Blame, Apathy, and the Descent Into Stillness

Lately, I’ve been thinking about blame. I was listening to the section on depression and apathy in David Hawkins’ Letting Go, and it stopped me in my tracks. He talks about how apathy isn’t just sadness — it’s when the system shuts down. The fight is gone. There’s no charge left, no spark. And underneath that, so often, there’s blame — subtle, simmering, sometimes almost invisible.

You see it all the time in therapy. Someone sits across from you, heavy, flat, detached, but quietly blaming the world — their partner, their parents, the past, life itself — for the fact that they can’t feel joy. And to be honest, I think most of us have sat in that seat at some point.

Blame gives the illusion of control. It’s a way of saying, I can’t move because of you. It’s protection disguised as paralysis. Because to stop blaming means to feel what’s actually underneath — grief, helplessness, sometimes unbearable fear.

Persephone in the Underworld

There’s this part of the Persephone myth that I think about often — the stillness of the underworld. When Persephone is taken underground, everything above the earth goes still. The flowers stop blooming, the world turns grey. That’s what depression can feel like: life halts. Time stretches out. You’re down there, half-asleep, and you don’t even realize you’ve stopped breathing properly.

But what I love about that story is that Persephone doesn’t stay a victim. The descent changes her. She becomes Queen of the Underworld. She learns its language. She stops fighting it and starts listening. That’s the moment the energy shifts — not when she escapes, but when she accepts where she is.

That’s what letting go feels like. It’s not passive. It’s an act of radical courage. It’s saying, I’ll stop waiting for the person who hurt me to fix it. I’ll stop waiting for life to turn around before I can be happy again.

The Quiet Cost of Blame

Blame feels righteous, but it’s a trap. It ties you to the past, keeps you in a holding pattern. Every time we mentally point outward — they did this to me — we leak energy. And depression, in a way, is the body’s protest against that constant outflow. It’s like the system says, no more.

When we start to release blame, what returns isn’t instant joy — it’s space. Breathing room. Energy begins to move again. The psyche starts to thaw.

Climbing Back Toward Light

I think real healing starts when you stop bargaining with life. When you say, Alright, this is what happened. It hurt. But I’m not going to let it define the rest of my story. That’s when the descent becomes transformation.

Like Persephone, we all have to go down sometimes. But if we’re willing to face what’s beneath the apathy — the grief, the fear, the heartbreak — we come back with something sacred. A kind of wisdom you can’t learn in the light.

Letting go isn’t giving up. It’s saying: I’m ready to stop being at war with what was, so I can finally be alive in what is.