Today in a conversation with my partner I finally realised that I had been living in blame for most of my life: blaming people, circumstances, and especially women. This blame was so normal for me that I did not even see that it had been running my life for so long. Until yesterday, if anyone had indicated that I was living in blame – or in other words not taking responsibility for myself and basically acting as a victim of life – I would have said they were completely off track.
So how did this all start? Where did it come from and how does this continue to play out even today?
It all started when I was very young. My mother, who was very sick, demanded that I make her happy, which was a mission impossible because nobody can make somebody else ‘happy.’
I then chose to withdraw to my own room, feeling a victim of the whole situation, thinking I was unable to solve it. I created my own little bubble of life, with dreams, music and creative activities like building with Lego and aircraft modelling. I became angry with my mother, that she had ruined my life and I blamed and disrespected her. The disrespect and anger played out in my irritation of the things she said or did throughout the whole of my life.
I consider I am an intelligent man, so on a mental level I knew I had to love my mother. But in my body there was anger and the blame, so I was mentally controlling this behaviour.
The big problem here is: if you blame, or even be angry with your mother, this is transferred to all relationships with women. This stems from a fundamental psychological law: the relationship you have with your mother is the model you use to relate with other women. So, in a very subtle way I started to be angry with all women without even being conscious of it.
After this conversation, calling out my blaming behaviour, actually renouncing it, I felt like a huge weight was released from my body. I felt my body filling with a warm quality and the colour in my skin immediately changed from pale to more brownish. My hands, parts of my arms, my feet started tingling. What was happening? Then I felt sharp pains in several parts of my body and realised what was actually happening:
Blame had been the ultimate protection of not wanting to feel my own hurts, my feelings of discomfort in my body.
For years I have been saying that I wanted to heal my hurts. Being a student of The Way of The Livingness I understood very well that my hurts were my buried unresolved emotional issues and were the opening gates through which non-loving energy could manifest itself.
When touched upon, I have cried about some of my hurts, but normally if anyone came into contact with them, most often my dear partner, I immediately would turn the attention towards her, not wanting to feel my hurt. In hindsight it was blame in action. I basically said every time a hurt was revealed: “You are the one causing me to feel miserable, weak and sad and I became angry and defensive”… at first openly irritated, sometimes angry, but I learned to manage this anger because I knew that was not how I was supposed to act as a ‘good’ man.
I became a very sophisticated and ‘nice’ man – a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
But when this behaviour kicked in, I thought in anger and walked in anger. And sometimes I exploded; my charade dropped and showed how very angry and frustrated I was feeling on the inside – believing “Whatever I do you are never satisfied with me, why can’t you be happy with me? Stop criticising me!”… or something in that style.
It was the little boy speaking, and my partner had turned into my mother. I understood mentally that I was still playing the same game, just as I did as a boy, but could not find a way to stop this. Better said, I chose to not find a way out, not wanting to see and deal with the root cause and feeling the deep hurt which was underneath.
Meanwhile my beautiful relationship was like a war every now and then, seeing my partner as the enemy when I chose to go into this blame pattern again.
I even aligned with a friend of mine so that we could ‘support’ each other in our struggling relationships, as he was also in a relationship that was not going so well. But it was no support, because basically we were talking in anger and frustration about “how women play these insidious games” and we were always “the bad-guys.”
When we want to hang onto a behaviour, do not want to let go, and if we are not honest, we will seek the support of the exactly those people that support the very behaviour we don’t want to let go of.
I chose to hang onto blame. And when there is blame, there can be no love.
Of course I understood I should not blame and not play being a victim. This was a mental concept that I understood very well. The reality was: I did not live this. This pattern was so ingrained in my body, and the thing I was doing was controlling and suppressing this behaviour with mental discipline, and that just does not work.
In hindsight I could have easily observed the anger, the hate, the disrespect, the not wanting to take responsibility and seeing myself as a victim, which was all caused by living in blame.
Examples are:
- When any of my numerous relationships ended – even though I saw my own part in it – I concluded that she was not the true love I was seeking and/or there was something wrong with her.
- Not really wanting to hear with my whole body when my partner pointed out my unloving behaviours.
- Withdrawing in self-pity and victimhood when my partner had pointed out something I had “done wrong.”
- Being glad to leave for work, after my partner and I had another argument.
