Blaming other people

[Harmony]

When I was young, I blamed other people for everything and was always pretty mad at the world.

So then I had a friend in a 12-step program who said I should look at what I did wrong and stop thinking about what other people did wrong, and then I did not get mad all the time.

So then I returned to the Church, and it seemed like being angry was bad. Even tho people said it wasn’t anger itself, it was what you did, it seemed like if I got mad about anything, I was in the wrong, so I tried to only look at what I did wrong.

This kind of fit in with being Catholic because we are supposed to offer things up and suffer and be accepting of God’s will even if something bad happens and forgive people and also be submissive (if a wife).

Well, now it seems like that didn’t work well. The psychologist says that if you blame yourself for whatever bad thing happens, then you lose control of your life.

But that gets back to blaming others, not for everything like I used to, but thinking it out.

But I feel very guilty as if I blame others. Like we shouldn’t blame other people, because it’s like not accepting our guilt.

What I am trying to say if if you go to Confession and say that you got in a fight with someone because of what they did, like flirting with your boyfriend and acting all fake-innocent about it, well, that’s not right so it seems like when I think about things in this way that the psychologist is wrong.

Like you know how if two people split up and you talk to each of them, it’s like they tell you totally different things? Like each of them was totally perfect and the other person was totally messed up.

So I can’t really figure this all out, so please help me

 

[LoveMercyGrace]

The most help I think I can be is from a personal perspective and just concern for you.
first I believe finding a practicing- Catholic therapist is the way to go because, if they are good, they may be able to help you sort out these very valid questions. I am not sure how much a secular therapist could help. I am thinking to look for a therapist myself, and I’ve pretty much decided to try and find a Catholic therapist. not sure how easy or possible this will be.
I have read the church is shifting some focus on this but most priests are well, priests. the amount of help they may be able to offer would be limited. unless they also happened to be a psychologist or psychiatrist.
It sounds like you are seeing the reality of this situation clearly, the conflicting advice or counsel.
hope you are able to be guided to appropriate help. my prayers…

 

[Poet]

I completely get what you’re saying and I think the answer is to grow in wisdom and pray for guidance in seeing things clearly, seeing your part in it, but also seeing the times when there was nothing more you could have done, and wisdom for how to deal with difficult people.

I grew up in an alcoholic family and was the classic scapegoat. I was constantly being told what I did wrong and I spent my childhood and early adulthood trying to fix myself and quit messing up all the time. At a certain point, a situation opened my eyes that which ever path I took in that situation, I would have been found guilty. I finally understood that there are some things I can’t fix, and some people with whom you just can’t 'get along.

I read a hundred books on marriage and saw that I was already doing every single thing the wisest minds said to do to improve your marriage and finally understood that I couldn’t solve my husband’s problems by ME being a different person.

It’s vitally important to look at ourselves and be honest about seeing our faults. It is ALSO true that sometimes it really is the other person at fault and there’s not much we can do. It is ALSO true that sometimes the other person is the problem but there are better or worse ways to deal with it.

For instance, I know a certain woman who really did have a terrible mother in law who sought to cause all kinds of trouble. But this woman decided to get down in the mud and fight and she only ended up alienating some of her own children. Another daughter in law by contrast simply smiled, was nice, and went about her business, largely ignoring the mother in law. The mother in law was at fault in both cases but one daughter in law had a much better way of handling it.

And to know the correct answers and see clearly all comes back to wisdom. Pray for growth. Pray for clarity. Pray for wisdom.

Look for people you admire who live with a sense of peace and happiness about them and start watching how they deal with life’s situations.

 

[Harmony]

Thanks so much, LoveMercyGrace. I am on a waiting list for a Catholic therapist; I hope that that will come through soon!

The priests where I live are really busy; it’s hard to get a hold of them much less see them more often.

 

[Harmony]

Thank you, Poet, you really clarified the situation. Yes, I always seem to pick the worst solution. I fight when I shouldn’t and don’t fight when I should.

Or maybe in both cases, there was nothing I could have done anyway.

Life is very confusing.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Blame is pointless and unproductive. Unless you’re in a lawsuit where the verdict is based on who is found to be at fault, it really doesn’t matter if a bad situation is your fault, the other person’s fault, or no one’s fault. You still have to deal with the bad situation and do what you can to fix it and prevent it from reoccurring. Best to focus on fixing and not blaming. Going forward, if you can prevent bad stuff from happening by changing your behavior, then do so; if someone else’s behavior caused it, then you have to look carefully to see if you can do anything about that (avoid the person going forward, sue him, vote him out of office etc). Often we can’t do anything about others’ behavior and we ask God for grace to accept it and pray for the person.

