Playing the Blame Game

They say that you can’t blame your parents for your choices. You’re a grown up. You need to take responsibility for your decisions, your actions, your words. It’s fruitless to blame your parents. After all, you are making those choices. Your parents aren’t standing there telling you what to do

Hopefully.

However, if you look at the most recent family, genetics, psychology, and trauma research, it’s more complicated than blame.

There are so many different things that I could say about all of this. I’ll try to keep it as simple and practical as I can and give you a bunch of book recommendations at the end so you can do the research and not just take my word for it.

I’m going to get a fresh cup of tea before I start in on my explanation.

I’ll be right back.

Alright. Tea is steeping. I stretched my back, checked on the pups. They’re sleeping.

They heard me typing that and they needed to go out. Go figure.

Let’s talk about food

Look back at your childhood.

What kind of food did your family eat at Christmas?

My family always ate the same food at Christmas that we did at Thanksgiving.

When I first told my husband this he was shocked. “But that’s Thanksgiving food!”

They traditionally ate a Christmas breakfast because his mom worked at the hospital on Christmas.

When my dad’s family gets together, someone has to make Grandma’s potatoes au gratin.

Right now, my siblings and I are planning a family Christmas weekend and we’re trying to decide what food we absolutely have to have there. We’ve determined that we definitely have to have a lot of olives and cranberry sauce shaped like a can.

Let’s save the cranberry sauce debates for later.

What you think of as a “must” for a holiday dinner–or even comfort food for that matter–pretty much depends on how you were raised.

Oatmeal habits

It’s kinda like that with other stuff, too, like habits. My mom used to make hot cereal every day. And I don’t generally like a lot of hot cereal especially oatmeal. But when I do have oatmeal, I like to spread it on toast.

I did it that once at my grandma’s house and she mentioned that my grandpa used to eat his oatmeal that way. I think I remember seeing my mom eat her hot cereal that way once. And now I eat my oatmeal that way as well.

I didn’t consciously realize that I was eating my oatmeal on my toast exactly like my mom ate her cereal on toast who may not have realized she was eating it exactly like her dad had done.

Were my grandpa still around, I’d ask him who inspired him to eat his oatmeal on toast.

All I knew when I gave it a shot was that I loved how the creaminess and saltiness of the butter gave a little extra something to the oatmeal.

So a seemingly small, innocent food choice was actually based on a habit of my grandpa’s he’d passed down to my mom.

If food choices and preferences are passed down like this in families, what about other stuff?

Stuff like guilt and shame.

Prejudices.

Abuse.

Racism.

Athletics.

Science.

Music.

Poetry.

It’s not just bad stuff. There’s good stuff that can get passed down, too.

But that’s usually the way not the way things go.

let’s go back in time

Think about it this way, your grandparents lived during the Great Depression during the 1930’s. Everybody was super stressed out about money and surviving and where food was going to come from because of the economic crash and all the craziness.

That could have shown up in so many different ways in your family down the road.

Your grandma could have saved every single margarine, cottage cheese, and sour cream tub she ever bought; so when you visited as a kid, every time you opened the fridge, you were never sure what was in any of the containers until you opened the lids.

Maybe your mom still saves containers.

Maybe you hang onto things because you never know when you might need something. You know that as soon as you toss it is the exact moment you’ll need it and you’ll have to go buy another one.

But maybe it isn’t quite so obvious

Perhaps it shows up as anxiety–an anxiety that’s always there. You have no idea why it’s there. But it’s pervasive in your family. You can look back at your grandparents and see the anxiety. You see it in your aunts and uncles and parents. It’s there in yourself.

It could be that your family just isn’t a “touchy-feely” family.

That could come from so many different places, but I’ll stick with the Great Depression for now.

Let’s assume that your grandparents, and possibly great-grandparents, were super stressed out due to the circumstances. Everybody was working who could get work. If food could be raised, it was. Every resource was used as well as it could be. Flour sacks were re-used and made into clothing.

