4 Steps to Stop Blaming

This is the third blog in a series on blame. I wrote the first two blogs to help those who feel consistently blamed, while this installment is for those who do the blaming. It was not my original intention to write a piece for blamers, but I was inundated with (and inspired by) emails from readers who self-identified as blamers and asked for help in stopping their behavior.

Let me say first that in some situations blaming is helpful and healthy—it's not always a dysfunctional reaction. Assigning blame where it is appropriate can empower and protect you, and stop harm in its tracks. But the kind of blaming that I am addressing here is the unhealthy and chronic kind. It is the habitual and reactive sort that blocks your personal growth, damages your relationships, and gets in the way of your own well-being.

Try the following test:

1. Would it be normal for you to respond to someone with a problem by telling him why he is to blame for his problem?
    
2. In relationships with friends and family, do you often find yourself pointing the finger? Do you tell others how and why they are wrong, using phrases such as You did it, or, It’s your fault?
    
3. When you confront difficulties or inconveniences, is it common for you to identify and ruminate over who or what is to blame?
    
4. When you are upset or in a difficult situation, do you frequently blame someone for making you feel the way you do? 

If you answered yes to any one of these questions, you are a blamer. If you answered yes to multiple questions, then your blaming behavior may very well be compromising your relationships, your well-being, and your personal evolution. That said, keep reading: Blaming is a habit and awareness is the first step toward breaking it.   

First, I want to congratulate you on your willingness to look honestly at your behavior, and to address what may not be working in your life. It’s hard to investigate the parts of yourself that need improvement; such awareness takes courage. In addition, I congratulate you on the aspiration to grow and improve, which comes from your highest self. The intention to evolve is already evolved—just by continuing to read, you are doing something remarkable. 

Your blaming, when it began, was probably an innocent defense mechanism meant to protect you from harm. If your sister was to blame for eating the cookies, then she would be punished—not you. But sometimes, blaming takes a turn toward the dysfunctional, when blaming becomes your default reaction to life, causing harm to you and others. 

Blaming, when dysfunctional, is a way to avoid and deny feeling what you are feeling. While it may not be conscious, blaming is something you do to get away from the feelings you do not want to feel. But I feel lots of things when I blame, you might argue. And it is true that you do feel when blaming, but you feel something other than what you would if you could not blame. In this way, blaming conceals and distorts your real truth—you replace your feelings about what you are experiencing with feelings about who caused it. 

At its core, blaming is a form of self-abandonment and self-betrayal.

Case #1: "Jon"

Jon (not his real name) is driving his teenage daughter to a gymnastics meet. Traffic is dreadful and they are going to be late for this important event in her life. Jon goes to his default response—blame—accusing his daughter of dilly-dallying before getting in the car and related crimes. He spends the entire trip angry; berating her, explaining why it’s her fault that she is not going to make her meet on time. Later, as I unpacked the event with Jon, it became evident that underneath the blame, he was in fact experiencing many emotions. He felt sad and guilty about not being able to get her to the meet on time. He felt powerless that, as her dad, he couldn’t take care of her, which is what he really wanted to do. He felt anxious because he thought there might be a better route to take, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He felt heartbroken because he knew what the meet meant to her, and how hard she had worked for it.

Under all of the blame was actually love and pride for his daughter. As Jon and I re-scripted the event, reliving it in a new way, we replaced Jon’s blaming script with acknowledgment and expression. He revealed all the juicy feelings that he had not allowed toward his daughter or even in his awareness. Together, we invited in Jon’s actual truth. We re-framed the traffic jam as an opportunity not to determine blame or rightness, but rather to connect, create intimacy, and meet the truth of the moment. With the need to assign blame set aside, there was an opportunity for Jon to touch his actual experience. He could feel the depth of his vulnerability and love, which, thankfully, he was later able to share with his daughter.

Blaming is a way to uphold your self-image and protect your self-esteem. Your partner is the cause of your relationship problems, your boss is why you are not successful, the government is to blame for your lot in life. Someone or something else is to blame. This allows you to avoid having to look at your own participation—and, potentially, aspects of yourself that conflict with your self-image. Blaming keeps you safe from having to look at the gap between who you believe yourself to be and who you are. But in so doing, blaming also prevents you from being able to grow and change. Pointing the finger is a way to avoid responsibility, which ultimately keeps you stuck at the place from which you point.

