The years with small children were often plagued with exhaustion and frustration, especially about facing it all alone overseas. My husband was off to work, and I was left to cook, clean and entertain my child, and sometimes it was just downright tedium. I remember texting other mothers at 9 am to beg them to get together as I had already played house, read books, done crafts, sung songs and pretty much used my entire repertoire by that early hour. I remember times when my husband walked in the door and I pretty much threw the baby at him with both of us in tears, exclaiming I had to get out of there because I was at my wit’s end. I remember fantasizing about getting on a plane; alone.
Recently I had a client screaming about a total stranger who gave her parenting tips in a grocery store while her child was having a temper tantrum. I remember similar times and feeling as though my insides had been painted red; I was so angry. Sometimes it was a stranger, or my mother-in-law, or my husband, or the car that drove by too close, or my child who seemed to pick the most inopportune moments to act up that were to BLAME for my anger.
The definition of BLAME is to assign responsibility to someone else. You have literally given someone else responsibility for how you are feeling. Do you really want to delegate your feelings and your emotional life to a total stranger, or anyone else for that matter?
BLAME is so disempowering. It’s not about the person or the thing you’re BLAMING. It’s putting someone else in charge of you. You give all your power away when you do that. Do you want to rely on them and their behavior for how you feel? Do you want them to change what they’re doing in order for you to feel good? Other people are so bad at making us feel good. Have you noticed that? They just don’t behave. They just don’t do what we want them to do, especially people from other cultures.
If someone else is responsible for how I feel, I have to depend on them if I want to change how I feel. Or I have to change the situation in order to feel better, and sometimes that’s not possible.
When BLAMING extends to how we feel or how we act, that’s when we’re very confused. No one else is responsible for how we feel. That’s our thinking. No one else is responsible for how we act. That’s a hundred percent up to us. We can’t have a feeling without a thought causing it. That is great news, as you have the power within yourself to influence your own thoughts.
The stranger’s unsolicited parenting advice did not cause you to be angry. You are angry because of what you thought when you heard it. You are likely making it mean that you are not a good mother, or you are not “doing it right” and those thoughts you are having are why you are mad.
People we don’t even know, people that we have no influence over, make us so frustrated and we want them to behave in a different way so we can be happy. Other people are not assigned responsibility for our feelings or our actions, and this is actually really good news. No one is responsible for how we feel, therefore, we don’t have to change their behavior in order to change how we feel.
So think about the people in your life who you tend to BLAME for how you feel. Don’t forget the blanket statements about the people from the country you are currently living in that we like to BLAME for our frustrations or loneliness. This will be very powerful because most of us don’t even realize that we’re doing this, and when you can start taking that power back from the other people in your life and the other things in your life and own responsibility for how you feel, you can start feeling a lot better a lot more of the time.
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