Sections
BLAME
The blame game is one game where no one wins, and everyone loses. Blame creates shame and victimization and the only antidote is mature, healthy accountability. When caught in an unhealthy dynamic with anyone important in your life, it is very common to swing back and forth between thinking the other person is always wrong, to believing you are what’s wrong. If you and your partner (or anyone you are close to) are caught up in the blame game, you are treading in very dangerous waters.
Break this pattern immediately with these steps and by answering these questions as thoroughly as you can:
Take inventory of how you are a contributor of the dynamic. What is your part?
When necessary, apologize sincerely to your partner for blaming them and promptly admit to your part in the situation.
Take stock of your triggers. How can you begin to take responsibility and own your triggers and yours?
Read carefully about the poison, “Projection”.
How do you react when you feel blamed by someone you love?
How can you respond instead of react? (be sure to do the communication blueprint)
CRITICIZING:
To be clear, what I mean here is to be critical. Healthy criticism = loving and constructive feedback. To be critical, however, is mean, harsh and nit picking, and it also promotes shame and low self esteem. When a relationship is secure with a strong foundation, then healthy feedback is encouraged. Ideally, you want your partner to give you feedback and you want to be able to give yours. This is how you both become co-healers in your relationship - meaning, you help each other grow, heal, and transform.
Those who are critical were often criticized or could never be enough for a parent.
Common ways we are critical, or feel criticized:
of clothing/style: “Are you really going to wear that?” or something similar.
of behavior, or character: “Why do you always _____?” “I can’t stand it when you are ______” “why can't you be more like _____”
Of decisions: “I cannot believe you decided to _____”
*please note that if your partner body shames you, that is unacceptable.
PROJECTION:
When we project, we indirectly blame someone unfairly based on unrecognized and unprocessed feelings we have towards ourselves or towards a parent. Here are examples of projection inside of a relationship:
We have a part of ourselves that we do not accept - let's say its “anxiety”. When we see anxiety in our partner, however, we get annoyed and frustrated and will then criticize him or her for having it.
We have an unprocessed story around a parent (see Parents workshop) and we project our parent’s qualities onto our partner. This makes us behave irrationally and unfairly towards our partner.
We feel not good enough in some way and we hold our partner accountable for “making us feel” that way when really it has nothing to do with our partner. It is our own “stuff” that we are responsible and accountable for healing and processing.
Here’s the deal: we ALL project. We are tricky beings with a very complicated subconscious so there's no way around it. BUT, there is a way to drastically reduce it with radical awareness. This is huge part of being “emotionally fit” in a relationship.
RESENTMENT:
As you probably are aware, resentment is its own hell. Resentment takes a hold of our entire physiology creating tension in our faces, jaws, necks, shoulders and gut.
If you ever feel resentful, its because you have something to say that you are not saying. I detail this in the Assert Yourself section of the Communication Blueprint so I won't go too far into it here. But know that resentment is poison, because over time it will either turn into contempt, or you’ll be habituated towards letting all the bitterness come out in inappropriate ways such as angry outbursts. Both destroy intimacy. It is in everyone's best interest to learn and then practice the art of skillful self assertion in order to prevent poisoning one self and the relationship.
CONTEMPT:
Unaddressed bitterness and resentment turn into contempt and contempt destroys relationships. This may be the ugliest poison to intimacy, because it is basically impossible to recover from. Once you are in contempt, its over.
Contempt is the closest thing to hatred. It is disgust and repulsion.
DEFENSIVENESS:
Its normal to feel defensive when you feel “attacked” by someone you love. In fact, it is our nature to defend ourselves from threat. This is why I adamantly teach people to communicate in such a way that their partner, or whomever, doesn’t feel under attack. However, chronic defensiveness is a habit - and a very destructive one. It inadvertently controls your partner.
The habit of destructive defensiveness is and looks like:
Often learned from modeling a parent, or from feeling not enough as a child, or picked up later in life from a challenging relationship.
Offended by constructive loving feedback
Rarely/never takes responsibility for actions and behavior
Thinks every comment is an attack
Defends instead of listens to loved one’s grievances
Makes it impossible for partner to bring up anything that bothers them (control)
SHUT DOWN:
This manifests as withdrawal, withholding, and stonewalling. The “cold shoulder” is often used to describe this. Shutting down is a form of passive aggression and it is incredibly difficult to live with someone who habitually does this.The shut down is used often subconsciously, as a way to control and get leverage over the relationship. A milder version of the shut down is disengagement. This is when one or both of you are polite to one another yet not really connected. You’re “checked out”.
The shut down:
Didn't learn how to express his or her needs growing up, and often didn't get her needs met.
Remember that every time you withhold love from someone, you withhold it from yourself.
Unexpressive and uncommunicative
Won’t admit to anything being wrong when asked.
Cold
Impenetrable - surrounded by iron walls
Dismissive and quiet
Low energy
Always feel like you did something wrong when you are around them - paranoid.