Might it be possible that you aren't the problem and neither are they?

Nobody is taking responsibility.

what should I do?

Not everybody is like you. I know that might sound obvious, but it wasn’t to me. I spent the better part of many decades believing that we all MUST be somewhat similar, right? Not right.

So, it’s important to understand that some people will be operating under the assumption that they are not the problem.

And if they truly believe that to be true, then it must follow that you aren’t the problem either. After all, if my assertion is to be believed that I am not the problem, then you can also tell yourself “I am not the problem.” And if hypocrisy is to be avoided, that must also be true.

So now we have “I am not the problem. You are not the problem.”

Maybe your response to this is, “Well, you didn’t know my Aunt Mildred! Now that woman is a problem.” Or maybe, “You haven’t met my husband/wife/child/boss if you think nobody is the problem.” Or maybe you think, “Haven’t you seen the news? [Fill in the blank] is a PROBLEM!”

And I hear you. I have spent much time trying to reconcile four seemingly disparate ideas:

I am not the problem.
You/they are not the problem.
Sometimes I make mistakes or don’t treat others well.
Sometimes others make mistakes or don’t treat me well.

After all, aren’t they “the problem” if they aren’t treating me or others well? That’s where it gets complex. The short answer is no, and the long answer is, well, long.

Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge that people absolutely do cause problems and display problematic behavior. No argument there. I an primarily taking issue with labeling anybody as “the problem.”

I will demonstrate to you how it can be true that “I am not the problem and you (they) are not the problem.” Even when it seems at first glance to be obviously wrong.

The Imagined World

Imagine a world where every single person knows deeply and completely that they are not the problem and that those around them are also not the problem. Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine what this type of world would look like.

Now I will place you in this imagined world:

You believe in yourself deeply.
You know that you are unique and perfect just as you are.
You have emotions and feel them deeply, and you trust these emotions to guide you, to inform you.
Because you feel no shame for feeling any particular emotion, you don’t attempt to suppress or hide anything.
You freely cry when sad, freely express anger when boundaries are crossed, and freely laugh when delighted.
Because you know that others are not the problem, you recognize that feeling anger informs you of your likes and dislikes rather than being anything about the other person.
You feel free to follow what you desire in life.
You trust yourself and so can follow your own navigation, even when you make mistakes.
You are free to trust others because they are comfortable in themselves and in you.
You naturally gravitate towards people and situations that are healthy and good for you.
The people around you all know that they are not the problem and also know that you are not the problem.
You don’t blame others for your problems and they don’t blame you for theirs.
Naturally, you will still share common interests and values with some more than with others, and will still choose to spend time with some people more than others.
There is no comparison. We all know we are ok.

In a nutshell, love and acceptance abound. However, it is not all happiness, because we still will disagree and have differing opinions and values, but because at our core we are confident in our goodness and the goodness of others, we can work out differences fairly easily.

Now of course this is not the world we live in.

The Real World

In the real world, I suspect we all generally start out lacking any belief about who is or isn’t the problem. We simply exist, not questioning whether we are the problem or whether those around us are problems. We quickly begin adapting to the real world, though, which requires us to question both ourselves and others.

Let me place you now in this all-too-familiar world:

You do not believe in yourself.
You strive to be perfect.
You despise feeling your natural emotions.
Because you feel shame for feeling particular emotions, you attempt to suppress or hide them.
You hold your tears in when you are sad until they fester into a depressive state, or you suppress your anger for as long as you can before it comes out in a rageful tantrum.
Because you believe others are also the problem, you interpret your feelings of anger as proof that that is true.
You don’t let yourself follow what you desire in life, even shaming yourself for wanting frivolity to begin with.
You don’t trust yourself and so look to others for navigation, rarely stopping to consider if those you are trusting are heading in the same direction.
You gravitate towards people and situations that make you feel better about yourself or make you look better.
You tend to blame others for your problems and they blame you for theirs.
Naturally, you share common interests and values with some more than with others – sometimes these common interests and values are centered around your dislike or distrust of someone else or another group.
You compare yourself to others, feeling both better and worse.
You try to make others look worse, so you can feel better.

Anger and bitterness abound. Even simple disagreements erupt into massive fights. We have so much brewing under the surface that things are often not what they seem to be. And all of this simply because we fail to recognize that none of us were the problem to begin with.

