Blaming someone else becomes an addiction that is very destructive. It seems like relief at first, but it will lead to suffering later on. Amy Killingsworth shares with us proverbs that would clear our minds and heal ourselves. In this episode, she elaborates on the circumstances that trigger our need to blame another person and gives us an overview of handling certain situations. We will dive deep into the process of cultivating our thoughts in the right way and avoiding negativity to ensure inner peace and freedom. 

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The Blessings Of Being Blameless

This episode is all about the blessing of being blameless. Is blame ruining your life? It might be. Read on to find out how to transition from the misery of blame to the blessings of blamelessness. Remember, God wants you healed so you can wholeheartedly live your purpose, and love your life. 

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In this episode, we are wrapping up our little mini-series on sovereignty. Sovereignty is one pillar in the Rise to Reign framework. There are seven pillars and seven categories. I would say it’s definitely the most important if we were to categorize them by importance. The entire system hinges on sovereignty. They are all necessary but this one is big, robust and important. In the first one on sovereignty, a couple of episodes back, I introduced the concept of sovereignty. When I tried to go forward, I felt that it needed some expansion. I spent an entire episode after the last episode on consent, which is an integral topic around sovereignty. This episode is going to be on the quality of being blameless. 

Our brains are meaning-making machines and always collecting data. Click To Tweet

If you will remember from the prior episodes on sovereignty and if you haven’t read them, I recommend that you go back and read them because it builds precept upon precept and line upon line. If you remember, the way the mechanism by, which we give our sovereignty away is to blame. I’m going to impact blame a little bit more because blame is a true root cause. If you look at problems in relationships, in the micro, macro, your finances and your body in the world globally, blame is at the root of much of it. If there’s a problem that Rise to Reign solves, it is the problem of blame. I feel like we need to spend some time understanding what it looks like to live a blameless life, to be without blame and what that might look like. 

Projection

I’m going to give you some practical tools, tell some stories but I’m also going to invite you to dream a little bit with me about the life that you can have and the world that we can create without this scourge of blame. Let’s start by talking a little bit more about projection. Projection is a psychological term that means that you see other people on a movie screen and what you see playing out on the screen of them is what’s coming from a projector that’s inside of you. You take what you are experiencing but have disowned, and you see and experience it through another person, even another situation or sometimes an institution. I will give you an example of that. 

When I was growing up, my dad was angry. He had bouts of anger and rage. As I grew up, I developed a pattern of being codependent, walking on eggshells and trying to make him okay so that I could be okay. That’s pretty typical in a type of environment where you have an angry person who’s a rageaholic or an alcoholic. There’s always the family that is enabling that pattern of behavior in a codependent manner that the two go together. I grew up with an angry father. I made a lot of unconscious decisions about how men are, how life is, how my dad was a pastor for some time and how God is based on growing up with all I knew, which was my father. When I’ve got older and I started having romantic relationships with men, I would play this dynamic out over again. 

It was so unconscious because all I wanted to do was get away from the chaos and the fear of my family of origin but I ended up finding myself in the same situation with very small nuances. Almost identical relationships over again with an angry person that I had to walk around on eggshells and make okay so that I could be okay. That is an example of how we project what is unhealed in ourselves onto the other situations and the other people in our lives. There are a bunch of other things involved there from a psychological standpoint. I want you to get the picture that when I haven’t owned my own codependency, I am going to automatically see that and attracted to a bunch of different situations that I unconsciously create so that I can undo the dynamics of the past. 

When I talk about becoming blameless, it’s a way of undoing projection. Your nervous system is a tape recorder. Every single circumstance that you have ever found yourself, everything you have ever seen, heard, and experienced in your life, is recorded in your subconscious mind. It’s all there. You can’t necessarily recall it on demand but it’s all there buried in your subconscious. Some of those experiences are good, some are neutral and many of them are traumatic. I coined this term to help explain this to my clients but the repository of all of the trauma and the woundedness that we experience throughout life, I call that the toxic tank. If you imagine you have a tank inside your nervous system, inside your subconscious mind and you are walking around with trauma, hurt and all of these unhealed wounds in this tank, it’s slimy, gross and it smells bad but we keep a tight lid on it. 

