Blaming and Blamers

Reza Hossein Borr

Blaming is to pass responsibility of the faults and mistakes to others. Accepting the fact that the person is responsible for a mistake or a fault requires enormous courage. At the same time it requires punishment. If you accept that you have done a mistake you have to accept that you must be punished for it. Although the fault may not be a criminal act yet taking responsibility for even a small mistake means that you do not know how to do things and therefore, you have to learn how to do them.

It is not easy for people to accept that they don't know how to do things and therefore they do not blame their ignorance but they blame others while they may be possibly completely innocent. At the same time when a person transfers the blame to other people, he reduces the scale of guilt that must be felt after any mistake or fault.

Blaming usually starts from childhood. These are the children who blame each other for different mistakes they do. The reason is quite clear. The children do not know how to do things and therefore when they do something wrongly they will be immediately the target of punishment. The more a child is the target of punishment for committing mistakes the more the person will deny doing any mistake and therefore when a mistake is done it is imperative that somebody has done it but who has done it, that is the big question. The blame game starts here. The children begin to blame each other because they are scared or they do not know how to handle it. When a lot of them played the blame game nobody knows who has done the mistake. The person who is responsible for correcting a mistake will be confused and would avoid punishing all. This is the beginning of feeling immune collectively.

As the children grow they are supposed to be trained to learn different ways of doing things. As they learn more skills for doing things, they reduce the number of blames. But if the children do not learn the skills of doing different things, they continue to blame others for their mistakes. There are many adults that use blaming as a way of protecting themselves. The problem with the adults is that they may not learn sufficient skills for accomplishing different tasks. Our daily experiences show that the adults who have learnt fewer skills than the rest will continue to blame others. If you compare two different kinds of people, one that accepts responsibility and one that does not accept responsibility and blames others, you would know very clearly that the one that accepts responsibilities is the kind of person who is ready to learn from his mistakes and learn more skills to avoid the same mistake or other mistakes in future. But the person who blames others is usually a person who is very slow in learning or in fact very reluctant to learn new skills. They hardly read books. They hardly seek advice and they hardly go forward and say, "Yes, it was my fault and I am going to redress it."

Reliable researchers show that some adults will stay in the state mind of a child even when they get old. All of us would retain some of our childhood qualities but some of us retain more of these qualities and therefore, our behaviour looks childish in certain areas of life. Blamers blame others because they think like children even if they are adults. That part of their brain that needs accepting responsibility does not grow and therefore, these people will react like children when it comes to wrongdoings. Instead of developing the skills of coping with mistakes and correcting them, the blamers blame others just because they cannot cope with the scope of blame they would receive when they accept responsibility for any wrongdoing.

In many cases, the blamers are not aware that they are blaming others; because this has become a habit and compulsory reaction to encounters that may be considered aggressive. To reduce the level of blaming means to reduce the level of aggressive encounter. Blamers are usually good people that think they have been victimised and therefore, the person or the elements that have victimised them, must take the responsibility for their blaming attitude.

Reza Hossein Borr is an NLP Master Trainer and a leadership consultant and the creator of 150 CDs and 14 Change management models. He is also the author of Manual Success, Manual of Coaching and Mentoring, Motivational Stories that Can Change Your Life, and a New Vision for the Islamic World. He can be contacted by email: www.sarawani@aol.com www.rezaaa.com