One day you are sure your childhood explains why your life turned out this way. The next day you are ashamed of blaming anyone and telling yourself to get over it. How do you stop blaming your past? Blame and shame turn out to be the same move, and you can put both down without saying it didn't hurt.
Alfred Adler, an early psychologist, wrote a sentence that sounds almost cruel the first time you read it. He said no experience is a cause of success or failure. If you grew up with a parent who shouted, left, or never noticed you, that line can feel like being told your pain is made up.
It isn't. Your hurt counts, and nothing below asks you to make it smaller. The claim is narrower and more useful. Your past can explain a great deal about you. It just doesn't get the deciding vote on what you do next.
I call that the deciding vote, and it clears up a trap many people sit in. One day they want to blame their parents for how life turned out. The next day they hate themselves for blaming, and wonder if they have a victim mentality. Four ideas show why both feelings come from the same mistake, and why the story you tell about your past does more work than most advice admits.
Are blaming your parents and shaming yourself the same move?
Both start from one picture. The past is a judge, and the only job left is to decide who is guilty. Blame says my parents are guilty, so I am stuck. Shame says I am guilty, so I am stuck. The defendant changes, but the verdict stays the same. If the shame side sounds familiar, it often shows up as not being able to feel proud of anything you do.
Sometimes the blame is simply correct. Someone did hurt you, and saying so out loud is not weakness. The trouble starts when "they hurt me" quietly turns into "so nothing I do can matter." That second sentence is the part people call a victim mentality, and it is worth telling apart from the first. Being a victim of something is a fact. Believing the fact has settled your future is the mentality.
Think of a satnav. It knows exactly where you started, and that explains why you are on this road. It still has to ask where you want to go.
Now read "my trauma made me a bad person" again. A bad person is a verdict. What actually happened is that you learned ways to cope, like going quiet, snapping first, or keeping people at a distance. Those are habits you picked up, not a character you were issued. A habit can be changed. A verdict cannot, which is why the verdict is the part to drop.
It is also the honest answer to "how do I let go of the past." You may never fully let go of it. You can stop handing it the deciding vote.
Adler asked what a habit is for, not only where it came from
His school split the question in two. Etiology is the search for causes, meaning what happened to make this. Teleology is the study of purpose, meaning what this is aiming at. Most of us only ever ask the first.
Take a man who freezes whenever his boss asks for his opinion. The cause story is that his father mocked everything he said at dinner. That is probably true, and it matters. The purpose question is different. What does freezing do for him now? It keeps him from being mocked again. Seeing that is not blame. It is a handle. Once you know what a habit protects, you can ask whether there is a safer way to get the same protection.
I put it plainly in my own notes. I don't find it very helpful to blame the past for where we are, because it takes control away from you. You start to feel like a puppet. Asking what you are aiming at hands the strings back.
One limit matters here. This question fits habits like avoiding, snapping or shutting down. It does not fit nightmares or flashbacks. Nobody chooses those, and I come back to them near the end.
The same event does not print the same life on everyone
Go back to Adler, because the useful half of his sentence is about meaning. "We are self-determined by the meaning we give to our experiences" (Adler, quoted in Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 208). He added that there is probably always something of a mistake in taking one experience as the base for your whole future.
The research points the same way, though it cannot prove it. Bonanno (2004) reviewed the evidence on loss and trauma. He found that many people keep positive emotional experiences and show only minor, short disruptions in how they function. Resilience, he argued, is more common than psychologists used to assume, and it takes several different paths. So one event does not stamp one outcome on everybody.
Then there is the story you carry about it. McAdams and McLean (2013) reviewed work on narrative identity, which is the life story you keep in your head. People who find redemptive meaning in suffering, and whose stories feature personal agency, tend to report better mental health and well-being. The word to watch is "tend." This is a link, and happier people may simply tell happier stories.
Does telling the story help? Frattaroli (2006) pooled 146 randomized studies in which people wrote or spoke about personal, meaningful experiences. On average it helped, but only a little, with an effect of r = .075. Small is the honest size of it. Nobody writes their way out of a hard childhood in four evenings.
Now think of the story you tell about your worst year. Who is the main character in it? Someone it was done to, or someone who got through it and is still deciding what comes next?
Blame is comfortable, and it sends a bill
People in the Adler tradition call one version of this the life-lie. It is a story you use to dodge the big jobs of life, which they sum up as friends, work and love. The story is often partly true. It also does a second job, which is excusing you from trying.
Blame feels like relief because it lowers the stakes. If your past broke you, then not trying is not cowardice, it is just physics. The bill arrives later, in the friend you did not call and the job you did not apply for.
A man says he cannot date because of how his mother treated him. Maybe she did hurt him. But "I can't" deserves a second look. "I'm afraid to, and here is where the fear comes from" is both truer and easier to work on. The fear is still there, but now you can see it and work with it. If saying no or yes is where the fear lives, why saying no is so hard covers that from another angle.
What to try
None of this asks you to forgive anyone or feel better by Friday. It asks for four small, plain moves.
1. Split the sentence. Write "They hurt me" on a page, then write what you usually add after it, such as "so I can't trust anyone." Cross out the second half. Keep the first half exactly as true as it is.
2. Ask what the habit is for. Pick one habit you dislike, like snapping or avoiding. Write down what it protects you from. Then write one smaller, safer way to get the same protection. This gives you a next step instead of a verdict.
3. Write it down once. Take ten minutes to write about something that still stings, in plain words. Start with a smaller memory, not the worst one, and stop if it floods you. The studies suggest a small benefit, not a cure, so treat it as a way to see the story, not to fix it. How a thought can mislead you is covered in why a thought is a map, not the territory.
4. Pick one move the past only advises on. Ask what you would do this week if your history could give you advice but not orders. Choose the smallest version, such as one message or one booking, and put a time on it. The gap between knowing and doing is its own problem, and I know what to do and still don't do it goes into it.
How far to trust all this
The research here shows links, not proof, and the effect in the writing studies is small. Adler also wrote long before modern trauma research. His line that we do not suffer from the shock of our experiences goes too far for severe trauma, because nightmares, flashbacks and feeling unsafe are not purposes you picked. The popular phrases "deny trauma" and "the courage to be disliked" come from Kishimi and Koga's 2013 book, which retells Adler's ideas as a dialogue. They are not Adler's own words.
If your past still brings nightmares or flashbacks, or if you ever think life is not worth living, please talk to a doctor, a therapist or a local crisis line. I studied clinical psychology, but I am not your therapist, and some weights are too heavy to carry alone.
For everyone else, the story you have been reading as a sentence was only ever testimony. Your past is the best witness you have, and it was never the judge. The chair has been yours all along.
Sources
Ansbacher, H. L., & Ansbacher, R. R. (Eds.). (1956). The individual psychology of Alfred Adler (p. 208). Basic Books. The passage as quoted in Thomas, C. R., Alfred Adler: Trauma theory. https://www.centroadleriano.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/EMAlfredAdler-TraumaTheory.pdf
Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20-28. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066x.59.1.20
Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 823-865. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.823
Kishimi, I., & Koga, F. (2013). Kirawareru yuuki [The courage to be disliked]. Diamond.
McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233-238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622