For those who self-blame

[Hopeful83]

Hi all,

I just got home from therapy and thought I'd share something with you.

My T keeps pointing out that I self-blame a lot, and I didn't realise what she meant until today. I always say that there were red flags along the way in my relationship - his rage being the main one. However, like she pointed out to me, on the whole my relationship was relatively 'normal' and I cannot have possibly predicted that my ex would have done the U-turn that he did from his rages alone. And yet, from the way I talk about everything, I make it sound like I was to blame for the way it ended because I never saw it coming. She says I shouldn't look at it like this, as I put all the responsibility of his behaviour during the breakup on myself.

On the whole my relationship was a loving one, albeit with many ups and downs. I knew at the time my ex wasn't entirely emotionally healthy, but his 'good' side outweighed the bad one. Like so many of the moderators like to remind us on here, most of our exes had plenty of positives, too, which is why we chose to stay with them. It helps to try and see the relationship in a balanced way, which is what I've been doing at this later stage of my grief. At the beginning it was easier to just think of him as evil, then I started blaming myself, and now I'm starting to think of it as two people who had similar emotional health at the time, and the train simply derailed. It doesn't take away from the fact that the way he treated me in the end was appalling, but given his upbringing, it's not surprising that he acted out in the way that he did.

I thought about it and realised that a lot of us self-blame on here and talk about how we should have known and kicked our exes to the curb while we could have. While yes, it's good to think about what warning signs there may have been in our relationships, I think we should remind ourselves that this should mainly serve to make us examine what made us deal with these red flags in the way we did, and hopefully, moving forward, we'll make better choices and deal with similar scenarios in a potentially healthier fashion should they arise again. We should not, however, use these red flags as a way of telling ourselves we're in some way defective for not having dealt with them in a different way.

I know that our stories differ from case-to-case and a lot of people had far more abuse to deal with than I did, but still, it's good to remind ourselves that we shouldn't self-blame for the way we acted while we were with them, and for the cruel way many of them discarded us in the end. We all dealt with things to the best of our abilities at the time and it's important to remember that.

Not sure if this jumbled collection of words makes any sense, but I hope some of you find it helpful.  Perhaps I should have allowed myself to process it first before typing it all out, but I wanted to get the gist of it down before I forgot.

Hopeful

[Meili]

This applies to those of us who stuck around as long as we could before leaving too.

I had a talk with my T about self-blame today as well. Yes, I am accountable for my actions. Yes, I made the choices that I made. Yes, I acted poorly from time to time. Yes, I made my x's prophecies a reality.

What my T wants me to not lose sight of is that had I not been in the situation in which I found myself, my choices would have been completely different. I didn't start out working towards leaving my x. I didn't start out making poor choices about the r/s. I wasn't defensive from the beginning. I didn't feel the need to end things on the day that I met her.

We all evaluate based on the information that we have available at the time. I don't think that any of us had the information available at the time with which to make the decisions that face us today. We can look back and guess all that we want to about how we could have acted, the choices that we made, what we did, and a bunch of other things too. The fact is that we made our choices based on what we had before us at the time. None of us should feel bad about it.

Besides, it's wasted energy. We can't change any of it now. But, Hopeful is correct, we can learn from our choices and actions. We can add our history to the information that we have available to us when it comes time to make future decisions.

[bunny4523]

Meili and Hopeful -

Very well said.  An important message for many on here to read.  Thank you

[Hopeful83]

We all evaluate based on the information that we have available at the time. I don't think that any of us had the information available at the time with which to make the decisions that face us today. We can look back and guess all that we want to about how we could have acted, the choices that we made, what we did, and a bunch of other things too. The fact is that we made our choices based on what we had before us at the time. None of us should feel bad about it.

Exactly. It's so much easier in retrospect, but we have to remember we didn't have the 'tools' nor the clarity that we now have at our disposal. It makes a massive difference.

[Reforming]

Hi Hopeful

Good post. I completely agree. I think blame is actually very unhelpful and is very different from understanding  and acknowledging why something happened.

I made plenty of mistakes and did things that I regret through a combination of ignorance and unhealthy behaviour. I've tried to learn from that and focus on not repeating the same mistakes. Blame and shame just makes things worse because they rob us of the power to change. I'm learning to forgive myself - perhaps the most important thing - and move one.

Reforming