Give Up the Blame Game

“Blame aggressively shifts shame onto someone else… Making someone else the problem allows us to feel better about ourselves, while having the effect of making the other person feel the way we really feel inside.”

Darlene Lancer, Conquering Shame and Codependency

Addicts love to play the blame game. Most of us are pretty poor at taking responsibility for our own mistakes and dysfunctional behaviors. This resistance is rooted in our poor self-esteem, which makes it nearly impossible for many of us to admit that we were wrong in any way.

As a result, it’s often subconsciously important for us to make someone else responsible for our mistakes, as well as for the guilt and shame we feel about having made those mistakes.

It’s rare for a codependent to be able to honestly laugh-off his/her mistakes. We don’t know how to laugh at ourselves and we are too paranoid that people will reject us for making mistakes. Our refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for mistakes forces us to do the opposite: Enter into denial and find a scapegoat to blame.

In the height of my codependency, I was terrified if taking responsibility for a mistake. It was as if admitting to a mistake would negate my value in life completely. If I was faced with a big mistake, I’d replay the entire situation over and over again in my mind; looking for a way to rationalize that it was really someone else’s fault and not mine. The shame I felt was so great that I really believed that owning the mistake would annihilate my right to exist.

Through recovery, I’ve learned to laugh at my mistakes and even poke fun at the fact that I am perfectly imperfect. I’ve also discovered that it actually feel pretty good to take ownership for a mistake. I have an immediate sense of relief knowing that I have taken responsibility. It proves to me that I am a valuable, responsible person who has enough integrity to do the right thing.

No one respects a person who is constantly shifting blame for his/her errors off onto someone else. Again we can rationalize our way into believing we have fooled people with our lies and denial, but that’s rarely the case. Most people see through our smokescreen, and their respect for us goes down the drain. So it’s actually ironic that the more we try to protect ourselves from looking bad by blaming others, the more we actually do look bad in the eyes of others.

The blame game is destined to blow-up in our faces. So it makes more sense to drop our denial, to learn to love ourselves better and to begin to take responsibility for all of our words and actions. If we feel shame over making a mistake, that’s OK. We need to face the shame and then remind us that there’s no mistake big enough to negate our value as human beings. As we take our power back from the shame, we will be better able to own our errors, be responsible for them and thus be right with ourselves and others. And we can always call upon our Higher Power to help us.