How to Stop Blaming Others: Start Growing Instead

How to stop blaming others is a question most of us never think to ask, because the blame game is something we play without noticing. It quietly decides how much we grow. I first saw the pattern clearly through a conversation with an old colleague, a teacher I worked alongside in Spain who was approaching retirement after thirty or forty years in education.

I asked her what had changed most over her career. She said it was not the curriculum or the technology. It was the parents. Early on, when a child was not performing well, the parents would look at their kid and say: you need to work harder, you need to study more. As the years passed, that finger moved. It stopped pointing at the child and started pointing at her: you need to teach better, this is your fault, not ours.

That conversation stayed with me because I recognised the same shift in myself, not with children or teaching, but in how quickly I had learned to point outward when something went wrong.

Blame as a Protective Cloak

Blame functions as a kind of protective cloak. If something goes wrong and it is someone else’s fault, then there is nothing uncomfortable to look at in ourselves. We did not get the job because they did not like us. The plan fell apart because of what someone else did or failed to do. It is never quite our fault, or at least that is the story we tell.

Epictetus gives us a precise way to understand what is happening here. Pierre Hadot, in his book The Inner Citadel, identifies three disciplines running through Epictetus’s teaching: the discipline of assent, the discipline of desire, and the discipline of action. Blame belongs squarely to the discipline of assent. When something happens, an impression arrives, and we immediately attach a judgment to it. In the blame game, that judgment places responsibility in someone else’s hands rather than examining it honestly first.

We form an opinion about where the fault lies, but we rarely do the honest work of checking whether that opinion is actually true. Epictetus considered this the very first act of philosophy: examining our beliefs, examining our impressions, before accepting them as fact. In the blame game, that examination is exactly what we skip.

Where the Blame Game Actually Lives

The blame game shows up everywhere. It is the traffic that made us late, the boss who will not help us move up, the colleagues who make work harder than it needs to be, the family that keeps asking for more than we can give. It is the partner, the economy, the circumstances. There is always someone or something available to point at.

This is genuinely difficult territory, because real obstacles exist. Difficult people exist. Circumstances outside our control genuinely shape what is possible. The Stoic point is not that these things are imaginary. It is that the discipline of desire matters here too. If our wants and aversions are fixed on externals, on how other people behave, on circumstances beyond our reach, then blaming those externals when they disappoint us follows naturally. But if we look inward instead, at what is genuinely ours to work with, the question changes entirely: what am I doing, and how am I showing up?

What I Learned From Blaming My Divorce on Someone Else

I saw this pattern most clearly in myself during my divorce. Watching a shared future come apart, seeing every step we had taken together suddenly mean nothing, I blamed her. She did not do this, she did not do that, it was all her fault. For a long time that was the entire story I told myself.

Slowly, a different realisation arrived. A relationship involves two people. Each one has a side, each one plays a role, and it is never only one person’s fault. Once I stopped pointing entirely outward and started looking at my own behaviour, my own actions, how I had actually shown up, something shifted. I could finally see where I needed to grow.

That change in perspective did not happen instantly, and it was not comfortable. But it opened a path forward that blame had been blocking completely. As long as the finger pointed outward, nothing changed. There was always someone else to point at next, and the frustration did not shrink. It grew.

What Blame Actually Costs You

Every moment spent blaming someone else is a moment not spent growing. It keeps us stuck in the past, in the story of what happened to us, rather than focused on what we can actually do now. And this is where the discipline of desire becomes relevant again. If we place our eudaimonia, our flourishing, in the hands of what someone else did or did not do, we have misplaced it. Our good life was never theirs to give or take away.

There is also a quieter cost. When we keep blaming, we are handing over our prohairesis, our faculty of moral choice, to people who might not even be in our lives anymore. They may have moved on entirely, unaware of the weight they still carry in our thinking. We are the ones still paying the price for a debt the other person may not even know exists.

This is close to what I have written about elsewhere as the victim mentality, and it is a pattern Epictetus addresses directly when discussing anger at other people’s errors. The groan that turns outward becomes resentment. The groan that turns inward without examination becomes self-pity. Neither one actually moves us anywhere.

The Three Stages of Blame

Epictetus offers a useful map of where we can be on this journey. In the Enchiridion he describes three stages. The person who is uninstructed blames others for whatever goes wrong in their life. The person who has begun to make progress blames themselves instead, which is a step forward but still a form of misplaced judgment. And the person whose education is complete blames neither others nor themselves.

