There Are No Causes, Only Results
Stop playing the blame game if you want to learn to let go.
Our brains love having a cause to blame for our issues. It turns our lives into series of events that make sense in their context.
John Bell, a famous mathematician, dedicated his life to finding causation in the Universe. The big bang is the start of everything, but what was the cause of that? A shrinking Universe? He didn’t find it. There are no causes — there are only results.
Our brain doesn’t find that satisfying enough. There has to be a cause.
I have commitment issues because I didn’t have a reliable father figure in my life. You could say something like that. It’s a sensible cause to blame something like that on. But is that really where it all started? What if your father also didn’t have a reliable father figure in his life? He’s just mirroring his own father’s behavior. Can you blame him for that?
Then it would suddenly be your grandfather’s fault. But maybe he wouldn’t have those issues if his wife loved him unconditionally. Maybe that wasn’t the case. Then it’s suddenly your grandmother’s fault. But what if your grandmother’s parents set a wrong example for her?
In this scenario, your commitment issues are now suddenly the result of the shitty example of love that your grandmother’s parents gave to your grandmother, who then failed to love her partner, who then failed to step up as a good father figure, who then passed on that behavior to your dad, all of which has now manifested itself as your commitment issues. As you can imagine, you can trace this back endlessly.
What John Bell found out makes a whole lot of sense. No matter how much we want to make sense of our life, there are no causes, only results after results and effects after effects.
OK, great stuff. Why do I need this information?
Playing the Blame Game
Let me explain what happens when you’re thinking in terms of all things having one single cause. When you’re looking for a cause, there are automatically also things/people to blame (the cause) and victims (the result/effect). This can be positive, but 99% of the time, the context is negative.
Because in what type of situation are you looking for something to blame? Right. When things go south. If things work out well for you, you won’t feel the need to blame your fortune on someone or something. So why do we play the blame game? Generally speaking, there are a few common reasons for that:
- Blame is a fantastic defense mechanism. It helps you to keep your sense of self-esteem safe by avoiding acknowledgment of your own shortcomings.
- Blame is great a tool to use when we’re in attack mode. We use this destructive conflict resolution method to try to hurt our partners, relatives, friends, or anyone else for that matter.
- It’s just way easier to blame someone or something than to accept responsibility. There’s something about blaming things on something or someone else that lifts the burden off your shoulders completely, even if you’re (at least partially) at fault. Blaming things on someone is simply way easier than accepting responsibility and all the consequences that come with it.
When you blame your situation on a single cause, you automatically create a ‘’pointing the finger’’ atmosphere. This may come in handy if you need to settle things with someone, but for yourself, it’s not great. Remember that every blame-game has two players: a cause and a victim. And what happens if you’re looking for someone to blame?
You automatically become the victim.
And you did that yourself by wanting to blame someone, while it’s totally unnecessary. Taking up a victim mentality like that won’t do you any good, as the victim mentality generally rests on three key beliefs:
- Bad things happen and will keep happening.
- Other people or circumstances are to blame.
- Any efforts to create change will fail, so there’s no point in trying.
Doesn’t exactly sound like a party for the mind, does it?
There are No Causes, Only Results
As we established with the daddy-issue example earlier, blaming your circumstances on a cause often only reflects a mere sliver of the full context. Anything you perceive as something also has a cause of its own. Suddenly, the context changes. I read a quote recently that reflects this beautifully. I can’t find it anymore, but it was something along the lines of:
Everything that somebody does or goes through makes sense in the context of their full story.
Your first instinct might tell you to judge someone based on an action, but without knowing the full context of their story and life, it’s really near impossible to judge them.
The person to blame also has a story. That story is the result of something that happened, and that something is also the result of something else that happened before that. Results on results on results. So who’s really to blame? Is it fair to look at one result in the chain that has been building up effect on effect for millions of years?
It’s not an excuse for whatever that someone did, but keeping your eye on the full context does help in learning to let go quicker, creating space, understanding and maybe even a hint of compassion.
Our brains don’t like not pointing fingers and blaming things on single causes very much. But our hearts sure do.
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