Blame is the anchor to the past
Gary John Bishop frames blame — of self or others — as the mechanism that keeps people anchored to past pain and unable to move forward.
Snapshot · The School of Greatness
Why You Tolerate a Relationship You Know Should End | Gary John Bishop
Explore episode
Jul 10, 2026
Where this was said
Blame Is the Anchor to the Past
At 24:47 · chapter starts 24:30
Bishop argues that the core obstacle to freedom is the question of blame — of yourself or of someone else. He frames blame not as a moral question but as a practical one: as long as you are engaged in assigning it, you remain anchored to the past moment when whatever happened, happened. He describes how he came to this by looking at truly damaging events in his own childhood, including sexual abuse. He explicitly states he is not making excuses for the perpetrator or calling the behaviour okay. But when he was able to see that person's humanity — to understand they were acting from their own broken logic — 'they were no longer the devil.' The emotional charge evaporated. That flatness, he says, is freedom: not approval, not forgetting, but the removal of a permanent psychological tether to a moment that cannot be changed.
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