Shame & Blame! How to Play The Game And Not Be Played!

A lot of people never learn the rules of shame and blame, which is exactly why the game works. You can be maneuvered into feeling responsible for something another person did, and the maneuvering happens so smoothly you rarely catch it. For some people it functions as a tool: they shift the fallout from their own behavior onto you before anyone can pin it on them. Sometimes the trick runs in reverse. They get caught doing something, then spin it so you end up believing they were really doing you a favor.

Blame assigns fault for a bad act to a particular person, and the expectation is that the person should then feel ashamed. Things get slippery when you are the target and you have no idea the game is even in play. The people most prone to being shamed tend to be the ones who mean well. Someone with worse intentions can push a well-meaning person into guilt without that person ever realizing it, because the well-meaning person is too busy apologizing and trying to fix a mistake that may not have been theirs.

When shame lands, deserved or not, people react in a handful of predictable ways. Some try to forget the whole thing, which can amount to repression. Some conceal it. Some get angry and strike back at the accuser, with words or sometimes worse. And some swallow the blame, or part of it, and sink into feeling low about what they supposedly did or failed to do. Brene Brown, Ph.D., called these reactions shame shields in a free continuing education seminar titled On The Armour We Use To Protect Ourselves And Why It Doesn't Serve Us.

A quick aside on children, since the pattern touches how we raise them. Kids are not pawns, and their needs come ahead of your own. If you are not ready to give far more than you receive, parenting may not be for you. Putting a child first often means inconvenience, sacrifice, and no immediate reward. Done well, the payoff arrives years later: children who can usually support themselves, who raise decent kids of their own if they choose to, and who may one day thank you for it.

The opening move for people who play this game is almost always to point the finger, at you or at someone nearby, rather than at themselves. It deflects responsibility for whatever they actually did, or for whatever you have been led to think you did. They tend to flare up fast, before you or whoever they are targeting has a second to think, which pushes you straight onto the defensive. The blame bounces off them and lands on you. They are often skilled enough at this that you accept the setup without question, so stay alert and don't take on fault that was never yours.

Have you ever lost an argument this way? Or won one? Either outcome usually leaves confusion behind, both for the people directly involved and for anyone who hears about it later. The shame tends to arrive right away and then linger, sometimes for days, sometimes for years. I once had a stepsister-in-law, an alcoholic, who would phone her mother while drunk and hold her responsible for everything that had gone wrong in her life, most of it the result of her own choices rather than her mother's.

She tore into that woman over things the woman had never been able to control, like a husband who abandoned her with three children to raise during the Depression. My stepsister-in-law was so practiced at transferring blame that I would call her dangerous, and our children were never left with her unless another trustworthy adult stayed in the room. Even then we kept them away as much as we could, because they didn't need to absorb the things she said. She had another move too: the moment her isolation became obvious, she could play wounded. One fair thing to add is that she occasionally made dolls by hand for our kids, who still have them, so it wasn't all bad.

Shame can register instantly as a bad feeling that comes from the amygdala, the part of the brain built for fast reaction with no thinking attached, the way a startled cat lashes out. That region handles emergency responses in the body, and it likely fires before you ever reach the part of the brain that asks why you feel bad, or good. Think of all the moments you felt there was no time to think and simply reacted. I am not scolding anyone for immediate shock or grief in a genuine tragedy. Some feelings are physical responses that let you act quickly when an emergency demands it.

Have you ever been played like a piano when shame or blame enters the picture? Sometimes another person does it to you, and sometimes you do it to yourself, running old scripts written by things that happened long ago. My own script says I have done something wrong without having known at the time that it was wrong. Maybe it was something foolish or careless, or something a person got furious about even though there was nothing I could have done differently in that moment.

Relationships get wrecked carelessly this way. Perhaps the other person believes they are competing with someone like me for a desired person's love or loyalty. I can end up feeling deeply guilty and mourning a relationship that mattered, one someone else apparently wanted for themselves. I can't shake the thought that the person involved with my friend never knew, or never admitted, that she had a hand in my loss and my friend's loss too. This runs into the territory of drama, which I have written about elsewhere on the blog. Doreen Virtue covers that ground in Don't Let Anything Dull Your Sparkle: How to Break Free of Negativity and Drama, a book that explains the subject clearly and ranges widely across it. She has also written The Yo-Yo Diet Syndrome: How to Heal and Stabilize Your Appetite and Weight, on eating disorders, and The Courage To Be Creative: How to Believe in Yourself, Your Dreams, and Ideas, and Your Creative Career Path, which seems to echo where my own interest in writing began. As with most good writers, you may not take to everything she produces, but she works across enough subjects that something is likely to reach you. Both titles come from Hay House publishers.

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