Summary
Joe Hudson explains why blame — whether directed at others or at yourself — is fundamentally corrosive to relationships. He uses the humorous anecdote of a man who misses the toilet at night and thinks “she must have moved the toilet” to illustrate how reflexively we assign blame.
He argues that blame doesn’t work because it’s never truly accurate — you can always trace causation further back (to parents, grandparents, society, blood sugar). The real function of blame is to avoid feeling shame, but it never succeeds: we never walk away from blaming someone feeling great. Blame directed outward passes shame to the other person without motivating change; blame directed inward creates self-punishment that prevents genuine healing. The alternative is to drop blame entirely and focus on how you want to be together and move forward.
Key Concepts
Key Quotes
“At the beginning of the path you blame somebody else, in the middle of the path you blame yourself, and at the end of the path you don’t blame anybody.”
“We never walk away from blaming somebody and go, ‘I feel great, it’s their fault.’ It doesn’t relieve us of the shame.”
“If I blame you, I don’t feel better and I haven’t motivated you to fix anything. So what does it do? All it does is pass shame back and forth.”
“Every addict out there right now who knows they’re an addict is telling themselves that, and it’s not changing anything.”
“The question is how are you going to move forward. The question is how do we want to be together, what’s our shared vision.”
Transcript
T and I were in a therapist’s office earlier in our relationship and the therapist tells us the story about how one of his clients wakes up in the middle of the night, goes to the bathroom and starts to pee and misses the toilet and notices that his head says, “She must have moved the toilet.” And it’s funny because we have all done something like that where we’ve entrained ourselves in a relationship where something doesn’t feel right, something goes wrong, the other person must be responsible. And so that’s how corrosive blame is in a relationship. And so there’s this great saying that I love which is at the beginning of the path you blame somebody else, in the middle of the path you blame yourself, and at the end of the path you don’t blame anybody. And that’s a really critical part because usually what happens is if somebody stops blaming somebody else in a relationship then they start blaming themselves, or if they’re blaming themselves or not blaming the other person, and all of that is just as corrosive. Blaming you or blaming me in a relationship, both of those things are corrosive. So the reason that blame doesn’t work is because it’s not true. Like blame is not true. It’s like the same concept of trying to figure out like what’s exactly fair in a marriage — there’s just no way to find it. So am I going to blame you or am I going to blame your parents because of the way they raised you? Or am I going to blame your grandparents because of the way that they raised your parents? Am I going to blame the blood sugar that you have? Is it the way that your day went at work? What am I blaming? Is it your boss’s fault? Who am I blaming for this thing? Right, so there’s this idea that we have that if we find blame then we don’t have to be responsible. That’s the logical side. But what’s actually happening there is what we’re saying is we don’t want to feel the shame. So if I blame you I cannot feel the shame. But that never works in a relationship and that’s why blame is corrosive. So I blame you but I will feel even a little bit of shame for blaming you. We never walk away from blaming somebody and go, “I feel great, it’s their fault.” Right, like we’re not — yeah, we’re good. It’s like it doesn’t have — see, it’s your fault, but look at me, I’m not happy. That hasn’t relieved me of the shame. So that’s why the blame doesn’t work, because it doesn’t actually make you feel like you want to fix anything. If I blamed you, it’s like that’s not motivating. Right? Hey, you’re the one to blame, you’re right, I’m messed up. It’s not like, “Oh wow, yeah, we could fix this thing. Let’s do that together.” Or, “Yeah, I could fix this thing and I’ll be happier.” No, it’s “I’m bad.” So if I blame you, I don’t feel better and I haven’t motivated you to fix anything. So like what does it do? All it does is it just passes shame back and forth. Moreover, if I go and blame you, if I’m like okay, you’re wrong, and you accept it, eventually you’re going to be tired of being wrong all the time. You’re going to be like, “I don’t want to be wrong all the time.” And so either you’re going to be passive aggressive and start attacking me under the table, or you’re going to throw that shame back at me eventually. And then I’m going to be blamed, and on and on it goes. It’s like you’ve never seen someone say, “You know what, we got in this massive fight, I blamed the other person enough and now it’s all resolved.” Like that has never happened. So blame is just — it doesn’t work. But there’s something in our mind that says, “Yeah, but somebody’s wrong.” And I question that. I question that. Like if you need somebody to be wrong in a relationship, so then you’re married to or dating somebody who’s wrong. Is that a turn on? No. We’re just all humans and we’re all doing things and sometimes what we do is a match, sometimes what we do is not a match, and everything is a symptom of something else. So we often are told — let’s just take the worst case scenario, which is she cheated on me. Like that’s an easy one. I blame you for cheating on me. But yeah, the relationship was cold almost guaranteed before the cheating happened. Or she compulsively cheats because of daddy issues, and I got involved in that for some reason. Some way I was attracted into that relationship. And so is it really her fault? What was I accepting from the beginning? How did I remove my love so that she needed to go to somebody else? And if I do find out everything that’s wrong with the other person, then I haven’t fixed myself, which means I’m still going to be attracted to the next woman who’s going to — right? I have to look at what my role and responsibility in it is. And if I’m blaming someone else, I can’t do that. If I’m blaming myself, I can’t do that either. Because if I’m blaming myself, I’m being hard on myself and I can’t objectively look at it in a shame-free way where I want to actually improve it. So if I’m in a relationship and I’m saying, “I screwed up, I did it wrong, this is all my fault in this relationship,” one thing I’m doing is I’m abdicating any kind of accountability for the other person. So that’s going to be like — I’m basically telling them they’re weak, they’re not accountable, I’m better than them because I’m responsible for everything and they’re just along for the ride, as if they don’t have agency, they’re not their own human being. That’s demeaning. But the other thing that’s happening is that I am just doing that so I don’t have to feel something underneath. So I don’t actually have to feel the thing that’s underneath the blame, which is where my healing happens. My healing doesn’t happen by saying, “I’m bad, I’m messed up, I need to improve.” Because I can tell you every addict out there right now who knows they’re an addict is telling themselves that, and it’s not changing anything. I know that you right now, if I said to you, “Tell me about the five things that you wanted to have changed in the last decade that haven’t changed,” every single one of those things would be stuff that you shame yourself for, that you blame yourself for, that you say you’re bad for. So it doesn’t heal anything because it prevents you from feeling the emotion underneath, which is that feeling that you have to feel and move through to get through the trauma. That’s why blame is just corrosive as hell to a relationship. And it’s blaming you, blaming the other person — that all has to be let go. And the way to let that blame go is just really simple: it’s to see that it’s not real. It’s like, are they at fault, or is it their parents that are at fault, or is it their grandparents, or is it society, or is it social norms, or is it Beyoncé who taught you that you needed to have a ring on it? Like who is to blame for this thing? It doesn’t resolve anything. The question is how are you going to move forward. The question is focusing on how do we want to be together, what’s our shared vision. Blame — it’s elusive, it’s like perfection, it’s different for everybody. Anybody can have their point of view. The question is, are we able to be together? How do we want to be together? How do we want to love each other? And how do we get there? That moves you forward. Looking in the past and seeing who was wrong — just corrosive.