 

Most of us go through our life and the toxic tank stays somewhat buried. When something happens, when we get triggered or we face adverse circumstances, that’s what we find out what is in that toxic tank. That’s when stuff comes up and escaping out of the toxic tank. When somebody makes us mad or when somebody rejects, insults us, cuts us off in traffic or doesn’t listen to us, we find that those old patterns and old wounds get bumped and come up out of the toxic tank. It can be quite off-putting or upsetting because you want to be a reasonable person. 

You don’t want to blow up, you don’t want to lose your temper but sometimes it hijacks you, and find yourself being out of control. One of the patterns that I have become more conscious of in my later years in maturity, I don’t find myself experiencing this as much anymore because I’m aware of it. Awareness is key. One of mine was not having my experience validated when I was a child, being gaslit a lot when I was a child. If I said, “I’m hungry,” “No, you are not. You just ate.” If I said, “I’m sad and I was crying,” it was, “Quit crying. You are fine.” I was constantly told how I was feeling and wasn’t listened to. 

As an adult, when I became a mother, most of the things that my kids did, I was pretty patient and chill for the most part but when they didn’t listen to me when I told them to do something or when they ignored me, I would find myself losing control of my mind. I’m not screaming, yelling or anything but I would find myself having this, “Grr.” I was even noticing I’m like, “This isn’t that big of a deal, why is it so upsetting for me? Why does this make me so mad?” It was because it was triggering something that was already there. That thing was now coming up, wanting to be expressed and wanting to be healed. We don’t want that. We don’t want to feel that. We hate that feeling. We tried to get away from that feeling. What do we do? We take it to try to throw it away. 

Blameless Is Healing

Becoming blameless is a process of healing, sitting with your feelings, acknowledging and processing them through so that they can come up and out. As you do that, that toxic tank begins to empty and you begin to experience a lot more peace. Remember, the queendom in Rise to Reign is righteousness, which is a right relationship with God, with yourself and other’s peace, which is nothing missing, nothing has broken the idea of human flourishing. The Hebrew idea of Shalom and Joy, which is a calm delight. That’s our birthright and our natural state. 

Judgment is a meaning that our brains give the offense based on our prior experience.  Click To Tweet

Anytime we are not in righteousness, peace, and joy, we are outside of the kingdom or the queendom and one of the false selves, which is either the prisoner, the slave, the prince or the princess. We want to cultivate self-awareness as we find ourselves being triggered by circumstances in our life because believe it or not, everything is happening for you, for your good and your healing. It doesn’t feel good and it’s not enjoyable but it is good if you respond the right way and if you interact the right way. 

Let’s talk about the process of being triggered. The process of being triggered goes like this. Some very specific steps happen very fast and usually unconsciously but the progression goes. A perceived offense takes place. Somebody cuts you off in traffic, your kid doesn’t listen to you or your spouse doesn’t call and come home for dinner when they said they would or something happens. We will call that a perceived offense. Immediately what our minds do is create a judgment. Judgment is a meaning that our brains give the offense based on our prior experience. This is important. It’s not based in reality at all. It’s based on our prior experience. Our brains are meaning-making machines and always collecting data. 

Remember, everything that you have ever experienced is recorded in your subconscious mind. It pulls on that data to create meaning and that’s a judgment. For instance, if your husband doesn’t come home on time for dinner and doesn’t call, he could be in a car accident. His phone could have gone dead. He could be in a meeting with a client that he literally can’t get out of. There are a million different explanations but your brain is going to pick the one that is emotionally charged that reminds you, mirrors or recreates a situation usually from your childhood. It goes like this when my dad didn’t come home, he was out drinking and being unfaithful to my mom because he didn’t care about her and us. That’s your little girl’s mind making a meaning based on her experiences. Do you see how that works? You make that judgment based on your prior experience. The offense happens, you make a judgment, which is a meaning based on a prior experience and you go straight to blame, which is deciding who or what is at fault. In this situation, it’s the husband that’s at fault. That’s where you are going to go. You are then going to go to the next step, which is an accusation. 

