According to post-structuralists (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault), it is not my fault whether I am screwing up my life.
Post-structuralists say I am not the only one to blame.
They say that everything that is external to me determines how I behave.
So when I can't stop drinking and my wife wants to leave me, it is not solely my fault.
Rather, everything that has happened in my life up until this point has led me to drink or behave in the way that I do.
But regardless of whose fault it is, the question still lingers...
What can I do to change? The post-structuralists say that you cannot change unless you change the things around you.
In other words, you would have behaved differently had your context been different.
Hence, something external to yourself is keeping you from doing your best.
The really cool thing about post-structuralism is that merely understanding that you are not to blame for your problems, will create change.
If you stop blaming yourself and share the blame with something or someone else, then your attitude changes.
The change in attitude consequently incites change.
Post-structuralist philosophy says that our environment inscribes our bodies and that our bodies, in turn, inscribe our environment.
What they mean is that you cannot separate the part from the whole and that we are one with what surrounds us.
Hence, our reality is merely a reflection of this relationship.
So, a change in one individual means a change in the environment and vice versa.
How can we put this philosophy to work? First, by believing that we are not responsible or can determine how we behave.
Second, after we stop blaming ourselves, and feeling deficient, we can try something different, whatever is possible at that moment.
Remember, we cannot determine what those possibilities will be.
After we try that, we keep on trying.
Eventually, according to post-structuralism, things will turn out in the only way they can.
If you still have problems, then you need to keep on trying.
And if you die trying then you can conclude that even though you tried, and things did not change, that it was not solely your own doing.
To put it simply, it is not only trying to make change individually, but rather that the world and the individual are trying together.
If you fail, then you both fail.
For those of you who believe in God, for example, the thought would resemble the saying that you do not walk alone but hand in hand with God.
In other words, the world you create is the world according to you and God.