How Do You Handle Blame? Are You an Internalizer or an Externalizer?

How you handle blame can tell a lot about yourself. It can also have a big impact on your personal and work-related relationships (see my article: Relationship Skills: Why is Self Awareness Important to You and Your Partner?).

How Do You Handle Blame?

The following descriptions are the most common dynamics when it comes to handling blame:

• Externalizers: People who are externalizers usually blame someone or something else when it comes to blame. They rarely, if ever, accept responsibility when things go wrong, even when it's objectively clear that the problem was their fault (see my article: Having the Courage to Admit You Made a Mistake).

How Do You Handle Blame?

• Extreme Externalizers: People who are extreme externalizers have a very difficult time taking responsibility for their own mistakes. They often lack a self reflective capacity, which means they not only fail to look at their own contributions to their problems, but they also don't learn from their mistakes. This means they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. People who are extreme externalizers are often personality disordered (see my article: The Dark Triad Personality: Narcissism, Psychopathy and Machiavellianism).

How Do You Handle Blame?

• Internalizers: People who are internalizers often take on all or most of the blame when things go wrong--even when it's obvious they weren't at fault. 

• Inconsistent Internalizers: People who are inconsistent internalizers often take on too much of the blame in situations, but they can also do a 180 degree turn and externalize all the blame on someone else.  Inconsistent internalizers were often emotionally neglected as children.  Whichever side they're on, they often see situations as being black-and-white with no grey (see my article: Overcoming All or Nothing Thinking).

• Balanced: People who are balanced see their own realistic contributions to problems at the same time they take into account other people's contributions as well as other contributing factors.

How Your Family Handled Blame

Children internalize family dynamics unconsciously.  This includes how families handled blame.

The following vignettes, which are composites, are examples of how families often handle blame and the consequences of their dynamic:

• An Example of an Externalizer: Joey's Family: Joey tended to get into trouble at school for fighting and cutting classes when he was in high school. Whenever Joey's parents were called in to meet with the dean, they were very defensive.  When the dean told them about the problems, both parents blamed Joey's friends for being "bad influences." They never asked Joey to take responsibility and, as parents, they never took responsibility.  So, when Joey became an adult, he became an externalizer.

• An Example of an Internalizer: Alice's Family: When Alice was growing up, she was often scapegoated by her parents and older siblings. Whenever anything went wrong at home, they blamed her.  When they were court-mandated to attend family therapy after Alice's older brother was arrested for stealing a car, they told the family therapist that Alice was the cause of all the family's problems. But when they were asked to explain this, they got defensive (see my article: The Role of the Scapegoat in Dysfunctional Families).

• An Example of a Balanced View: Nina's Family: Nina's parents taught her the importance of self reflection so that whenever she had a problem, she reflected on what she could have done better.  They also taught her how to look at problems within the context in which they occurred so she could take a balanced perspective of situations when they went wrong. This helped her in all her relationships as a child and as an adult.

Practice Compassion For Yourself and Others

Dynamics which are internalized at a young age are often difficult to overcome.

If you tend to blame yourself, even when it's objectively clear that you weren't at fault, you could benefit from learning self compassion (see my article:  Psychotherapy and Self Compassion).

Practice Compassion For Yourself and Others

If you tend to blame others, when a situation goes wrong, take a moment to pause and assess the situation when you're calm.  

If you're blaming others and not taking responsibility for your own mistakes, you're being unfair to others and you're depriving yourself of a potential learning experience.  

If you can stop being defensive and allow yourself to be open, you can gain a new, more balanced perspective when things go wrong. 

Getting Help in Therapy

Problems with internalizing and externalizing usually have their roots in early childhood.

Both internalizing and externalizing can create problems in personal and work-related relationships. 

Problems in relationships often bring people to therapy.

A skilled psychotherapist can help you, if you're open to being helped, to take a more balanced approach when things go wrong.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

What's the Connection Between Fear of Getting Hurt and Blaming Communication?

Fear of getting hurt is often connected to blaming communication (see my article: Fear of Intimacy Can Lead to Fault-Finding, Which Can Destroy Relationships).  Blaming communication occurs  when a person communicates anger or hurt by blaming the other person instead of focusing on his or her own internal experience of what happened (see my article:  Relationships: Fear of Being Emotionally Vulnerable).

What's the Connection Between Fear of Getting Hurt and Blaming Behavior?

Examples of Blaming Statements

• You made me feel hurt when you forgot my birthday.
• You made me feel unloved when you ignored me at the party and talked to your friends the whole night.
• You were so inconsiderate of me when you made reservations without asking me where I wanted to go.
• You were selfish when you chose to make plans with your family without inviting me.

And so on.

Why Do People Engage in Blaming Communication?

As you can see, what all of these statements have in common is that one person is blaming another person without speaking from his or her experience or taking responsibility for his or her own feelings.

Often when people communicate in this way, it's because they are afraid to make themselves emotionally vulnerable by expressing their own emotional experience.

People who communicate this way in their relationship often have no awareness that they're afraid of getting hurt because the fear can be unconscious.

