Needing a Target for Blame

The blamer is often falling apart on the inside.

Source: Tumisu/Pixabay

Blaming can be a central dynamic in couples engaged in habitual conflict. Yet blaming usually leads to a dead-end with regard to actually resolving any contested issue.

Certainly, there are times blame may be warranted, but the subject here is something else: a repetitive pattern of interaction between two people whereby one chronically locates blame in another. It’s your fault so-and-so happened!

How does blame work?

Blaming comes in many forms: criticism, accusation, belittling, and verbal assault. What psychological purpose does it serve?

Blaming is an aggressive act, as psychoanalyst Mel Lansky notes. The faultfinder inflicts psychological punishment as they dispense blame. What a bad boy, child, daughter, mom, wife! This is an attack on another that unloads anger and other pent-up emotions.

The blamer is often someone prone to internal fragmentation and shame, followed by storms of narcissistic rage. The act of dispensing blame serves to reconsolidate the self. It is the glue that keeps the personality from becoming disorganized. Surprising though it may be, the angry person shaking a pointer finger is often falling apart on the inside.

When one attributes culpability to another, there is certainty and self-assuredness, qualities that bind the self. Blaming relieves one of doubt and ambivalence. It restores self-cohesion. A collapsed personhood is suddenly reinstated and inflated with self-righteousness.

The act of blaming affords the blamer a sense of mastery and control—even feelings of omnipotence—over their surroundings. Exhilaration infuses blamers as they accuse another and claim the entitlement to justice or payback for the supposed wrongdoing.

The accusation of fault is often accompanied by reductive thinking and a simplistic illusion of one-to-one causality: This would never have happened if you hadn’t done such and such! For the blamer, being right is more important than being related.

What’s going on in the blamer?

An individual in the ever-ready state to accuse is a person who feels very guilty on the inside. Paradoxically, there is often, too, a sense of “specialness.” The blamer is the sole arbiter of truth, a knower of true facts and ultimate reality. They are the executor of absolute judgment.

One who blames regularly is engaged in the primitive (childhood) defense of “splitting,” whereby life and people are cut up into rigid categories of who’s “right or wrong” and who’s “good or bad.” There is no room for ambiguity or complexity of thought.

Blaming also serves a defensive function. It protects the blamer against their own feelings of inadequacy. These feelings are offloaded to the other partner in the couple. The accusation being made often contains a direct reference to that which motivates it: some sense of defectiveness or failure in the blamer. The blamed partner, for instance, is required for the externalization (projection) of what are basically the blamer’s self-reproaches. Easier to disown and disavow than to acknowledge such painful states in oneself.

The blaming couple

This is a relationship where the second person involved must be willing to accept the blame. The individual who is the object of such aggressive attacks is often a person prone to guilt and, therefore, vulnerable to accepting and absorbing the blame. They are at home in this role, perhaps conditioned so as the “scapegoat” of the family in childhood.

The blaming couple is engaged in a secret conspiracy, an unconscious bond. Couples collude unwittingly in such patterns and intuitively find one another for such roles. The blaming transaction holds this partnership locked in place, in an angry and guilt-ridden dependency.

Refusing blame

Blaming is likely to intensify when one party in the relationship takes independent initiative or seeks autonomous gratification. This upsets the relational equilibrium and is easily a source of anxiety or threat to the self-integrity of the blamer, who doesn’t want to face their feelings of being “wrong” or lacking. Shame and fears of inadequacy and abandonment rise up like old infantile anxieties when the partner decides to go their own way, reaching beyond the restrictive collusion, wanting a break-up or separation.

Blame is a lifestyle for some. While this dynamic can pervade a relationship, such denunciations rarely address either party's deeper, more authentic concerns. Blaming shuts down any reflection and the possibility of working through it. What is lost to the relationship is a more complex understanding of reality, of the partner, and of the partnership itself.