Blaming Your Parents

Posted by Stephan on February 28, 2010 under Me Thinking, My Personal Therapy |

That one’s a bummer. I have read some stuff related to that topic but there were a lot of different opinions. The topic is also handled in rather a lot of movies and tv show, but mostly in the way of the spoiled child blaming its poor innocent parents. In Two and a half men it’s maybe the most neutral one if have seen so far since there it goes both ways. You can see that Charly and his brother Alan do have a point when they are blaming their mother but also that they are often exaggerating a bit too much.

Because of my complex posttraumatic stress disorder I am very related to this topic and therefore have been thinking a lot about it. But without reaching a satisfying conclusion by now.

One of the problems is that whether or not you are right, blaming someone else doesn’t help and usually has even a negative effect on yourself. First, the thing happend and can’t be undone. Next part is that you are giving up your responsibility.

But. On the other hand if your parents did terrible stuff to you and you think of them as nice and loving people, you are just denying reality. And that wont help you neither.

Lets take a step backwards and approach this by an easier example. Someone hits you in the face out of nowhere. It was not your fault that you where hit and now you are injured. Blaming the person who hits you wont make the wound disappear. Any negative emotion towards this person will only damage yourself, like lowering your immun system and stuff. But emotions have a cause. Being angry at someone who hit you is only natural. It is an internal reaction of your body, that was developed before we had a civilization, even before we were humans. If you were attacked by an other animal you had to choose as fast as possible whether to fight, run away or do something else.

So in the moment of being hit your emotional or instinctual reaction can be very useful. And it is also useful to save this information for future reference, to know this animal or person is dangerous, pay attention. But this saved information can also be hindering in your everyday life, because it also depends on how you saved it. If it was the product of a logical conclusion it will probably be positive. But if it was saved subconsciously and linked with the emotional reaction there is a fat chance that the negative effect will outweigh the positive one.

Now back to the parents situation. It follows the same rules but is much more complex. They nurtured and protected you and stuff and are therefore saved as nice and trustworthy people. But if they did some terrible stuff to you this information gets all tangled up. As a child, chances are very small, that you will be able to create a logical and sophisticated conclusion from everything that happened to you. But if something that’s not nice happens to you, you certainly don’t want it to happen again. Since your parents are saved as trustworthy there must be a good cause for them to do something terrible to you, so in may cases the child will blame the fault on itself.

But the important part is that the saved information will be linked to the emotional reaction. Like judging youself for being such a bad person, fear that it will happen again, suppressed anger, and stuff like that.

Now we fast forward. The child is now a messed up grownup. Lets compare that to the example of being hit and look at the differences and the similarities.

• both create an emotional reaction
• in both cases it wasn’t your fault
• in both cases you now have an injury in some kind of way
• in both cases you have to deal with that injury
• in both cases the injury wont go away by blaming anyone

So why the blaming? No. Better question. Is there anything positive about blaming your parents?

Hmm. I think there might be. As mentioned it probably happens very often that the child blames itself. So in that context blaming your parents could be seen as a reassurance for yourself that you are not crazy. A step into the direction of getting a grip back on reality. And that can be very important. Because not only ones parents are the measurement of what’s normal and what’s not for a little child, but also the whole social circle. Like other relatives and friends and acquaintances of the parents. If they don’t intervene when the parents are doing some terrible stuff to the child it only adds to the picture that what the parents are doing is alright.

So blaming might be a way of getting the blame from yourself back to where it belongs. But this can only be one of the steps of letting go, else this too will get unhealthy.

Since I now have too think about this and possible following steps and stuff … that’s it.