JUSTIFYING MISTAKES OR BLAMING OTHERS
Growing up in an unforgiving environment makes children defensive. They either actively defend by justifying their mistakes or blame someone else. When a child is asked to stop hitting his sibling, because he is afraid of getting punished, he blames the sibling. He says, “He hit me first.” This defensiveness is natural, but it is magnified by punishment. When a child isn’t afraid of punishment and a parent asks him to stop hitting, he will more readily listen and cooperate. He doesn’t feel a great need to blame others or justify his actions.
As adults, the only way we can learn to self-correct our behavior is by taking responsibility for our mistakes. As long as we justify our mistakes by blaming someone else, we cannot self-correct. Although we are adults, we behave like children who have been raised in an unsafe environment.
As long as we justify our mistakes by blaming someone else, we cannot self-correct.
Carol came to me for counseling. She didn’t know whether to stay with her new husband, Jack, or leave. On several occasions, he had become angry and then violent. The occasion that triggered her visit was when he had taken all of her belongings and thrown them out of the house. Later, he was remorseful and wanted her to come back. He clearly loved her when he wasn’t upset, but he probably wasn’t ready or capable of having an adult relationship.
She wanted to know what I thought. I told her I would need to talk with him. When they both came in for a session, I asked him if he would ever do this again. He was very definite in his response. He said, “What I did was wrong, but what she did was wrong, too. As long as she doesn’t say the things she said, then I will never become violent again.”
After much discussion, he would not budge. I tried to help him see that what he did was wrong no matter what she did to provoke it. Jack could not accept that, and, as a result, Carol was able to see clearly that he was too immature to be in a marriage. In Jack’s mind, his violent and abusive behavior was justified by Carol’s rejecting comments. As long as her behav ior justified his, he could not truly self-correct. Clearly, as a child, Jack didn’t grow up in a forgiving environment. He never learned to be responsible and to self-correct; instead, he learned to defend himself by blaming others.
When children don’t feel safe making mistakes, too much time, energy, and conversation is wasted on defending what happened, explaining why it happened, and what should happen because it happened. All this misery for both children and parents can be avoided by making it safe to make mistakes. When it is okay to make mistakes, instead of defending, children are open to listening to what parents want him to do. Looking back and trying to teach children what they did wrong is a dead-end street—it goes nowhere.
When it is okay to make mistakes, instead of defending, children are open to listening.
When we justify our mistakes and blame others for our problems, we reinforce the mistaken notion that we are powerless to solve our problems. When we make others responsible for our problems, we forfeit our power to heal our wounds, learn from mistakes, and proceed in our lives to get what we want.