It's not a surprise that this fear usually originates in early childhood where children feel blamed, criticized, unloved or invalidated by their parents or other significant adults in their lives (see my article:  Reacting to the Present Based on Your Traumatic Past).

How Can People Learn to Stop Engaging in Blaming Behavior?
This fear is difficult to overcome alone or by reading a self help book.

Even if people who engage in this behavior learn to make "I statements" where they speak from their own internal experience (without blaming the other person), if the fear of getting hurt is strong enough, the fear can be emotionally paralyzing, especially if they grew up in a household where they were invalidated emotionally.

This problem can be overcome by working with a psychotherapist who knows how to gently help clients to get to the underlying issues that are causing the problem (see my article: You Can't Change Your Past, But You Can Change How the Past Affects You Now).

Once clients feel safe enough to get to the underlying issues, they can begin to differentiate between "then" and "now" in terms of being a young child with their family back then and being an adult now (see my article: Working Through Emotional Trauma: Learning in Therapy How to Separate "Then" From "Now").

They can also learn to distinguish between their family (when they were children) vs. their current relationship.

Psychotherapists who specialize in working with this type of problem often do inner child work to help that aspect of the client to feel safe (see my article: Understanding the Different Aspects of Yourself That Make You Who You Are).

Fictionalized Vignette

The following fictionalized vignette demonstrates this dynamic and how therapy can help:

Ida

Ida began therapy to deal with the loss of a three year relationship after her boyfriend broke up with her.  She was sad and upset about the loss.

What is the Connection Between Fear of Getting Hurt and Blaming Communication?

Initially, Ida said she couldn't understand why her boyfriend left her.  He told me that he was fed up with being blamed for the problems in their relationship.  This was something that he had told her many times before, but that she didn't understand.

From Ida's point of view, "I was only telling him how I felt.  I don't know why he got so upset that he left me."

At that point in her therapy, Ida was unable to see that she used blaming communication with her boyfriend.

Her therapist helped Ida to see the difference between:

"You make me feel hurt and unlovable when you don't call me."

vs.

"I feel hurt and unlovable when I don't hear from you."

When her therapist asked Ida to practice saying this, Ida froze.  To her surprised, she was so afraid that she couldn't utter the words.

What's the Connection Between Fear of Getting Hurt and Blaming Communication?

Since Ida was too afraid to say the words, her therapist asked Ida about her internal experience, on a physical level.

Ida told her that her chest was tight, her heart was racing, her throat was constricted and her stomach was tight.  She also felt light headed.

Fear: Chest tight, racing heart, throat constricted and stomach tight

Ida's therapist asked Ida to stay with those sensations, if she could, and see what else came up for her.

The first thought that came to Ida was an early memory of telling her mother and grandmother that she felt sad about her grandfather dying (see my article: Looking at Your Childhood Trauma History From an Adult Perspective).

When her grandmother left the room, Ida's mother slapped her and told her that she made her grandmother feel sad by bringing up the grandfather's death.

Ida had many early memories of being scolded and beaten for expressing her feelings, and she was able to see the connection between her current problem and the abuse that she suffered when she was a child when she expressed her feelings.

Her therapist helped Ida by doing inner child work.  She asked Ida, as her adult self, to speak to her younger self in a compassionate and nurturing way.

But when Ida imagined her younger self and began to speak to her compassionately, she felt a great deal of shame.  Then, she got angry and blamed the younger self for causing problems in her family.

Ida and her therapist had to work for a while to gradually help Ida to feel compassion for her younger self.

Ida was someone who loved children and who would have felt compassionate for a young child who was being mistreated.  But she had trouble summoning up self compassion without feeling shame.

So, her therapist had to help her to separate out self compassion and shame before she could truly feel compassionate for herself.

After a while, Ida was able to see that she could express her feelings to her therapist and there were no negative consequences.  She felt safe with her therapist, so she began to believe that it was possible to feel safe with other people if she was discerning with regard to the friends and romantic partners that she picked.

Gradually, Ida felt less and less afraid to express her feelings and she learned to express them without blaming others.  When she knew that she could trust the person, she didn't feel the same emotional vulnerability that she had felt in the past.

What's the Connection Between Fear of Getting Hurt and Blaming Communication?

Eventually, she was able to get into another relationship and express herself in a healthy way.

Conclusion
Fear of being emotionally vulnerable often starts at a young age in the family of origin.

This fear can result in your communicating in an unhealthy, blaming way instead of expressing your feelings and taking responsibility for them.

This fear is often unconscious and difficult to see on your own, especially if it has been part of your life for a long time.

Working with a therapist, who can help you to discover the origin and meaning of your fear and who can provide you with a safe place to talk about your feelings, can help you to express your feelings in a healthy way so that you're no longer engaging in blaming communication.

Getting Help in Therapy
Blaming communication can ruin a relationship.

After a while, this type of communication erodes the relationship and can lead to its demise.

If you are in the habit of engaging in blaming communication and you want to learn to express your feelings in a healthy way, get help from a licensed mental health professional who has expertise in this area.

Not only can it save your relationship, but it can also help you to work through unresolved childhood trauma that can be at the root of this and other problems.

