The ways we all blame and how blaming causes massive problems and anxiety.

There’s such relief in knowing who to blame. If we are suffering, then someone must be responsible.

When we’re lonely, hurt, or frightened and someone must have provoked these feelings. If others around us are unhappy, we have to know who to blame, someone must have done something!

A woman got angry because at the weekend her husband suggested she hang the pictures she’d been meaning to put up. She thinks he ought to have known how tired she was – he was being totally insensitive.

The husband then as usual accepts that it was all his fault, he should have known better and assumes the blame that his wife is not happy.

The problem was that she expected him to be clairvoyant, to read her mind, when it was her responsibility to inform him of her fatigue and say no. He accepted this and blamed himself. At times we all do this.

This example shows how blaming can appear in two ways: the never-ending blaming of others which assumes no responsibility and the never-ending blaming of ourselves.

Blaming others:

Blaming others involves making someone else responsible for the feelings, choices and decisions that are actually our own responsibility.

A man blamed the butcher for selling hamburger that was always full of fat. But it was really his problem: he could have paid more for leaner meat or gone to a different butcher.

In blame systems, someone is always doing something to us and we ignore the responsibility for asserting our needs, saying no, or going elsewhere for what we want.

The person placing the blame on others commonly takes up the victim position.

“The teacher sucked that’s why I failed the test”, “My mother didn’t drive me to work so I got fired for missing days”, “The police man was so annoying, I was going to get that light fixed eventually”, “My partner doesn’t love me enough so I feel bad about myself”.

At the centre of this distortion we might find that the person never learned the full spectrum of responsibility coming into adulthood. This is not their fault and may be related to never being taken care of as a child.

The person might also have had too much care taken of them as a child and expects their every need to be anticipated. There is normally a high-level of emotional reasoning (if I feel bad, something must have happened) and reverse mind reading (they should be able to read my mind) involved here.

This often germinates in childhood where we weren’t able to communicate our needs, but this continues into adulthood when a person anticipates that the other should know their needs and respond to them appropriately.

There can be a disavowal of responsibility for communication and often the blamer seeks the moral high ground (Fallacy of Fairness).

However, the examples above are extreme and obvious cases and this can be far more subtle and to a certain degree we can all employ this at times to a certain extent.

We are the central character in our own story so it is easy to see others as impacting on us more than they actually are.

Why we blame others:

One of the main reasons we blame others is a blindness to our own power to change situations. There may also be a familiarity and laziness in complaining that our uncomfortable emotions must be someone else’s fault.

For some of us “blamers” it may be important to consider the role of transference.

What the hell is that?

It is something that therapists are trained to watch out for, but it happens in all human relationships. It is an unconscious phenomenon and every single human does it.

Transference is where we take things that happened or didn’t happen in a previous relationship and bring them forward into our current relationships.

We all have needs: for most of us one or more of these needs might never have been met. As children we all have the needs to be loved, to get attention and to be cared for.

However, if these needs were never met by our care givers, we are going to spend our lives looking for others to meet these needs.

We transfer our un-met needs onto others and often when they don’t get it right we get mad, mad as hell. We think that the opposite of love is anger, but as I’ve said before the opposite of love is indifference.

Anger, in relationships can often mean unmet love; it’s because we feel they’ve let us down.

But really all the time we go along transferring un-met needs onto others and blaming we are just going around in circles. This can be why some women go for men like their fathers, and why boys do the same with mother types.

It’s why we keep picking the same type of person to fall for. It’s a dangerous habit and happens in all relationships not just romantic ones!

While we blame or expect others to meet our needs we are powerless, vulnerable and out of control of our own happiness. It makes us unreasonable and brings conflict as a cherry on top.

Blaming ourselves:

The opposite of blaming others are those that focus blame exclusively on themselves. This can happen because we have made ourselves responsible for everyone/thing/else.

These people see everything as their fault and feel responsible for everyone. When they see others not happy they blame themselves.

Seeing ourselves as responsible for other people and the things that go wrong also comes partially from habit and from our distorted beliefs.

