Blame-shifting in relationships is a manipulation tactic designed by the abuser to victimize themselves while portraying negative situations as your fault.
The blame game in relationships is often a running joke in popular movies and TV shows.
However, what do you do when your partner shifts all the blame onto you while absolving themselves of everything?
What is Blame-Shifting in Relationships?
People who use blame-shifting are often escapists who lack the emotional maturity to own up to their behavior and the resulting consequences of their actions. These people often perceive negative situations as another’s responsibility.
Since blame-shifting is a form of a coping mechanism, the person shifting the blame may be doing it unconsciously and may not understand their faulty logic.
However, the individual on the receiving end of the blame games often believes such accusations are true and tries hard to work on the relationship.
Unfortunately, when dealing with projection and blame, the victims often find that they aren’t able to make things work. They often blame themselves for the failure of the relationship.
Is Blame-Shifting an Abusive Behavior?
Everyone indulges in blame-shifting now and again.
Students who score low grades in their class quiz blame it on their teacher for not liking them, or people who lose their jobs often blame their boss or colleagues.
But, how long can you go around passing the blame?
Yes, blame-shifting is a form of abusive behavior.
Being with someone who doesn’t take responsibility for their actions takes a toll on your psychological and emotional wellbeing. You often feel drained and emotionally exhausted from taking all of the blame for things you didn’t do.
This created a toxic equation between you and your partner.
Blame-shifting in relationships is also a way to manipulate you into doing something that you otherwise wouldn’t be willing to do. The abuser makes you feel like you “owe” them something.
Finally, blame-shifting is often done to create a shift in the power dynamic between you and your partner. When your partner finally convinces you that you were at fault, they tend to have more power over you. Additionally, the responsibility of fixing the relationship also falls on you.
If your partner has the habit of always blaming others, it is a red flag that you should not ignore.
Psychology Behind Blame-Shifting
Blame-shifting can often be explained as a classic case of fundamental attribution error.
So, what does this mean?
In simple words, we often attribute someone else’s actions to their personality and character. Still, when it comes to us, we often attribute our own behaviors to external situations and factors out of our control.
For example, if your colleague is late to work, you might label them tardy or lazy. However, you’ll attribute it to the alarm clock not ringing on time if you are late to work.
There’s another reason why we shift the blame on others.
According to Psychoanalysts, our ego defends itself from anxiety by using projection–a defense mechanism wherein we take out our unacceptable feelings and qualities and blame them on other people.
So, you often find yourself blaming others for your actions.
The defense mechanism always points to a lack of insight into our feelings and motivations. Since defense mechanisms are often unconscious, a person who is projecting on you will usually not realize what they are doing.
Techniques Used To Shifting Blame in Relationships
These include the following:
Minimizing
In this manner, the abuser will try to invalidate your feelings, and you may feel like you’re going crazy. This is a technique of dismissal and rejection of someone’s thoughts and feelings. Psychologically, it negatively impacts the partner.
Christina and Derek were on a break, during which Derek started dating her best friend, Lauren. When Christina found out what was going on, she confronted Derek, who told her she was childish and immature. He also called her “too sensitive.”
The Victim Card
By playing the “poor me” victim card, Max was able to shift all the blame onto Joe. Playing the victim card means the person feels powerless and does not know how to be assertive, but tries to gain an advantage by cutting a sorry figure.
Joe and Max were in a relationship for three years. Joe is a lawyer at a well-reputed firm while Max is in-between jobs.
One night, Joe came home to find Max drinking whisky after five years of sobriety. Upon confronting him, Max said, “I drink because I’m alone. My wife leaves me alone at home to fend for myself because she’s too busy building her career. You’re so selfish, Joe. I have no one.”
The Stink Bomb
The go-to-hell attitude is reserved for when the abuser knows that they’ve been caught and have nowhere else to go. This clearly means that when the person has no opportunity to defend or escape, they unabashedly accept it and pretend they aren’t even at fault.
Jack caught Gina texting her ex-boyfriend and planning to meet him on the weekend. When he confronted Gina, she said, “So what? Can I not meet someone without your permission?” and “Am I your puppet? Why do you think you need to control my every move?”
Breaking The Blame Cycle
Blaming and defensiveness are reflexive actions hard-wired into our survival mechanism. Those who tend to blame others for problems, deny any wrongdoing on their part or reject taking responsibility for their actions may have developed this pattern from childhood — particularly if parented by people without regular boundaries or respect for others.
While blaming others has become a default position to deflect problems, it was often for very good reasons — mainly around personal safety. Children learn survival mechanisms quickly. They continue adapting them while moving through adolescence, but unless new strategies are developed and a more mature approach learned an unfortunate cycle of blame and defensiveness continues.
Sadly, many relationships can suffer under the barrage of blame, accusations and denial — whether at work, in the home or in your personal connections.
Understanding Why People Blame
If a person experienced trauma in younger years as a child and/or were raised by parents with few boundaries, blaming others may have been a safe way to protect oneself. This space is full of hurt. Painful memories of how they learned to avoid emotional or physical abuse.
Research estimates that between 35% and 45% of all children in the US experience some kind of attachment issue (goodtherapy.org). As you can imagine the fallout of not having a positive upbringing by mature parents ripples into negative behavioural patterns. Dr Benoit says, “Children with disorganized attachment are more vulnerable to stress, have problems with regulation and control of negative emotions, display oppositional, hostile, aggressive behaviours …”
What happens is a separation of ‘self’ emotionally from others. Rejecting responsibility for ‘any problem’ that arises taps back into the need of feeling safe using the only mechanism learned — blaming others to take the heat off oneself.
Learning how to minimize feelings and distance oneself from others helped keep the person safe. Unfortunately, as an adult, it’s these same emotions that cause problems in relationships as ‘detachment’ has become a safe place to retreat to.
The Need For Empathy In All Relationships
When one can truly empathize in the face of someone acting as a bully, or blaming and accusing them, the body’s mirror neuron network kicks in and what’s felt inside can be transmitted to the other person. If both people become flooded with stressful hormones/chemicals emotions become escalated. If one person is able to keep the rudder in deep water and steer a straight course then the other person can also feel this deep empathetic space and regulate their own body.
This may feel like a counterintuitive thing to do in the heat of the moment if you feel unfairly blamed. Yet if you can regulate your own emotions, then the fuel that keeps old behavioural patterns alive diminishes.
Dr Dan Siegel believes that building empathy skills helps by being better able to consider what another person’s perspective is.
Becoming more integrated with others is about building optimal social relatedness — you’re differentiated as an individual while also being linked to others.
The Secret To Being Empathetic
The secret to engaging empathy is learning how to create a ‘pause’ in thinking so you can stimulate a more empathetic response in both yourself and the other person.
There’s an old Tibetan proverb that goes like this:
Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north.
In seeking happiness, we need to exit our cave and enter another’s to experience what their emotional state is. When we can do this from a place of pure selflessness and engage curiosity (without triggering our own defensiveness) then we have a better chance of managing our own emotional state and influencing the emotional state of another.
It’s about allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, knowing that in understanding ourselves and raising awareness of our emotional responses we can be more present to others.
Essentially it’s about coming from a more vulnerable heart space, being present to another person without embodying their ‘blame’, anger or emotionally disruptive state — and then having the language to express your needs in a non-judgemental, non-accusatory way.