Blaming is also a strategy (albeit usually unconscious) to keep from having to make changes or address your actual reality. As long as the problem is someone else’s fault, you can stay busy and focused on trying to correct the blame—that is, fix that person or situation that is at fault. You pour your attention into what you have determined to be the source of that fault. As a result, you turn your back not only on your actual experience of the situation, but what you might need to do—given that the situation is the way it is. 

Case #2: "Maggie"

Maggie (not her name) had been in a relationship with Phil for a dozen years. For 10 of those years, she had been talking about how and why he was to blame for what was not working in their marriage. She focused her attention perpetually outward, on changing him: He was to blame, so she needed to fix him. And when she fixed him, she would be happy in the marriage. She believed that blaming and fixing would set her free. In fact, it was paralyzing her and keeping her stuck, with her life balanced on a potential future that didn’t exist. 

After much suffering, Maggie became aware of how the blaming was prohibiting her not only from directly experiencing her unhappiness but also from honestly addressing what needed to happen because of it. If this was the state of the marriage, what then? Thankfully, she was finally willing to stop the cycle of blame, turn her attention away from Phil and his faults, and focus it back on her own heart. She was then able to see and take the next right step.

Recovery: how to break the blaming habit?

Step 1: Set an intention (make a decision) to stop your blaming behavior. Identify what it is you want and hope to experience as a result of moving out of blaming (better relationships, more peace, freedom from anger, less time ruminating, etc.). Write down (or tell a friend) about this decision. If possible, begin a journal dedicated to your evolution from blaming. 

Step 2: Start paying attention! Make a conscious effort to become more mindful of your blaming behavior. When you are able to catch the impulse to blame (before it happens), create a pause, be silent, and take two deep breaths. Then, make a different choice.

Remember, however, that breaking the blaming habit is a process that takes time. You will not be able to catch yourself before you blame on every occasion; it may be quite a while before you can catch yourself at all. That’s okay. It is a huge step just to notice your habitual reaction to blame, even if it is after the fact. But the more you practice, the more you will be able to interrupt the process before it happens and ideally respond in a new way from a different place.

Step 3: At whatever stage you notice your blaming impulse (before or after), ask yourself the following questions (and journal on what you uncover):

1. If I couldn’t blame in this situation, what would I have to feel?
2. What about that feeling is hard to feel?

Step 4: Honor yourself for making the commitment and doing the work that emotionally and spiritually evolving requires. A Final Note

Be gentle with yourself: This is not an opportunity to blame yourself for not getting yet another thing right. Practice these steps and when you forget to practice them, remember and start again. If you commit to making this effort, you will grow in ways you can’t yet know, and so will your relationships and your life.

Read more on the topic:

• What to DO About the People that Blame You for Everything
• When You're in Relationship with a Blamer
• The #1 Most Important Relationship Skill and How to Learn It
• How to Heal Defensiveness in Close Relationships
• "And" Not "But": The Secret to Healthy Relationships

When You're in Relationship With a Blamer

There is no better time for growing than the holiday season. And not just growing in the belly, but in the heart and mind as well. Family interactions, particularly those that go on over a period of consecutive days, offer profound opportunities for self-awareness, learning, and evolution. 

Our greatest challenges are our greatest teachers, and they often manifest in the form of family—at least, that’s been my experience. I have taken on a practice and habit of bowing to my hardest or most painful situations, even as I struggle with and loathe them. I know that if I can approach my greatest challenges with awareness and self-kindness, I can use them to evolve and find more peace in my life. I know from practice that the hard parts of life will change me, and for this opportunity to change, if not the situation itself, I am grateful.

Recently I had the good fortune to spend time with one of my teachers. Over the years, this particular teacher, who happens to also be a family member, has provided seemingly unending opportunities for me to grow and change. So I begin by saying thank you. I have become who I am, in part, because of what I have had to work with in my relationship with this particular person. 

But this family member is also a blamer. We all know a blamer—most families have at least one. This weekend, my daughter falls down, skins her knee, and is crying. His first words: “That’s what happens when you run so fast on the pavement.” Later, my tooth is hurting so much that I have to take pain medicine. He offers, “Well, why don’t you take better care of your teeth? You must still be chewing ice.” 

You get the point. 

The circumstances are irrelevant; empathy is always off the table. The only item of concern is fingering the person to blame and identifying his or her crime. 