Testing the Theory

As I mentioned, I have seemingly spent my lifetime trying to reconcile my real life experiences with my self-taught (and deeply-held) beliefs that I am not the problem and others are also not the problem. To that end, below is an account of one of my experiences that have struggled to understand in the light of my newly-held beliefs. I believe it would have looked very different in the idealized fantasy world described above.

Scenario Setup:

My sister, Laura, and I had rented a condo for our families for an upcoming summer vacation in the mountains. I was married, with two young children (5 and 3), was pregnant with my third, and would be traveling a great distance for this vacation. Laura was divorced, but also had three young children (8, 5 and 3). The condo we had already rented was for both of our families, 8 people in total, including 5 children under the age of 9.

About a month before the planned vacation, Laura called me to tell me that she had begun dating one of the physician’s assistants at the doctor’s office where her children were patients. His name was Mark, and he was about 20 years her senior, and they had been dating for 2 weeks at the time. She asked me if it would be alright to bring Mark on our vacation. She explained that he would just sleep on the couch in the living room. I very briefly considered it but ultimately decided that I was uncomfortable with a man I had n ever met and that she couldn’t know all that well sleeping in an already-crowded condo with my young children present. So I let her know that I wasn’t comfortable with it. I offered that if he got a nearby hotel room, perhaps we could spend some time getting to know him.

What Happened in the Real World

Laura became immediately enraged at my response and my lack of openness to her idea. She angrily told me I was arrogant and sanctimonious. She told me she was angry that I was accusing Mark of being a pedophile when I didn’t know him. (Note that I had not accused him of anything, just stated my concerns about having relatively unknown men (or women for that matter) spend the night under the same roof as my young daughters.) She then retaliated by requesting that my husband of 12 years (and the father of my children) also not be allowed to stay there. She asserted that she didn’t yet know him well or know if she could trust him.

She raged and yelled, but could not change my mind, so she quit speaking to me.

The vacation was already planned and paid for and our parents and other sister and her husband had rented a place nearby, so we proceeded with our plans. Laura refused to speak to me for the month leading up to the vacation, for the entirety of the vacation, as well as for many months after the vacation. [Notably, the silence ended when she was ultimately taken to jail for her participation in a violent physical fight with Mark, whom she and her kids were then living with.]

In addition, for the bulk of the vacation, she left her young children in my and my husband’s care so she could spend time with Mark. She did not organize any events for us to get to know him so we could become comfortable with him. She remained silent, angry and closed-off.

While I cannot know the absolute truth, my analysis of this situation is that Laura had long believed that I was a problem. In our family of origin, I was often blamed for causing much of the trouble. Therefore, my less-than-enthusiastic response to her request for her new boyfriend to stay there triggered that belief and, thanks to confirmation bias, she immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was again causing trouble. She then reacted accordingly. Because she felt confident in her belief that I was the difficult one, aka the problem, she also seemed to feel justified in her reaction to what I believed then and still believe was a reasonable boundary to set.

What Might Have Happened in our Fantasy Land

If we had been living in the imagined world described above where everybody believed that they were not the problem and that others were not the problem, this is how I imagine this scenario would have played out:

Laura would have still been disappointed at my reluctance to have Mark sleep on the couch in our condo, but having young kids of her own, she would understand my decision. Because in this imagined world, she would have deeply believed that she wasn’t a problem and neither was I, she would have (again, thanks to confirmation bias) trusted my judgment and accepted my boundaries. Laura would have asked her new boyfriend to rent a nearby room and we could have begun to slowly integrate him with the family during that vacation.

We might have had a great time together. Laura might have asked me and my husband if we could watch her three children one night so that she and Mark could have a date night. We would likely have agreed and our vacation would have been a mostly enjoyable one for all.

Analysis

Depending on your unique history and life experiences, maybe you agree with me in the above scenario. Perhaps you would are tempted to label Laura as the problem.

Or maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you believe that I was too uptight and should have just allowed Mark to stay there. In this case you might be tempted to label me as the problem.

But what if we step back and recognize that neither of us should be labeled “the problem?”

I assert that neither Laura nor I were “the problem”. Rather the problem was that neither of us had internalized the necessary message that neither of us were actually the problem. Rather, in this case, both Laura and I had spent our lives being conditioned and trained to view me as the problem.

