Thinking About How Everything Is Your Fault

In basketball, I am not great. And I think I can be somewhat annoying to play with because I am the “my bad” guy. My team turns the ball over — I put up my hand and say “my bad.” I miss a shot or my teammate misses a shot because I didn’t space well enough — “my bad.” The opponent is halfway up the court and I’m sprinting up to catch up, and fail to do it before they easily lay it in — “my bad.”

There’s one meme video I saw about the “my bad” guy, and I chuckled because that’s what I do. But being the “my bad” guy extends to a lot of other parts of my life because I always think about how everything is my fault, as a Christian, partner, educator, law student, and more.

At one point in my life, I suggested this to an authority figure who had a lot of power over me and my friends. We had a moment where there was a lot of controversy over his decisions. To make the organization better, think about how everything is your fault, I said, and reflect on how we can all do better in the future.

He did not appreciate that sentiment. He took it as a personal attack since I didn’t see things from his perspective. I was in the doghouse for a couple months before I was in his good graces again.

I quickly realized that mindset I have is not so popular with other people. Most people would probably think it’s better than thinking about how nothing is your fault, but it’s a complicated mindset to have that isn’t the best in every situation.

Thinking about how everything is your fault is a very slippery slope. It’s not healthy to blame yourself for everything. It’s not healthy to take responsibility for everything. You can fall into being far too self-critical and self-blaming by thinking about how everything is your fault. You can be way too hard on yourself for things that are objectively not in your control.

I believe anyone in a position of power, leadership, or management should have a little bit of the mindset that they have the capacity to change at least something and ameliorate a past wrong or change something. I’m in a position of middle management, so I have to have this mindset to some capacity to help my team.

But there are boundaries with that mindset of reflecting on how you’re at fault with something and thinking you have the power and responsibility to change it. You can’t save the world. And it’s objectively not good optics or good for your career to be the fall guy for absolutely every societal ill or problem within an organization.

I thought about how everything was my fault in my early days of teaching, including poor test scores on reading and math tests, bad behavior from certain students, and the altercation that happened in the hallway. But eventually, I reached my breaking point and limit and had to reflect on how a lot of things were genuinely out of my control and things I could do nothing about.

A quick Google of “thinking about how everything is your fault” yields search results of clinical mental illnesses like responsibility OCD and anxiety. I don’t think it’s necessarily always the result of a serious mental illness, but there was probably some childhood trauma that leads me to think about how everything is my fault, where I thought I could control outcomes I couldn’t necessarily control. Perhaps I thought if I acted differently or did better in school, my family wouldn’t move so often. There are other experiences I won’t put online, so you probably get the point.

No one should ask someone suffering abuse or trauma in a situation of powerlessness whether everything is their fault.

It’s different when you are in a situation of power, authority, or influence. Often, perhaps it’s just a high internal locus of control and megalomania. Even if I don’t have the power in my capacity at work to change something, I know the school system well enough with all its cogs and functions to be able to direct that person to the right person. When a colleague is unhappy with work, I usually try to put it on myself to find someone to fix it.

According to Gabriel Lopez-Garrido at Simply Psychology, locus of control is when someone feels they have control over their behavior. People with a high internal locus of control usually take a lot of personal responsibility for their behavior, while people with a high external locus of control perceive their behavior as a result of luck. I think we all exhibit both, and I’m as willing as anyone to attribute luck and being at the right place at the right time with my success.

At the end of the day, it’s just a balance for all of us. There’s a difference between saying “this is my fault” and stopping there versus saying “this is my fault and I’m going to try to do something about it. There are also a lot of people who say “this is not my fault so I’m not going to do something about it,” or people who have likely the healthiest mindset of them all of “this is not my fault, but I’m going to try to help and change things.”

I think we all play this game, particularly in CYA work cultures and public bureaucratic institutions where we evade and deflect responsibility and try to blame others for shortcomings, and I do think more people can step up, take responsibility, and try to be a part of the change instead of pointing fingers.

But, again, it’s a balance, and everyone is different. Finding it is much easier said than done.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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