Repeating the Past: The Codependent Blame Game

I can look back over my life and see a pattern of my past becoming my present. I guess it’s not surprising since we humans like to stay in our comfort zones. We stick with what we know, and we rarely take the time to question whether or not what we know is good for us. If your past keeps catching up with you, it’s time to discover what it is trying to teach you. There’s a reason why it’s haunting you.

Codependents are very good at playing the Blame Game, and I think this is a primary reason why we end up repeating our past. The Blame Game is a protection mechanism that allows us to deflect all of our faults onto others. By using the Blame Game, we focus solely on the bad behavior of others. It enables us to believe that the other person is 100 per cent to blame for all of the problems in a relationship because it enables us to turn a blind eye toward everything that we ourselves have done wrong. After all, to blame others is to pretend to be faultless.

It’s easy to see why codependents use the Blame Game. First off, we learned our codependent behaviors by observing our parents. Many of us grew-up watching our Moms and Dads blaming each other for all of the problems in our families. Likewise, many of us grew-up observing one parent placing all of his/her attention on the other parent. Either Mom was always focused on Dad and never on herself, or vice-versa. As a result, we learned to always place our focus outside of ourselves. We aren’t used to examining ourselves. In fact, it’s taboo to us. We don’t look inside ourselves because we are always so busy looking inside everyone else.

As long as our focus is solely on others and never on us, we will repeat the past over and over until the day we die. We will continue to take everyone else’s inventory and understand all of the things they did wrong while never having a clue about all of the things we are doing wrong.

This is generally how the Codependent-Blame Game Pattern works: We pick an emotionally unavailable toxic person to focus on and we fall madly in love with them. We focus all of our attention on them as we attempt to mold them into what we want them to be. They cooperate enough to keep the codependent fires burning, but then they begin to balk. We rev-up the manipulation and they rev up the resistance. The relationship blows up, we take their inventory and drop all of the blame on them like a hydrogen bomb. We storm out, never look at what we ourselves are doing wrong, and then we pick up another emotionally unavailable toxic person and start the pattern all over again. The past has become the present—again and again and again.

There’s only one way to break this pattern of behavior and that’s by taking the focus off of others and placing it on ourselves. We need to stop taking other peoples’ inventories. There’s only one inventory that counts and that’s ours. We need to examine our own behavior, take responsibility for it and start learning from it. By doing so, we will finally realize what’s been going on with us all of the years.

First off, we will realize that we always pick the wrong people to be in relationships with. If we can come to realize who is toxic for us, we can stop picking those people as mates or friends. This is a huge step in and of itself. We may not be able to stop the toxic attraction, it’s pretty well engrained, but we can learn to run the other way when we realize that someone is toxic for us. We can stop a relationship from getting off the ground if we are aware enough to know who is unhealthy for us.

Taking our inventory will also help us to realize all of the codependent tools that we have used over the years to manipulate and control other people. Once we are aware of these dysfunctional tools, we can start throwing them aside. We can begin to trade them in for healthy, loving tools that can help us build healthy, loving relationships.

Recovery is very much about awareness, especially self-awareness. It’s a foreign concept to us, but one we must embrace. If you don’t want tomorrow to become your codependent yesterday, you have to learn from your mistakes. Begin focusing on yourself, understand yourself and your patterns of behavior better, stop playing the Blame Game and choose to walk through life with complete self-awareness. It will guarantee that each tomorrow will bring some fresh newness of life because you will be letting go of yesterday’s musty old mess!