Blame Is a Beginning, Not a Destination
4 Minute read
By Chris Meehan, LMFT
We're often told that blame is unhealthy. Stop blaming your parents. Stop blaming your ex. Stop blaming your childhood. Take responsibility for your life. And ultimately, that is good advice. But there's a problem with trying to get there too quickly: sometimes, before we can stop blaming, we actually have to blame.
I was recently reading something from psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud that describes this well. His point wasn't that we should build a life around blame, resentment, or victimhood; it was almost the opposite.
Sometimes, blame is simply the act of putting responsibility back where it belongs.
If a child was neglected, humiliated, frightened, controlled, abused, or chronically unseen, something happened to that child. The child didn't create the environment. But children rarely experience it that way. A child is much more likely to conclude: Something is wrong with me. I'm too needy. I'm difficult. I'm unlovable. That's one of the terrible efficiencies of childhood shame; what belongs outside of us gets brought inside. Instead of "something bad happened to me,"
the conclusion becomes "I am bad." And sometimes healing begins by reversing that equation.
First, Find the Address
None of this works without safety first. You can't ask where something came from until some part of you believes it's safe to look.
In therapy, we spend a great deal of time asking where something came from ;
not because knowing the origin magically fixes it, and not because we want someone to spend their life prosecuting his parents, but because you can't return a package if you don't know where it came from. Maybe the relentless inner critic sounds remarkably like your father.
Your body might still brace before anyone's said a word. It learned, a long time ago, that this is usually how it starts. Maybe you panic when someone is disappointed in you because disappointment once meant withdrawal or abandonment.
Maybe you became fiercely independent because depending on anyone was dangerous. At some point it's useful to say: that came from somewhere. Someone may actually have failed you, or hurt you, or asked a child to carry something a child should never have been asked to carry. Naming that isn't self-pity. It's orientation.
Blame and Responsibility Are Not the Same Thing
This is where the distinction matters, and where people often try to skip a step — sometimes because they love their parents, sometimes because their parents had hard lives themselves, sometimes because they're frightened of anger, and sometimes because acknowledging what happened would mean admitting a childhood they've spent decades describing as "fine" wasn't entirely fine. So we rush toward understanding. My mother did the best she could. My father had a hard life. They loved me. All of that may be true. But understanding why someone hurt you doesn't mean pretending you weren't hurt. Compassion without truth can become another form of avoidance. You can understand your parents and still tell the truth about them. You can love someone and acknowledge what they did. You can forgive someone without rewriting history.
You may not be responsible for what happened to you. But eventually you become responsible for what you do with what happened to you. Those are two different forms of responsibility, and confusing them causes real trouble: make people responsible for what was done to them, and you produce shame; never help them take responsibility for their lives now, and you leave them powerless. Good therapy has to hold both truths. Your father may have taught you to fear conflict ; but your father isn't sitting in your marriage today. Your mother may have made love feel conditional ; but she isn't choosing your partners now. Someone may have created the wound. Eventually, though, the wound becomes yours to care for. That's not fair. It's simply adulthood.
Then We Have to Move
Blame becomes a problem when it turns into a permanent address. There's a profound difference between "this happened because of them" and "my life can never change because of them." The first may be an important recognition. The second hands your future back to the very people who hurt you.
Eventually therapy asks a different question, not who did this to you, but what are you going to do now. In time, Can you begin tolerate someone being disappointed in you? Can you ask for what you need, even in small ways? Can you move at your own pace, toward a partner who doesn't recreate your childhood?
Can you grieve what you didn't receive, instead of spending your life trying to extract it from people who can't give it? That's where blame begins turning into freedom.
Forgiveness Needs Something to Forgive
Cloud also makes an interesting point here: we sometimes use forgiveness to avoid reality.
Just forgive. Let it go. Move on.
But forgiveness only makes sense if something actually happened - if there was no injury, there's nothing to forgive. Which means the truth has to come first:
this hurt me, you did this, I didn't deserve it. Those sentences don't have to be spoken to the person who hurt us ; and sometimes they never should be.
But psychologically, they may need to be spoken somewhere, because forgiveness isn't the declaration that nothing happened. It's what becomes possible after we finally acknowledge that something did.
The goal of therapy is not blame. The goal is freedom.
But sometimes the road to freedom begins with putting the weight back where it originally belonged. Then, eventually, we put the weight down altogether.
Dr. Cloud's link
📝 Author
Bio:
Chris Meehan, LMFT is a Clinical Psychotherapist, writer, and speaker exploring the intersections of identity, trauma, and the modern search for meaning.
He is on staff at Revolve Trauma Recovery.
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