Blame is easy. It requires no self-awareness or accountability. It also conveniently allows us to avoid much of the grief we might be feeling in order to focus on our anger, outrage, and resentment. If we can point the finger to someone else, we don’t have to examine our own actions or make any changes.
Blame is the game where everybody loses.
The person or persons blamed often feel angry, guilty, attacked, or resentful — or sometimes, they feel nothing at all, having moved on with their lives. The person doing the blaming often feels self-righteous in their indignation. But no one and nothing changes. Patterns repeat, and nothing is learned.
There’s an easy experiment we can do to find out if we’re focused more on blame than accountability. We can review all of our past relationships and ask ourselves what went wrong. Why didn’t it work out? If every single answer revolves around the behavior of the other person, we’re stuck in a victim mentality that’s focused on blame. We haven’t yet progressed to self-awareness or accountability, which are essential parts of personal growth.
Of course, we can live our entire lives blaming other people. That’s our prerogative. We can hold them accountable for each and every one of their mistakes. We can even decide if we want to forgive them — or if that forgiveness has conditions. And the truth is that people will hurt us in life. They’ll let us down. They’ll certainly screw things up from time to time. Focusing on that can feel a lot better than turning that scrutiny on ourselves.
Frankly, looking at our own behavior to find our accountability can be a cringe-worthy experience. It requires that we accept some responsibility for our actions even in the face of someone else’s poor behavior. It means admitting that we might also have to do some work to change.
I’ve never enjoyed this part, but I also don’t enjoy repeating toxic relationship patterns. While finding reasons to blame former partners was simple, taking a look at my own patterns required sitting with some discomfort. It also required tapping into self-compassion in order to make sure that the act of accountability didn’t devolve into self-loathing.
Acceptance is the key to changing our relationships.
It’s one of the most essential lessons we can learn when we begin on a journey of self-awareness and accountability. To accept means that we recognize the facts and don’t attempt to change them. Our actions are predicated on the facts as they are — not as we wish them to be. In relationships, this means that when someone makes a decision, we respond rather than react to it. We cannot control our behavior, but we do choose our own.
When one partner showed early warning signs of emotional abuse, I made excuses for him. What I didn’t do was acknowledge that this was a deal breaker and leave the relationship. That would take many more months to do. I’m not at fault for the abuse, but I can see that I needed stronger boundaries to be able to leave this situation. Stronger boundaries from the start of the relationship likely would have ended it all so much sooner — and with so much less pain and damage.
When another partner demonstrated his unwillingness to be a full equitable partner in the relationship, I could have acknowledged that the relationship no longer worked for me and left. Instead, I began to pull more of the weight — and to carry the heavier load of resentment as a result. I tried to singlehandedly save the relationship, which never works. I stopped communicating, and instead of leaving a bad situation, I stayed and tried to make the best of it.
Do you see the pattern emerging? I do. When another partner began to show signs that he was no longer an enthusiastic participant in the relationship, I froze up. I couldn’t admit to myself that it was ending. I tried harder. I attempted to earn back his interest and affection. But what I didn’t do was accept reality and make my choices based on it.
Recognizing our patterns provides valuable information.
I didn’t want to see this pattern, but to refuse to see it means that I’ll only repeat it. I’ve had enough heartache for a lifetime. I ignored red flags and then complained when they hurt me. I didn’t advocate for myself and then got upset that no one else was doing it for me. I stopped communicating and wondered why my needs weren’t being met. I had weak boundaries and then got mad when someone took advantage of them.
It’s easy to wish that we had partners who loved us, cherished us, and treated us well. It’s easy to blame them for not being who or what we wanted. The true challenge is admitting that some of our relationships don’t work out because we ignore all the signs of incompatibility in the first place. We proceeded despite the risks and then got mad at people for being who they were all along. Even in the case of deceit, we often ignore warning signs that they aren’t who they pretend to be — and then get angry when our intuition proves we were right.
That anger often covers so much grief. I’ve had a lifetime of it, and for a while, I held the anger close so I wouldn’t feel the awful sadness beneath it. But as long as I held onto that anger, I couldn’t see my relationships clearly. I couldn’t find my responsibility within the patterns of my life. I couldn’t see the parts of me that required further healing. As long as I was looking at someone else and blaming them, I didn’t have to look at myself and take ownership for my healing and growth.
Assigning blame requires little other than pointing out the faults and flaws in other fallible human beings. If their faults were somehow “worse” than our own, we can comfort ourselves with that knowledge. But it doesn’t make us better human beings — or better future partners. It just keeps the cycle churning out more bad relationships we should have seen coming.
Taking ownership of our choices doesn’t mean just deciding the ways we should have responded differently to other people’s poor choices. It also means that we have to look at the poor choices of our own. I’m sure my relationship anxiety drove some partners crazy. Instead of taking responsibility for my feelings, I made it their job to reassure me. That’s something else I had to look at when I was examining my role in relationships. I hadn’t been perfect, but I expected their responses to be.
As I began to embrace accountability, I stopped needing blame.
I didn’t need it to protect me from my own challenging truths. I didn’t need it to cover up the grief I was experiencing. I didn’t need it to make sense of my relationship history. It no longer served a purpose in my life.
Instead, I stepped into my power. If I could see my mistakes, I could work on them. If I could admit that I needed to work on my communication and boundaries, there was empowerment in acknowledging that I could do something to change and grow. The simple act of being accountable for my choices made all my relationships make sense, and it also changed the pattern of the relationships I have now. I learned to heed the warning signs. I began to acknowledge when once-good relationships were no longer working out.
I spent years being bitter, but then I got better.
I know that who I am now wouldn’t have chosen all of the past relationships, but I decide to be compassionate to the me of then. I did the best I could at the time. It’s also made me more compassionate to former partners. There’s not a lot of anger left in the mix. Acceptance took the wheel quite some time ago.
Blame can be a factor in the anger part of our grief. It can serve a purpose. But in the long run, it doesn’t really help us. If we stay in this stage, we miss out on so much growth — and give up so much of our power to things that are outside of our control.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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