“If you would stop being so lazy and clean the bird cages when you’re supposed to, I wouldn’t need to yell at you!”

After 20 years, I can still hear those words ring through the air as if they were happening for the first time. In a perfect world, I would have cleaned the bird cages once a week. In the real world–where I was a bratty teenager concerned with a host of growing pains–it meant I cleaned the bird cages only when they looked (or smelled) like they really needed it. After a skipped week (or two), my poor mom had no choice but to inspect the work I’d neglected to do, become exasperated, and fly into a rage.

Believe it or not, I never responded well to her rages. 

First of all, they were the kind of rages where the topic moved sideways, inside-out and upside down. Sure, the dirty bird cages had prompted the whole thing, but within seconds, my ass was on the line for every wrong thing I’d ever done. 

For another thing, the screaming and name calling meant that I emerged from the wreckage of these fits with a self-image so bruised that it was damn near impossible for me to get off my butt and do the thing that sparked the rage in the first place (sorry, birdos – I know now that I should have cleaned your cages more often).

The Roots of Blame

It’s difficult for me to recall specific instances of blame in my childhood home because it wasn’t so much an event as an atmosphere. Blame filled the air like perfume – we couldn’t see it, but we smelled it everywhere. 

Being a kid, I had no idea that some people lived differently. I didn’t know that some people talked about their needs openly, took responsibility for their behavior, and worked together to find forward movement in sticky situations. I thought everyone’s family was mired in blame. I assumed that when Cassie’s mom saw something she didn’t like, she also flew into a rage, condemning the people around her and faulting them for mistakes.

There was no other mechanism besides blame for problem solving in our house. It was simply: There’s an issue, it’s someone’s fault, let’s make sure that person knows it’s their fault and feels really bad about it. The pecking order determined who was allowed to blame and who was on the receiving end of it, and my position in the pyramid gave me practically no leverage. My role in the house was to be blamed, and each day I woke up and dressed the part.

Being steeped in it from an early age, it’s not surprising to me that blame has become my default filter for viewing the world. This has not always been obvious to me. Instead, I’m like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water speech, who suddenly realizes for the first time in its life that the substrate in which it lives is water, except that in my case, the substrate in which I live is blame.

Now that I’m an adult, my position in the pecking order has changed, which means I’m not only on the receiving side of blame, I also find myself blaming others quite a bit.

What Is Blame?

As far as I can tell, blame is a formula for understanding cause and effect. It goes like this:

Cause + Effect = Blame

Except, under further contemplation, I’m starting to think that a more accurate formula is:

Perceived Cause + Perceived Effect = Blame

It might seem like splitting hairs, but the difference between these two formulas is not insignificant. The first formula assumes that cause and effect have been interpreted correctly–that the blamer has accurately seen and understood all of the contributing factors that result in a specific outcome. The second formula acknowledges that there may be errors in how we perceive cause and effect, and that blame is a result of curating our perceptions in a particular way in order to arrive at the conclusion of blame. 

As I’ve studied my own tendencies to blame, I’ve realized that often it’s the second formula at work. Most of the time, I don’t have a full and complete picture of an outcome or its contributing factors. It dawns on me that it might actually be impossible to have a complete picture of anything at any time.

Cause and effect is not as straightforward as our blame would have us believe. It’s based on the logical fallacy that causes can be isolated and segmented from their context, and that only a handful of causes contribute to any one outcome. To blame means to hyper focus on this subset of perceived causes, preventing us from seeing anything else that may have contributed to the outcome. In other words, blame creates an inaccurate picture of what’s going on.

The Problem with Blame

In a certain way, I appreciate blame. It’s the recognition that life could be better than it is. Blame is actually a rallying cry to look at the issues that prevent us from experiencing meaning and happiness in life. In this way, blame is supremely well intentioned. 

But, as the adage goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and blame is absolutely on the road to hell.

Let’s use the example I opened this essay with: my mom getting mad at me for not cleaning the bird cages. Here is this scenario laid out using the blame formula from above.

Perceived Cause (My laziness) + Perceived Effect (Neglected bird cages) = Blame

As far as I can tell, there are two main problems with blame:

1. Blame focuses our attention on things outside our control - I imagine that part of the reason my mom flew into a rage when she saw the dirty bird cages is because she felt powerless. Viewing the situation through her blame filter, she perceived my laziness as the cause of the neglected bird cages, and she felt powerless to influence either my laziness or my volition to clean the cages. Blame focused all of her attention on the changes I needed to make in my life, and she became enraged knowing that she would not be able to help me make those changes.

