Blame tends to be one of those universal behaviours that we, as human beings, naturally engage in.
We like to make other people responsible for how we feel.
You were rude to me? It’s your fault that I lose my shit, flip you the bird and start mouthing off at you. It’s nothing to do with me. How else could I respond to that?
It’s quick, it’s easy and then we get to move on with our day, knowing that some asshole did this to us. No additional processing required on our part.
BUT, what if the process of blame is actually ripping us off?
What if it’s actually keeping us stuck repeating the same cycles over and over again?
What if it’s preventing our growth?
Is it still worth engaging in?
I see a lot of people that make blame their way of living. And they live miserable lives. They see the state of the world and make “the world” the problem. A lot of people did that while COVID was around. The lockdowns, the vaccines, the masks, all of it was subject to people using it to blame and justify their upset, without recognising that their blame was actually creating their dissatisfaction with their circumstances. It wasn’t the external circumstances tied to the virus that were actually making them feel shitty.
Other people do this by seeing the world as being wrong. “Oh, the world values the wrong things! It values economic productivity and business skills and materialism. Those are the wrong things to value. The world should value the environment and love and care for one another and a harmonious existence for all of us on this planet!” Ok, maybe there’s some truth to those things. Maybe life would be nicer if we could take some steps in that direction. But do you need to blame life and suffer because things aren’t exactly the way you’d like them to be? The answer is pretty obvious to me. No, you don’t.
I’ve been looking at blame a little more closely lately, specifically, I’ve been looking at how I blame. When it comes up, what it does inside of me, how aware or unaware of it am I and whether it’s actually worth keeping or getting rid of.
In this blog post, I want to talk about three things:
· What I’ve been noticing about blame in me
· What I think the mechanism is and what it does
· What to do about it from my perspective
What I’ve noticed in me when I blame
Firstly, I’ve noticed that blame is happening a lot!
Like, a lot, a lot!
Hundreds of times a day.
It’s happening in the big moments. When I have a fight with my wife. When my toddler isn’t listening to me or is doing something he “shouldn’t.”
But it’s also happening in the small moments.
Whenever I feel angry, blame is there. If I’m fearful, blame is there. If I’m sad, blame is often lurking just beneath the surface. It may not be blame of any particular person, but it can be a more amorphous, generalised blame towards life.
Blame is like an ever-present condition of being human. We are always looking outside of us for both the good and the bad. If I feel pleasure, someone else is responsible. If I feel pain, someone or something else is also responsible.
It’s like it’s baked into the ego and our psyches at a very fundamental level.
What I think blame is
I think blame happens unconsciously and automatically, unless we go out of our way to deliberately do something about it. I think it’s a pattern that most of us learnt as children. It’s what our parents did, so we see it as both natural and normal. Why question it?
How it functions, though, is it results it me avoiding taking accountability for my role in the situation. If I’m always looking elsewhere for the cause of what’s going poorly in my life, how will I ever look inward and change what needs to change about myself? How will I identify and remove the obstacles to my own growth?
Blame also functions as a denial of my own limitations and my own vulnerability. These can be hard to recognise and admit to and own, but it’s so absolutely vital to do so in order to be real about ourselves. Blame can be a powerful emotion to experience. It can puff us up into something big and tough and all-conquering. But it blinds us to our own pain, our own frailty, our own condition as a human being. The fact that we need life to be comfortable and convenient and to always, at every single moment of our day, consist of enough entertainment and pleasure to satisfy us is a problem. We are all wired this way, there’s no way of escaping it. But blame often masks this fact. It points the finger outward. “It’s not me that’s the problem, the problem is over there!”
Blame, as a process to engage in, presents an incomplete picture to us. It’s not presenting the full story. Blame may be able to spot what is not quite right with the other, but that is never all that is happening. If you’re involved in an interpersonal conflict, being able to clearly identify and name what is going on over there might be useful to win the argument, but you are then blinded to how you are showing up and contributing to this dynamic. And, if that’s the case, this dynamic will simply continue to play out in your life, over and over and over again until you recognise the part you’re playing and do something to change it.
Blame is partial rather than being purely impartial. It inherently contains bias in it. It is looking at things through a very strong filter of “I”, “me” and “mine.” What’s in it for me? What will I get out of it? How is this beneficial to me? To really see the truth, we need to be able to step back, drop that framing and look at things more objectively than that. To look at things from a perspective that takes in a much bigger picture. From 40,000 feet, so to speak.
When we engage in blame, we are creating ourselves as helpless victims. If somebody else is completely at fault for my life situation, there is, by definition, nothing I can do about it. I’m helpless to change it. This is not a good place to find yourself in. You are then forever a victim of life with no power whatsoever to alter the circumstances you are in. Be aware not to go to this place and stay there. It’s hell on earth.
Blame makes me suffer and doesn’t do anything to the other. It’s the same with anger. It doesn’t hurt the other or make them change. It just hurts us. When seen through that lens, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to continue with it, does it?
Blame can be interpersonal, but it can also just be about inanimate objects or circumstances in life. It can be about the weather, too hot or too cold. Or sitting on an uncomfortable chair. Or accidentally cutting yourself with a knife while washing the dishes. I can blame anything in my environment for why I feel a certain way. In doing so, I avoid responsibility for it, but I also limit my ability to respond to it.
Blame is fundamentally associated with the interpretation of events or circumstances in life. It is the interpretation itself that is creating the suffering or the joy. The exact same thing can happen to two different individuals, but if they have different interpretations of what happened, they will have two different experiences. For example, if someone gets road rage and yells at me in traffic, two possible interpretations of that are “fuck you, what an asshole!” or (very differently) “poor guy, he must be having a rough day…” My internal experience will be very different in each of these cases. I know which one I’d rather choose because life is more harmonious when I choose compassion over disdain.
What to do about blame
By saying these things, I’m not saying that I’m living some perfect life where I never blame and I’m free of this kind of suffering. Far from it. I notice myself engaging in this kind of finger pointing a lot, every day! But I am slowly learning to notice it more and more and quicker as well. Rather than it taking an hour to notice, I can notice it within minutes. And I am hoping to continue to decrease that time lag so that I can notice it in the moment and drop it immediately when I become aware of it.
The first useful step seems to me to just be to notice it. Over and over and over again. Just notice it. Observe it. Be aware of it. As much and as often as you can.
The more aware of it you become, the less it will be able to hide and play in the background.
You can see it sneaking up into your thought process and attempting to take over.
So, eventually, blame won’t completely take over and run things as much.
As you start to see it more, it will naturally lose some of its power.
That’s not to say that it will vanish any time soon or without some considerable and sustained effort.
But just seeing it helps, in my experience.
It can even just help to have a reference point for the fact that it might be playing a part in my suffering in this moment and just to see if I can, perhaps, frame things a little differently that allows me to take more responsibility and ownership of the situation than I did previously.
In the long run, of course, it would be great to get rid of blame altogether. So that I am never a helpless victim of anyone else. That I can see clearly that no one can make me feel anything if I don’t choose to feel that way. As I’ve already mentioned in this post, I’m not there yet, but I do believe it’s possible (because I have two exemplars in my life that have demonstrated this to me very clearly). It is very clear to me that it’s worth going for!
N.B.: If you’re interested in hearing someone who has examined this idea of blame and how it works very thoroughly, I spoke more about it with Justin Jaye Gold in this conversation (from timestamp 1:33:48 to 1:47:26 to be precise):