Blame can be a great tool for protecting yourself. As long as you can point your finger at somebody else, you don’t have to accept any guilt. If your mistakes and problems are somebody else’s fault, then you can excuse yourself. Sadly, it can be pretty easy to blame somebody else for your decision to use drugs. Maybe somebody else got you to try drugs, perhaps by using peer pressure. Maybe the stress of your job made you look for some way to escape. Maybe you have been treated badly or even abused by others, so you needed some way to cope with your problems. Maybe you suffer from depression or bipolar disorder, and you need drugs to cope with the suffering in your life. Maybe you suffer from chronic pain, and you need drugs to cope with the pain. The list of reasons why people say they need to use drugs is long and very sad.
There’s an old saying, however, that when you point your finger at somebody else, that leaves four other fingers pointing back at you. In other words, blaming other people really doesn’t help. Unless somebody holds you down and forces the drug into your system, you have made a choice to use. And not just the first time, but every time you used. Let’s face it. Nobody ever really held you down and forced you to swallow a pill or a bottle of gin. There may have been pressure of some kind or other, but the fact is that you made a choice to use. Every. Time. You. Used. The problem with blaming others for our addiction is that you surrender your freedom. If you are willing to assert that your use of drugs is in the hands of others, then you implicitly admit that you are helpless.
https://youtu.be/qvSTGedFNi0
You’re not helpless. You made have made poor choices in the past. For any of a variety of reasons, you may have decided that using drugs was the answer to your problems. The important thing to realize is that you made a decision and repeatedly chose to continue down that path. Blaming doesn’t do any good for you or for anyone else. Blaming is an attempt to exempt yourself from the guilt for what you have done. All it really accomplishes is to prevent you from moving forward to recovery. Pointing fingers is, pardon the pun, pointless. Give it up. Stop blaming. Stand up and make better decisions in the future.
One of the challenges of recovery from addiction is the acknowledgement of the damage you have caused in your own life and the lives of others. Parents must sometimes admit that their addiction has left them unable to provide proper care for their children. Employees must sometimes admit that they have not performed their duties at work because they were more focused on getting more of their drug of choice than on completing their work. Worse, they may have to admit that work sometimes just didn’t get done because they were unable to get to work. Recovering addicts must admit that money which should have been used to pay bills was instead used to buy drugs. The wreckage of a life of addiction must be confronted and acknowledged, and that can be both difficult and painful.
isors at work about why we are absent or why our work is slipping. We may lie in order to get the money we need to purchase our drug of choice. We may like to ourselves about the extent of our drug use or make excuses about our need to use drugs. Some research indicates that people who abuse drugs often come from the more intelligent among us. This isn’t really surprising, considering the fact that victims of addiction must keep track of an entire web of deceit. That can’t be easy to manage. You have to remember who you told what lie to.