How To Stop Excuses Being Your Emotional Crutch

I, like every other human being on the planet, has used an excuse. I’ve dug into my arsenal of feeble reasons and delivered it without a second thought.

We all know our excuses well. We know the reasons we give for not cleaning the house when we should have. Or the excuse for not doing our daily workout. And the excuse we gave for throwing out our favourite pair of jeans when intended to keep them.

For many people, these excuses are harmless. They help us to feel better about our decisions. Skipping a workout doesn’t seem so bad considering we will forget we’ve skipped it by the next day. Sometimes our excuses only punish us.

But if you’re like me, there are times when the excuses escalate. And they become reasons to blame other people for our mistakes. When our world implodes from our own undoing, we’ve pointed the finger elsewhere. We’ve laid blame on everyone else but us.

It’s possible you think you’re immune from this behaviour. Yet I too have lived in excuse denial. I’ve removed this negative perception of myself and refused to believe that I could unfairly make excuses.

But that would be another excuse.

Yet, we stand a chance of authentic living without our excuses limiting us. We also have the chance to deepen our relationships and forge trust with the people in our lives. Living excuse free is liberating if only we tried it a little more often.

Understand what harmful excuses are

Before you can live excuse free, it’s important to understand what negative excuses are.

From my experience, there are differences between the excuses we make for skipping our gym class to the excuse we make for cheating on our partner. The two excuses are worlds apart, with contrasting consequences. In many ways, these actions shouldn’t maintain the same label.

Harmful excuses are the ways we justify our toxic behaviour so that we can repeat them over and again.

Most of my harmful excuses have come from putting the blame onto others for my actions. I’ve blamed my friends for getting too drunk at a party. I’ve blamed my sister for not reminding me to pick up groceries. It’s this way of clearing my conscience by transferring my guilt to someone else.

But what makes these excuses harmful is the repetition. We use repeated excuses so we can keep making mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes can be the same thing, like running late to work. Or they can be varying in nature. We often blame the same people or the same collection of people.

Blaming ‘family’, as a collective, is common.

We need to make sure we aren’t confusing reasons and excuses.

There are reasons why we make our decisions, why we do what we do. And we’re allowed to have the reasons that fuel our decision making. Our reasons are our values or religious beliefs. Or they formed from extended periods of thoughtful contemplation.

But excuses are often irrational compared to reasons. Excuses deflect blame onto other people or circumstance. Reasons are why we do what we do, both negative or positive. Reasons take ownership. Excuses deflect blame.

Comes to terms with answering the question: ‘who’s to blame?’

One of the most powerful ways I’ve learned to kick the harmful excuses is my analysis of the truth.
When something hasn’t gone right, when I’m searching to justify what has happened, I question, “who is to blame?” I ask internally, where my truth isn’t subject to criticism. It’s the place where I can evaluate my role in the event, the role of others, and decide who’s at fault.

What asking this question has helped me learned is when I’m lying out loud. It’s helped me distinguish the difference between reality, which is in my head, and ‘who’ I blame, the excuse I use.

Sometimes the two are equal, and that is ok. But when I know I’m to blame, when I can admit that privately to myself, it can challenge the idea of making an excuse.

Verbalise the truth

In some way, I verbalise who is to blame in this situation. But when I started to take this approach, I had to start privately. I couldn’t just shout out to the world, ‘it’s my fault and I stuffed up.’ I hadn’t quite channelled that courage. What I did instead was I wrote it down. I took pen to paper and scribed the truth.

It took quite a few times of writing it before I could vocalise the truth. Out of consistent repetition, I had trained myself to not think of excuses, instead seek the truth. I was always seeking the truth to write down, and it helped to disarm the idea of an excuse being an option to say.

Put yourself in the other person’s shoes

When I battle against taking accountability for my actions, when excuses come to my lips, I always try to think about other people. What it would be like to have the blame put on me when I didn’t deserve it? What would it be like to be an innocent bystander to suddenly have the burden of guilt on my shoulders?

I imagined the pain, the frustration, the lack of trust I would have for the person doing this to me. And as much as I didn’t want it to happen to me, I couldn’t live with myself being the one doing it to others. That realisation, the way I stack blame on someone else’s shoulders, I couldn’t live with.

Excuses are subjective

The problem with excuses and kicking the habit is everyone’s view of them. Some people don’t see excuses to be such a big issue. They don’t see the gravity of what they’re doing, the way they’re twisting the truth to suit them.

But believing in excuses, using them, is distorting the reality we live in. We remove what is true and replace it with lies. As much as an excuse may be subjective, especially how harmful it is, an excuse is still an excuse. It’s laying the blame where it isn’t deserved.

We need to ask ourselves what side of blame to do we want to be on. Can we live with ourselves not taking accountability for our actions?

I know I can’t.

…

I’m Ellen McRae, writer by trade and passionate storyteller by nature. I write about figuring about love and relationships by analysing my experiences. Some of the stories are altered to protect the people in my life. But my feelings are never compromised.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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