Blame, like forgiveness, is a completely misunderstood part of the healing process.
People are exhorted to stop blaming your parents! Move on! Let go!
“Each moment you hold onto the resentment, you keep yourself stuck in a prison of victimhood. You are not responsible for what happened to you as a child. It happened. You were young back then. But now, today, you are responsible for what you choose to do.”
It’s this ‘hurry up’ mentality toward healing because you need to be healed, recovered, better – and right now! – or you are unenlightened, deficient, creating your own misery.
Like many cases of abuse, healing is a process that occurs over time. In many cases, victims have had to live a lie for years – the lie that everything is okay, the lie that nothing is happening, the lie that their abuser is the best person in the world – so many lies for so many years. If you tell a lie for long enough, you’ll start to believe it…or, at the very least, identify with it. The lie becomes an inextricable part of your identity.
Blaming helps you claim your history, the truth of what actually happened, and rewrite your identity.
People believe that ‘victim’ is dis-empowering, but what if you have never before been able to tell the truth of your situation? To finally be able to speak the truth is empowering, to acknowledge your experience and, finally, allow yourself to feel what you’ve been suppressing to maintain the lies.
Blame is a tool that helps reinterpret those perceptions that have been skewed through attempts to cope in profoundly dysfunctional situations.
Blame is a function of the need to obtain support and validation from loved ones and the community, the need to reverse what has been pushed onto a victim by an abuser, and the need to reassert the truth.
Will blame always serve in someone’s best interests?
Of course not. But we need to fundamentally re-assess our concept of what healing entails; to expect someone to heal immediately from wounds that were inflicted over years is harmful, short sighted, and selfish.
Blame is warped in abusive relationships.
Abusers often blame the victim, the community often reinforces that blame, and victims blame themselves. The healthy, appropriate re-direction of that blame is healing for earlier stages of recovery.
It isn’t about ‘creating your own misery’, it’s about acknowledging the misery of your experiences.
The more I learn about abuse recovery, the more I think there is a law of conservation of emotions. And research shows that the brain will ‘defer’ dealing with strong emotions until it is safe to do so. You can’t wish away your emotions because healing means you’ve just decided to ‘live in the present’.
And of course, no one ever tells you to ‘get over’ and ‘move on’ from happy emotions.
What these stupid exhortations really mean is that you shouldn’t be angry, fearful, upset, frustrated, or ‘negative’. Because those emotions are ‘bad’ and being happy is ‘good’.
It’s like saying a hammer is ‘bad’.
A hammer is simply a tool.