Blaming others or yourself when things go wrong can negatively impact your health.   Blame keeps us stuck in the role of victim, surrounded by negative emotions including anger, fear, resentment, shame, guilt which can contribute to physical and mental health issues, including anxiety and depression.

Blame can be internalized or externalized and typically comes in 3 different flavors:

• Blaming others = Anger

• Blaming yourself = Guilt

• Accepting others blame of you = Shame

At its root, blame is a form of avoidance.  By transferring responsibility to someone else or carrying the blame of others, you stay stuck in the victim space. The longer you stay stuck in these emotions, the longer these emotions stay stuck in your body, creating stagnation which can impede detoxification and contribute to inflammation.

You may not realize that blame can be an amazing opportunity for healing!

Most situations are the result of multiple contributing factors, and can be caused by a mix of your own actions and those of other people.  The more you can take responsibility for your own actions – both for causing your own pain, and for managing the pain caused by others and circumstances – the faster you can heal.

How Blame Impacts Your Health

Blame ignites your fight or flight stress response, which interferes with your hormones and immune function.  Actually fighting, or resolving the situation, dissipates this stress response. But harboring ongoing emotions like blame, guilt, shame or self-loathing can cause your body to punish itself.  The ongoing mental stress literally keeps you stuck in the stress state, increasing blood pressure and inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein.

Blaming others distracts you from resolving the stress.  It literally allows you to redirect, repress or utterly avoid experiencing uncomfortable, painful emotions, which in turn keeps you stuck and prevents you from growing and healing.  Repressed emotions often leak out in unhealthy ways, vibrating through the cells of your body, impacting your health. Read more about how Unresolved Emotions Make our Immune System Vulnerable HERE.  For example, repressed emotions can present as physical symptoms, such as pain and fatigue,  mental anguish like depression, anxiety and fears or even trigger the onset of chronic illness, like auto immunity or even cancer.

Shame is also directly linked to illness. A group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) recently demonstrated the vicious cycle of shame and illness.  Students who felt shame showed an increase in inflammatory markers in their blood work, with the people who felt the most shame had the highest elevation of inflammation.

Essential Oils for Blame

Essential oils can be powerful tools to help calm blame, shame and guilt. Our sense of smell links directly to the emotional control center of your brain known as amygdala, where emotional memories are stored.

Research in neuroscience demonstrates that emotional, morally judging brain systems operate swiftly and out of conscious awareness.

Your sense of smell is the only one of your five senses that is directly links to this unconscious area of your brain, known as your limbic lobe, making the sense of smell and the tool of essential oils the most direct path to healing emotions like blame, shame and guilt.

Essential oils inhaled through the nasal passageways enable immediate access to the regions of the brain that house these intense emotions like anger, shame and guilt so we can integrate and release them. The word “emotion” can translate as “energy-in-motion.” Emotion is the experience of energy moving though our bodies. This emotional energy actually works at a higher speed than thought and essential oils can help us clear the energetic residue of blame so it doesn’t remain in our thought patterns, negatively impacting your energy field or your health.

The following essential oils for blame can be used to help you process through the toxic emotions of blame, guilt and shame.

1.  Release External Blame and Anger

“When a man points the finger at someone else, he should remember that three of his fingers are pointing at himself.” — Louis Nizer”

As this quote illustrates, blame is a mechanism for abdicating responsibility for all the difficult things that may happen to you.  By transferring responsibility to others, you get to stay stuck in the role of victim, which allows you to repress or deflect your emotional pain.  When you blame others, you force them to carry your pain for you – this is really the underlying mechanism of shame. Blaming is a way to project onto others what you don’t want to see in yourself. When you carry the shame of other people’s projections, you are carrying other people’s emotions for them and that is a heavy load which can take a heavy toll on your health.  On the flip side, when you blame others, you might feel relief as it can free you from having to carry your own toxic emotions.

There is also a sense of ego involved in blame.  By blaming other people, you get to feel superior or more important, playing the role of the ‘good’ person as opposed to their ‘bad’.  In the same vein, blaming allows you to control the narrative, deflecting any situation of which you are not proud, by abdicating responsibility and potentially avoiding criticism.  Control “freaks” often abdicate all responsibility and blame because they equate admitting failure with losing control.

But these benefits come with a heavy price.   By making everything everyone else’s fault, you are actually choosing to remain powerless to change, grow or learn from challenging situations. Similarly, trying to control the problem only keeps you more attached to it.  If you can let go of your attachment to what went wrong or what should have happened, you can create the possibility of growth—and pave the path for more positive results.