About Me
I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website:

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Self Blame and the Internal Critic: Overcoming the Tyranny of "Shoulds" You Impose on Yourself

Many people have such a strong internal critic that they feel overwhelmed by that self blaming part of themselves.  The internal critic imposes so many "shoulds" that it becomes emotionally and physically exhausting.

Self Blame and the Internal Critic

For many people, this internal critic is so strong that it stops them from even starting a new endeavor because they know in advance that they'll be overwhelmed by self criticism.  It feels safer to just stick with what's familiar than risk the tyranny of "shoulds" they impose on themselves.

The Internal Critic Can Show Up in Any Area of Your Life
For some people, the internal critic comes up in specific areas, like their physical appearance.

For those people, just looking in the mirror can be emotionally painful as the internal critic criticizes their physical appearance, often in very distorting ways.

For other people, the internal critic comes up, not just in specific areas, but in most areas of their life, no matter what they're doing.

Parts Work Combined with the Mind-Body Connection in Therapy to Overcome the Internal Critic
Parts work in therapy has many different names, including ego state therapy, internal family systems, and so on.

Parts work combined with the mind-body connection can be a very effective way to overcome the internal critic.

Self Blame and the Internal Critic

Using parts work and mind-body therapy, like Somatic Experiencing, the therapist can help facilitate the identification of the different internal aspects of self (or parts) that are affecting the client, including the internal critic.

Parts work is non-pathologizing, so that all the parts are recognized as having a good intention of wanting to preserve the self, but the parts might be going about it in a skewed way.

Here's an example of a client struggling with a strong internal critic and how a combination of parts work and mind-body therapy helped.  As always, this is a composite of many cases with all identifying information changed:

Nina
When Nina came to therapy, she was nearly paralyzed by self blame.  In almost every situation in her life, she had self blaming thoughts like, "You should have done it this way instead of that way" or "You shouldn't try that--you're just going to fail."

Before she could embark on any new endeavor, like a new job or a new project, she had to do battle with all her negative thoughts.  It was mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting.

Nina was aware that she grew up in a home where both of her parents were highly critical of her and of themselves. So, she knew she internalized this critical part of herself from an early age.  But just knowing this wasn't enough to change it, which is often the case with problems like this.

Helping Nina to get into a relaxed state, I asked her to recall a memory when she felt the internal critic as being especially strong.

Nina remembered how she felt when she moved to NYC from her small hometown in the Midwest to attend college in NY.

She remembered being plagued with negative thoughts about how she would never make it in NY, including the thought, "You should stay home and go to the local college.  You'll never measure up to the other students in NYC."

We continued to work with this self blaming part to try to understand what its intention was.

Before I go on, I should explain that looking at the internal critic this way is a symbolic way of making it come alive in an accessible way.

Rather than just thinking about the thoughts, we explored the internal critic almost as if it was a person.  After a while, Nina was also able to identify where she sensed the internal critic in her body, including a tightening in her throat and in her stomach.

Using parts work and the mind-body connection (i.e., identifying where the feeling is sensed in the body) helped Nina to continue to explore the feeling more deeply.

After a while, what she discovered was that the internal critic really did have a good intention, which was to keep her from getting hurt.  So, for instance, when it told her that she should stay home instead of moving to NYC to attend college, this part held a lot of fear and its intention was to keep Nina safe.

The problem was that, even though the internal critic's intention was good, the way it expressed itself was critical and damaging.  So, we worked towards helping that part to be more balanced in its expression.

With practice, instead of being critical, Nina learned to soften this part's expression so that it could evaluate in a more balanced way instead of being critical.

Of course, this takes a lot of work because the internal critic doesn't develop overnight and it takes a while to change.

As Nina became more aware when the internal critic was operating, she asked herself, "What's the intention of this part?  What is it trying to do?"

By looking at the internal critic in this way, Nina learned that there were times when the internal critic had something of value to express but, as mentioned before, it was expressing it in a skewed way.  Nina could stand back and look at her negative thoughts (the internal critic) and use her judgment to assess when to pay attention and when to gently put the thought aside.

Doing Parts Work and Mind-Body Psychotherapy
Parts work combined with mind-body psychotherapy is a gentle process.  We're never trying to squelch or get rid of a part.  Instead, we're recognizing that the part usually has a good intention, but there's a distortion involved and the part needs to be modified in a way so that it's more balanced.

Parts work helps with many different aspects of yourself.  It can be an angry part, a sad part, a fearful part, and so on.

Parts work combined with mind-body psychotherapy helps you to recognize how many different aspects of yourself are involved in you, and how the different parts can manifest at various times and in different ways.

It also helps to explain why you might feel many different feelings at the same time.  Before you recognize that you have many different aspects of self, this can be confusing.

Mind-body psychotherapy and parts work work well together in combination in dealing with difficult parts.

Getting Help in Therapy
If you feel overwhelmed by self blame that comes from a harsh internal critic, you could benefit from working with a therapist who does parts work and mind-body psychotherapy, like Somatic Experiencing.

If you work through the issues involved with your internal critic, it's possible to feel a heavy burden being lifted from you and you'll feel freer to live your life.

About Me
I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.