Blame takes on a very similar pattern in intimate relationships.
When you blame your partner, you temporarily take the focus off of yourself and throw it onto the other person. Instead of taking responsibility for your part in the situation, you create a distraction – and a very effective one. Blame is the ultimate cop-out. But blame, when practised regularly, becomes an addiction.
Just like a “traditional” addiction, the need for blame escalates and begins to overtake our thinking. We can’t go an hour without a critical thought, or we look for reasons to blame whenever we can. It becomes our default go-to position.
But something else is also happening, and it’s a profound revelation.
Conflict creates a spike in adrenaline. Blame actually works faster than cocaine, because in less than a second, your body is energized from inside. When both partners engage in blame, it can serve as a substitute for whatever is lacking in the relationship – usually intimacy, sex, and connection.
Locking into blame creates intense feelings, but not the good kind. Rather than coming together to solve a problem, you “point fingers” at each other and try to climb over each other in the rush to “be right.”
Your senses get all fired up – just as they are when you’re making love – but with opposition rather than harmony.
Blame just fuels more disconnection and conflict. Science tells us that since adrenaline wears off quickly, it creates a vicious cycle where the couple keeps escalating the conflict in order to sustain the “high.” You’re trying to replace the joyful feelings of love, connection, and intimacy – with the destructive adrenaline of fighting, frustration, and pain.
Blame becomes our drug, and until we quit it – cold-turkey – we become slaves to it and our relationship will never flourish.
We can’t say it enough. You need to eliminate blame from your relationship, or you will never feel the joy and connection that you crave. A great book by Gay Hendricks, Conscious Living: Finding Joy in the Real World, will give you the tools you need to permanently break your addiction to blame. He’ll teach you how to effectively resolve problems – even fights that have been repeating for decades! – and grow closer and more connected than ever before.
When We End Blame, We Begin To Thrive
When we make the decision to eliminate blame from our lives, we will be amazed by the profound amounts of positive energy and vitality that replace it.
When you stop blaming, something magical – and maybe a little scary – happens: suddenly you have a lot more time on your hands!
Time to create the relationship you want together. Time for fun, and laughter. Time for your hobbies. Time for your kids. Time for self-care. For date nights.
Instead of focusing all your energy on “winning the argument” and “being right” and complaining about each other, you can now focus on what will make you happy and satisfied as a person and as a couple.
Where before, your mind was running in circles with critical thoughts, now you have the space to create. The cycle of addiction loses its grip, and intimacy rushes in to take its place.
How To Go From The Drama Of Conflict… To The Flow of Connection
Blame can be a difficult addiction to break, especially without the right road map. It has taken some people several years to figure out how to end blame and criticism in their relationship once and for all.
But now, after all the trial and error, they can teach you how to live and love blame-free. Gay Hendricks and his wife have been doing it for fifteen years, and they say “trust me, it is more fun and fulfilling than you ever imagined”.
In their highly recommended book, Conscious Living: Finding Joy in the Real World, they’ll show you exactly how they stopped their own addictive blame cycle right in its tracks… and replaced it with a commitment to expanding our individual creative potential.
They’ll also teach you the Blame Eliminator tool – a 2-step process for banishing blame from your relationship and raising the level of positive feelings you share with your partner.
You’ll be able to quickly pinpoint when you’re in a cycle of blame. They’ll show you how to recognize blame in your body, since when it comes to feelings, our bodies are much better and faster indicators than our brains.
And then, they’ll teach you how to replace the blame with what you’re really after: connection.
What couples don’t realize is that adrenaline, which drains and depletes you, is very different from the flow, or “harmonizing” hormones secreted when we are loving and feeling loved. And these hormones – unlike adrenaline – can be renewed and built on, time and again!
If you think that blame may be something that you or your partner may be addicted to, then instead, you want to liberate your harmonizing hormones. Once you understand these techniques and you’ve gone just one full day without blame, you’ll experienced huge shifts in your relationship.
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