The accusation is where the projection happens. This is where we see in others the effects of the emotion that we don’t want to own in ourselves. This is where we take that hurt from being a little girl whose dad was unfaithful or unreliable off onto our husband. Chances are, he is blindsided by this and doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. He feels shame because a fault was assigned to him. He gets defensive and it is now going to trigger something that happened in his childhood. He’s going to take that and offend the judgment, blame, accuse you right back and now we are in a fight. We are playing out a pattern from each of our childhoods, not making any progress or constructive forward motion in our relationship. We are racing for the victim position. We are playing hot potato with blame and shame. It’s counterproductive and it destroys relationships. 

We have this fictional example. I have a feeling that if you have ever been in a romantic relationship, you might be able to understand or relate to what I’m talking about. It doesn’t just happen with romantic relationships. It happens with parents and children. It happens between countries in diplomatic discussions. This is how war takes place. It’s important to see this process to gain emotional intelligence to heal and to gain emotional maturity. How many of you know that it doesn’t matter how old you are where emotional maturity is concerned? All of us know a 65-year-old toddler. Maybe you are a 65-year-old toddler. This is how we mature emotionally. This is how we gain emotional intelligence and expand emotional intelligence. This is how we heal so that we can rule and reign in our lives, be at cause, live our purpose, love our lives, enjoy our lives and our relationships, and feel righteousness, peace and joy. 

A quick word about the accusation. In Revelations 12:10, Satan is called the accuser. I want to make a strong statement here that hopefully, you remember. You are never more like the devil than when you are accusing. Some of us have more self-control than others. We don’t have a lot of accusation that comes out of our mouth but we think in our mind. It’s slightly less destructive because you are not giving power to it with your words but you are still accusing. That carries incredible weight in the spiritual realm. That energy of accusation is a real thing and very destructive. I want to add and pull something else into here because you are thinking, “I’m not too bad at this because I get along with others and I am mad at myself.” 

How many of us have that mean girl voice or inner dialogue that’s constantly accusing ourselves? “You are fat. You are stupid. You are lazy. You did this again.” Remember, you can be accusing yourself as well. It’s every bit as destructive as if you are accusing other people, even if you are not speaking it out loud. On the flip side, you are never more your heavenly father, our God, when you are exercising sovereignty and offering amnesty. Our very next episode, I promise this time is going to be on amnesty, which is forgiveness. That’s the way out. That’s how we get out of this prison of blame and accusation. Remember, you are never more like the devil than when you are accusing and you are never more like God than when you are exercising your sovereignty. You are walking in your sovereignty and offering amnesty. 

This is where I want to dream about what’s possible if we give up blame. You might be thinking, “I’m convinced I want to give up blame.” Blame is an emotional addiction. I would say most of you are absolutely addicted to blaming. It’s super seductive because it feels justification and pain relief. There is a perverse pleasure in the brief moment but it always leads to multiplied suffering later on. I want to dream for a few minutes about the blessings of being blameless. I pulled every one of them out of scripture. They are promises for you if you decide that you don’t want to participate and engage in blame. 

 

Job 8:21 says, “He will fill your mouth with laughter and your lips with joyful shouting if you are found blameless.” Psalm 37:37 says, “Consider the blameless, observe the upright. A future awaits those who seek peace.” There’s this correlation again with the kingdom. Peace is found in blamelessness. Psalm 37:18, “The blameless spend their days under the Lord’s care and their inheritance will endure forever.” Proverbs 11:20, “The perverse heart is repulsive and shamefully vile to the Lord but those who are blameless and above reproach in their walk are his delight.” Proverbs 11:5, “The righteousness of the blameless will smooth their way and keep it straight but the wicked will fall by his own wickedness.” There’s this juxtaposition between the righteous and the wicked and the correlation between being blameless and being righteous. It’s a connection to the kingdom or the queendom. 

