Why We Blame

One of the most difficult things for many of us to do is break the habit of blaming others for our situation and our feelings.  In my role as a leadership development consultant working with organizations large and small, I’ve found this to be rife in spite of much talk about personal initiative and responsibility.  However, the one place where I see it most graphically on display is in my capacity as an Imago Educator working with distressed couples.  Almost any upset will send us reaching for our hip-mounted six-shooter to blast off a couple of blames, shames, sarcastic remarks, criticisms, put-downs, mocks or outright attacks.  Of course, not everyone voices these, but they are no less limiting when they happen within the confines of the mind, manifesting as “the cold-shoulder” or stonewalling or an eruption in the chat room between our ears.

Clearly, a cascade of this kind of negativity damages and limits intimacy.  So why do we do it?  It seems almost self-evident this is a behavior developed in childhood for the simple reason that in childhood, we have no or little power (depending on our age) and other people have all the power, especially our caregivers.  We need them to fulfill our needs.  We are other-directed from birth.  The source of food is mother’s breast.  Warmth and protection are in her or Dad’s arms as well as the ability to dry us when we are wet, cool us when we are hot, soothe us with holding, rocking, cooing and singing when we feel bad and stimulate us to learn and feel good. We are incapable of providing and creating safety for ourselves in all its many forms. 

In a well-nurtured childhood, this other-orientation would give way increasingly to the rise of our competencies and sense of selfhood.  In fact, childhood could be seen as a gradual journey from powerlessness to, ideally, full empowerment.  In a perfect world, we would ultimately be able to fully care for ourselves physically, emotionally and mentally and enjoy others as friends, companions, team-mates, partners, fellow citizens.  We would have a fluidly clear sense of what lives within us—those things for which we are responsible and those things we do, in fact, have power to influence or change. 

But the evidence is that most of us do not get to adulthood through well-nurtured childhoods.  We are highly vulnerable during the first many years of life.  But the period beginning with conception, including all of gestation, followed by the birth experience and the first three years out of the womb constitutes a time of exceptional vulnerability—a fact that most of us adults don’t seem to be able to hold in consciousness for very long.  This is likely so because our physical and emotional suffering from that time is utterly out of reach of the adult day-to-day mind.  In our culture, day-to-day tends to be dominated by left-brain functions.  Early painful imprints were laid down in the brain stem, the limbic system and the right brain.  As the saying goes, “You can’t get there from here” or, put another way, why would we believe we can think our way (left brain) out of what we were wounded into (brain stem, limbic, right brain)?  In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux highlights the fact that the neuro-pathways from the limbic brain up to the cortex are far more plentiful than those returning.  This makes sense because our brains evolved upward, not downward.  This is surely one of the main reasons Harvard neuro-anatomist and author of My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor, has stated “we are feeling creatures that think” not thinking creatures that feel.

The likelihood is that the deficits we experience in the womb, at birth and those first three years are so strongly taken into the early brain that they set up a neural architecture that is only added to when other insults to the system come in the following years.  As I have said often, this is not about blaming parents who, by and large, did the best they could with what they had.  But it is about discovering cause in order to understand better how to address the issue.

It has struck me recently that when we feel so angry with a partner that we whiz around a kind of high-speed merry-go-round over and over again about what they did versus what they should have done, we are re-enacting a moment in childhood that probably happened to most of us several times and which we have buried because it occurred so early and was so excruciating.  That was the first moment when the deficit of nurturing crossed a threshold into the unbearable.  Something in us cried out to our parents.  We didn’t have the words but the basic meaning was: “You must change!   I cannot bear this. You’ve got to start loving me the way I need to be loved!"  Again, we didn’t have the words or the ideas.  We had the experience, though, on an organic level.  The cries reverberated within our cells and tender souls. 

In The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff teaches us that we are born with naturally unfolding expectations.  These are, again, on the organic and implicit level.  We expect to be protected in the womb.  We expect to have a tolerable birth.  We expect to be soothed and calmed after birth.  We expect to be suckled at our mother’s breast.  We expect our parents to be fully responsive to our need for skin contact, soothing sounds, appropriate stimulation.  When these expectations are met, we have what Liedloff calls “a sense of inner rightness.”  Biologically, she is probably describing homeostasis.  Need arises, is met and subsides.  We are calm.  All is good.  This process unfolds throughout childhood with the needs changing as we develop.  What does not change is the innate expectation that our caregivers will largely be there for us, will “regulate” us until we can learn to regulate ourselves, which is to say, care for ourselves.  Considering this, it is a devastating shock to our fragile and open beings to experience parents/caregivers who, for whatever reason, are not giving and cannot give enough of what we naturally need to protect and nurture a sense of inner rightness.  In adult terms, inner rightness is to feel like ourselves, comfortable in our skin, psychologically solid, capable and confident enough to take on life.