Anger is a human emotion. Jesus’ human nature got angry. The Apostles got angry. Many saints struggled with anger. It’s unrealistic to expect yourself to never be angry. The issue is what you do with your anger. Good stuff you could do would be to offer your anger up to God, ask him to help you be less angry, pray for the person who made you angry, try to make peace with the person. Bad things would be to scream at the other person or punch them, to carry around anger every day and not work on forgiveness, or to blame yourself which is not healthy.

Remember that a lot of interpersonal situations don’t have a good guy or a bad guy, and there are always 3 sides to every such story: the first person involved, the other person involved, and the truth.

 

[Harmony]

I agree with you about the three sides but you are talking about figuring out what went wrong and maybe in a certain situation what went wrong was actually the other person and figuring that out is necessary in order to figure out what happened so you can figure out what to do in the future.

So blame might be the wrong word to use but I don’t know another word which says that realizing that it was the other person who did the wrong thing, like in my example where the girl flirts with the boyfriend, maybe he flirted with her first, and if I say do I want to be with a guy who flirts like that? But it would be different if he totally did not flirt with her, right? So in a way we do have to blame someone to see what to do.

But on the other hand, just because you blame someone doesn’t mean you have to do the bad angry things you said, but it does mean you don’t just sit there and say what a bad girlfriend you are because of what happened.

(I’m not dating or anything. That is just an example.)

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I agree with you about the three sides but you are talking about figuring out what went wrong and maybe in a certain situation what went wrong was actually the other person and figuring that out is necessary in order to figure out what happened so you can figure out what to do in the future.

My personal rule is if it takes longer than 10 minutes to figure this out, don’t bother and just move on. Unless maybe it’s a recurring issue with one’s close family member or spouse, in which case a couple good conversations should be enlightening; if not, it’s time to consult doctors and counselors.

In my experience, some people can spend weeks, months or years analyzing what went wrong to cause an argument with their friend or boyfriend or parish priest etc…it’s a lot of wasted time analyzing that could be spent living. Don’t fall into that trap.

 

[GLam1761]

I am not a psychotherapist, but I say that the BEST way
out of your dilemma is to FORGIVE the other person wrong
or not, and forgive yourself… and move on.

 

[Daniel27]

As @Tis_Bearself said, “Blame is pointless and unproductive” - this is a nice simple way to explain the role of blame in God’s grand plan for us. It is so ridiculously hard to accept when we have done something wrong and accept blame for it, especially when it’s something bigger. Pray to God to help you grow in the virtues of Christ; it’s like a muscle that needs to be trained. There is no magic switch for turning it off and on.

 

[Zaccheus]

@Harmony

It’s not about blaming yourself. It’s about resisting the urge to blame others, and about facing honestly your own responsibility for your own actions.
Accepting responsibility does not mean self-blame.
It just means admitting when you got it wrong and trying to not repeat your errors.

It looks like you’ve already got the important part. Just keep trying and keep forgiving. That includes forgiving yourself as well.

You might try praying for those who offend you. It does help.

God’s blessing to you.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

FORGIVE the other person wrong
or not, and forgive yourself

I agree, and it’s especially important to also forgive yourself and let it go, rather than be beating yourself up for weeks afterwards. If you sinned, repent, confess, don’t do it again, and let the old sin go as God already did.

 

[Harmony]

. At a certain point, a situation opened my eyes that which ever path I took in that situation, I would have been found guilty.

@Tis_Bearself @Daniel27 @Zaccheus

This is what I am talking about, where you realize that even tho you you thought you were the one doing something wrong, it turns out that it was actually someone else.

It’s not like I don’t want to forgive others, even sometimes it is hard. Is kind of just letting go of them and not really thinking about them forgiving them?

Mostly now I see that I was wrong about some things or how I handled them, so now I want to do things differently and in order to do that, I need to look at those mistakes and understand why they happened. Like, a lot of disastrous things happened and that made me overly cautious about stuff, but just because those things happened then doesn’t mean I have to think they are going to keep happening.