This particular aspect of my teacher’s way of being was helpful some years back. Indeed, I grew from it. I can now be with his empathic vacuum, and recognize how it allows him not to feel sad or bad about himself. Being angry protects him from having to experience another’s pain, something by which he clearly feels threatened. I am also able (now) to refrain from getting involved in his pathology by defending the blamed. I am instead able to use it as a catalyst for opening my own heart and accompanying the other (the one being blamed) in the experience where they are. 

But this year, I witnessed a new form of blaming over the Thanksgiving weekend. Or you could say that a new teaching appeared from which to become even wiser and more aware. The challenge at the holiday table this year was that of being blamed for causing bad feelings that another person feels independently—projection, at its most basic level:

• Problem 1: She has (for many years) felt crippling shame about something at which she failed in her life.
  Reaction: She blames the other (in this case, me) for shaming her. I, in her narrative, become the active humiliator despite never actually raising the issue of the failure.
   
• Problem 2: She feels bad or guilty for getting stuck in traffic and not being able to get her daughter to an important event on time.
  Reaction: She blames the other person in the car and accuses that person of blaming her for not being a good mother. (In truth, the other person has not said a thing.)
   
• Problem 3: She feels entirely responsible for her husband’s happiness and vigilantly seeks to protect him from being unhappy or displeased even for a moment.
  Reaction: Overwhelmed, she then blames her husband for expecting (or demanding) that she make him happy.
• You get the point.

  This blamer blames the other for creating the feelings that she does not want to feel. She can then fight with and be angry with the person "doing" this to her. She makes them the keeper/source of her bad feelings, and in so doing, she can disown the bad feelings as not part of her, split off from the experience she finds threatening. 

  For the person being projected onto, this is quite a challenge. When the blamer is projecting their bad feelings onto you, they actually believe that you are doing this to them. You are to blame for creating this bad experience inside—with intention. They are not playing at being deluded, but actually believe that you are the bad one and blame you for trying to make them feel this way. In their projection, they are the victim of your negative intentions. The result: They succeed in morphing their bad feelings into a bad you. 

  The one receiving projection—the blame—has several fundamental dilemmas to deal with (and then some):

  • First, there's their own hurt—of not being seen for who they are and being assigned a negative intention that doesn’t belong to them.
  • Second, the anger and confusion at blame for something that they did not create, and the unfairness of the emotionally abusive behavior they experience.
  • Finally, the frustration of trying to communicate and portray oneself correctly within an environment of distortion and the absence of awareness. 

  How do you respond and, if you so choose, continue to be in relationship with a person who uses you as a place to assign the feelings that they cannot own? How do you learn and grow from someone who creates negative actions and intentions for you that aren’t yours as a way of splitting off from their own unprocessed experience—a way of staying in denial? How do you be in relationship with blindness—specifically, when your mistreatment is a part of that blindness? 

  I'll leave you with questions and a promise to return in the next few weeks with, hopefully, some answers that are helpful. For now, perhaps just knowing that this is a common difficulty and pain in relationships may help ease your own pain. If you are experiencing something like this, you are not alone. And you are not alone in the suffering that it is to live under the burden of projection. Remember too, as I am trying to, that with each projection, another teacher arrives, offering us yet another chance to become more aware, wiser, and more at peace with what is. 

  To be continued.
  Be sure to read the following responses to this post by our bloggers:

  What to Do About the People Who Blame You for Everything is a reply by Nancy Colier LCSW, Rev.

  4 Steps to Stop Blaming is a reply by Nancy Colier LCSW, Rev.

  You Can't Change Someone Else. But You Can Do This. is a reply by Nancy Colier LCSW, Rev.

Why We Hold Grudges and How to Let Them Go

• Karen, 65, is very angry at her ex-boyfriend. It seems he asked her best friend out on a date, a few days after breaking up with Karen. He was her boyfriend in high school. 
• Paul, 45, can’t forgive his sister, because, as he sees it, she treated him like he didn’t matter when they were children.
• Shelly talks of her resentment toward her mother, whom she is convinced loved her brother more than her. While her relationship with her mother eventually changed, and offered Shelly a feeling of being loved enough, the bitterness about not being her mother’s favorite remains stuck.

These people are not isolated examples or peculiar in any way. Many people hold grudges, deep ones, that can last a lifetime. Many are unable to let go of the anger they feel towards those who “wronged” them in the past, even though they may have a strong desire and put in a concerted effort to do so.