That third stage is not indifference. It is clarity. The person who has arrived there is not looking for someone to hold responsible, themselves included. They are simply doing the best they can, showing up as fully as possible, and if something does not go the way they hoped, they take the information and learn from it rather than searching for a verdict. There is no one to blame at that point, because blame has stopped being the question that matters.

How to Catch Yourself Mid-Blame

This does not mean excusing people who genuinely cause harm. Other people still make choices that affect us, and where we can, it is right to step in, guide, or set a better example. That responsibility does not disappear. What changes is whether our own peace depends on the other person’s behaviour changing first.

The next time frustration or anger rises, pause and ask what you are adding to the situation. Is the judgment accurate? Is the responsibility genuinely resting where you have placed it, or have you handed it to someone else’s shoes? Describe the situation factually first, stripped of interpretation, before deciding what it means.

Then ask what you could have done differently, honestly, without harshness. Arrived late for work? Perhaps leaving earlier next time is the answer, if the delay was genuinely within your control. Sometimes it was not, and that is simply the truth of it too. Either way, the question is not who deserves blame. It is what belongs to you and what you intend to do with it.

Owning your part is not comfortable. It means encountering things about yourself you might have preferred not to see. But the moment we own it, energy returns. We stop being a puppet pulled along by circumstance and start moving with intention, showing up as ourselves rather than reacting to whoever or whatever crosses our path. This is where blame and responsibility meet directly. Taking responsibility is simply the other side of setting blame down.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Stoicism say about blaming others?

Stoicism treats blame as a judgment error rather than a moral failing. Epictetus placed it within the discipline of assent: when something happens, we attach a judgment to it, and blame is what results when that judgment is placed on externals without honest examination. The Stoic response is not self-blame either. It is examining the situation clearly and asking what is genuinely ours to work with, rather than searching for someone to hold responsible.

What are Epictetus’s three stages of blame?

In the Enchiridion, Epictetus describes three stages of progress. The uninstructed person blames others for their own misfortune. The person who has begun to make progress blames themselves instead. And the person whose education is complete blames neither others nor themselves, choosing instead to focus entirely on acting well with what is in front of them. This progression marks a genuine developmental path, from misplaced blame outward, to misplaced blame inward, to clarity.

Why do we blame others instead of taking responsibility?

Blame offers a form of protection. If something is someone else’s fault, there is nothing uncomfortable to examine in ourselves. It keeps us feeling justified rather than exposed. The difficulty is that this protection comes at a real cost: as long as responsibility stays external, nothing about our own situation actually changes, and the same frustrations tend to recur in new forms.

How do I stop blaming others and start taking responsibility?

Start by describing the situation factually, without the interpretation attached to it. Then ask what genuinely belongs to you in it: your actions, your choices, your part in how things unfolded. This is not about excusing other people’s behaviour or blaming yourself instead. It is about identifying what is actually within your control and directing your attention there. The shift happens gradually through repeated practice, not through a single decision.

Is taking responsibility the same as blaming yourself?

No, and Stoicism is explicit about this distinction. Blaming yourself is still a form of misplaced judgment, just redirected inward rather than outward. Genuine responsibility looks at a situation clearly, without harshness, and asks what can be learned and done differently, without needing a verdict against anyone, including yourself. The most advanced stage Epictetus describes involves no blame at all, only honest attention to one’s own actions.

The Moment You Stop Blaming

Life will keep giving us reasons to blame. Traffic, difficult people, circumstances beyond our reach, none of that stops simply because we understand the pattern. What changes is what we do with it. Marcus Aurelius wrote that the impediment to action advances action, that what stands in the way becomes the way. That reframe only becomes available once we stop spending our energy on the finger pointing and start spending it on the work.

This is not comfortable. Looking honestly at our own part in things means encountering aspects of ourselves we might have preferred to leave unexamined. But it is, without exception, the more rewarding path.

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Want to Learn More?

If this resonated and you are ready to start building your own philosophy of life, a conversation with Benny as your Stoic coach can be a good place to begin. Not to be told what to think, but to have the space to figure it out. You can also sign up for the newsletter, The Pause, or watch or listen to the Via Stoica Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

About the Author

Benny Voncken is the founder of Via Stoica and host of the Via Stoica Podcast. He has practiced Stoicism as a way of life for over six years, spoken at Stoicon, and led Stoic walks across Europe. Through Stoic coaching, he helps people use Stoic principles and practices to develop their own philosophy of life: one that gives them the tools to face obstacles, navigate change, and find more balance and peace. He writes, teaches, and walks wherever the philosophy takes him.