How Can You Deal With Setbacks That Are Not Your Fault?

When dealing with setbacks, failures and major events that change your life for the worse, it is easy to fall into one of two extremes, neither of which is especially helpful and one is a trap that people giving advice can often fall into.

The first is to regress into the blame game; everything that goes wrong is not your fault, even when it is your actions that ultimately caused the setback. This is not helpful, and most bespoke life coaches will start their work by providing healthy ways to take responsibility for the actions you take.

However, the opposite is just as unhelpful, which is taking responsibility for events and incidents that were in no way your fault, often in a misguided way to take back control following something that made you feel like you had no way to steer the trajectory of your life.

Oddly enough, despite being very different responses, both are self-defence mechanisms that deny the reality of a situation and the emotional pain that goes with it. This also makes it addictive.

This concept, known as self-blame, can have a wide range of origins including anxiety or depression, childhood trauma, an all-or-nothing mentality, perfectionism or low self-esteem.

The first step when dealing with a setback that is not your fault is to tell yourself that. You are only responsible for what you do, not what is done to you.

It obviously is not always as easy as simply saying to yourself that it is not your fault, so instead, the starting point is to ask yourself this:

Could you have done anything to change what happened to you?”

If there isn’t, then it is time to forgive yourself, but even if there was anything you could have realistically done to change a situation, it is important to take responsibility only for your own actions and not to assign blanket blame to yourself.

Only then will you be able to take the steps to take ownership of your life.