The ‘man in the mirror’ always turns out to be our worst enemy

Whatever goes wrong in our lives, there’s always someone else to blame. Always.

The boss wouldn’t give me a chance. The woman I loved cheated on me. The man I married turned out to be an abuser. He was a terrible father. My friend made me start using drugs and partying all the time. I had to go into debt because all my friends had nice things and I had to keep up with them. I didn’t get the education I needed. I’m fat and nobody likes me.

Our excuses are endless. But even when our justifications for ourselves are completely accurate, there was always someone else who ultimately had control. And even if we got into a terrible situation — or a hundred terrible situations — there’s always someone who can take control to fix things and make our lives better.

It can be a painful shock to accept that the man in the mirror — or the woman in the mirror — almost always has the power to turn a miserable life into a satisfying life.

But it’s easier to blame someone else and ignore the man in the mirror. I’ve done that at times. Maybe you have, too.

It’s true that other people can do terrible things to us. We can come from abusive and dysfunctional families. (I certainly did.) We can trust the wrong people and those people can betray us. We can face all sorts of situations in life that we didn’t cause.

We can have life-changing accidents. We can have debilitating diseases. Romantic partners can turn out to be lousy and abusive people. There are a million bad things that can happen to us — things which we didn’t cause and which we largely couldn’t have prevented.

But we are the only ones who can interpret what’s happened to us. We are the only ones who can decide what these things mean. And we are the only ones who can decide what to do next.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to develop a pattern of accepting terrible things that we can influence. If someone finds himself or herself in a series of familiar problems — a string of abusive romantic partners, for instance — it’s very easy to simply say, “See? This is what all men are like!” Or, “Women are all terrible people.”

It’s easy to overlook the fact that we’re often the common denominator in all of the disasters that happen to us in our relationships.

This isn’t victim-blaming. That isn’t the point.

Other people are genuinely responsible for the dreadful things they do to us, but if we find ourselves in situation after situation with such abusive people, we have to ask ourselves why we’re choosing such people. We have to ask what it is in our psychology — or the way we were raised or what we think we deserve — that causes us to keep putting ourselves into such situations.

Ultimately, it’s liberating to take responsibility.

As long as we believe that other people are responsible for whatever happens to us, we are powerless. We feel like meaningless pawns being pushed around by powerful figures and nameless forces.

But when we decide — not as a matter of blame, but as a matter of taking power and responsibility for ourselves — that we can choose to make things different, we take the power back.

That doesn’t mean something else terrible can’t happen to us in the future. Of course it can. But taking the power to define what’s happened and how to react to it can change what happens next.

Taking the power back can determine whether we’re going to keep living with a terrible person who’s an abusive partner. It can determine whether we’re going to stay in a miserable job or friendship or family — and just accept that we can’t do any better.

Taking the power back can determine whether we curl up and passively wait to die — or take constant actions, both big and small, that will change what tomorrow can bring to our lives.

Nobody can take that away from you. Nobody except you.