Proverbs 3:25 says, “Do not be afraid of sudden fear, nor of the storm of the wicked when it comes since you will be blameless.” There’s an offer of protection that comes with being blameless. Proverbs 2:21, “For the upright, those who are in right standing with God will live in the land and those of integrity who are blameless in God’s sight will remain in it.” A promise of being established. Provers 28:18, “He who walks blamelessly and uprightly will be kept safe but he who is crooked or perverse will suddenly fall.” Proverbs 28:10, “He who leads the upright astray on an evil path will himself fall into his own pit but the blameless will inherit good.” There’s an inheritance that comes with being blameless. “Righteousness guards the one whose way is blameless but wickedness undermines and overthrows a sinner.” Proverbs 13:6. Those are straight out of scripture, promises and some offers that come along with this idea of being blameless. 

I also wanted to make the tie-in and hopefully, you saw that the kingdom righteousness or the queendom of righteousness peace and joy is directly tied to this idea of being blameless. There are two different meanings of blameless. The first one is that you have done nothing wrong. Blameless means without blame. Being blameless could mean that you don’t deserve any blame and that you have done nothing wrong or you are above reproach, also righteousness. This is a state of being in a perfectly right relationship of being innocent, of no wrongdoing. 

Here’s another scripture from Job, “The Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered and reflected on my servant, Job? For there is no one like him on the Earth, a blameless and upright man. One who fears God with reverence and abstains and turns away from evil. He maintains and holds tightly to his integrity.’” There’s that aspect of blameless about being perfect as a human being. If that seems out of reach to you, I have good news for you. The other idea of blamelessness is based on our deservingness of blame or not. This one is that you don’t engage in blame, that you don’t blame other people so that you are not worthy of blame but you are also not one to blame other people, other situations, other institutions. Both are necessary for sovereignty and both are necessary for righteousness in your taking part in the kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy. 

That begs the question, is which among us is without reproach. Who among us has lived for very long and doesn’t deserve some blame for something? Who hasn’t made mistakes? There’s nobody. There’s no human other than Jesus Christ who walked the Earth as a perfect man who deserves to be called blameless because we all, to varying degrees or another, have messed up, some of us more than others, we are all deserving of blame. That is the reason why blame is hardwired into human consciousness. It’s what happened when at the fall of man. We had blame wired into our human consciousness as part of the fall of man and the curse that came on us. You see that blame happen right away. I covered that in a prior episode. When God came walking along and said to Eve, “What have you done?” She said, “The serpent,” when he said to Adam. Adam said, “Eve,” and then blamed God. It was like this hot potato of, “It’s not my fault.” 

Shame Is Intolerable

Blame provokes shame. We were never meant to carry shame. The reason why shame is so intolerable to our nervous system, the worst feeling ever, is because we weren’t ever meant to carry it. You don’t have to carry it. We are not meant to carry shame. We try to throw it off onto others. There’s an example of this in the Old Testament when the Israelites were in the wilderness and they were learning how to follow God. This is where the term “scapegoat” comes from. They had this practice where the priest would bring a goat into the assembly and the people would put all of their sins, mistakes, shortcomings, and would run and scapegoat out of the camp. The scapegoat would carry all of their sins away. This is a type and in the shadow of what Jesus came to do. 

Let’s talk about shame for a second. Shame is a negative emotion caused by an awareness of wrongdoing, hurt ego or guilt. Shame can be caused by a hurt reputation or embarrassment, whether or not one’s own guilt is involved. Shame can come from something that’s done to you. If somebody violates you or perpetrates an offense against you, then you feel shame. It’s not because you did anything wrong but it’s because you are ashamed of what has happened to you. This is a prime opportunity for blame because we are wanting to get that off of you. “It’s because you hurt me, you stole from me, you did this.” This is happening because of you. It’s a prime opportunity for shame when we are wrong. Shame always results in a loss of dignity and to be restored to the original design, which is our full dignity. As humans made in the image of God as kings and queens as our righteous nature demands, our full dignity has to be restored. 

