Nothing drills down another person’s happiness like constant blame. “The sun rose so it’s your fault. There was an earthquake on the other side of the world, so, again, it’s your fault. Everything is your fault. In fact, I don’t know why I married someone with so many faults.” Blame is verbal abuse.
The most fascinating thing, to me, is that when I confront all these blamers, they tell me that they love their spouse, child, etc. So what gives? What in the world do you love about them if they are responsible for every problem you have?
Now you’re going to ask me, “Well, DrDeb, if they upset me and I don’t tell them, aren’t they going to keep on doing it?”
Great question.
The problem is that if you do keep piling blame and accusation on them, I guarantee they’ll keep on doing it. After all, you’re making them feel miserable, so what is their motivation to be nice to you? Ever hear the old expression, “You get more bees with honey than vinegar”? Think about it. Bottom line: Your relationship will fall apart, if it hasn’t already, if you feel a need to rehash every thing that went wrong with blaming. You can’t rewrite the past by rehashing it, and you definitely don’t create what those in the business world call “good will.” So put the brakes on that behavior. Pronto.
How Did You Start The blaming Thing, Anyway?
It started three ways:
One: Your parents did it to each other and to you.
Two: You thought as a little kid that somebody has to be at fault for everything that went wrong and that somehow, If only the guilty party were uncovered, it would make the problem go away.
Three: You don’t know how to rid yourself of the uncomfortable feeling that you’re left with when something goes wrong.
Taking these one by one, you realize that just because your parents did something did not make it a brilliant idea. Some parents were wrong, what can I say? And this is one of them.
Blaming Always Backfires
If you look at all the terrible mistakes in life, the truth is that there is, indeed, plenty of fault to go around. But, so what? Finding out who is at fault does not solve or even reduce the problem. Have you found that it does? In fact, if you are honest with yourself, it doesn’t prevent future occurrences of the problem either. Actually, blaming insures that you will get future occurrences of the problem. The reason is simple: The person who got blamed is not going to listen to blame. I mean, do you like listening to blame? So she/he shuts down, doesn’t listen. And therefore nothing is learned from the blaming episode.
Furthermore, just to make matters worse, you have lost goodwill with the person you’re attacking. Goodwill is that intangible thing that allows you to make a mistake yourself once in a while. It’s what you get from being nice a lot. Then when you screw up, the person says, “Oh, well; we’re all human.” But when you’re into blaming, forget it. So without goodwill, why should the person you blamed care if she or he messes you up in the future? You can see how this really, really boomerangs.
Finally, a big reason people blame is the same as the reason they get angry: To get rid of those uncomfortable feelings they’re left with when confronted with some problem. Like, what do you do now? Actually, nothing. But, but, but….I can’t just sit here and not say anything about this awful situation!! Yeah, you can. See, letting it go is very hard. But, friend, that is part of being a grownup. S–t happens, as they say. Just let it go. Once it’s happened, there is no way you can undo it and certainly not by pinning the blame on someone.
So, what to do to stop this awful habit
You need to bite your tongue. Literally. Just don’t say anything. If you can’t seem to control yourself, think of your boss standing there. Or someone you actually respect. God, maybe. Or leave the building for a self-imposed time-out. Think of something you enjoy doing, like going fishing, shopping, whatever. Get your head somewhere else. Get in the habit of letting it go. And then congratulate yourself for being able to do that.
Dr Deb, this is a confusing article when you pair it with verbal/emotional abuse. Are you suggesting you don’t tell the abuser how he has hurt you because that will sound like blame? This is exactly what happens in my own relationship and I have read it’s very common with abusers and narcissists. If you tell them that their abuse is hurtful they will play victim and say you are hurting them by labeling their abuse. This is exactly what my husband says and it minimizes my pain and gets the focus off of the real issue (his abuse of name-calling, mocking, taunting, projecting, telling me my reality and motivations, etc.) to suddenly the ‘issue’ is now how I hurt his feelings and ‘devastated’ him by merely suggesting his behavior was inappropriate and therefore ‘blaming’ him for my unhappiness when according to him I just need to own my own feelings and ‘take responsibility’ for my pain! It feels like the equivalent of being punched in teh face then told that the black eye is my fault and how dare I ‘blame’ him for my sensitive skin. Do you see how they use these psychological terms to twist everything? This article, I fear, helps them with this. I find many articles like this are probably written with healthier relationships in mind but when abuse enters the relationship, does this article even apply? Sometimes ‘blame’ (not always a bad word) is needed in order to focus on the real issue – the abuse. If someone is a murderer do we not ‘blame’ him for his actions and hold him accountable? Do we ‘bite our tongue’ and let it go? I would love to hear your clarifying thoughts on your blame article in relation to abusive behaviors.
Thank you for writing such a SMART question. I do cover it in my new book (really coming shortly, I promise). But let me try to address it here. The template for blame is like this: “You do X, Y, Z.” or “You always do X, Y, Z.” or “You caused this problem.” Now, when you are hurt because your husband has been verbally abusive, here’s what’s going on: (a) he is so used to verbal abuse that he doesn’t recognize it as such, (b) he was indeed injured by it as a child and is set up that way to play victim, (c) because of the abuse he received, his ego absolutely can’t take hearing blame. When you tell him that he hurt you, he will deflect it as you have described.
So you can see from your own experience that it doesn’t really inform him, it doesn’t stop him, and it invalidates you more. Obviously, just ignorning it is no answer. It will continue. So what do you do? One recommendation I have is to say something like this: “You must be unhappy to have said this. I’m unhappy, too. Let’s go to marriage counseling to get this resolved.” or, “Let’s read Dr. Deb’s book to see if it can help us.” I realize you must be thinking: Oh, she’s plugging her book. I want you to understand that I will not make enough $ from the book (authors rarely do) to make it worth writing. I really did write it for all of the people who need it, for you. I wrote it with abusers in mind, so I am fairly gentle with them and yet I don’t gloss over what is abuse and why it hurts.
My premise in all my work is that abusers will keep abusing until THEY heal from the abuse they received. Since the goal is to have them take responsibility and stop the abuse, it has to be done in baby steps that they can handle. By the end of the book, they’ve heard the entire story and they would accept that they have done the wrong thing all these years. In an earlier version of that book, abusers would tell me they broke down crying while reading it because they “got it.”