The three best reasons to stop blaming your spouse
Posted by John Malloy on 07/31/2011
When was the last time that blaming your partner accomplished anything other than escalation of negative emotions? Even when it really is his or her fault, choosing not to blame your spouse offers short-term and long-term benefits. In the short-term, you avoid ugly scenes, tantrums, and regrets. In the long-term, you build self-responsibility. Here are previews of the three best reasons to stop blaming your spouse:
1. Blaming triggers your partner’s associations to childhood anxiety, anger, and shame. So, why wouldn’t he or she react like a child?
2. Blaming reflects your own unrealistic expectations.
3. Blaming comes out of your own emotional immaturity.
Short-term benefits
Reason #1 – You can avoid triggering child-like reactions
Pointing out that blaming your spouse triggers associations to parent/child relationships is about like pointing out that cigarette smoking kills people:
Both are well-established in psychological/medical literature;
Just about everybody knows it;
The people who are most in need of behavior change, don’t want to hear it.
It is only human to react with negative emotions when we feel threatened. A child’s braininterprets an angry, punishing parent as threatening to the child’s survival. An adult associates (though, perhaps, not consciously) an angry spouse, who is demanding behavior change, with threatening childhood experiences. In most cases, of course, interactions with spouses are best described as ego-threatening. Exception: If your spouse’s behavior is, in fact, life-threatening, see previous post: Great Mistakes: The Big Six Red Flags, Parts 1 and 2.
Key fact: Remember, your brain doesn’t know the difference between life-threatening and ego-threatening. Threatening is life-threatening. Whether you hear an explosion or drop your keys in the toilet, your brain’s instant reaction is the same.
Then when your adult mind thinks – “This is awful, horrible. I can’t stand this!” - the brain signals for more releases of fight-or-flight hormones. If you are the blamer, you are most likely experiencing a threat to your ego – peace-of-mind, desire for equality or respect, sense of fairness. If you are the one being blamed, associations to potentially life-threatening situations, stored in the amygdala and right hemisphere, are triggered. Well, you see where this is heading: The brains of two adults interpret ego-threatening situations as life-threatening and react accordingly.
via The three best reasons to stop blaming your spouse | Psychology Today.
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