Do you “play the blame game?” If so, how often do you point your finger at your partner and for what reasons? What is the usual outcome?
Caution: Unabated criticism can lock partners in a disquieting fallout of lingering, costly couple discord.
On the Couch
Partner blaming poses one of the more formidable hurdles I face as a psychologist specializing in couples therapy. Even within the therapy session itself, couples often pull the pin on the blame grenade in a real-time demonstration of their debilitating “at-home-combat.”
These vexing but not uncommon in-session blowups have taught me that if “law and order” aren’t soon restored, the session can rapidly spiral down a rabbit hole, sometimes irretrievably. At its best, blaming is counterproductive, if it has a best. But at its worst, relationships crumble.
Many blame-weary couples present to treatment precariously teetering on the precipice of separation and divorce. The couple’s mushrooming defeatism often reflects an acrid buildup of poor personal need management pocked with partner blaming.
The Economics of Blame-Free Communication: A Quick Example
Stephanie’s need for her partner’s understanding is patently valid. Yet, she often mismanages it by angrily blasting her partner when she feels he’s not attentive enough. Stephanie’s angry demands deny her partner’s equally valid need for a respectful request. Worse, Stephanie’s poorly managed need can easily rally her partner’s defensive, inflammatory retorts.
Instead, were Stephanie to purposefully “invest” in a respectful request for her partner’s attention, she’d likely merit a “return” on her investment, a requital of her partner’s respect.
For instance, Stephanie might say, “When I feel your understanding, it means a lot to me, and I could sure use a little right now, if it’s OK?” Managed in this way, Stephanie evenly doles out respect for her partner, not just herself—esteem replaces blame.
Stephanie’s depth-of-feeling, vulnerable expression of her need may not be economical of her time or energy. It can be pricey or labor-intensive because she exposes her sensitive feelings while investing respect in her partner.
The Costly Alternative
Conversely, consider the often-egregious costs of blaming and need mismanagement with their potential for abuse of time, energy, and tumultuous fallout. Whereas blame-free need management promises a boost in mutual respect, blaming portends the opposite. Of these two options, which is more costly?
A First Responder
Not infrequently, I’m forced into the role of a “first responder,” where I must speedily inject a hefty dose of reassurance. I assure the couple that despite their painful upheavals, their issues are amenable to treatment. By quashing their blaming habits and burnishing their personal need management skills, I stress their relationship can be rehabilitated, even strengthened, or otherwise scratched from the endangered species list.
This consoling, sanguine intervention can keep lit the hope the couple must have had in coming to therapy in the first place.
Insight Born of Hurt
In lockstep with cognitive psychology, I’ve learned that helping blame-worn couples reinterpret their conflicts in neutralized terms can effectively mitigate the sting of their mutual contempt, a corrosive by-product of blaming. Moreover, proactively assigning new meanings to the couple’s conflicts can breathe therapeutic value into their struggles, making them more endurable and welcoming of change.
Typically, partners are keenly aware of each other’s relational “felonies and misdemeanors,” which, regrettably, can become the target of blame. When these not-so-developed traits make their inevitable but unwelcomed appearance, a fertile ground is laid for blaming, accompanied by its disparaging bedfellows, anger, hurt, and embarrassment.
A Trove of Partner Data
However, stripped of blame, these “character revelations” become a rich source of personal data invaluable to the treatment process because they point out the direction for change—like a CAT scan of each partner’s emotional maturity. Therapists and partners can then collaborate on the diagnostic value and therapeutic uses for this valuable trove of informing personal data.
Relationships Essential Reads
Intimacy’s Job
Intimacy‘s uncanny propensity to reveal the character traits of its constituents can be viewed as part of its “job,” one not done as rigorously in our less significant, casual relationships. Intimacy thus shines a bright, unveiling spotlight upon us, giving us a singular opportunity to replace partner fault-finding with constructive self-examination and correction.
While this concept percolates, I encourage partners to focus on what their relationship reveals about them. In particular, what personal glitches have reared their ugly heads, especially those imperfections discoverable in each partner’s poor need management habits that can spark blame and its hapless aftereffects, disharmony and conflicts.
Intimacy’s Nemesis
I emphasize to couples that partner blaming is the antithesis of effective need management; it’s a self-evasive, self-and-relationship-eroding retreat from the otherwise challenging but personally maturing work of good personal need management.
Blaming ignores or recklessly casts aside the growth-spurring efforts of compromise, negotiation, bargaining, and quid pro quo, skills spawned out of our need to manage endeavors. Isn’t the bettering of these very skills the lifeblood of a healthy balance of give and take that characterizes quality relationships?
Blaming’s Disguised, Infant-Like Demands
What’s more, blaming’s camouflaged but still blaring inference is plain: Were the “blamee” more accommodating, or better, were the “blamee” to compliantly gratify the needs of the blamer, all would be well. When done continuously, the blamer could live perpetually content in an “infant-like manner,” freed of the adult work of managing their needs themselves (forgive my facetiousness).
Succumbing to the temptation to blame is commonplace. Nevertheless, it arguably reeks of a de facto, temporary lapse in mental health because it unwittingly locates the “jurisdiction” of our needs outside ourselves, nesting them within our partner’s purview—as though there had been a “personal power outage.”
Dousing the Heat of Blame
I sometimes find it clinically opportune to ask couples, “What emotional atmosphere is most conducive to managing your individual needs? Usually, and fairly quickly, most couples reply with something similar to this, “One where each of us shows understanding…when we show acceptance of each other.” Then, I’ll ask, “Is blaming a part of this?” Of course, their answers are an unhesitating, “No.”
From Blaming to Partner Esteem
My clinical aspiration is to help awaken the couple to the counterproductivity, or worse, the utter futility and potential destructiveness of partner blaming. When successful, formerly contentious partners are now positioned to ask themselves why they fight when clearly each partner brings to the other valid needs worthy of sensitive, respectful understanding. Partners can now move from blaming to esteeming one another.
