How to Step Out of the Blame Game

I picked up my box of Dungeons and Dragons miniature figures and it had an unusual rattle that sounded a lot like pieces. I felt my body tense as the wave of recognition rolled over me.

“Of course, she dropped this box.” I thought to myself and peered inside. There they were in a plastic bag—the pieces that used to be attached to their respective bodies were very much shattered and in pieces. Gazing on the dismembered plastic limbs, I closed the lid with an exasperated huff.

I held on to the box as I walked to my wife to confront her with what I found. I didn’t want to hear any of the justifications. I wanted her to know how frustrated I was. If she hadn’t been the one to try and move it for me none of this would have happened. I was pissed and it was her fault. 

It was so much easier for me to blame her for dropping the box than to recognize anything else at that moment. I could feel my face looking something like this:

The Blame Problem

There are so many people, things, and systems that we can blame for the state of our global and private worlds. We can blame big pharma for the opioid epidemic. We can blame fast food for problematic eating habits. We can blame ourselves for disappointing the ones we care about. We can blame our partners for the pain we feel. Blaming has this nasty tendency to produce defensiveness in people.

Where does that leave us though? What does it truly resolve?

Blaming is one of the many ways in which we discharge anger. Locating fault in others is tantalizing purely because it provides a place to direct the anger we have building inside us. Blaming attempts to shift the weight of the circumstances onto one person or group of people. It offers up this illusion that our problems will be righted or the guilt we levy will prevent a future where we are hurt again. 

In our closest relationships, we are all the more prone to be hurt. The closer we are to people the more vulnerable we are, which invites the things that matter to us into closer proximity with that potential for emotional pain. The benefits of closeness are married to this ever-present possibility of disconnection.

I wonder how often this illusion blame offers has delivered on its promise. 

The thing that I have come to notice about blaming is that it often perpetuates issues rather than remedying them. We are all less likely to recognize our role in relational tension when we place fault on someone else. Blaming all but removes the opportunity for empathy, curiosity, learning, and deeper connection in our relationships. 

I wonder what difference we would see if we resisted this tendency to quickly place blame. Would we have deeper relationships? Would we be more open to demonstrating empathy to the people that we care about most? 

How to Change Our Blaming Patterns

Whether we are caught in minor hurts like in my story or deeper relational pain like an affair, blaming others for our pain does little to bring about real resolution. Our snap judgments in these scenarios will often beget defensiveness and further counter-criticisms. It takes intentional time to slow down and create new processes of interacting in these spaces.

Here are the opportunities that we all have to create a space for connection, empathy, learning, and curiosity when we experience a tendency to blame others.

1. We all operate and act from a place of our own logic. What might have been going on for this other person to create the logic for how they showed up? We are often unable to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes when we want to place blame.

2. Recognize the role we played in what happened. How was the way I showed up (or didn’t) contributing to the other person’s logic? We often hate this question because we are quicker to justify our actions that absolve us of our contribution to what happened. By recognizing our role in that conflict, we are not condoning the harmful actions of others and saying that our actions provided permission for people to be blatantly hurtful. It is more about reflecting on how we showed up. 

3. Refrain from judging or criticizing the way someone acts. When we refrain from our snap criticisms, we increase our opportunity for learning and empathizing with the people who hurt us. When we don’t put pressure on someone to defend their position, we can find common ground and empathize with the people we are close to.

What might our anger look like when we show up like this? I think the first thing to recognize is that it often doesn’t erase the frustration or let problematic behaviors off the hook. We can still be frustrated and be curious about these things. Our anger and pain are often uninformed by what was going on in the person that hurt us.

Our New Trajectory

By creating opportunities for our frustrations to be tempered by an increased perspective, we have a higher likelihood of our pain being heard rather than dismissed through the defensiveness we can provoke.

This shift requires us to look at ourselves instead of others. And I think the biggest hope here is that by looking at ourselves we have the greatest opportunity for controlling our outcomes. Blaming puts the locus of control in someone else, where we have no control (as much as we would like to believe). 

Reclaiming our ability to be curious, empathetic, and connect helps us achieve a reality that not only we but also the people who hurt us are valued and appreciated. There is a greater possibility of meeting a positive conclusion to our frustration when we have an actual conversation rather than belittling others by blaming our pain on them.