- Being glad to go shopping, or do chores so I could avoid my partner.
- Eating things to feel better, just like a drug addict who thinks that the drug is the only thing that can make him feel better: a victim in action.
- Blaming one of the directors in a company I used to run, or all the things that he did wrong even though I was the one who employed him and did not take the responsibility to correct him or to let him go when the time was right.
The days after the ‘letting go of blame,’ more miracles followed. People around me observed my eyes opened up more, people expressed that they saw more love in me and that I walked in a different more, gentle loving way.
When I place things down the way I used to do it now feels hard in my body, so I changed these movements. I felt I could, and that I had the power to hold the connection with myself, feeling an almost constant radiation of love in my hands. Sometimes it went away – for example when I got absorbed or distracted in a discussion – but then I could bring the feeling back easily.
I even started laughing more, about myself too, so much so that tears would roll down my face!
Hardness out – love in.
Is this blame pattern now resolved? Sometimes it still creeps in, when somebody and especially my partner, points out something I have done in an unloving or irresponsible way. I then get this uncomfortable feeling in my body because I know I have made an irresponsible choice. Accepting now that I have the choice to feel in full and not shift the attention to someone else, instead of silently blaming them because I have perceived they are making me feel so awkward and knowing it is me who has to deal with the higher level of self-responsibility.
So thank you deeply Sylvia, my dearest partner, for pointing out this ugly pattern of blame – that I have been carrying around for such a long time and even considered to be my normal.
Choosing to let ‘blame’ go has changed my life and my body, and continues to do so. I am a powerful man, an adult and I know I can deal with anything and any hurt that surfaces in my life. There’s no need to defend what is there to be felt; I know I can handle it.
I know and feel that our relationship can blossom AT LAST.
Published with permission of my partner, Sylvia Brinkman.
By Willem Plandsoen, MsC, Sales consultant, Business owner and dedicated student of The Way of The Livingness
Further Reading:
Relationships are always about evolving – the key to making relationships work
Breathing my Own Breath
Having The Right to React?
271 Comments
So often our knee jerk reaction when someone brings up something that we don’t like is to either blame them immediately or to say ‘yeah well, you, blah, blah, blah………….” And then what happens is a rapid fire back and forth that gets neither person anywhere other than in a strop.
ha ha I so agree and feel ashamed to say I have done that way too often but I love that you have offered a perspective that is more observational than self-bashing.
To share the transformation that you have lived with such honesty, openness and rawness is absolutely beautiful.
Very cute Willem, and I particularly enjoyed the latter paragraphs and the freedom you so obviously feel having let things go and just allowing / enjoying yourself.
Thank you Willem for expressing your appreciation towards your partner – it is very beautiful and deeply healing. I am inspired.
Brilliant blog Willem. So important to get these emotions out in the open. Your blog is also helping me look at my relationship/s in the same way. We can often recognise aspects of ourselves in someone else sharings. Especially when it gets uncomfortable. It really feels like you have let go of something rather big and good for you. I look forward to hearing more of your experiences.
A very honest understanding of how important our relationships with our children are because they form the foundation of all our adult relationships. The fact that you have been empowered to recognise the quality of the relationship you had with your mother and hence release yourself from it is immense, a true turning point for the whole of humanity Willem, because when one person achieves this, you make it possible for everyone to do so too.
Willem, I love your openness and honesty in this blog, reading it makes me realise how easy it is to blame others and to not truly listen and take responsibility for our behaviours.
Yes it is so easy to jump into the blame game but if we do we do not heal what is being shown to us in that moment.
Men are often very competitive with each other, which can result in them keeping what others may consider to be their ‘weaknesses’ to themselves and flaunting their strengths. The fact that you have stood up Willem and for all intents and purposes ‘aired your dirty laundry’ in public is a reflection of true inner strength and personal solidity.
Willem, what you have shared is very powerful indeed. You have been able to identify a deeply ingrained pattern of behaviour and it’s origin and through that recognition you have been able to shift it. Even if we don’t share the exact same behaviour as you, your description of the shedding process is very supportive for any of us that have ingrained behaviours. It is through sharings like this that we truly support others to evolve. Brilliant stuff.