Often we hold onto our grudges unwillingly, while wishing we could drop them and live freshly in the present, without the injustices of the past occupying so much psychic space. 

Why do we hold grudges when they are in fact quite painful to maintain, and often seem to work against what we really want? Why do we keep wounds open and active, living in past experiences of pain which prevent new experiences from being able to happen? What keeps us stuck when we want to move on and let go? Most important, how can we let go? 

To begin with, grudges come with an identity. With our grudge intact, we know who we are—a person who was “wronged.”  As much as we don’t like it, there also exists a kind of rightness and strength in this identity. We have something that defines us—our anger and victimhood—which gives us a sense of solidness and purpose. We have definition and a grievance that carries weight. To let go of our grudge, we have to be willing to let go of our identity as the “wronged” one, and whatever strength, solidity, or possible sympathy and understanding we receive through that “wronged” identity. We have to be willing to drop the “I” who was mistreated and step into a new version of ourselves, one we don’t know yet, that allows the present moment to determine who we are, not past injustice.

But what are we really trying to get at, get to, or just get by holding onto a grudge and strengthening our identity as the one who was “wronged”? In truth, our grudge, and the identity that accompanies it, is an attempt to get the comfort and compassion we didn’t get in the past, the empathy for what happened to us at the hands of this “other,” the experience that our suffering matters  As a somebody who was victimized, we are announcing that we are deserving of extra kindness and special treatment. Our indignation and anger is a cry to be cared about and treated differently—because of what we have endured.

The problem with grudges, besides the fact that they are a drag to carry around (like a bag of sedimentized toxic waste that keeps us stuck in anger) is that they don’t serve the purpose that they are there to serve. They don’t make us feel better or heal our hurt. At the end of the day, we end up as proud owners of our grudges but still without the experience of comfort that we ultimately crave, that we have craved since the original wounding. We turn our grudge into an object and hold it out at arm’s length—proof of what we have suffered, a badge of honor, a way to remind others and ourselves of our pain and deserving-ness. But in fact our grudge is disconnected from our own heart; while born out of our pain, it becomes a construction of the mind, a story of what happened to us. Our grudge morphs into a boulder that blocks the light of kindness from reaching our heart, and thus is an obstacle to true healing. Sadly, in its effort to garner us empathy, our grudge ends up depriving us of the very empathy that we need to release it.

The path to freedom from a grudge is not so much through forgiveness of the "other" (although this can be helpful), but rather through loving our own self. To bring our own loving presence to the suffering that crystallized into the grudge, the pain that was caused by this “other,” is what ultimately heals the suffering and allows the grudge to melt. If it feels like too much to go directly into the pain of a grudge, we can move toward it with the help of someone we trust, or bring a loving presence to our wound, but from a safe place inside. The idea is not to re-traumatize ourselves by diving into the original pain but rather to attend to it with the compassion that we didn’t receive, that our grudge is screaming for, and bring it directly into the center of the storm. Our heart contains both our pain and the elixir for our pain. 

To let go of a grudge we need to move the focus off of the one who “wronged” us, off of the story of our suffering, and into the felt experience of what we actually lived. When we move our attention inside, into our heart, our pain shifts from being a “something” that happened to us, another part of our narrative, to a sensation that we know intimately, a felt sense that we are one with from the inside.

In re-focusing our attention, we find the soothing kindness and compassion that the grudge itself desires. In addition, we take responsibility for caring about our own suffering, and for knowing that our suffering matters, which can never be achieved through our grudge, no matter how fiercely we believe in it. We can then let go of the identity of the one who was “wronged,” because it no longer serves us and because our own presence is now righting that wrong. Without the need for our grudge, it often simply drops away without our knowing how. What becomes clear is that we are where we need to be, in our own heart’s company.   

If you're interested in this topic and want to read related Psychology Today blogs:

• "How to Live in the Real World (Minus One Troubling Word)"
• "Are You Feeding On Your Pain... Past Its Expiration Date?"
• "How to Heal Defensiveness In Close Relationships"
• "Stop 'Shoulding' Yourself to Death"
• "Letting Go of Toxic People"
• "When Old Friends Stop Being Good Friends"
• ""And" Not "But": The Secret to Healthy Relationships" 

Copyright 2015 Nancy Colier