Blame is a way of being in relationship that represents victimhood.

It represents being at the effect of your relationship, and taking what you get. When you’re in the blame game, you are looking for who's to blame. You either blame your partner and feel resentful towards them or blame yourself and beat yourself up about it. Or you might even say, “Well, nobody's to blame, like the old song says, ‘Ain't no good guy. There ain't no bad guy. There's only you and me, and we just disagree.’” 

But, it always takes two to tango. Always.  In situations where one person is absolutely abusive and the other is clearly the victim, the perpetrator is absolutely responsible for the abuse.  That said, any time we are victimized, we can restore our power by taking responsibility for the ways we ourselves  perpetuate a dynamic where we are victimized in this way.  If we don’t make those hard choices, it never changes.  

In most relationships, the roles are seldom so clear as “victim and perpetrator.”  If yours are, please seek an organization that can confidentially help you get to safety. The national domestic violence hotline is available at 800-799-7233 in the United States.

Short of abuse, many relationships have places where we blame our partner or ourselves, but don’t find the points of choice where we can create what we desire.  Coping with dissatisfaction through blame is really just hunkering down and saying, “This just sucks and there's nothing I can do about it.” It’s like you're a renter, just hanging out in the space of your relationship. You're not treating it like you own this love, like it's yours to craft, like you can make it however you want. 

When you own a home, you have the right to paint or knock out a wall. It's yours to do with as you please. That's also the truth about relationship. And it’s what gets tricky about relationship. 

Now, I was an econ major undergraduate so pardon me if I get a little wonkish here, but one of the concepts that we talk about in economics is the free rider syndrome. Voluntary fees are an example: if you don't have to pay it, some people won't. How many people listen to National Public Radio and never donate when they have their pledge drives? That's the free rider syndrome and action. 

Free rider syndrome happens a lot in marriage, too. Because when you have a partner, it's very easy to say, “Well, things could get a lot better if my beloved would ____.” Since it’s not hard to point at places where they could do better, it's easy to shirk our own responsibility and take a free ride on the relationship, not taking full ownership.

As you consider how to make meaningful changes, I invite you to always look at your relationship through the lens of what you can do single-handedly, as if you took 100% ownership of the outcomes in this relationship and in particular, of your own satisfaction. We can't necessarily make our partner happy.  We can't guarantee that they'll do anything in particular, that our relationship will look a particular way. 

But what if you kind of get off on blaming your partner?  What if it feels really good, at some level? Blame can sometimes give us the pleasure of self righteousness, but it seldom creates the satisfaction of feeling closer to our partner or helping them give us more of what we want. To get what you really want, you’ve got to be willing to let go of that little zing blame can give you.  The payoff?  A healthier, growing relationship.

When I ask clients what they fear will happen if they let go of blame, they often realize they’re clinging to blame because they believe it’s somehow protective or self-respectful.  Blame is never a good substitute for holding a healthy boundary, nor is it a pathway to doing so.  Just because I think it’s your fault and stay mad at you about it, that doesn’t mean you even realize what you did or how it hurt me, let alone that you’ll stop!  In fact, when someone else’s behavior doesn’t work well for us, our negative feelings of blame and the destructive behaviors blame leads us to can actually sabotage the very boundaries we need to enforce with that person.  

What you do have complete ownership of is your own experience. That might mean that you do things differently in the relationship,  It might mean you renegotiate some of the tacit agreements you have with yourself and with your partner about how you're going to show up. It may mean you seek our satisfaction in places other than the relationship, if you can't seem to get that in ways that your partner is showing up. You may invest certain eggs in different baskets, and that may actually help the relationship, or it may show you that its dividends aren’t worth the investment it asks of you.  We don't know in advance. But it all starts with taking full ownership of our experience. 

When we STOP blaming, we have the energy and clarity of thought to communicate what we need, what we want, and what we’ll do if our limits aren’t honored. 

In my work, I help visionary women look with precision and kindness for the part they played in the situation they’re upset about and find their power to resolve their relationship frustrations.  My new program, RECEIVE, is a profound relationship transformation formula that is enacted unilaterally by a woman.  You can learn more about the program and be the first to know when registration opens here.