When you choose to blame others in situations where you also played a role in the outcome, you are often miss a powerful opportunity to grow and expand.  Growth is the key to health – to allowing you to acknowledge shortcomings, accept responsibility for your choices and open up to the possibility of making different choices that can result in different outcomes.

What’s more, your anger doesn’t do anything to fix the situation.   It just holds the negative energy in your field.  Liver Support™ allows you to release anger, blame and shame that are often stored on very deep cellular level. Just place the bottle under your nose and breathe deeply, fully inhaling the oil for 3 – 7 breaths, then slowly exhaling while intentionally releasing the anger.  It helps you breathe into and work through the emotion.  You will know that the essential oil for blame is working when you stop smelling it.  You can also topically apply 2- 3 drops of Liver Support™ over your liver (right side of the body under the breast) to help work through and release your anger and boost resilience.  You can also apply it around the ankles as this is often an area where we hold resistance to moving forward in life and block the ability to receive joy and pleasure.  Start at the back of the ankle and apply under the ankle bone around to the front and back under the other ankle bone, all while allowing yourself to release your anger.

2.  Release Guilt and Stop Blaming Yourself

Guilt turns blame inward, a concept known as self-blame, where you  attribute any negative outcome to a personal short-coming. Or deficiency. Guilt also has to do with control.  You may like to believe that things should go your way and when they do not, you feel guilty about it.

Similarly, your brain is wired to put more emphasis on prior negative experiences than positive ones. This “negativity bias of memory” is a biologically adaptive response important to our survival as a species.  More specifically, your brain preferentially scans for, registers, stores, recalls, and reacts to unpleasant experiences. So even when positive experiences outnumber negative ones, the pile of negative implicit memories naturally grows faster. Since you are more likely to focus on what you did wrong than what you did right, you will find a way to feel guilty even if you if you everything right 99% of the time, your brain will hyper-focus on the remaining 1%.

The energies of guilt can create stagnation in the body, which may cause problems in the physical organs of the body, physically affect the back of your body, including your heart and pain in the back of the head and neck  (where your skull joins to the spine) where guilt and self-recrimination hides.  A pain in the neck often means you believe you have made mistakes and haven’t forgiven yourself.

Guilt can also weaken your immune system. A study compared those who had high guilt levels with those who had lower guilt levels related to pleasurable activities. They found higher levels of illness-fighting immunoglobulin A levels in those who took pleasure in activities with less guilt.

Heart™ helps amplify feelings of self-love and gratitude, helping to balance and heal feelings of guilt. Every moment of our life you have the opportunity to see the glass as half empty or half full. How you envision each moment helps paint a picture of our actual experience, so why not choose to be happy, to think of and move toward things that bring you joy.   Essential oils for blame are a wonderful tool for cementing in that positive frequency.  Apply 2-3 drops of Heart™ directly over the heart (left side of chest) or on the back of the neck to calm guilt and uplift the heart and the body.

3.  Release Shame and Stop Accepting Blame from Others

Shame results you receive negative messages from others, leading you to believe that you are bad, defective, or unworthy and somehow helpless to change that deficit. Feelings of helplessness and powerlessness often accompany shame, producing high levels of stress-related hormones, like cortisol, that wreak havoc in the body. Others may feel justified in showering you with mental, physical, emotional or verbal abuse, in effect shaming you for something you are doing or not doing.  If you choose to accept that as your truth, you allow yourself to suffer unnecessarily.

Poor boundaries are correlated with shame, especially when you believe you lack the power, skill, knowledge, or capability to manage the expectations of others and continually seek validation through serving their needs and wants.  Not surprisingly, your body holds shame in your digestive system, primarily the small intestine which is also associated with boundaries. Small Intestine Support™ may help you support positive boundaries and confidence to assist in bringing a sense of peace to our lives.  When you are struggling with negative emotions, like shame, it can be uplifting and help release and clear any residual negative emotions.  I find it best to apply in a clockwise direction around the belly button or massaged into your ears for emotion related issues.  You can start on the bottom of the ear at the earlobes and gentle massage upward along the exterior of the ear, hitting many of the major reflexology points.  This article and chart show specific points on the ears for specific issues.  Bladder Support™ is another excellent blend for releasing shame, especially any shame related to sexual assault.

Using Essential Oils for Forgiveness

The final step in releasing blame, guilt and shame is learning to forgive yourself.  Essential oils can help amplify a forgiveness practice as you can breathe in the oils and release all past hurts and disappointment as you exhale.  I have read that inhaling an oil through the nose, then forcefully exhaling through the mouth allows the body to best release emotions that no longer serve.  Read More about Essential Oils for Forgiveness HERE.

Resources:

Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:

• Bladder Support™ available here
• Heart™ available here
• Liver Support™ available here
• Small Intestine Support™ available here