This is a terrible loss to suffer—the loss of trust and safety amplified by our dependence.  It is cause for grieving.  The first station of grieving is shock and denial.  Here, perhaps, we see the first experience of shock—in utero or in infancy.  This is an overwhelming moment.  It makes sense that since our brains are so far from fully developed, we are not able to fully process it in consciousness, which is a delicate neural web itself at this point.  Denial follows (a neural-electro-chemical sequestering) as a survival mechanism to help us get through to physical adulthood and, hopefully, material independence. 

However, to be a physical adult does not necessarily mean we have arrived at emotional adulthood.  How could we, carrying such a legacy of unresolved hurt?  In adulthood, this hurt that stubbornly resists identifying its true origins naturally transfers to our partner more than all other people in our lives, though we may project it onto bosses, friends, politicians and oligarchs. But with our partners, we are more exposed emotionally than we have been since childhood.  In other words, adult love relationships have powerful resonance with childhood experience.  This is not only an experiential truth.  It is a neurological truth.  After the initial romantic phase of falling in love, we awaken to the reality that our partners are not us, are not here for the singular purpose of satisfying our every need, including those of which we were bereft long ago.  In short, as much as we like to describe them as “a dream come true” in the romantic phase, in reality, our partners are not our dream persons.  (Is that a burden any of us would want to carry for a lifetime anyway?  Wouldn’t we rather be our partners “real person”?)  No matter how much we love them and they us, there are ways in which we are different enough that it triggers that old hurt of feeling totally alone yet dependent on someone who “really doesn’t get me.”  We are indeed back in childhood shock/denial, wishing they were different (“if-only-ing”) and anger—the first three stations of grieving.  Why are we so deeply stuck here?  Because the very essence of the childhood predicament is that we are not safe and not yet capable of consciously experiencing and processing the full depth of the hurt of what it is to be at the mercy of those who cannot consistently enough care for us as we need, in spite of their best efforts. 

The thing we most need to do in adulthood is the thing that was most forbidden in childhood—to weep our way past our shock, wishing and anger down into the full sense of fear and abandonment…and even to go beyond weeping to deeply feel the physical pain that is often the core hurt in the pre-verbal years.  It makes sense, then, that barring a full immersion in such a process, in adulthood we would be caught in a kind of repetition compulsion, if you will—focused on our partners and desperately wanting them to change now, blaming and criticizing them when they won’t, can’t or don’t  

Even with the best therapist, breaking this cycle is likely to be difficult.  However, it is within reach for people who have the emotional bravery and the good fortune to have a therapeutic process that helps us feel safe enough to go there.  We are not dependent little children any longer.  Our brains have fully booted up.  We have psychological and social resources available to us that were not there in childhood.         

As scary or painful as it may be, this requires skills different from what the day-to-day strategic accomplishing mind offers. Cognition may help some, particularly in increasing our awareness of the impulse to blame/go negative.  It can educate us and nudge us toward taking responsibility for what resides within us.  In doing so, surely new neural pathways are being developed.  But when we talk about neural plasticity, there are a few critical questions we would be wise to continuously ask: 

1.      In what part of the brain are these new neural pathways being developed? 

2.      Does development of new pathways in, say, either Pre-frontal Cortex correlate to changes in the deeper, older systems where early childhood pain is likely held?   

3.      Finally, what do these changes mean in terms of sustainable body-mind health?                                      

It seems a “no-brainer” (pun intended!) that whenever we learn something, we develop new pathways.  The questions above go to what kind of learning is taking place and whether or not it actually contributes to more long-term openness, consciousness and health or is actually a new stealth form of self-suppression.  After all, we have ample examples in the history of humanity, not just the history of psychotherapy, of individuals learning what is best for them yet going ahead and doing the exact opposite.  This is likely because it is literally a top-down approach, meaning that we are trying to think our way beyond something that does not yield to the most brilliant left brain because the locus of the generating dynamic resides in the emotional and sensory systems, literally embedded in a different part of the brain.  The skills necessary for resolving them have to do with emotional and sensory learning, learning to let go and surrender to what lives within our bodies and hearts in its original childhood context, not figuring it out or controlling it.  This would be a bottom up process fully in alignment with the way the brain evolved. 

If we are to help people break the behavioral grip of reactive blaming, isn’t it clear we will have to make ample space amidst the words and ideas for emotional, non-verbal and even somatic experience?  Wouldn’t this be true of both individuals and couples?  And doesn’t it make sense to be looking for how old neural pathways are changed and new ones generated in the brain stem, limbic system and right brain, too…in other words, in the entire brain?

C 2014 Bob Kamm