We did not learn basic self-love and love for others.

Did I believe I was the problem? Most of the time, yes.

Did I believe she was the problem? In this situation, yes.

Did she believe she was the problem? It didn’t appear so, but I cannot know the answer to that.

Did she believe I was the problem? Yes, she explicitly stated this.

We were at an impasse.

The only way forward would have been for us to explicitly agree that neither of us was the problem here. If we could have seen the situation as simply one where we (both good people) had conflicting needs and wants, I believe we could have worked through the situation in a healthy way.

We didn’t have the beliefs to back that up, nor the skills to make it happen.

So What Can We Do?

Idealized worlds cannot and will not exist.

We have no power to force even one other person to adopt and live by the mantra, “I am not the problem and you are not the problem.” People will continue to believe what they believe. We can only control what we can control, and influence who we can influence. I believe that it is imperative that we do what we can to move the needle, however minutely, toward living out this mantra each and every day, and doing our best to teach it to those over which we have influence.

So what lives in the middle ground? What might it look like if just some of us begin to live with the mantra “I am not the problem and you are not the problem.”

There are infinite possibilities for envisioning this “middle ground” real world. My vision is therefore just one possibility for how this world might look if we shifted only our own beliefs. This shift would inevitably impact those around us and everybody over which we have influence, either directly or indirectly.

I will now place you in this newly-modified world:

You are starting to believe in yourself.
You accept that you are not perfect, and that you do not need to be.
You better understand that emotions are natural.
You stop shaming yourself (and those around you) for feeling these emotions.
You let yourself (and others) cry when sad, and you let yourself (and others) express your anger when your boundaries are crossed.
You interpret your feelings of anger as information about what you need.
You start to let yourself follow what you desire in life, understanding that frivolity is subjective.
You start to trust yourself and so stop looking to others for navigation.
You gravitate towards people and situations with which you resonate, focusing on quality of friendships more than quantity of friendships.
You accept ownership for your problems, even as others still sometimes blame you for theirs.
Because you seek to follow your natural interests, you connect with others over these activities.
Because you are looking at the world through a new filter where others are not the problem any more than you are, you resist the urge to common-enemy-bond.
You start to recognize the essential equality of everyone, accepting that nobody is intrinsically better or worse than anybody else.
You witness those around you and try to get to know them, rather than trying to change them in any essential way.

Not everybody in your orbit will react well to this new version of you. Some will not appreciate the display of emotions they are still trying to suppress. Some will continue to blame you for their problems. Others will become upset that you no longer wish to bond over common enemies.

The key is to hold strong in your new knowledge of everybody’s essential goodness, even as you protect yourself from those that have yet to recognize this. Those that still cannot see this will continue to blame you, sometimes even more so when you stop fighting back and defending yourself.

Anger and bitterness will still abound in the world in general. And you will witness simple disagreements starting to erupt into massive fights. However, your new viewpoint will change the way you see these disagreements. You will understnad that people are acting out of the deep-seated belief that either they are the problem or you must be. Sometimes you will even be able to speak from your new knowledge and be heard. Regardless, the world will look different and those around you will likely begin to see things in this new way.

Conclusion

Let’s revisit what might have been your initial reaction to the assertion that “I am not the problem and you are not the problem.” So what about those people that absolutely seem like problems? What about Aunt Mildred or my spouse or my child, friend, boss? Regardless of what stories you have about them, I remain absolute in my contention that we not label them as the problem, just as we don’t label ourselves as the problem.

I contend that people who appear to be the problem are simply caught in the cycle of trying to prove to themselves and others that they are not the problem. Often they will do that by trying to prove that somebody else is the problem instead.

What they don’t know is that they never were the problem, so they never needed to prove it to begin with.

“I am not the problem. You are not the problem.”

Try it on. Take the leap. Give it a shot.

Can you take this too far? Absolutely! You can go so far in the direction of having compassion for others that you lose yourself. I will talk about the dangers of going too far in the next part of this series.

We could all use more compassion for ourselves and more compassion for others. So, to start, don’t worry about taking it too far, not yet. Build your compassion muscle. Give it a try.

“I am not the problem. You are not the problem.”

Question for thought: Who have you seen as being the problem? Are you willing to consider the possibility that maybe that label is unfair?