Who's fault is it? Reflections on personal responsibility & victim-hood

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Hi All,

I am getting really tied up in knots over this issue. I read what other people say about self-responsibility and the roles we have played in the outcome of our relationships but I find myself sinking into a mire of depression generated by self-blame and self-criticism. So I'd like to open up a debate.

Okay, here's a scenario:

I have had a bad day at work and come home and 'kick the cat'. Is the cat to blame for my action? What if the cat gets under my feet? Is the cat to blame then? What if the cat has cr*pped in the corner of the kitchen or brought in a mouse and spread it's entrails around the kitchen? Is it the cat to blame for my reaction then?

How does this relate to human beings? If my partner/child/mother 'kicks me' because s/he is in a bad mood, am I to blame? At what point do I become to blame, if at all? At what point am I mutually responsible for his/her behaviour? Does my partner having a mental health issue excuse my significant other from their bad behaviour or make me mutually responsible for it? Does it excuse me for my reaction if I have one too? If so, why do you think so? If not, why not?

Are there issues that change how you think? Do grades of bad behaviour make a difference? Is there such a thing as a victim and why do you feel as you do? Is it bad to be a victim? What does it mean to live in a no-blame culture? Is no-blame just us kidding ourselves? What does it mean to accept responsibility for our part in a situation? How does this differ from self-blame? How can we accept responsibility and remain supportive of ourselves? And anything else that takes your fancy... .

Looking forward to your replies... .

Love Lifewriter

x

[Lifewriter16]

Hi All,

I am getting really tied up in knots over this issue. I read what other people say about self-responsibility and the roles we have played in the outcome of our relationships but I find myself sinking into a mire of depression generated by self-blame and self-criticism. So I'd like to open up a debate.

Okay, here's a scenario:

I have had a bad day at work and come home and 'kick the cat'. Is the cat to blame for my action? What if the cat gets under my feet? Is the cat to blame then? What if the cat has cr*pped in the corner of the kitchen or brought in a mouse and spread it's entrails around the kitchen? Is it the cat to blame for my reaction then?

How does this relate to human beings? If my partner/child/mother 'kicks me' because s/he is in a bad mood, am I to blame? At what point do I become to blame, if at all? At what point am I mutually responsible for his/her behaviour? Does my partner having a mental health issue excuse my significant other from their bad behaviour or make me mutually responsible for it? Does it excuse me for my reaction if I have one too? If so, why do you think so? If not, why not?

Are there issues that change how you think? Do grades of bad behaviour make a difference? Is there such a thing as a victim and why do you feel as you do? Is it bad to be a victim? What does it mean to live in a no-blame culture? Is no-blame just us kidding ourselves? What does it mean to accept responsibility for our part in a situation? How does this differ from self-blame? How can we accept responsibility and remain supportive of ourselves? And anything else that takes your fancy... .

Looking forward to your replies... .

Love Lifewriter

x

[enlighten me]

Hi Lifewriter

There are a lot of questions here and no one answer.

Personally I feel that just because a person has problems be them mental health, work, relationship it doesn't excuse them doing hurtful things. We can understand the factors but don't have to justify the actions.

As to our part in things. No one is faultless. We have to realise that our values and standards aren't necessarily the same as the next persons. Because we think that our behaviour is valid doesn't mean that someone else does. Just because you are willing to say lend your neighbour your lawn mower doesn't necessarily mean that they are happy to lend you things. They may see this as you over stepping a mark where you don't.

When you throw mental health into things it complicates matters more. Where at times in a normal interaction you may not be on the same page with mental health you may not even be in the same book.

[Surg_Bear]

Thank you for asking these tough questions.

I will not pretend to have answers- because I do not.  I feel compelled to reply because I struggle with many of the same questions.

In my too long marriage to a woman with BPD, I suffered a zillion little emotional abuses in the form of nitpicking, and there were some really big abuses that came from really scary rages.  What part did I play in that situation?  Can I really stand on a pedestal of clean and blameless victimhood because I was the cat that got kicked when its human came through the outside door?

No, I don't think so.  It feels wrong to say I was blameless in all of this.

I can't deny the hurt I felt a zillion times - because it was just her mental illness abusing me.  I can't make the hurt feel worse by taking some of the blame for it, because I don't know what I should attach my portion of the blame to.  What did I do, to deserve this?

I think the answer is not so easy.

I stayed with my wife for 25 years.  I accepted this as my lot.  Her mental illness was covered in the "in sickness and in health" thing that I promised when we got married way back when everyone thought we were just kids too young to be doing this.  I stayed longer than my self respect would allow.  I started to believe her attacks and criticisms as truth.  I took her reality, and in many ways, allowed it to be more real than my own.  It was somehow easier to accept her explanation for emotional abuse and sexual neglect than to feel my own feelings about it.  I didn't deserve sex in my marriage because I wasn't being the husband that I should.  I should have tried harder, been a better husband, worked less, did more around the house, helped more with the childrearing responsibilities, etc. 

