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Some people have a lot of misfortune in their lives, while others seem to be handed everything. When you accept that life isnโt fair, itโs easier to stop blaming the world and to play with the hand of cards you were dealt.
Letโs face it, the world can be a ruthless place. Life is going to hit sometimes, and there wonโt be anything that you can do about it. To add insult to injury, sometimes it will be uncalled for, and youโll be left with an important decision to make.
Am I going to play the victim, blaming the world and pitying myself? Or am I going to take control of the situation, leverage it for my growth, and get on with it?
One path is a nosedive into powerlessness. Other people might even give a shit for a moment, but sooner or later youโre going to be left alone wallowing in your self-pity, dependent on the world to cater to your every need.
On the other hand, if you take responsibility for the things that happen and understand that sometimes life just isnโt fair, thatโs a fast track to real self-empowerment.
So how can you turn your misfortune into a blessing? How can you leverage your unfair life situation to become much more empowered than people who have so much but are dependent on things going right? Radical self-responsibility is the key.
Why Radical Self-Responsibility Leads to Empowerment
Radical self-responsibility is an approach to life that involves taking complete ownership of your lifeโs outcomes. Itโs the understanding that youโre the sole creator of your reality, where everything that happens within it is a manifestation of your consciousness.
Understanding that your reality is dependent on your consciousness is the key to radical self-responsibility.
You need to acknowledge that you shape your destiny, regardless of the challenges you face or the past experiences that have held you back. You are responsible for literally every aspect of your reality, even the things that are out of your control.
Radical self-responsibility encourages you to be the driver of your lifeโs journey rather than a passenger. Simply put, your life changes in beautiful ways on both an internal and external level when you fully acknowledge that you create your reality, one way or another.
In this sense, when you understand your role as a creator, you start working the strings of life a little differently. This allows you to take control of your life trajectory and achieve a quality of life that most people donโt (even those who are given everything).
Self-Responsibility vs Radical Self-Responsibility
Self-responsibility refers to taking accountability for your thoughts, beliefs, and everything that results from your actions.ย Radical self-responsibility is a more wholesome, spiritual outlook of this phenomenon, where you take responsibility for everything that happens inย yourย life.
The secret here is to take responsibility for the things thatย werenโtย under your control. If a bad situation happens to you, radical self-responsibility is to explore why you attracted that particular thing to happen and what lesson it serves. Self-responsibility is needed to be a capable and independent adult.
Radical self-responsibility leads to a deeper sense of empowerment and spiritual wholeness.
Are You Ready to Take Control of Your Life?
If you want to be in control of your life, it starts by taking responsibility for every single occurrence that happens within it. The reason why so many people play the victim is because itโs easy to be the victim. Itโs easy to defer responsibility by pointing the finger at something else, whether itโs a person, the government, or god.
At the end of the day, it doesnโt matter who or what you think is responsible for your life situation. And thatโs the thing. If you think that anyone or anything besides yourself is responsible for your life situation, then you need to try harder.
Embracing radical self-responsibility isnโt just about shifting blame: Itโs about recognizing your capacity to create positive change within, and outside of your own life. When you take control of your life, you cultivate some powerful intrinsic qualities that change your life experience for the better.
Self-Responsibility vs Victimhood

The antonym for radical self-responsibility is theย victim mentality. The victim mentality is where you believe that external forces control your life and that thereโs nothing you can do about it but blame. As weโve discussed in other articles, blame is a dense energy that certainly isnโt going to help you attract the life situation that you want.
But people blame anyone and anything anyway because itโs the easier pathway to cope with a difficult, or unfair situation. But victimhood is also a catch-22.
When people give off the negative energy of victimization, they start attracting negative things into their lives in the form of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and situations. Things go downhill, so they blame even harder, giving away more of their power until their life becomes a concoction of blame, powerlessness, and resentment.
Victimhood is a cycle that I see so many people get sucked into. The only way to get out of it or avoid it is to cultivate an awareness of it and start building radical self-responsibility to overturn that table. Below are a couple of resources to further explore the victim mentality and why it will ruin your life.
Signs of Victimhood
- Blame shifting: People with a victim mentality usually shift blame onto other people. They rarely take responsibility for their actions.
- Helplessness: People with a victim mentality often feel powerless to change their circumstances. They believe their happiness is dependent on others.