You're never more like the devil than when you're accusing, and you're never more like God than when you're exercising your sovereignty. Click To Tweet

We have to have a place to put our shame. Shame doesn’t go away as much as you try, even when you accuse and when you hot potato blame and try to throw shame off of yourself, it doesn’t leave because you are then ashamed because you accused someone. It’s this awful vicious cycle. That’s the absolute beauty of the gospel. This is missed so often in the simplification of what is presented sometimes in the church. Jesus came to save us but he came to save us from everything that lessens our dignity as humans. Every bit of suffering, sorrow and shame has already been born away by the once and forever scapegoat. The scapegoat in the Old Testament was a type and shadow of what Jesus came to do for us. 

The gospel is a divine exchange. We get to give our wrongdoing, our shame, our blame to Jesus. He takes it on himself, transmutes it and gives us back righteousness. That’s a gift that we can give shame and get back righteousness. That is all that’s necessary. It’s not based on our performance and worthiness. It’s because he loves us. That is how he decided he would deal with this problem that we created of shame that was created by the human race way back in the garden. When we resort to blaming, we are trying to find a place to put our shame. When we blame others, we blame ourselves and sometimes we even blame God. For us to be restored to our original design and experience healing our full dignity, we have to have a place to put our shame. 

We have that in Jesus. That’s why complete healing and restoration aren’t possible apart from the cross. I mentioned in season number one that I wanted to come out and be honest about what I believe in the foundation of healing that happens. The fullness of it can’t happen without the cross of Christ and the gospel. These principles will work no matter what. They are universal principles. You can experience a high degree of healing but to get all the way down to the root, we have to get rid of blame. The only way that we can get rid of blame is to have a place to put our shame. To have somewhere we can get rid of it and offload it. If we offloaded onto other people, it creates more shame. It creates a cycle of shame for them. Sometimes we try to offload it on God by blaming him or offloaded onto an institution like a church, school, government or president. When we do that, not only are we perpetuating shame in the world because we are now putting accusation and fault on them but we have shame that boomerangs back onto us because we participated in accusation and it feels awful. 

 

Jesus is the interruption of that cycle. He incarnated into the matrix of humanity so that he could fix this problem for us. All we have to do is ascent and agree to it, and give our consent to Jesus Christ to take away our shame and give us back his righteousness. It’s a gift for anybody who wants it. To get all the way down to the root and pull this thing up so that it doesn’t keep cycling, we have to have the cross and the gospel. To be blameless, we accept the gift of righteousness offered by Christ. Instead of trying to throw our shame off onto others, we take it and give it to him. We interrupt the blame cycle by getting curious about our reactions to offense instead of looking for who and what is at fault. This is the framework of true inner healing. Next episode, we are going to get into amnesty, which is forgiveness. We are going to get into amnesty of receiving forgiveness for ourselves and also offering forgiveness to everything that agitates us and that we become offended by. 

This can be easier said than done. I mentioned most of us have a lifelong addiction to blame. It’s our go-to. Though it feels good at the moment, it’s a large cause of much of our misery. That was a deep dive on blame and, more appropriately, on being blameless. We are going to unpack it a lot more next time but now we have the foundation that we can build upon that we are going to be able to build a structure for healing and getting so much freedom and being able to live like kings and queens and reign in our life because God wants you healed so that you can wholeheartedly live your purpose and love your life. That’s it for this episode. If you want to leave me a voicemail or ask me a question, go to AmyKillingsworth.com/podcast. Otherwise, I will see you next time. 

Important Links:

• Sovereignty – Past Episode 

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