I have a confession to make. I’ve blamed my childhood for issues I didn’t want to take responsibility for as an adult… Sound Familiar?

In my search for the cause of certain quirks, which I attributed to “just being my personality”, I was able to point (with help from the Intentional Prosperity™ System) to specific childhood experiences which I was the victim of.

Aha! It was something that happened to me at a point in my life when I was least able to protect myself from it’s effects. Hey, when you’re young, you don’t have a lot of experience and wisdom to handle those constant trial and error experiences. You get affected. I mean, that’s what childhood is about. Finding out what works and what doesn’t work. It’s a time of life when everything affects you.

The challenge, once you “discover” the source of your quirk: Do you use it as an excuse or do you fix it and move-on?

Believe it or not there’s a growing number of people who actually embrace victimization as a valid excuse for their continuing problematic life experience. As a victim they are not responsible for their actions now, as adults. Okay, I even bought into that one for a while. Call it my misplaced sympathy which bordered on enabling bad behavior. Then one day I woke up to a simple yet profound realization:

The trajectory of my life has resulted in a number of experiences which constantly tested the boundaries of what I thought I knew… what I actually believed… and what I wanted to believe. These experiences have been continuous since I was a child. As I got older I had a greater amount of experience I could rely upon as a means of sorting out the “ultimate” meaning. You would think this would give me a much greater overview and capacity to deal with the challenges of day-to-day life.

Not true.

The betrayal and victimization of a childhood incident continued to influence and flavor how I was reacting to things. I was unconsciously reinforcing my own victimization… punishing myself again and again as if I was reliving the childhood experience.

Wait a minute! I’m doing this to myself?

I was refusing to take responsibility for my own life. Because now, as an adult, I had the power to forgive myself, forgive others and dissipate the lingering emotional ghost of a (long forgotten, recently remembered) childhood incident. My refusal to view my childhood experience from my adult perspective had two unintended consequences:

1. I was chaining myself to a point in time where I was victimized by an emotional reaction based on inexperience.

2. I compounded the emotional damage by still blaming that poor kid’s experience for issues I was refusing to take responsibility for now as an adult. Which means I was blaming my inner child!

The victim mentality blames the child inside and continues to punish the child because the adult refuses to take responsibility for changing the perspective of the memory. Yes, changing the perspective. As an adult with years of experience and wisdom we can finally let our child out of emotional prison. We have the power to pardon the prison sentence.

Of course, doing so requires you to take responsibility for how you feel, think and act. You must have the courage to look back in time and see your life as a set of experiences.

It’s a detached way of looking at your life which enables you to become more connected to your true self.

-Bob Baran