Negative core beliefs and assumptions are like mental virus’ that infect our minds and poison our thoughts. Much of my work in clinic using CBT is in helping clients to first identify and then challenge beliefs that they may have held for their entire lives.

For example: A young man felt so ashamed of dropping out of college, he thought that for his family this would mean things would never be the same again.

He assumed he had somehow ruined his family by his actions; in reality they didn’t mind, he was 18. This is tied to the control fallacies where we assume that we are responsible for other peoples’ happiness.

Why do some think this way? Perhaps in our family of origin we became the peace maker or the one who made sure everyone was alright.

In terms of taking on too much responsibility many do this when they are children. It evolves at a time when the child feels responsible or wishes they could change the situation.

Exposure to fighting in the family, deaths, accidents, trouble between parents or certainly parents in addiction can lead to the beliefs that “I am now responsible and it’s my job not to allow anything bad to happen”.

This can also happen in older children in the family who felt responsible to protect little siblings even though they were only children themselves.

As I spoke about in the piece on beliefs and anxiety, the foundations of our belief system were laid down by us when we were really small.

Many people carry beliefs like these into adulthood and then place insane pressure on themselves to be the fixer. They blame themselves when it all goes wrong. I think we all know someone like that.

The person who blames themselves thinks that they are the one anointed to do everything. Little do they realize it is not their responsibility!

Blaming comebacks:

It is our responsibility to assert our needs, say no, or go elsewhere. As adults other people are not responsible for intuitively knowing or helping us meet our needs.

We may have been let down as children when we were not able to assert our needs. However, even when we are children no caregiver or adult can read our mind or know how we make sense of things.

Unfortunately this can lead to potential pain and issues, however now as adults we have the power to sort out our needs and grow from our pain.

No one else can really be fully at fault if we, as a responsible adult, are distressed or unhappy. People need to take responsibility for their end too as blaming someone 100% is passing the buck.

Focus on the choices we have made or continue to make that created or maintain this situation. Examine what options we have now for coping with it.

How we can drop the victim standpoint is to remember that in every adult situation we are a percent responsible for allowing something to happen or if we are allowing it to continue to happen.

We make a choice to stay in situations where we are not happy. We are also 100% responsible for our own happiness no mater what. No one else can make us happy, asking them to is unfair and only leads to disappointment.

This is hard because every decision we make closes the possibility of other options. For many of us it’s just easier to claim powerlessness rather than take responsibility. Taking responsibility means accepting the consequences of our own choices.

There is a difference between taking responsibility and turning the blame on ourselves. Blaming ourselves because we have negative beliefs about ourselves or take too much responsibility means attacking our self-esteem and labeling ourselves bad for things we can’t control.

Taking responsibility doesn’t imply that we are also responsible for what happens to others.

Blaming ourselves for another person’s problems is a form of self-aggrandizement. It means we think we are having more impact on their lives than they are.

If someone asks us to make them happy, we have a responsibility only to ourselves to make ourselves happy. We can support someone, but we are not responsible, just like they are not responsible for our happiness!

Fortunately the beliefs keep us locked in blaming can be challenged and changed. left unchallenged blaming others or thinking we have responsibility for others is going to cause anxiety!

Other Distorted Thinking styles are also extremely important for how we deal with and suffer from anxiety. Distorted thinking styles include: Filtering, Polarized Thinking, Over-generalization, Mind Reading, Catastraphizing, Personalization, Control Fallacies, The Fallacy of Fairness, Emotional Reasoning, The Fallacy of Change, Global Labeling, Blaming, Shoulds, Being Right and Heaven’s Rewards Fallacy.

Therapy is a great way to get to the bottom of these questions and at Anxiety Ireland, we have a team of accredited psychotherapists who work helping thousands of people with anxiety every year.

If curious about anxiety please feel free to visit our website, take our anxiety quiz or get anxiety help. On this page we will continue to write about Anxiety and related topics. We are always happy to answer messages to our page or I am happy to take calls/text to see how I can help: 087 063 0948.

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Michael

Team Anxiety Ireland

Anxiety is a merry-go-round, going nowhere fast, it’s ok to step off.