"Standing next to me in this lonely crowdIs a man who swears he's not to blameAll day long I hear him shout so loud,Crying out that he was framed." Bob Dylan, "I Shall Be Released"In my last post, I talked about how depression caused by lack of adequate mirroring can forestall the process of finding your life purpose. If you don't expect to be positively responded to by the people who matter to you, it is extremely difficult to feel that you matter and that you can make a difference in the world.But there is a second, even more insidious, way that inadequate responses from parents and other caregivers can interfere with the process of finding your life path. It was described most eloquently by the British psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn who said, "It's better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God that to live in a world ruled by the devil".Fairbairn was reflecting on the fact that, as young children, we are completely dependent upon our caregivers for our survival. If the people upon whom we are so dependent are abusive or neglectful, we have no control over them. This thought is simply too frightening to entertain.The only way to maintain a sense of control--albeit an illusory one--is to believe that we are being treated badly because we are bad. So, when we don' t get the responses from our caregivers that we need, we conclude there must be something wrong with us. We tell ourselves that we're too needy, too selfish, too sensitive, too difficult--anything that shifts the responsibility for our suffering from our caregivers to us. As one of my favorite psychological thinkers, Robert Stolorow, puts it, we "blame [our] own reactive states for the injuries that produced them".I'm not encouraging you to stop blaming yourself for the things in your life that cause you suffering and to blame your parents instead. Therapy is not about assigning blame. Believing that there's something seriously wrong with you, however, can be a major obstacle to finding your life path. Indeed, in my experience, it is the most serious obstacle people confront. It turns your attention away from finding a meaningful life purpose to trying to figure out and fix what's wrong with you.In future posts, I'll discuss the many ways you might come to feel that there is something wrong with you and how you might change these feelings. Here I simply want to encourage you to consider the idea that your feeling that there is something wrong with you might have less to do with your actual shortcomings than with beliefs about yourself that you had to develop for the sake of your own emotional survival. While you needed those beliefs when you were completely dependent on others for your survival , you don't need them now. Release from paralyzing self-blame is a crucial step in the process of finding your life purpose.