You started this!

The success story for your personality to be able to blame others: they were the one who said something, did or did not do something and because it is experienced as unpleasant by you, hurts or such, it now 'entitles' your personality to play the role of the attacked-and-innocent one.

When you choose to entertain this idea, you surrender your experiences almost completely to what others do and whether this does or does not meet your standards, values and ideas. For solving the unpleasant feelings these cause in you, you now are dependent on the willingness of the other person to adjust in an appropriate way to your judgment (and when this is not done, you are stuck with the tensions of your own interpretations which are not met now).

"You started this" for your personality is a very pleasant way to be able to project the results of his interpretation of a situation which was neutral in itself, away from himself and onto somebody else, thus avoiding responsibility for your own experiences. It is an attempt to prevent you from seeing what really happened: you yoursélf chose to start with interpreting what the other person said, did or did not do, and assigned a label 'unpleasant' to it. Now you attempt to have the other person be responsible for solving this unpleasant feeling.

The standard personality reaction often is to want to have the other person experience what you yourself experience, so when someone rejects you, you immediately reject the other person. When someone is angry with you, you feel the tendency too react likewise. When someone has an authority issue, you will be triggered to have your own authority re-established. Etc. Only the way in which it is expressed (or suppressed) varies. By the way, this also works the other way around: when someone is nice to you, it is easier for you to be nice to the other person, you frequently use this mechanism in your social contacts.

Now, from experience, you are likely to have noticed this logic can be broken. When you are nice to someone, it may well be that the other person reacts in an unpleasant way (many helpdesk employees can practice with this!). So when someone is not nice to you, you may well attempt to return a pleasant reaction (even though to your personality there is a limit to the period of time in which you will do so without the results he expects to gain through this).

Consciously realize that it is up to you to keep on repeating these mechanisms and make them 'true' in themselves, thus limiting and imprisoning yourself. You can also choose to free yourself from them. Not because the óther person changes, but because you want a different experience, on you can find within yourself, regardless of the input of the other person: through your inner Self.