Does your client tend to blame others for all his/her ills? Or does your client indulge in endless self-blame?
Externalised blame
It is often said that those who have not undergone therapeutic intervention will tend to blame others for their own negative feelings with remarks such as “You are making me angry” or “it’s all your fault that I feel depressed”. This benchmark is often a good barometer for gauging what the client feels but the client’s explanation may only be partly true. If the client feels angry or depressed then these reactions will almost certainly stem from the past and not the present.
It is true that someone in the present may trigger feelings of anger, unhappiness or inadequacy but the current situation is not the true origin.
The angry individual, for instance, may well have issues with a parent if his/her tendency is to blame an intimate partner in the present. The worst-case scenario is that the individual becomes violent towards a partner because of misplaced blame. A good dose of therapy will enable the angry individual to apportion blame where it is due – usually with a parent, a carer or another authority figure from the past when the client was a child.
The depressed individual, moreover, may be suffering from feeling unwanted or unloved as a child and again may be displacing the blame on to the wrong person, even if his/her partner is actually not the attentive and loving type. This situation also begs the question of why the client chose a partner who was incapable of love in the first place.
So, in essence, the client may be genuinely experiencing negative emotions towards someone in the present but he/she may be attributing blame in the wrong quarter.
Addressing those experiences in the client’s life which have become the seeding incidents for such feelings will be the key to allowing the client to see his/her present situation more realistically. It may well be that after a thorough excavation of the past the client will need to review a current relationship very carefully and then take appropriate action accordingly but constant blame in the wrong direction will not be the ultimate solution and will only create unhappiness all round.
Internalised blame
Sometimes the client will experience confusion about who is to blame in a given situation when revisiting the past, especially if the event was in any way traumatic. And in these circumstances, self-blame may often become the norm.
When revisiting childhood experiences the blame cannot possibly be attributed to the child because there is nothing whatsoever which a child can do which could possibly be wrong except in the eyes of someone else. A child is an innocent creature who will be earnestly trying to conform to the rules of social interaction, family demands and school regimes – and desperately trying to survive and thrive in a crazy world.
An angry parent or teacher, for instance, who accuses the child of wrongdoing will merely be blinkered in his/her approach to the child. If the child is “naughty” or “unco-operative” then there will be a good reason for this seeming step out of line. Is the child unhappy at home? Does the child not know the rules? Is the child rebelling against over-oppressive authority? Is the innocent child just trying to please himself/herself in an over-strict or over-oppressive world? Is the child confused by what is required of him/her? The child, fundamentally, is just being a child in any situation.
The skilful practitioner will need to encourage the client to gently tease out the truth of the situation and to invite the client to see life realistically through adult eyes. Was the parent or teacher being unreasonable? Was the adult working out his/her own stressful-traumatic malaise using the child as the bait and blaming the wrong culprit? Was the parent or teacher being overly cruel or unjust? Was the authority figure using the child as a scape-goat for his/her own feelings of guilt or inadequacy? Was the dice heavily weighted in the adult’s favour and against the child? Were the expectations of the child unrealistic because he/she was too young to understand? The practitioner’s role, therefore, will be to empower the client to realise that the punishment received was unjust and out of all proportion to a so-called “crime” on the part of the child. Self-blame can colour the client’s life for all time until it is resolved in the therapeutic context.
If you feel that you are suffering from a tendency to blame others for your own distress or an inclination to blame yourself for everything which goes wrong in the world, then please visit the JMHT “Find a Practitioner” page (www.jmhypnotraining.co.uk) in order to gain the key to unlocking your distress.
Jacquelyne Morison
November 2022