In my own case, I believe that my role in the abuse and neglect was that I let it happen.  I let it happen over and over for 25 freaking years and never stood up for myself.  Was it OK for her to do those things that amount to emotional abuse? No.  It is her fault for treating me so cruelly. BUT, it was my fault for letting it happen for 25 years and never trying to advocate for myself and make things better.  I put "peaceful home" and "wife's emotional comfort" above my own needs and feelings.  This was wrong.  This was my part in it.  I let her kick the cat for her reasons, and let her believe she was doing it for cat reasons.  I should have told her that it is never OK to kick the cat, and stood by this as an ultimate boundary- a line in the sand- 25 years ago, instead of 6 months ago, when it was far too late to change anything.

This is my fault in the dissolution of our marriage.  I let it happen.

Not sure if this helps you, but it is the only way I can see my part in the "it takes 2 to tango" statement of how this could have happened.

Love,

Surg_Bear 

[Michelle27]

I have struggled with this for a long time too.  Almost a year ago, when I was still in the marriage with my stbx, I took myself to counseling because I couldn't drop the anger and resentments towards him for years of abusive behavior.  I WANTED to forgive but I couldn't get there.  Months of therapy helped me to realize that I was in fact angry and resentful towards MYSELF.  I couldn't forgive him because I had to forgive myself first for allowing the behaviors to happen over and over again and allowing my kids to be subjected to it.  Forgiving myself for my own part in the "dance" was key to moving forward.  It didn't allow me to forgive him and stay in the relationship, but rather it allowed me to recognize that I could now accept that his illness was about him and I could choose whether to subject myself to the risks of continuing in it or end it and move on. 

At times, I am still angry about allowing so much damage to be done to myself and my kids.  I am working hard on healing and being open with my kids about how we got where we did and why it was wrong and why moving forward for all of us has been the best choice.  I know I have more healing to do, but I am well on my way. 

I didn't answer any of the questions posed above, but I do think understanding the dynamics takes the "fault" out of the equation.  When you understand it, you can choose your own path better.

[Lucky Jim]

Like what you're saying there, Michelle27.  Forgiving oneself, I agree, is part of self-acceptance and self-love.  I had to learn to love myself again in order to get to the point that I care enough about myself that I can't ever allow myself to be the object of someone else's abuse again.  I'm less codependent, too, because I don't need to caretake in order to feel good about myself.  I don't source my self-worth through others anymore; instead, I get it from within.  I love myself enough now to say a polite "No, thanks" when my gut tells me to.

LuckyJim

[balletomane]

What part did I play in that situation?  Can I really stand on a pedestal of clean and blameless victimhood because I was the cat that got kicked when its human came through the outside door?

No, I don't think so.  It feels wrong to say I was blameless in all of this.

I can't deny the hurt I felt a zillion times - because it was just her mental illness abusing me.  I can't make the hurt feel worse by taking some of the blame for it, because I don't know what I should attach my portion of the blame to

... .

In my own case, I believe that my role in the abuse and neglect was that I let it happen.  I let it happen over and over for 25 freaking years and never stood up for myself.  Was it OK for her to do those things that amount to emotional abuse? No.  It is her fault for treating me so cruelly. BUT, it was my fault for letting it happen for 25 years and never trying to advocate for myself and make things better.  I put "peaceful home" and "wife's emotional comfort" above my own needs and feelings.  This was wrong.  This was my part in it.  I let her kick the cat for her reasons, and let her believe she was doing it for cat reasons.  I should have told her that it is never OK to kick the cat, and stood by this as an ultimate boundary- a line in the sand- 25 years ago, instead of 6 months ago, when it was far too late to change anything.

The sentence I have put in bold is exactly what I did too. I used to apologise for things that I knew I hadn't done just to try and get him to stop hurting me. I accepted blame even when I knew he was irrational. This was partly due to my fear of him and a sense that I needed to defuse the situation before it got worse, partly because when things were good they were very good and I was choosing to focus on his behaviour during these times as 'the real him', and partly because I've always had a problem with asserting myself and my needs. I ended up damaging myself. This relationship made me question my judgment to the point where I began to think that he must be right about everything, and I really was just an awful deceitful manipulative abusive person who had ruined his life. I let that happen. I colluded in my own abuse.

The only thing I would add to this post is that in a healthy relationship both partners will sometimes do things to annoy and upset each other. I'm sure I did things to cause my ex legitimate unhappiness and annoyance sometimes. The trouble was that he reacted in a wildly disproportionate way, an abusive way, which has made it doubly hard for me to evaluate my own behaviour honestly and accurately - if I say to myself "You were selfish to him sometimes" it starts to feel like a justification for how he behaved in response. The best way I have found to help myself with this is to try and mentally separate my faults from his reactions. They are not connected. I can see this because he could be horribly vicious in response to a completely innocuous thing, like me not giving him what he considered to be the right answer to a question. Separating the flaws I brought to the relationship from the abuse that followed enables me to see myself as a person who makes mistakes, yes, but who still deserves to be treated with respect.