- Resistance to change:ย People with a victim mentality tend to resist change out of fear that it will disrupt their familiar but unhappy status quo.
- Lack of accountability: People with a victim mentality rarely acknowledge their role in creating their circumstances. Itโs easier to point the finger when you defer responsibility.
How the Victim Mentality Hurts You
- Stunted Personal Growth: Believing that youโre not in control of your life prevents you from taking the necessary steps to grow, learn, and improve.
- Strained Relationships: Constantly writing off problems to external sources can strain your relationships as it leads to an inability to reason.
- Negative Self-Image: A victim mentality can erode your self-image, leading to feelings of inadequacy.
- Unfulfilled Potential: By having a victim mentality, youโre simply not going to view your life situation in a way that instills optimism, hope, excitement, and all the good things that encourage you to make the most of your life experience.
What Is Spiritual Victimhood?
Spiritual victimhood is something I also want to address here. Essentially, spiritual victimhood is using a facade to pretend youโre all spiritually developed and empowered, but you blame spiritual phenomena for your actions, behaviors, and so forth.
How often do you hear people in the spiritual community say โI lost my shit at someone and screamed at them, but itโs Mercury retrograde, so itโs not my faultโ. Ever heard that before? How about โThe full moon made me a little bit crazy last night, sorry about that!โ
Whether these phenomena influence you or not doesnโt matter. At the end of the day, youโre still blaming something else for your actions, and youโre trying to shift accountability to something else besides yourself.
How Can You Get Out of the Victim Spiral?
Radical self-responsibility is the antidote to the victim mentality. The victim mentality is a very disempowering view of life where everything happens to you.
You have no control over it, and you deserve all the sympathy in the world because life isnโt fair. Radical self-responsibility leans in the other direction โ towards empowerment.
People who have a victim mentality view themselves as helpless in the face of lifeโs challenges. They often see themselves as passive recipients of lifeโs outcomes and view their difficulties as external factors such as luck, other people, or circumstances beyond their control.
To get out of this spiral, you need to understand that itโs not the challenges you face or the situation that you find yourself in that defines you as a person. Itโs how you handle these challenges. So do it with dignity and honor. Be humble with your life. Because if youโre not, life can be a merciless teacher.
Practical Steps to Embrace Radical Self-Responsibility

When things go wrong, especially when theyโre out of your control, the first instinct is to react. But itโs easy to react, itโs hard to think about why you manifested this situation. By taking responsibility for what you do, and the effect that your actions have on your life, you are going to push towards better things with better outcomes.
Letโs say you were caught in traffic and arrived late to work. Itโs easy to blame traffic, but perhaps you should have left early if you had any suspicion. Even if you didnโt and thereโs nothing you could have done, you need to acknowledge that you are arriving late and that itโs your error.
Not to say you need to take the blame for everything that happens, but itโs important to acknowledge everything that affects other people. It might not be your fault, but it is your responsibility to follow up with your commitment and make amends if you canโt do what you said you would do.
On the other hand, if your phone slips out of your hand and breaks, instead of yelling at your phone, you should turn that attention to yourself.
Donโt beat yourself up about it, but maybe you shouldnโt have been holding your phone, or you should have been more careful with it. The first step to taking radical self-responsibility is to take accountability for your actions.
Learn From Your Mistakes
You donโt want to go in circles with your life. What I mean by this is if you donโt learn from your negative experiences, youโre bound to keep repeating them. In the context of radical self-responsibility, if you never take responsibility, thereโs always going to be something to blame.
Thatโs why you need to learn. Especially when something goes wrong, think about what you could have done differently to have changed the outcome.
A big part of personal development simmers down to your ability to reflect, process, and pick up patterns. So pay attention when you feel like shoveling blame, and remember to bring it back to yourself.
Make Conscious Decisions
Every cause has an effect. By correlating the cause and effect of every behavior, action, attitude, or thought, youโll begin to see that everything you do has an outcome. Whether that outcome works in your favor or not comes back to the thought process that created it, which is why you need to be conscious about your decisions.
Realize that the energy youโre putting out will be returned in some form. If you put your energy into your work, the energy you receive will be money. If you put your energy into your growth, you will receiveย greater fulfillment.
Therefore, be conscious of every little decision you make and know that those decisions all build up to create your life experience.