Thank you for this wonderfully honest sharing Willem. The ‘blame game’ is one of the most insidious and destructive games of all, and we all have probably played it to certain degrees in our lives; I know I did. But what I can say with all honesty, is that once I started to take a long look at my part in anything that was playing out in my life, I could see that the blaming was simply a way to absolve myself of any responsibility, and by choosing to take responsibility for my own choices and my own actions, the need to blame others began to dissolve; and that felt so very freeing from a very suffocating behaviour.
“I am a powerful man, an adult and I know I can deal with anything that surfaces in my life. There’s no need to defend what is there to be felt; I know I can handle it. ” The true mark of an adult and a Gentleman Willem, thank you for sharing. True adulthood is knowing how to remain steady, open and calm when people expose the uncomfortable and we don’t get lost in it or attempt to run away, but stand with our hands up in the knowing that the learnt behaviour that is being exposed is not who we truly are but a strategic game of survival needed as a kid, which can finally and thankfully be relinquished.
What a healing you have given yourself here Willem (with the help of your partner), it just goes to show that if we are willing to see and be honest then we can heal ourselves.
‘When we want to hang onto a behaviour, do not want to let go, and if we are not honest, we will seek the support of the exactly those people that support the very behaviour we don’t want to let go of’ This is so true . I have noticed this in my own life occasionally when there have been big decisions to be made – it’s a game we play that serves no one.
Stunning sharing Willem, very raw, honest and inspiring.
This beautifully and simply exposes the devastating imprint that blame has on our body –
“Hardness out – love in”.
Your story is so relatable, Willem. I am sure many of us have used blame to avoid going beneath the hurt and to stay in our pattern, and your honesty in sharing your process in such details is very inspiring. Thank you, Willem.
Awesome honesty and sharing of the unravelling of the ‘blame game’ and its insidious harm to all.
I find your willingness to be honest, open and transparent very touching here, Willem. Much can be learnt from reading about your experience and applying it to our own lives.
I have found that when we are willing to be “honest, open and transparent”, although in the first instance we may feel very exposed and uncomfortable, it is so worth it when we see and feel the magic that begins to unfold within us, and around us.
It is a very interesting observation you make here Willem that when we have a hurt or issue we don’t want to heal or deal with that we seek out others to collude with us in the issue and so the moaning and complaining becomes a normal part of life.
I find it interesting too how we call upon others to justify our actions. I am aware that I carry out this behaviour by giving examples of others to give me the comfort I am seeking when I feel hurt. I am also aware of seeing this game being played out in others. Boom – bullying is created but whether we play the victim or perpetrator we always have a part we have chosen to play in the game til we master what it is that is being asked of us.
As a result we can totally justify our own behaviours, whilst being completely blinded to anyone else. Collusion is the right word.
It seems to me that appreciation is the very opposite of judgement and blame, and I could illustrate this here by deeply appreciating such a raw and honest sharing of your painful experiences here Willem and celebrating with you in the joy of the greater love that returns to fill the space made when we renounce such ugly patterns. These are intense yet loving times we live in where the opportunities for getting to more of these core issues abound. Thank you for sharing.
It is very liberating when I look at and feel my hurts rather than playing the victim and trying to soothe and comfort myself. Comfort doesn’t let those hurts heal, they get worse.
Beautiful sharing Willem to which I can relate so much. Blame may protect one from feeling one’s hurts but it does not resolve them, it fact it not only compounds them it is also a dense filter preventing the flow of love in and out.
I can so relate to this. Not because I ever blamed my mother for anything, I did not in fact the very opposite, I chose to not see her neediness nor the manipulation that it incited. But I blamed my father instead for not expressing love to my mother nor to his children and basically living withdrawn from life. I blamed him and chose to withdraw myself instead of bringing all of me to life. Then when 17, a girlfriend called time on our relationship when she went to university and I not only blamed her for this, I blamed all women for a very long time. I thought that this was now cleared but this blog has me wondering whether it was completely healed or whether I have allowed a remnant to remain.
It’s interesting how we look at our parents’ relationship and judge them and blame one more than the other. I know I struggled with my parents’ relationship and chose to leave home at seventeen. Now I have more of an understanding of how they became the people they did and why they stayed together.
I love your willingness to unravel what is not working in your life Willem and how you describe it is always so helpful and tangible.
