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I was at a meeting recently where a guy said, “I need to put down the blamethrower.” I laughed out loud—quite loud, actually. I was completely caught off guard by the cleverness of that phrase, and I even sighed a little bit wishing I had come up with it.
It’s a great word, isn’t it? Because when I play the blame game, I don’t gently assign blame. I don’t use a blame-letter or a blame-fax machine—I use a blameTHROWER. I start torching people, usually in my head but occasionally to somebody’s face. And guess what flamethrowers tend to leave in their wake? A lot of damage and a lot of things that got burned down.
I spent the next 24 hours trying to track how often I would assign blame on someone, and it was more than I thought. There actually weren’t a lot of giant things that caused terrible heartache and that I tried to blame on others. But there were so many little things that I immediately tried to pawn off on being somebody else’s fault.
As I tracked those instances, I noticed a boomerang effect in almost every example. My wife raised her voice at my 9-year-old for some shitty behavior, and a half-hour later, my 9-year-old raised her voice at me. I immediately got irritated with my 9-year-old, which resulted in me blaming my wife for teaching her to raise her voice. Did the two things have anything to do with each other? Maybe. Maybe not. Even if they did connect somehow, was it worth coming up with a blame theory? Definitely not. I did catch myself trying to look everywhere but in the mirror.
Since I heard that phrase, I also thought about how assigning blame for things might not even be a horrible thing sometimes… but it’s horrible to do it as a blameTHROWER. That phrase evokes the idea that you don’t just hold someone accountable, you burn them down entirely. Assigning blame might be healthy in some situations, but there’s almost no instance where I need a blamethrower. That’s going after somebody to an extreme.
I also spent the past few days thinking about the concept of never blaming anyone for anything. It doesn’t quite work 100 percent of the time, because you do need to occasionally hold someone’s feet to the fire—in a healthy way, of course. But when I was thinking about trying to not blame people or the world for things, I found myself letting go of mild transgressions much quicker. I found myself not making connections between a small mis-step from one of my kids and all the catastrophic thoughts that usually accompany assigning blame to them—I usually think, “She yelled at me, and it’s only going to get worse, and I need to fix this or I am going to have 50 years of hell in my future where she yells at me all the time and she also yells at her own kids, too.”
What I ultimately found is that the less I tried to lock in a blame strategy, the more I was able to move on. And I gotta say, I haven’t yet had an example where I looked back and thought, “I wish I had fired up my blamethrower more than I did.”
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
When the doctor finished applying the bandage to a minor injury to my eye, she asked if I would be driving myself home.
I responded, "Yes," to which she admonished me to be very careful since I had only one eye to use. "Doc," I said, "I've had plenty of experience driving with one eye open and one eye closed."
(Credit: Grapevine, October 2009, Jim O. of Waller, Texas)
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