Donโt Attach Yourself to the Outcome
Itโs good to have plans and to move towards goals, but you shouldnโt be dependent on those outcomes for your happiness. When your satisfaction is independent of your material situation or life condition, itโs going to be a whole lot easier for you to accept outcomes that you didnโt expect and to take responsibility for them.
Your metric for a fulfilling life should be to experience it. At the end of the day, it shouldnโt matter how much shit you go through, and how much misfortune you have had. As long as you are present with your life experience instead of endlessly hoping, desiringโฆ youโll see that the outcome of your life doesnโt matter, as long as you did your best to enjoy it.
Practice Self-Compassion
A big part of radical self-responsibility comes down to showing yourself compassion. Donโt be too hard on yourself, because things arenโt always going to go your way. And itโs okay when things donโt go your way, or when you fail, or make mistakes.
Recognize that you are a human being who isnโt perfect. Accept imperfections and maintain a positive self-image, regardless of how much you muck up. Also, donโt let it get you down! Be forgiving of yourself as you work through the challenges of life. Understand that changes take time, so apply this self-compassion to this learning process too.
Should You Take Responsibility for Whatโs Outside Your Control?

Now that weโve looked at the things you can do to take control of your life, radical self-responsibility is to feel accountable even for the things that happen to you that arenโt in your control.
But wait…
Isn’t that a bad thing? I know that taking some responsibility is good, but for everything? How and why should you feel responsible for everything?
Let me explain. No, I’m not saying that you should assume accountability for everything that happens. A coworker being late and jumping into the fire, taking the blame is not what you want to do. Owning up to an accident that wasn’t your fault also isn’t the thing to do, nor is playing the martyr.
What radical self-responsibility is in a spiritual framework is that acknowledge that if something is in your reality, you’re the creator of it in some way.
Perhaps it’s karmic, perhaps it’s a manifestation. Perhaps your soul just chose to have this particularly painful lesson for a reason that you don’t understand. A mentality that has been helpful for my spiritual growth is to say, “If it happened to me, I manifested it somehow”.
This is a better way to approach spiritual self-responsibility. You can’t only play the creator role and believe in the spiritual stuff when things are working out for you, then wash your hands when they’re not.
You need to fully embody that role, even during the bad.
Thereโs a fine line when it comes to taking responsibility for everything that happens in your life. This can also spiral in a negative direction if you play the martyr or pity yourself. But, genuinely believing that you are in each situation for a reason and that there is something to learn from it is the quick path to personal growth.
Your Life Is a Manifestation of Your Consciousness
If you follow my work, youโll understand that reality is malleable. Your consciousness creates your entire life experience and calls in the lessons it needs to go through in this life. From a spiritual perspective, you are creating the difficult lessons in your life for your growth and evolution. Deep down, you chose these hardships.
Once you learn the lessons you need to learn, things will ease up, and life will become much easier to navigate. If you believe this, then how can you blame externally when you know youโre the reason for literally everything youโre experiencing? Realize that all of this is coming from your reality, not someone elseโs.
Your Soul Chose This Life
You chose to be here. You chose all of these difficulties, all of the trauma, all of the dysfunctions you would face. At a soul level, you chose to be born into poverty because your soul needed to experience that particular lesson to evolve. You chose to lose someone close to you because, from a spiritual perspective, your soul needed to mourn.
You might not want to believe this. If youโve been through something very traumatic, of course, the instinct is to blame whoever was responsible for causing that suffering. Thatโs fair. But if you want to do this thing, youโve got to get beyond the ego that wants to play the martyr because your soul chose to experience that particular lesson for its spiritual growth.
Build the Muscle of Gratitude
Gratitude is of the highest frequency we can experience. As gratitude signals that things are going great, when you build the muscle of gratitude by expressing appreciation as much as you can, your entire reality is going to change. Therefore, if you want to take radical self-responsibility, start pushing yourself to be more appreciative.
It doesnโt work the other way around. Life doesnโt hand you things then you become grateful. You become grateful for the little things, and life will start giving you more because itโs reciprocating to your vibration.
If youโre in a constant state of blame, your vibration is constantly going to be low, meaning youโre constantly going to be attracting more unpleasant experiences because they match the vibration. So turn this ship around, and take responsibility for your emotions, knowing they create your reality and arenโt dependent on it.