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How
to Tame the Lame Blame Game!
How many times
have you looked at your partner and thought: If only he/she were different, then
I wouldn’t feel like this. It seems logical that if your partner didn’t talk
to you in a certain way, didn’t say certain things, didn’t act the way they
did, or did what you told them to do, then the relationship would be better and
everyone would be happier. This type of thinking has existed through many
generations and few people think to question it. What is wrong with that way of
thinking you might ask? Well, what you are essentially doing is blaming your
partner for your unhappiness and looking to them to make you happy, which does
not work. Let’s look at what is really happening when you blame someone for
how you feel and want them to change. Whenever you want
somebody to act in a certain way in order to make yourself feel better, you have
stopped being responsible for your own emotions. This falls along the same lines
of “I’ll feel better when I have a new job, new living situation, new
partner, etc”. You put the responsibility for your happiness and well being
outside of you and into the future without addressing what is happening inside
of you. An interesting thing that happens when you communicate to another person
that they need to change, you essentially say to them “you are not lovable and
acceptable exactly the way you are”. You are giving them conditional love;
with the condition that they be what you think they should be in order to fully
receive your love and acceptance. Going back to the
idea of not being responsible for your emotions, what emotional needs are you
are projecting onto your partner? We are not talking about judgments like:
“That habit drives me crazy, I’m tired of them not picking up after
themselves, I hate it when my partner withdraws and won’t talk to me, etc”.
We are talking about the feelings and emotional needs that are underneath those
kinds of judgments. We are taught to comb our hair, brush our teeth, get dressed
in the morning and undressed at night, etc. all on our own, but we haven’t
been taught to fill our own emotional needs. In fact we do much of our learning
as children by watching our parents and they watching their parents before them,
and what we are all used to doing is demanding that our emotional needs be met
outside of ourselves. Our emotions are
like the food that we eat. We need to choose the foods that will nourish us and
give us energy to get through the day. With emotions, we need to choose the
thoughts that nourish us and that make us feel good throughout the day. If we
choose not to eat or eat unhealthy food, we get hungry and experience
physiological reactions that cause stress to our bodies, which react by being
fatigued, not being as strong, and storing fat along with a number of other
symptoms. When we choose thoughts that are unhealthy or that are hurtful, our
own emotions start to slip, become negative and set us up for sadness, anxiety,
depression, and unhappiness along with a number of other symptoms. Blaming your
partners or anyone else for how you feel is feeding yourself unhealthy food. You
may not even be aware that there are other choices out there, because you have
done the same thing, have thought in the same way for so long that it has never
even occurred to you to question your choices. Many behaviors are automatic and
questioning them on occasion does lead you to healthier choices. Instead of
blaming somebody for how you feel, the option is to look at why we think the way
we do and look for ways to change it. So when you start
to automatically feel that somebody else is to blame for how you feel, stop.
Stop your thoughts of blame and choose instead to take a deep breath and think
to yourself: “What am I feeling right now”? Am I being resentful for
something? Am I angry about something that was said or done? Do I feel hurt by
what just happened? What am I feeling? Once you identify the feeling, you then
have the power to step back and observe it without all your emotions getting in
your way and clouding your judgment. When you feel
hurt, it is because you have interpreted the situation in a way that hurts you.
Yes, it is your perception of the situation that is causing the hurt. As long as
you are not being physically attacked, the other person is not hurting you. It
is your reaction to a situation that causes you to feel hurt. To some of the
readers, this may be a brand new concept that is difficult to accept. Yet with
deeper understanding and practice, you can and will make yourself happier and
you will experience less and less hurt as you change your perceptions. After stopping
the automatic response of feeling hurt, the next thing that you do is to think
about what just happened. Your mind will want to tell you flat out, that that
other person hurt you. The way to shift your thinking is to start to think about
what are the different reasons that would have caused that person to act or
speak the way they did? What kind of fears could they be dealing with in that
moment? Lets look at a few of them: A person could be afraid of being judged. They could be afraid of being rejected. They may be afraid of you seeing the turmoil inside of them and want to distract you. They may be afraid of being hurt so they put up an offense as a defense. They could have just said something that they did not know had so much meaning for you. Now lets look at your possible role in this: You could be
feeling vulnerable. Your association with that tone of voice is that it caused
you hurt in the past. Certain words trigger hurt from your past and
re-experiencing those words brings that hurt back, even though it feels all new
again. If you are tired then it is easier to emotionally react. Perhaps you had
a bad day or just got bad news or just got up feeling down. Then what you hear
or see takes on a different meaning than if you felt great to start with. There are so many
different things that contribute to the feeling of being hurt. When you stop and
look for other possible definitions, you realize that whatever your partner said
or did was not intended to hurt you. It’s up to you. You are the only one who
can choose to see things differently. Try it and see what happens. You might
just be pleasantly surprised at how useful a tool it can be to stop playing the
blame game and taking control over your own feelings. Ewa Schwarz Latest Online Counseling http://www.onlinecounseling.org/ We
welcome your questions and comments on this article as well as suggestions for
future articles: Ezine
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