I love your honesty here Willem not easy for someone to go to and as you share we try to avoid these feelings. Also it just goes to show the importance of truly healing our hurts otherwise 30, 40, 50 or even 60 years later they are still running in our body and affecting our life, the way we feel about ourselves and all of our relationships.
Great observation Vicky – how many decades get wasted on our journey through life, and so how important is it that not only do we live everything we know to be true, but reflect that back to others that it is possible to change and let go of our past hurts.
“Choosing to let ‘blame’ go has changed my life’ and now is the time to live that change, as it is for us all.
A beautiful honest sharing of the life long effects of our hurts and blaming others and the reality of true acknowledgement and healing that can change everything and allow love into our lives truly. Thank you Willem this is so supportive for anyone who reads this and opens up so much to be seen.
‘Hardness out – love in.’ The absolute miracle of getting deeply honest and nominating patterns of behaviours that haven’t served and renouncing them.
Yes energy is very scientific and precise when you think about it.
Willem I so love your honesty and willingness to share your ‘blame game with us’. I am learning how complex blame can be and how much we use it to manipulate and hold back not only ourselves but all relationships.
“Blame had been the ultimate protection of not wanting to feel my own hurts, my feelings of discomfort in my body.” This is rampant throughout society. How beautiful it is that you’ve got to the root of your blaming and are healing those hurts, to blossom once again. Thankyou for sharing Willem.
It is interesting to observe how different we feel and even appear to others once we have healed an old hurt. There is more light in our bodies and hence more light in our faces and our eyes. It is very lovely to see and appreciate.
Blame is a very destructive force in a relationship primarily because it is about trying to deny responsibility rather than accept it. To me blame is a dead end street, whereas responsibility is the road to the freeway. My feeling…and experience…is that if we ask ourselves ‘what’s my part in this?’ first before trying to apportion blame to others, our relationships are on a much more healthy foundation.
I love the ageless wisdom teaching that there is never ever anyone else to blame but ourselves. Realising that we ourselves are at the root of everything that happens to us is a key learning and one that I am constantly having to remind myself of.
You have truly grown into the gentle giant that has always resided within you.
Most beautifully said Steve.
Blame clouds our understanding of the energy that is driving us.
It is so easy to blame others, then we don’t have to look at or own responsibility and our part we play in the situation. Well done Willem for being open enough to go there and expose this pattern you had. It is hugely supportive for others.
Blame is so commonplace in our society that we don’t actually recognise it. We habitually blame people in our families, at work, in our friendship groups, in the local council, in government, in positions of power worldwide etc. So much of our conversation consists of blame and so little of it is about us taking responsibility for anything at all. We seem to be literally unable to consider the fact that any mess that we’re involved in has something to do with us.
We are always going to blame another if we choose to hang onto hurts from our childhood. The relationship we have with our mother and father is a wonderful reflection of how we are in every relationship. When we heal what is there to be healed throughout childhood no matter our age it no doubt has a profound impact on our relationship with every man and woman we are in relationship with and not just those closest to us.
If we choose our parents to; be supported by them, or to support them and we give in to outside forces and call them hurts, we will always have the choice to heal the hurts we carry.
Very healing to nominate all your discoveries, Willem. A key to getting the issues out of the body and healing any relationship for sure!
Amazing – what a transformation after letting go of the shackles of victimhood and the ingrained from childhood pattern of blaming all and sundry for a lack of responsibility that is only ever our own.
As a woman and a mother, I found this very hard yet also beautiful to read, Willem. I’m also an ex-wife and from this angle, I can appreciate how easy it potentially can be to project the loss of true connection with your partner/husband onto your children. There’s no doubt about how the carrying of blame affects the body. This is an insidious cycle that needs more exposure and I’m very glad you’ve expressed here so openly as I can also feel how in walking around in blame all those years, has kept you absent not only from your wife, but all of us. Taking responsibility for our Livingness and conscious presence is paramount to all our relationships.
Willem this is such a beautiful blog and I am in awe at your willingness to be so honest and expose what I know I feel has been directed at me by my partner. If anyone is open to really connecting to what you share this blog could be their saving grace. What a joy and absolute blessing you bring from your heart and a big Thank You from mine 💓
Yes indeed, this is a truly awesome sharing that lifts the lid on a no go subject and offers everyone an opportunity to reflect and heal themselves.