So the other thing is you all said to forgive myself, and that seems kind of too easy. Like if my being overly cautious made my children’s childhood harder, then just forgiving myself seems too easy? Especially if a couple of them are still angry about it?

 

[PetraG]

Anger is a human emotion. Jesus’ human nature got angry. The Apostles got angry. Many saints struggled with anger. It’s unrealistic to expect yourself to never be angry.

Yes!!

Anger is actually a gift, the emotion that tells us that we have a deep sense that a right expectation has been violated.

Guilt, too, is a gift. It is the emotion that tells us that we have a deep sense that we ourselves have violated a right expectation.

These are just senses, though. They’re not facts. Just as we can think we see something and be mistaken or think we hear something and be mistaken, we can feel something and be mistaken. Also, just as we can see or hear something that “makes us jump,” we can also react instead of responding to our emotions–that is, we can act impulsively on our first sense of the situation instead of considering what we’re feeling, taking the trouble to understand ourselves and the situation, and only then choosing the best way to act.

The problem comes when our senses or our emotions don’t inform us but rather dictate to us. A watchdog is a great thing, but that doesn’t mean it is great if it yaps at everything that passes or feels free to attack whenever it feels threatened. A smoke alarm is a great thing, but it doesn’t have to be blaring in order to fight a fire. Likewise, our emotions and our senses are good things that cannot be good servants to us unless we develop the skills necessary to be good masters of them.

OP, I would look at this as a matter of learning skills of self-mastery rather than thinking some part of the way you sense things in the world as being “good” or “bad.” Instead ask, “Is this sense I am getting true?” and “Is the impulse suggested by this sense really what I want to follow?” Develop the habit of questioning your senses not with suspicion nor in a gullible way or with some idea that some of them ought to just be ignored, but sensibly and with prudence. If you do that, your anger (as an example) can become a good servant, giving you emotional energy to do the right thing vigorously and with deterimination. Alternatively, if you get angry when anger is out of place, you can identify where you have unrealistic expectations that you didn’t realize you had, leading to a sense of injury where no injury was done. Give yourself room to learn this way of mastering yourself. People under you won’t develop unless you are an understanding boss, and it isn’t an exception when the person under you is you.

 

[PetraG]

So blame might be the wrong word to use but I don’t know another word which says that realizing that it was the other person who did the wrong thing, like in my example where the girl flirts with the boyfriend, maybe he flirted with her first, and if I say do I want to be with a guy who flirts like that? But it would be different if he totally did not flirt with her, right? So in a way we do have to blame someone to see what to do.

In this case, what is the expectation being violated? When you feel angry, your inner self is telling you that there has been a serious boundary violation. The first thing to do is to more rationally recognize what set off that emotion. Understand yourself first, understand the situation, then decide how to act.

First off: when two people break up, is it your expectations that were being violated? Do you really have to know who was at fault? There are times when judging that might be your business–for instance, if you’re deciding whether the girl is a good candidate to date yourself–but most of the time it really isn’t your business to judge.

Let’s say that your girlfriend is flirting with some guy or some guy is flirting with her. In that case, ask yourself what exactly it was that she did that upset you. Why is it not OK to do that? Understand that about yourself, then talk to her and see how she sees the situation. Maybe you have expectations that can be brought around to match, maybe you don’t. Then ask what he did that upset you. You may come to the conclusion that he didn’t violate a trust, but you may decide that he did. Well, in that case, it is legitimate if you don’t trust him in a situation that requires respecting boundaries around couples in committed relationships. You can “turn off” the anger like you “turn off” a smoke alarm, though. The anger tells you, “HEY! Something is NOT RIGHT here!!” It blares at you, doesn’t want you to ignore the situation. Fine, when you recognize it, you can decide to calm yourself and look at the situation before acting impulsively.

 

[Harmony]

Yes, I think you described where I was, where I was later, and what I am trying to learn now

And I really like the way you said to think about your feelings, like if you feel guilty, it should be because you did something wrong instead of because something didn’t turn out right or if someone got mad at you.

Thank you very much!

 

[Harmony]

No, what I was saying is if I saw a girl flirting with my boyfriend and I got angry about it. I might be mad at her, but then it might turn out my BF was trying to pick her up, so the right person to be mad at would be my boyfriend and not her, right?

And I would really only need to know all this because if he was doing it, I would want to break up with him, but if she did it, then he might not have had anything to do with it and I wouldn’t.

