Why we blame

“No blaming” is right up there with “no name-calling” in the most common relationship advice books — and for good reason. Blame is hard to hear, it’s hurtful, and it is extremely likely to generate an equally unhelpful response.

However.

Before we jump to “just change your behavior” we always want to find out what is underlying what we’re doing in the first place. Because, often, just knowing you shouldn’t isn’t enough to change it when you’re actually in the situation and emotions are high. If we don’t have another way to meet the same emotional need, our best intentions aren’t going to do us very much good.

What if we ask, first, why it happens so often? Even when we know it’s damaging, even when we don’t want to do it, it happens constantly. If something is that prevalent and that difficult to avoid, that always makes me curious… what is it doing for us? Why is it so hard to stop? Is it possible that blaming is, in some way, trying to help us?

Let’s imagine a little girl. She’s a hard worker, she’s smart, she always does her best to do what’s asked of her and to please the grown ups around her. She tries to make friends at school. One day, she hopes that she will be asked to sit at the lunch table with a group of kids she likes, but they don’t ask her. She’s sad. She’s lonely. She goes home and tells her parents, “I’m scared the other kids don’t like me.”

Already, she’s started to explain it to herself. She’s had an idea about why they didn’t invite her - they don’t like her.

To her parents, now, this is unfathomable. They love her, they think she’s an amazing kid. Why would anyone not like her? Their daughter being unlovable is such an alien concept that they don’t even bother to refute it directly. Instead, maybe they say, “That’s silly, why would you think that? You’re probably imagining things.” Maybe they tell her she should have asked the other kids rather than wait for them to ask her, and that the problem is her passiveness.

She tries again, because she’s a hard worker. She goes up to the table the next day and says, “I want to sit here.” And they give her a weird look and say “our table is full.” Ouch.

She goes back to her parents, because now it really hurts. Now she’s really scared no one likes her. And this time, her parents see her pain and want to fix it, so they try some advice: “Maybe it’s the way you asked.” “People can smell desperation.” “They’ll like you if you like yourself.”

The message she’s receiving is “you’re sad for no reason. Your sadness isn’t important. Your sadness is your fault.”

Maybe some part of her starts to believe this, starts to internalize the idea that her pain in the lunchroom that day was because of her own needs. If she didn’t want to be friends so badly, they would have liked her better. If she had phrased her request differently, they might have said yes. Some deep part of her starts to be convinced.

I don’t matter that much. I don’t try hard enough. I need too much.

But another part of her fights back. Another part of her says, wait a minute. This isn’t my fault. This is THEIR fault. They’re mean. They shut me out. They hurt my feelings.

At this part, even though as a therapist I know the damage that blame does, some internal part of me cheers for that girl. Because in that moment, some part of her refuses to accept that she is unlovable. Some part of her says she deserves protection, she doesn’t deserve to be hurt. It comes to defend her.

We use the word defense a lot in psychology. Defense mechanisms. It almost becomes a pejorative term, this thing we have to get rid of in order to open up to therapeutic intervention or to have good relationships. Defenses get in the way.

But who do we defend in life? Who do we stand up for? We defend people we care about. We defend people who need help and care. We defend people we love. So when I see a defense, I think oh good. Some part of you loves you.

At the core, I think blame comes down to two basic reasons:

At some point, we got the message that needing help wasn’t okay. We learned that our needs pushed other people away; we learned that we are supposed to be independent, and it’s our dependence that makes other people not like us. So we change our need for help into the other person’s failure. Instead of saying, “I feel so overwhelmed by everything there is to do, I need your help” we say “You never do your part, why do I have to do everything?”

At some point, we got the message that our feelings weren’t important to other people, but we could make them care with a good argument. Invalidation is such a tricky thing. It sneaks in everywhere, despite the very best intentions of parents, of teachers, of friends. We don’t want other people to be sad, so we tell them they shouldn’t be. The parents in our story above weren’t trying to minimize their daughter’s feelings, they were trying to help. But the unintentional consequence was that she learned she had to explain, to demonstrate her effort. “I’m sad and lonely” wasn’t good enough, she needed a reason.

She learned how to make her case so that others would take her feelings seriously. Remember, our girl is a hard worker.

One of the early parts of my training that twisted my brain up like a dishrag was the idea that people who have a blaming defense strategy have a positive view of other people. What?? It sure doesn’t look like it. It’s hard to look at someone who is telling their partner, “You’re the reason my life is terrible. You screw everything up.” and see that as anything resembling a positive view. Except when you really listen to their frustration and despair, you hear what’s underneath: “You could make my life wonderful… but you won’t. You could do what I’m asking and then I would feel your love… but you won’t. You have the power to heal this… you just won’t.”

We don’t blame because we think the other person is incompetent. We blame because we think they’re unwilling. We see their inaction, or their minimizing, or their defensiveness, and we think, man… if I were doing those things, that would mean I really didn’t care about you at all. Because when I care, I fight. I work harder.

And I blame.