[thisagain]

I don't think it's the cat's (our) fault that we got kicked... .but if the cat has the option to run away to another room, and instead gets the claws out and mauls the kicker, then the cat is responsible for some of the escalation of the conflict.

I wish I'd found bpdfamily and the Lessons sooner, and given up earlier on the hope that my partner would get better. I kept thinking that if I just told her how she was making me feel and what I needed her to change, then she would care and make the change, or talk with me about a compromise... .Obviously never happened, and my continued efforts contributed to a lot of conflict in our relationship (along with opening up some old FOO wounds for me). So I guess technically I'm partly responsible. I could have accepted sooner that she wasn't healthy and couldn't respond like I expected her to.

And maybe even the relationship would have gone differently if I'd recognized the problem, come here, and committed to the lessons sooner.  I'm not hard on myself about it though, because I was just behaving like a normal human. Normal humans expect their partners to listen and care about their feelings and that's okay with me.

[eeks]

Hi All,

I am getting really tied up in knots over this issue. I read what other people say about self-responsibility and the roles we have played in the outcome of our relationships but I find myself sinking into a mire of depression generated by self-blame and self-criticism. So I'd like to open up a debate.

Here is a thread with some members' perspectives on it that you might find interesting to read:  https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=114232.0;all

I have also had difficulty with this use of the phrase "take responsibility" for a few reasons.  For one, it seems to imply a sort of a moral burden, a duty from which a person is absconding, and so, yes, it seems indistinguishable from blame or fault.  I think one of the pitfalls here is that for anybody with co-dependent or perfectionistic tendencies, before you know what it really means, the inner critic is going to grab hold of those words that sound like "oh look, you're doing something wrong" and beat you over the head with it.  

So many of my life incidents that I remember as painful that I've told my therapist, he's said "that was about them" or "that was their issue".  So keep in mind too that this is about accurate assignment of responsibility, yours, yes, but also sorting out what you are in fact not responsible for that you have been blaming yourself for.

If the suggestions about forgiving yourself are helpful, if they take some of the pressure off, that's great.  And maybe we can also break this "responsibility" and "your role" thing down into manageable pieces that you can work with.

Okay, here's a scenario:

I have had a bad day at work and come home and 'kick the cat'. Is the cat to blame for my action? What if the cat gets under my feet? Is the cat to blame then? What if the cat has cr*pped in the corner of the kitchen or brought in a mouse and spread it's entrails around the kitchen? Is it the cat to blame for my reaction then?

How does this relate to human beings? If my partner/child/mother 'kicks me' because s/he is in a bad mood, am I to blame? At what point do I become to blame, if at all? At what point am I mutually responsible for his/her behaviour? Does my partner having a mental health issue excuse my significant other from their bad behaviour or make me mutually responsible for it? Does it excuse me for my reaction if I have one too? If so, why do you think so? If not, why not?

You could try observing yourself in action and deciding for yourself.  

Whether it's your cat or your partner, noticing your emotions, and pausing to observe yourself before reacting.  This takes some practice before you will start to notice a difference in how you interact with people, and the degree of emotional intensity you can tolerate.  

You can do this in past situations, too, like thinking back to your relationship with a pwBPD.  Let's say he said or did something, you reacted and you now feel when reviewing it that your actions had a negative effect and you regret them.  So, take the memory of that situation, slow it down and rewind.  When he said/did the thing that "triggered" strong emotions in you... .what were you feeling?

There's a number of different things you could do with that emotional information once you get it, but maybe for now just start practising noticing emotions, especially the "triggers", the sudden intense feelings.  

This will begin to put you in the position of having more choice about how you respond to people in the present, and a different awareness of what you're responsible for and what you're not.

[Lifewriter16]

Thanks everyone for your posts.

Thanks eeks, your post is very helpful. You've put the origins of my discomfort around 'taking responsibility' into words for me. No wonder I've been struggling with it:

I have also had difficulty with this use of the phrase "take responsibility" for a few reasons.  For one, it seems to imply a sort of a moral burden, a duty from which a person is absconding, and so, yes, it seems indistinguishable from blame or fault.  I think one of the pitfalls here is that for anybody with co-dependent or perfectionistic tendencies, before you know what it really means, the inner critic is going to grab hold of those words that sound like "oh look, you're doing something wrong" and beat you over the head with it.

 

Hi thisagain, thanks for continuing with my illustration. I find it so much easier to relate to images than words and this makes sense:

I don't think it's the cat's (our) fault that we got kicked... .but if the cat has the option to run away to another room, and instead gets the claws out and mauls the kicker, then the cat is responsible for some of the escalation of the conflict.

Thanks Michelle27. It seems to me that I am struggling with forgiving myself for not being able to be consistently kind, compassionate and loving. I need to forgive myself for not being perfect and for my part in the demise of a relationship I really valued but ultimately had to let go of, simply because it wasn't good for me. I need to be kinder to myself.

Love Lifewriter

x