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