It’s more like what you said before, of figuring out the truth rather than all the bad parts of blaming.

 

[Harmony]

Fine, when you recognize it, you can decide to calm yourself and look at the situation before acting impulsively.

See, here is a good thing: now I know that I can be over-reacting in certain situations. So if I feel angry, then I can say, wait, is this one of those types of situations where I over-react?

And if it’s not, then I can stop anyway, and think it over later and maybe see that this is a new kind of situation where I over-react, altho this week when it all happened, I realized that what the problem was was not me but something about the way someone at work is handling something, which means I could go and say something instead of just feeling angry and then guilty and then just generally bad.

 

[PetraG]

No, what I was saying is if I saw a girl flirting with my boyfriend and I got angry about it. I might be mad at her, but then it might turn out my BF was trying to pick her up, so the right person to be mad at would be my boyfriend and not her, right?

And I would really only need to know all this because if he was doing it, I would want to break up with him, but if she did it, then he might not have had anything to do with it and I wouldn’t.

It’s more like what you said before, of figuring out the truth rather than all the bad parts of blaming.

Well, I think it is worth talking with him about the incident. First off, avoidng coming to conclusions like “she was flirting” and say, “she was batting her eyes and looking a little more interested than what I find comfortable in just a friend. Do you think she was coming on to you?” You could also say, “Is it possible you were saying nice things to her that she was taking in a way you didn’t mean them? Or were you trying to get her to flatter you with positive attention? I’m territorial about that. There is positive attention anybody can give you and then there is positive attention I don’t want to see you welcoming from anybody but me.” And so on. You might have to tell him “well, if you like flirting with other girls, some women are OK with their boyfriends or husbands doing that, but I’m not one of them. It isn’t a good idea, not if you want to remain faithful. All of us are just human, none of us are made of iron, and I want someone who takes being faithful to me seriously enough that he doesn’t take chances like that.”

That wasn’t getting mad at him. Now, if you’ve had this conversation before and he assured you that he wouuldn’t do such-and-so and then he goes and does it, then getting some emotional force behind your objection to that violation of trust–that is, getting angry with him–is totally appropriate. A woman may or may not feel angry about a violation of trust, and the presence or absence of angry feelings don’t mean she is more or less “right” about seeing it is time to draw her boundary lines, but if she feels angry when a clearly-drawn boundary that had been clearly discussed is crossed, then I’d say her feelings are fitting for the objective facts about the situation. Using the emotional force of those feelings when confronting someone who has crossed a line takes some self-mastery, but it is not wrong.

That, after all, is what Our Lord did when He cleared the Temple. The boundary that had been crossed was not something that needed to be explained. It was something that He was right to expect would be known and respected and had gotten to the point that the boundary needed to be enforced–a boundary He had the authority to enforce. Using the force of his feelings as he did that, leaving no question about whether his zeal was “negotiable” in the least, was an appropriate use of the feelings of anger he was experiencing.

 

[PetraG]

See, here is a good thing: now I know that I can be over-reacting in certain situations. So if I feel angry, then I can say, wait, is this one of those types of situations where I over-react?

And if it’s not, then I can stop anyway, and think it over later and maybe see that this is a new kind of situation where I over-react, altho this week when it all happened, I realized that what the problem was was not me but something about the way someone at work is handling something, which means I could go and say something instead of just feeling angry and then guilty and then just generally bad.

I think Thomas Jefferson said “When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.” This is coming from somebody who by many reports had a terrible temper when he was crossed, so I’d say it is advice from someone who had done battle in mastering his own anger.

Especially when it is a relationship issue, calm yourself down before you have it out. I don’t mean what my husband calls “gunny-sacking” which is to store up little grievances until you have a big pile of them and then dumping them all out at once. I mean get a grip on yourself and then find a time and place when you can have the conversation you need to have, even if it gets very heated. Having that conversation on the spot when you’re very angry and there are a lot of onlookers is almost never a good idea. It is OK to have heated conversations, but there is a time and a place for it.

Just as an aside, this also involves knowing yourself. My husband and I save these for earlier in the day, when we aren’t too tired. Our code is: “It’s after 4:30”… that is, “this may be important, but we’re tired now, let’s talk about this soon but not right now.” Sometimes, you find out when you’re less tired that the problem isn’t nearly as big or nearly as hard to solve as it looked when you were worn out and easily upset.