This is a powerful statement to direct at yourself. If you are feeling low, depressed, sad, desperate, anxious, scared, or anything else, there is always a reason, and the reason is almost certainly NOT that it is your own fault.
If you are feeling a certain way there will be a cause. An event or series of events in the near or distant past that have led to this point. Your reaction to those events will be a result of things that have happened in your life.
Take something such as feeling unable to get over a loss. Perhaps you are starting to believe that you should be feeling better by now. I'm not going to go into the fact that there are no rules with grief and loss but let's focus on the idea that you don't think you're dealing with things as well as you should. So you may be feeling angry or confused or frustrated or sad or all of these things and more.
But it's not your fault.
You've suffered a loss and it is taking time to recover and work out how best to move your life forward. Every loss is different which means you can't draw on past experience if you've maybe suffered a loss before. It also mean you cannot expect somebody to tell you what to do. So you're operating blind. That's not your fault. You're literally doing the best you can.
How about if you're a person struggling with depression? You may have read that things like exercise can help but you still don't get any. Therefore you're doing nothing to help yourself and you continue to struggle.
Again, that's not your fault.
It's the depression that has such a hold on you that it prevents you from doing anything for yourself, even if it would be positive. Blame the illness, not yourself.
Consider this scenario....
A person struggles to hold down a relationship because they get very jealous or are mistrusting of the other person and therefore the relationships never last.
It's not their fault.
There will be a reason why they act that way. Maybe they have been badly betrayed by somebody they trusted in the past? Maybe they feel insecure after being treated in a certain way when they were younger. There could be any number of reasons why a person acts this way but, crucially, non of them will be the person's fault. The blame will be in the circumstances of the events in the past and the fact they have gone unresolved.
It is not your fault if you're sad.
It is not your fault if you're depressed.
It is not your fault if you're struggling with grief.
It is not your fault if you're anxious.
It is not your fault if you're frightened.
It is not your fault if you feel you cannot cope.
Talking about these things can help you deal with them and find the root of the problem, which can lead to a solution.
Don't suffer in silence. If you are unable to share your pain, at least try to remind yourself -
"It's not your fault"
