The Psychology of Victim-Blaming

It’s not my fault! – Job d'Uz (paraphrased)

Louise Hay, by her own account, survived cervical cancer by letting go of a childhood trauma. In her super-selling book, You Can Heal Your Life (Hay, 1984), she mapped out the linkages between unresolved psychological conflicts and physical disease, as she saw it, in a manner rather unconcerned with reliable evidence. Most of her mappings find fault with the ill person, who is urged to get on with the conflict-resolving to get physically better. The map is an unscrupulous and psychologically transparent device. What is less transparent is why so many people welcome its message.

But let us first check in with Frau Schiller, a kindred spirit and presumed medium.

Schiller Thriller

Before I had heard of Louise Hay and her approach to disease (or “dis-ease” as she would put it), I had an encounter with Frau Schiller (not her real name), a freelancing healer in Stuttgart (not her real city). A well-meaning relative had brokered the session and offered to pay for it. I went out of curiosity and a what-do-I-have-to-lose attitude (see Krueger, 2022, for this attitude in the context of submission to homeopathy).

Frau Schiller had asked me to mail her two of my current life concerns so she could prepare. She was aware that I am a psychologist. Frau Schiller lays claim to clairvoyant abilities such as seeing auras or a person’s past lives even without hypnotic regression, and I was surprised to hear her ask me how I, in my practice with clients, think about “the soul.” With a little googling, she would have known that few psychologists put much stock in this concept, even though it is stamped into our discipline’s name. She would have also learned, without needing to be clairvoyant, that I am an experimental psychologist; I do not see patients.

I let that go.

The high point of the rather bizarre session that followed was her holding my feet, going into what I suspect was meant to look like a brief trance, and then announcing that in two separate past lives I had been respectively an abuser of women and children: hence my concerns in the present life. Whether this was open to being addressed with an improved attitude, repentance, or emotion work, she would not say. We left on polite terms never to see each other again.

Frau Schiller’s signature move, it is easy to see, is victim-blaming. She offers an “explanation” for current suffering by appealing to the person’s (prenatal) past, thereby establishing an odd nexus of unity without clarifying what caused what or how (see Krueger, 2008, on a related effort to sell this to a willing audience in a “self-help” workshop). The price for understanding the client is expected to pay, besides Frau Schiller’s hefty fee, is to shoulder the burden of guilt. Even more remarkable than Frau Schiller’s nerve to play this game is the willingness of many desperate sufferers to pay up.

Making Hay With Victim-Blaming

Louise Hay follows a similar script. The active psychological ingredient of her approach is a crude form of similarity matching. Kidney stones are “lumps of undissolved anger,” and influenza represents (or, is caused by) a “mass of negativity and fear” or preciously “belief in statistics.” And so it goes for over 400 “dis-eases” from abdominal cramps to yeast infections. Hay notes she could have extended the list, yielding to popular demand, but felt her point was made.

Indeed it was. The list itself quickly loses momentum when Hay declares there are really only two sources of physical suffering: anger and fear. In turn, both reduce to a lack of self-love. At last, there is the key that opens all doors.

Like Frau Schiller, Louise Hay does not hesitate to invoke past lives to explain the inexplicable. The soul, she declares, chooses where to incarnate, at what time, in what family, in what sort of fallible or broken body. The soul selects the tasks to be solved in the allotted lifetime. If she fails, she fails, and has no one else to blame. Cleverly, Hay admonishes her readers not to blame others, but to accept “responsibility” for everything that occurs, which rather amounts to self-blame cloaked in more genteel language.

What does the soul-person need to do to heal herself? Hay recommends positive affirmations. Kidney stones shall dissolve for those who declare “I dissolve all past problems with ease;” the flu will flee from those who vow, “I am beyond group beliefs [statistics?] or the calendar. I am free from all congestion and influence.” But the affirmer must really believe it. If not, she will fail. Ergo, if she fails, we know that she didn’t really mean it. This is the game of victim-blaming (Crawford, 1977).

Hay insinuates that it is easy to really believe. All one needs to do is call on the universe to make things as desired. The universe is not very smart, in Hay’s world, because it will automatically and unfailingly turn any human thought into a reality, no questions asked. As humans are radically free to think their own thoughts [and mean them], one wonders why anyone ever takes ill.

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The Needle in the Hay Stack

The more bizarre Hay’s “theory” becomes, the more pressing the need to understand why sufferers seek her counsel. The “I-have-run-out-of-options” experience and the “What-do-I have-lose” attitude surely play a role. And alas, there are two grains of truth in Hay’s version of psycho-immunology. First, chronic resentments and self-loathing are unhealthy states. They create stress, suppress the immune system, and make infections and other troubles more likely (Irwin and Vedhara, 2005). Myriad medical and psychological treatments seek to help mitigate such risk factors, knowing that success is difficult to attain. Second, self-blame, though largely dysfunctional, is not a categorically corrosive stance. The social emotions of guilt and shame have evolved for good reason, and they have a role to play: may this role be pointed and brief (Martin, 2001).

In a classic article, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1979) peeled the self-blame onion with a study of depression sufferers and rape victims. Her operative distinction was between characterological and behavioral self-blame. Depressed individuals were comparatively more prone to the former, thereby contributing to the maintenance of their dysthymic state. Those who regret specific behaviors—or failures to take action—have a greater sense of agency and control, an attitude that was comparatively more prevalent among the rape victims.

Hay leans heavily into characterological blame while at the same time asserting that one’s character is readily modified by decisive and affirmative action. Sufferers easily miss this slippage; they are rather distracted by their pain as it is. And so the show, with 50 million copies sold and counting, goes on.

Afterburn

After the title of this essay was edited by Psychology Today, I learned that an essay with the same title, though without the hyphen, had been published in The Atlantic (Roberts, 2016). That article opens with a complaint about a social media post that rhetorically challenged the view that women who accuse men cannot possibly be less than truthful. This appears to be rhetorical indeed – on the poster’s and Roberts’s account – because less than truthful accusations have been observed.

Roberts then summarizes work by Niemi & Young (2016), which bears on the present topic. The finding is that people whose moral outlook is shaped by individualist notions of fairness have little use for victim blaming. In contrast, people with “binding” moral values, that is, values concerned with behavior that might destabilize groups and relationships (loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity), do. Low binding values and high individualist values predict holding perpetrators responsible. All this is rather complex, and the more so for sufferers of illness who are told they are both perpetrator and victim.