Things like these can test even the strongest of relationships. What about the ones who weren’t so strong? Survival can give you tunnel vision. When someone is stuck in survival for a long time, other things just don’t matter if they aren’t prioritized and parts of relationships can be like that–like positive touching, like good hugs (as opposed to forced affection).

Even after the Great Depression ended and your grandparents enjoyed the prosperity that followed the end of the Second World War, they retained the emotional habits that they picked up during the Depression, which they passed on to your parents.

Your dad wasn’t exactly emotionally warm. His philosophy was, “I work all day to put food on the table. I don’t have to tell you that I love you.”

Normal, everyday physical affection just doesn’t come easily to you. Touching a friend on the arm when you’re having a conversation isn’t a thing you do. Hugging your best friend hello or goodbye is a very awkward experience for you. You have mixed feelings when you see your friends’ kids crawl up on their laps, and you wonder how they find being affectionate with their children so easy.

These are just a few examples of things that can be passed down through families without even talking specifically about trauma and abuse.

okay, yeah, i guess I’m going to go there, but it won’t be scary, i promise

Let’s take a minute and think about abuse, though, without going into specifics. Let’s say that a certain type of abuse just happens in your family because several generations back some sort of trauma happened to a grandfather and he became an abuser and it has been perpetrated through your family because no one has known better and has continued to choose abuse rather than healing.

Because of this abuse, there are just things that you do. You probably don’t even notice them. There are ways that you act. Things you say. Things you don’t do. Things that make you feel guilt and shame and you don’t even realize it or you realize it and you have no idea why. You may be easily addicted to substances or things.

Unless you end up in therapy or recovery, you may never know the reasons why.

Unless you end up in therapy or recovery, you will likely be a perpetrator of abuse as well.

If you’ve only done a small amount of therapy/recovery work and stop there, you are likely able to stop at the point where you know just enough to stop at the point of knowing just enough to be able to blame everything on your parents.

If you’re not careful, you can get stuck there.

Blame is a dangerous place to be stuck.

I’m not saying to absolve them of any responsibility whatsoever.

Because, truly, they are responsible for everything they chose when they raised you.

But as you were influenced by their choices, so they were influenced by their parents choices, and their parents were influenced by their parents and so on and so on.

Granted, there are always outside events, natural disasters, tragedies, that affect decisions and outcomes and everything.

Your grandparents were responsible for their choices.

Your parents were responsible for their choices.

You are responsible for your choices.

But acknowledging the responsibility is different from blaming. Acknowledging responsibility is saying “they were doing the best they knew how with the tools they had at the time.”

I will not include the purposefully cruel and abusive parents in the above statement. There are some people who know exactly what they are doing when they are being abusive and cruel.

No matter the reason behind a parent being abusive, they should be held accountable for the abuse. The hard part is getting them to see it. But likely, you won’t be the one to do that, because you’re “just their kid”.

What you can do is get yourself healthy. It’s hard work. And you’ll want to blame everyone.

Every time you learn something else about yourself about how something you always think or do is directly related to something from your parents, it’ll be easy to want to blame them.

But you don’t.

You keep going.

You do the work.

You move past the blame.

To forgiveness.

here i go again talking about forgiveness

Once again, you are not absolving them of all accountability or responsibility. You are freeing yourself of any grudge you hold toward them. Hopefully you now understand why someone would make the choices that they made. You’re choosing to not hold onto the hurt they did to you anymore.

You choose to heal yourself by dealing with the wounds caused by the past.

You set boundaries with the people who are choosing to not heal and are continuing to hurt you.

And you keep growing and healing and soon you’re further away from blame.

And you know what?

The more you grow and change and heal and become a healthy, amazing person, the more you will force your family to change. A family cannot function the same way it has if one of the members changes. The rest of the family has to figure out what to do.

They will try to make you change back. That’s why you’ll have to put up boundaries.

Keep doing the work.

Keep healing.

Change the broken system.

Be the one who breaks the cycle of whatever it is that’s been going on in your family for generations.

Be the one who gets the family headed in a healthy direction.

The next generation will thank you for it.

Just keep the really good food.