Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You
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I Must Have Done Something Wrong - Is It My Fault? | Trauma Ep. 7
What is the difference between accountability and self-blame when it comes to not being able to reach a goal? Tune in as Najwa Awad differentiates the two and recommends some practical tips to overcome self-blame.
Explore the series Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Assalamualaikum, Najwa Awad from Yaqeen Institute. Today we're going to be talking about the common thought, everything is my fault. Unexpected surprises can knock the wind out of us. When we have aspirations and things we're really looking forward to, it's almost like part of us is living in the future. And we have really high hopes for things panning out. And when those hopes are crushed and things don't go as planned, it can be a really traumatic feeling and a traumatic event in a person's life. When you married someone that you thought would be the only person you'd spend the rest of your life with, and it doesn't work out, or you worked years to try and get this job that you want, and you weren't able to, the promotion goes to somebody else. That hope being taken away can be very soul crushing. And you might start to wonder, you know, that everything is your fault. I'm trying my best, I'm making dora, I'm doing everything in my power to try and make things go right. But there must be something about me that's not making things work out. When something bad happens, we are wired for survival purposes to ask why. Why is this happening and who caused this? Reflecting on what goes wrong is essential for well-being. When you're accountable and you can reflect on things that you did that might not be right, or things that could have been prevented, then you can save yourself from future pain. You can also readdress people that you might have wronged. Accountability is one of the most important attributes that a person can have. A healthy-minded individual engages in accountability really for self-protection and to make themselves and the world a better place. This is much different than self-blame. Self-blame is when you criticize yourself and you are just focusing on the negative for no reason other than to make yourself feel bad. Over time, self-blame can be very dangerous.
It contributes to poor mood, it can be a major factor in depression, it can even lead you to one of the biggest sins in Islam, which is despairing the mercy of Allah. While self-blame happens to everyone, in my practice I feel like it really happens to a lot of women. Recently I was meeting with a client and we were talking about guilt. She told me this really awful saying. The saying goes like, beat your wife every day and if you don't know why, she will. It's awful because anyone would think that, but it's awful because a lot of women actually do engage in that level of self-blame in which they take responsibility and feel bad for things that really have nothing to do within themselves. This is one of the worst kinds of oppression because it's not only taking accountability from the person who should be accountable, but it's almost like a bomb on the self in which you are inheriting almost like someone's sins and you are blaming yourself and feeling bad for something that really has nothing to do with you. Sometimes bad things happen to us because of our own wrongdoing, but we also know that sometimes distress can be the result of a bigger picture things, things that we don't know about, the unseen. So while it's good to always do istighfar and seek nearness to Allah in that capacity, we also need to remember that just because something bad happens to us, it doesn't necessarily mean it's because we did something wrong. Many people who experience self-blame can trace the thoughts that they have back to a critical caregiver, someone in their past that might have had good intentions in trying to redirect them or trying to help them, but used feeling guilty or used blame as a motivator instead of growth and looking at things from a strength perspective.
You can go back and reflect on your early childhood and think, the voice that I have now, does it sound like someone that, you know, a teacher or a parent or some kind of caregiver? Does it sound like someone who used to say things to me before that made me not feel good? What happens is when we're children, we are very vulnerable and the things that people say to us eventually become a part of us. So the negative thoughts in your head and that script of self-blame might really be from someone in your past. We also know that shaitan uses this trick to make us feel bad and want us to not want to seek nearness to Allah out of shame or feeling that we're not worthy. So in addition to, you know, reflecting on people in your past that might have inadvertently hurt you this way, it's also important to realize that this is a tried and true trick from shaitan to try to get you to despair and think that you're just not good enough or worthy to be with Allah and be a good Muslim. Getting rid of thoughts of self-blame, that everything is my fault, or if I had done this, this could have been prevented, it becomes habitual and it becomes a way of thinking that's very hard to break out of. So it sounds very overly simplistic, but if this is something that you struggle with, in the morning and in the evening you can take a journal and you can write down some of these self-blame thoughts and once you're finished, cross them out with red or something really dark and thick and then replace those unhealthy thoughts with more healthy thoughts, positive things, and reflect on how those things that you were blaming yourself for had nothing to do with you. Your child having a disability has nothing to do with you.
Your marriage falling apart, sometimes it might have something to do with you, sometimes it has nothing to do with you. Again, it could be part of a bigger picture. So when we look at it from that framework, then we can really rework through some of those things, even if we had that negative voice in our head from our past, the more you practice, the easier it becomes over time. For more tools, insights, and reflections on self-blame, check out our series, Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You, on yokelininstitute.org.
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