2. Blame takes our focus off the things we can control - Focusing on my laziness used up all of my mom’s attention that could otherwise be used to figure out how to move things forward. For instance, perhaps it wasn’t my laziness that stopped me from cleaning the cages; maybe it was the fact that cleaning took too long because I didn’t have the right tools. Or maybe I was depressed because my mom’s auto-immune disease kept her in bed most of the day, and I wasn’t able to overcome the limbic friction that kept me sitting on the couch. Either of these scenarios would have made her feel more in control. In the first instance, perhaps better tools and training could have solved the problem of the dirty bird cages. In the second instance, perhaps a loving, connected conversation about the impact of illness in the household would have brought us closer together and given me the motivation needed to get off my ass and take care of the birds. 

Blame focuses our attention on what the other person did wrong and what they need to change about themselves in order to resolve an issue. If change is what we’re looking for, this is a futile approach. Perhaps we’ll get lucky a handful of times, and other people will be motivated to change how we’d like them to on account of us blaming them for something, but my hunch is that most of the time, blame actually backfires.

Why Blame Backfires

The reason blame so often backfires is because it blinds us to the ways in which we’ve contributed to the problem. 

People are actually quite open to hearing constructive feedback about their behavior, as long as we demonstrate self-awareness of our own interpersonal shortcomings, skill deficiencies and mistakes. It’s when we come out of the gate hot-headed, steaming over something the other person did wrong (without so much as a hint that we could have contributed to the problem), that the other person recoils and arms themselves for battle.

We are all imperfect people. We are all on our own hero’s journey to understand ourselves, the world and our place in it. The last thing we need is someone else coming into our zone, explaining to us the ways in which we’ve missed the mark on being a decent human being, while at the same time, making no mention of their own faults. That doesn’t seem right or decent to us. We reject it, not out of a sense of ego-driven righteousness, but because we know deep in our bones that we are all in the same boat. We all have growing and learning to do, and deep down we know that when someone is pointing their finger at us, it means they are neglecting their job of looking at themselves first.

It’s only when someone has the self-awareness and humility to admit their own faults, that we become open to hearing their criticism of us.

How To Stop Blaming

Blame has become one of my primary strategies for getting my way and provoking change in other people. Most of the time it doesn’t work (see above), and many times it actually backfires (also see above). Sometimes I don’t even know I’m doing it. Sometimes, for instance, Oli needs to parrot back to me word for word what I’ve just said in a conversation, so that I can see just how ridiculous and condescending it sounds to others.

The truth is, I don’t want to blame. I do want to experience more meaning and happiness in life, and often my tendency to blame is pointing at a real issue that needs to be addressed. So the question becomes, how do I address these issues without blaming others?

Here is the process I’ve landed on thus far.

1. Notice when I’m upset about something - Often, but not always, becoming upset indicates that my thought patterns have veered down the old familiar blame route. I’m not always great at knowing when I’m blaming (after all, blame is like water to me); but I can usually pinpoint when I’m upset about something.

2. Identify the variables I’m using in my blame formula - Once I’m aware that I’m upset, I’m in a better position to step back and try to take in the situation from a different vantage point. This is when I will try to identify the perceived causes and effects that contribute to my blame. This is something I can do contemplatively, just sitting on the couch or going for a light walk; or I might even pull out my journal and start thinking through my blame formula in writing.

3. Understand how I contributed to the situation - This is perhaps the most important part of the process. Without an understanding of my own contributions, I know that the other person is less likely to listen to me or to attribute value to the points I bring up. The moment I acknowledge the ways in which I’m culpable is the moment where I stop blaming and I start moving things forward.

4. Figure out my needs - If I’m experiencing negative emotion, it means I have needs that are not being met (learn more about human needs in my recent blog post). Blame is really a roundabout way of saying, “Please help me, there’s something preventing me from experiencing meaning and happiness.” Except the way it’s phrased makes it unlikely that other people will respond well to the request for help. When I understand the fundamental unmet need(s) underlying my blame, I’m in a better position to articulate my pain to the other person without them feeling guilty or ashamed for something they’ve done (or neglected to do, ahem, bird cages).

Life After Blame

Maybe I’ll be able to overwrite blame as my default mechanism for expressing my dissatisfaction in life. Maybe not. It’s never going to be perfect, and it’s not supposed to be.  I’m sure there will be plenty of instances where Oli will need to repeat back to me blame I didn’t know I was levying. There will be other times where I will be on the receiving end of blame, either from loved ones, coworkers, or strangers.

All of this is irrelevant to me. 

What’s relevant is aiming at the kind of life where my mental energies are aligned and in-tune with meaning and happiness. I want to spend as little time as possible noodling on things outside my control. I want to focus on matching my performance to my potential. I want to orient myself to resolving issues swiftly, completely and with as little friction as possible.

My hope is that, when I find myself obsessing over dirty bird cages, that I’m able to step back, focus on that which is within my control, and proceed to confront the issue with care, concern, and love for the other person. 

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