victim – and there are plenty historical examples of people benefiting from playing the victim
• you gain attention, other are obliged to feel sorry for you, or potentially be sen as sociopaths
• you gain increased trust and empathy if you blame yourself or apologize publicly. Here’s an eye-opening study. This could also be a sign of a codependent pleaser, as you are so obsessed about keeping certain people in your circle happy (to make them like you), that you sacrifice your self-worth for it and take the blame for the mistakes of others.
• you gain power because you’ve just decided for others how things have actually played out, you were the referee for some instance of social friction and you firmly stated the outcome of it (even if it’s the outcome of you being to blame for everything).
• you deny your vulnerability – since you’ve messed up it couldn’t have been someone else hurting or wronging you.

Next time you catch yourself feeling guilty for something you rationally know you cannot be solely and completely blamed for, find reasons within yourself for what causes that feeling. Do you feel in charge, thinking your worry can change something? Do you apologize, manipulating empathy out of others? Does it give you an excuse for inaction? Is it your well-established habit and default behavior in a conflicting situation? Try understanding yourself better, using the knowledge from this section.

Harmful effects of excessive self-blaming

As I mentioned many times in the previous sections one of the main damaging effects of thinking everything’s your fault is avoiding constructive action to improve yourself and/or the situation.

If your self-blaming habit comes from a more narcissistic angle than you aren’t likely to build quality relationships, as a huge portion of your action will come from insecurity and with manipulation in mind. Quality people will avoid your company and less desirable ones are likely to form mutually-destructive bonds with you.

If you are one of the over-responsible people you are vulnerable to the abuse of your excessive guilt – manipulative people can easily convince you to do what they want.

Not to mention the decrease of self-esteem you might experience, and the self-abuse inflicted by all the negative, derogatory internal monologue directed at yourself. If you don’t think that has any effect on you, try saying all of the negativity, that you think of yourself, out loud in front of a window, and see how you feel. Self-loathing has a more subtle but equally demotivating soul-sucking effect.

Ways to stop blaming yourself

One of the seemingly trivial, but effective techniques, which is especially effective for over-responsible people (but not limited to them) is a responsibility pie. Its is done in a few easy steps:

1. Draw a circle on a piece of paper
2. Next to this circle list all the people involved in an unpleasant situation, for which you feel guilty (excluding yourself)
3. Once you’ve compiled the full list start assigning the slices of the to those people (and labeling them), estimating their respective contribution to the situation (don’t try to make those slices add up to a full pie yet, see the next step).
4. Whatever the portion that is left un-labeled is approximately your share of responsibility.

I agree, that it looks very trivial, and it is based on guidelines for teaching children about responsibility, it has its clear benefits. Mainly, you get out of the automatic mode – you probably are used to assigning the heaviest portion of the blame to yourself subconsciously, but once you start consciously thinking and logically and explicitly estimating everyone’s degree of contribution – you are suddenly using different areas of the brain, different way of thinking. It is almost as if you’ve tried to get an unbiased perspective from a third-party.

Another approach is to see self-blame as a bad habit and to get rid of it, as you would with any bad habits. In my article about following a good daily routine, I have a section dedicated to the topic of habits, consult it for a way of destroying the destructive habits.

Additionally you want to consciously draw the line between what is and what isn’t your fault, in other words, what do you have a full control over:

• your actions
• your feelings
• your words

Take self-responsibility instead of self-blame, you are in control of and responsible for the 3 things, listed above. And taking responsibility for actions you choose, even when it hurts someone else’s feelings, but you know is the right thing to do, is a sign of maturity and first of all respect for others. Because you grant them moral agency and give them the responsibility not to get sensitive, emotional and upset over your choices. This, of course, doesn’t include destructive behavior, which brings harm to other people and their property.

Stoic philosophy can be a great guide to achieving serenity and leaving worries behind, replacing them with productive, constructive thinking and actions. Here are a few quotes by a Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius for you to consider:

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Marcus Aurelius

Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed

Marcus Aurelius

You have to realize that you are not responsible for everything, which can be humbling to some people. At the same time, any conflict is a group effort, so it is not possible for everything to be your fault, especially all the time.

Some questions self-blamer has to ask themselves:

• Recall the times you took the blame for something that isn’t your fault, how did it make you feel?
• How much time was wasted on negative self-talk and worry?
• Was there someone manipulating and convincing you into thinking that things were your fault?
• Did they blame you for no reason just and made you feel bad?

Lastly, here’s a list of suggested therapies for people who constantly blame themselves for everything:

• compassion-focused therapy
• cognitive analytic therapy (CAT) 
• cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)
• mentalization-based therapy (MBT) 
• mindfulness-based cognitive therapy 
• schema therapy
• transactional analysis

Whatever causes for excessive self-blame are inside you, whatever ways to fighting out of this sabotaging habit you’re going to take, always remember: there is a bright powerful beacon ahead of you. Once you reach it, the illumination of your soul with cast back the shadows of doubt, indecisiveness or over-responsibility which were plaguing your life, and show you the way to constructive action to move your life forward. Never give up!