Blame, Causation, Responsibility

There are three ideas I’ve found myself naming with clients recently, three ideas that seem to get mixed up with each other but are really very distinct: Blame, Causation, and Responsibility.

These three ideas also capture three stages many clients go through as they progress through therapy work.

Let’s take a look at each one to see what they mean for therapy and how they differ from each other.

Blame

Blame is where I find most clients when they first start therapy, most frequently self-blame.

Blame has to do with finding fault, pointing out who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. It’s a very black-and-white perspective, leaning too far to either the extreme that we have no control over our situation (this is someone else’s fault) or that we have all the control in a situation (this is my fault).

Black-and-white thinking tends to happen when we go through something overwhelming or threatening, and our brain doesn’t have time to sort through the gray areas. It needs to go into a very basic safe/not-safe mentality in order to survive.

It also tends to be our mindset when we’re younger, when we don’t have enough context to make sense of the world in all its complexity and ambiguity.

But as adults beginning to understand our own history, we have the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve experienced, and to come to a more complete understanding of our own history and how that history has impacted us.

Causation

The best thing to do with blame is to just drop it as soon as possible. It’s just not capable of providing us with a complete or accurate story about ourselves or what we’ve experienced.

Part of the reason is that the world is too interconnected for single causes. 

Anything we experience is made up of multiple causes, each one acting as an ingredient, or just a part of the story. No single ingredient is enough to cause or prevent an occurrence. And yet each ingredient is also a contribution to the final result.

Let’s say we’re walking through the woods and a tree branch falls on us, injuring our leg. While we’re in the hospital recovering, we think back over the incident and try to figure out why it happened and how we can keep it from happening again.

We might start with blame. Maybe it’s my fault it happened because I chose to walk in those woods on that day at that time. Maybe it’s the weather’s fault because it’s been raining so much and the tree branch was heavy with rain water. Maybe it’s the wind’s fault for blowing hard enough to break the branch.

None of these explanations is really helpful or accurate. We can’t reach a full explanation by looking for fault.

What we can do is build a narrative recognizing all the causes that contributed to the situation. I was walking in that spot. The branch was heavy. The wind was blowing. Gravity exists. 

Therapy can help us move from an overly simplistic, black-and-white narrative about ourselves and our past to a more complex and accurate narrative that takes into account the many contributing factors making up our history.

We can recognize the impact of our culture, our environment, our community, our family, our close relationships, our genetics, our choices, our experiences, all of which add to who we are today.

Responsibility

In the end, after developing a fuller narrative and a more accurate recognition of causes for our situation, we are ultimately responsible for what happens next.

Before we go any further, however, I want to take a moment to recognize what this word is really all about.

Responsibility is not another word for blame. Saying “I am responsible” is not saying “I am at fault”.

Look at the word itself. Response-Ability.

Responsibility is our ability to respond to our current situation. This is again where blame falls short. An inaccurate black-and-white narrative about ourselves or our history limits our ability to respond to that history. A more accurate narrative allows us to have a greater ability to respond.

We are not to blame for what has happened to us, and neither is anyone else. But we can come to recognize the many contributing factors that each acted as an ingredient in the complexity of our history. And finally, we get to make choices about how we want to respond to that history. 

We have the ability to respond to what we’ve been through and to where we are right now as a result. We have the opportunity to express our existential freedom by making choices within the limits of our situation.

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