eThoughts : April 1, 2008: Blame and Fault

It can be an interesting human characteristic to find fault and assign blame. Sometimes such endeavors are appropriate, as in murder, robberies, car accidents, and those who lie for gain at the expense of others, such as politicians (Henry Kissinger was reputed to have said that “ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation”), sales people, car mechanics, contractors, etc. However, most human interactions do not involve those kinds of behaviors, they mostly involve interactions of another kind—how we relate to one another in interpersonal situations. And that is the focus of this little piece.

How is it that if we do not get what we want from another person, we have to organize and mount an assault on their character—or our own? It is one thing to ask questions and quite another to point fingers. And it is perfectly clear that the role of constructive memory—making crap up and believing it—is a huge part of finger pointing.

If you’ve read Renewal, you might know that I’ve had to learn this myself—and relatively recently. I can tell you that I’ve a lot more energy since I gave up blaming others in interpersonal interactions for what I don’t get from them, even when they seemed to have promised it. We all want to be accepted, even embraced. And we all make mistakes. Tricky ground there. What if we learned to walk away without organizing an assault when it is clear that interpersonal misrepresentations of reality are a pattern, rather than a moment? Or, what if we backed off enough to only get involved on lesser levels?

And what if we’re the ones misrepresenting the reality of our own interpersonal interactions—pointing fingers like we’ve been abandoned? Why is it difficult to delete our cache and re-load our reality page? Are we afraid that we’ll lose momentum in our quest for righteousness? Are we afraid that we might rise above the fray and not have the excuses to remain a lesser being? After all, not all organizational assaults and finger pointing are about being better and knowing more, some is about remaining an underling and a “poor me.”

Managing interpersonal relationships can be a Cirque du Soleil act. However, if we or someone else drops some interpersonal plates while going for the interpersonal plate-spinning record, we simply dropped some plates, not our humanity. What does it really serve to call it otherwise?

A theme commonly embraced by personality theorists is that the very same self-system designed to protect the self, makes change nearly impossible. And giving up a self-destructive pattern will likely feel like the death of one’s self, even if it is actually a new birth. Ahh, the rantings of the womb ecologist, who is speaking the truth about the collapse of the environment, is difficult to ignore. But sometimes a truth is actually a lie, designed to avoid a dying that is really a growing.

Saying no does not have to mean rejection of another, it could actually reflect only the feelings of the one saying no—as in their own uncomfortableness. To take it further and assign blame, is to misapply meanings and construct “facts,” which misfiled, will be falsely recalled as truths. Listening honestly to another is not the same as hearing the scream in ourselves, any more than listening honesty to ourselves is not the same as hearing the scream of others. That screaming about being left to drown in this or that pit is a major distraction which can override the sound and feeling of centeredness, from which we’re more likely to see both the honesty and dishonesty of the interaction. We may not have gotten what we want from another, but we may have actually learned—a trait that is not about rejection, but about embrace. Isn’t that the direction we really wanted before we got thrown off by attending only to our own or another’s perceived loss?

While we’re busy attending to our carbon footprint, we might remember to pay a bit of attention to our interpersonal footprint—did we tread respectfully or stomp mercilessly?

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