Some of the things we have been through in life may never fully go away for the rest of our lives, and it can be difficult to find yourself still dealing with the pain erupting into your relationship spontaneously and unexplainably.
Blaming and shaming is different from disagreeing. Disagreements break out for understandable reasons and can be constructive; sometimes having a heated conversation is necessary. The blame and shame projection pattern that could reoccur in relationships makes things primarily and regularly contentious. Underneath blaming and shaming the other is a pernicious cycle, a manifestation of emotions we have locked up within. The best way out is to speak with empathy, without, of course, blaming the other person, but still explaining how they are affecting you.
Blaming and shaming is also self-inflicted, self-imposed, and superimposed on others, and minimally gratifying. It has its origins in low self-esteem, disappointments, and the negative feelings produced by having unmet needs. The shaming of the other can sound like name calling, outright insulting, and intentionally triggering the other with a hot button issue. Shaming the other in a disagreement creates a barrier, a barrier that causes one or the other to retreat within; that person mostly rejects the other by withdrawing. Once they are insulated by resentments, they go through the motions in which they are not able to break that barrier, having laid landmines. But those barriers are not irrefutable, they are not impossible to break.
Insert a focus on empathy and understand these patterns by looking at what happened to yourself and the other as a child in childhood, the time when we first realized we couldn’t do something, when we felt our first limitation. Can you summon the frustration we first felt, how it may have never been processed and resolved because we had no words to describe what we were encountering to any adult who would listen? In your partner, in your family, are those adults still there? And are you ever good enough? Do they act as the object of your projections which left that wounded child confused? Well, you need to talk them out somehow.
The blame and shame occurences are not necessarily about the present relationship, but you cannot deny that there was an injury committed, then an insult placed on top of it. So, the unconscious is triggered, and anger has the opportunity to express its fury. If this continues to happen, you find yourselves always arguing, you both may feel defeated and at a loss as to how to change. Those times where you lose control, the times when we fall back asleep, we are governed by the child and not by the adult.
Healing a relationship first occurs through reflection. You have to reflect on what was said, the deed that was done, and the result of what just took place. The opportunity for self-reflection has to be seized. Endeavor to understand and establish accurate insight into exactly why this ever-present, angry monster lurks between you. On the same token, if the blame and shame has been too painful and the barrier is not easily broken down, the time to admit the relationship is unresolvable may come. How do we walk the road of empathy down to the part where we realize our fear of abandonment is underlying all that is between us?
The first part of any argument is to first blame the other person. Next, we go to internalizing and blaming ourselves. The understanding is that the two of you are supposed to be in an agreement where the one is satisfied emotionally by the other. That thoughtfulness is truly what is expected and that the assumed negligence cannot continue. Before you blame yourself for the flaws they point out, and shame the other for their insulting ways, the word that should enter your mind is: Needs. And needs that the other is not responsible for meeting, but the needs that you have that you are responsible for meeting for yourself.
Whatever the need—whether it is compassion, understanding, or to matter, there is a deeper driving force polluting our suspicions–Neglect. Arguments are based on the premise that your partner has not acknowledged you, respected your needs, and did not perform thoughtfully. The impulse to complain and vent, and to advertise why you should not be abandoned, does not hold in a cry; it demands to be validated. Yearning needing soothing. From the abandonment and neglect that your parents couldn’t avoid.
The deep yearning is that this relationship not be tarnished, that the distance is put away and you be close once again, but once you shame your partner you fear a tarnished reputation. The active fear voice goes off like alarms–do you recognize if your fear voice has been unusually loud and dominant lately?
Empathy is Poetry 