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Changing Your Partner Without Saying A Word – No-Fault
By: Jonathan Goodman-Herrick, CSW
"If you want to be certain your partner will act like a bastard - accuse them of being one."
William O’Hanlon, MSW, during workshop.
When we approach our partner with a no-fault framework, it has an uncanny way of positively turning the tables. Though it is very difficult to do, it changes everything to look at relationship difficulty without laying any blame. No blame towards your partner. No blame towards yourself. No blame even towards your parents. The goal is to acknowledge everyone’s part in the struggle, and to feel the pain of the struggle, but without finding any fault. A key element to accepting ourselves, to recognizing our fears and needs, and to accepting that we contribute 50% to relationship struggle, is doing it without finding fault anywhere. Blaming means we step into a role of powerlessness, a victim role.
Some examples:
I’m a loser. I’ll never have the life I want.
My wife’s a loser. I’ll never have the marriage I want.
My parents mistreated me. I’ll never be the person I want to be.
Yet blame is a deeply imbedded habit that proves very difficult to undo. So when you do fall prey to it, don’t blame yourself for blaming.
When we experience ourselves as helpless, our partner as hopeless, and the situation as unchangeable, we become frustrated and anxious. And when we become frustrated and anxious, we blame. Based on personal observation, fault-finding appears to be almost instinctual to humans. I have seen very young children, who to my knowledge never learned about blame, blame when they get frustrated. This makes sense, because blaming serves two positive functions. First, it helps us avoid experiencing ourselves as powerless. When we feel hopeless and small, we can puff ourselves up by being an accuser and trying to make the other person feel bad and small. Second, it provides short-term pain-relief. Blame diverts us from feeling the pain of the situation. When there is no blame, what do we do with our disappointment, our anxiety, our hurt? We are hurt and we don’t know what to do with it. There is just raw pain, raw fear and sometimes also utter confusion, not knowing what to do. Rather than be with the raw pain, the fear, the not knowing what to do, we find fault.
If we aren’t certain whether or not we are blaming and feeling powerless, certain verbal tendencies make bright red flags indicating that we are. We know we have entered victimland when we start lobbing extreme words like never or always. “You are never affectionate.” “You are always inconsiderate.” Most important, the blame/victimhood framework precludes change. When we see ourselves as small and powerless, we lose the capacity to be constructive. Meanwhile, our attacks push our partner into a defensive, shut-down posture which precludes him from being constructive. If you criticize your partner for being a cold fish, he will probably act like one.
One client regularly scolded her husband for being emotionally unavailable. Feeling judged and rejected, he reacted to the scolding by making himself more unavailable. Blame maintains stuckness. When that same client finally spoke to her husband in an accepting, vulnerable way, telling him that she loved and missed him, that the separation saddened her, he immediately became more available.
Another client was enraged that her husband treated her so poorly, of all days, on Mother’s Day. Nor did he ever apologize. As Father’s Day approached she plotted her revenge. However on Father’s Day morning she had a change of heart, decided to let it go and treated him well. That evening he took her aside and told her how much he appreciated her kindness and apologized for his behavior on Mother’s Day. Because she didn’t blame, she and the relationship benefited.
Of course non-blaming doesn’t mean we avoid holding someone responsible for their actions. It usually makes sense to explain to a partner that their actions were hurtful to you. The important thing is to respectfully address your lover’s behavior, not attack their personhood.
However, much of the time blame is not at all about a partner’s inappropriate behavior, but about their not doing what we want them to do, about events not going the way we want them to. If because it is Sunday morning I look forward to making love with my wife, but that morning she needs so much extra sleep that she wakes up too late for us to get the chance, I may feel very disappointed, even rejected. To avoid those feelings I find fault, blaming her for not being available. But she never promised to make love. Often, things just happen that we wish didn’t happen. People behave in ways we wish they wouldn’t. If we can allow ourselves to feel the disappointment, to feel our vulnerability around not getting what we want, we can begin to live without blame.
Hurricanes
Dealing with disappointment is just like dealing with forces of nature. When a hurricane roars through the yard and knocks down a tree, whose fault is it? Simply, certain conditions combine to create tremendous winds, then to place a tree in the line of those winds. All we can do is look at the situation and ask two questions: Is there anything we can do differently next time to reduce the chance of harm or disappointment? And What can we do now, to clean up the mess? To protect against hurricanes, we can wire trees together, or remove overhanging limbs. Where there is no blame, we are free to act, to protect against storms, to clean up after they depart, to tell our lover what our expectations are, and to do our best to arrange for our desires to be realized. Then if our dreams are not immediately fulfilled, we can take a deep breath and feel the disappointment. It will pass.
Try no-fault. Find a place within yourself where there is no blame of other or of self, where there is no victim. Feel the pain, the discomfort, the sense of powerlessness. Accept these feelings. Make friends with them. Respect them. Eventually the pain and sense of powerlessness will pass. When they do, you will begin to find the energy to take care of yourself.
Jonathan Goodman-Herrick's book THE HEART OF RELATIONSHIP: FIVE ULTIMATE TRUTHS further describes many of his views on couples and their needs.
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