On Quitting Self-Blame

On Quitting Self-Blame

February 24, 2024

The first time I went to therapy after my child was born, it was because my then husband Garrett told me that there was something wrong with me and I needed to fix myself. He said this while he was having his first affair (which he would not admit to and is detailed in other blog entries such as https://wordpress.com/post/interrobangmehardbaby.blog/23 ) and was about to move out. I believed what he said without question, which I now, close to two decades later, find incredibly distressing. I knew that he was having an affair and I was relieved that he had found someone else to focus on because my marriage was quite literally driving me insane. It has taken me close to twenty years of intermittent psychological counselling to understand the relationship between self-blame, radical acceptance, and vulnerability. Ugh. I have railed hard against radical acceptance and vulnerability that I can barely type the words without feeling disgust in my chest and nearly rolling my eyes out of my head. 

Our child had been born a year prior to this accusation. River was born with a disease which paralyzed over a foot of its colon. That first year was terrifying, involving a stay in the NICU, at home medical care, and major surgery. Throughout this time I had noticed that Garrett was experiencing more intense mood swings and a furious new intensity that I was having difficulty managing. During my pregnancy, things had been tumultuous with him and I had a deep, queasy knowledge that I would be alone in parenting this child. Ever the pragmatist, I applied to teachers college with a long term plan of being self-sufficient in a job that would provide stability and medical benefits for myself and my unborn child. I got in and had to start school full time the month before River had major surgery. 

Throughout the year that I was back in school at 30 years of age, Garrett stayed home with River while I did my degree. He had always claimed to want to be a stay at home dad so I anticipated this being very good for his mental health, which had always been tenuous. Due to the nature of River’s medical issues I was told that this baby needed breast milk for as long as possible, so I would get up early, nurse and pump, and then carry the pump with me all day to use it every 4 hours. I could go on about how brutally difficult that year was, and I have lots of stories about pumping in janitor’s closets and other random places, but I am going to rein in that tangent. My main point is that I was vulnerable to accepting the blame for Garrett’s wild mood swings. My only method of coping with numerous issues throughout my lifetime had been to take all the blame all the time, because then it meant that it was in my power to affect a different outcome. I continued this in my marriage and in motherhood. 

  River was a baby who never slept through the night. I would spend hours trying to get it to sleep and then 45 minutes later it would be up screaming and scratching itself bloody. I would stay up all night, nursing and pumping and attempting to do my course readings and homework. Then I would be at school for ten to twelve hours most days. Much of the time, I would arrive home to a furious or hysterical husband. Other times he would be like a zombie, staring at a movie and telling me that it was his third movie of the day but the baby was fine in the playpen in the other room. He was clearly  not well, but I felt the only way to ensure our future was for me to finish this degree. He would accuse me of having affairs and he said that I was destroying him by being a terrible partner, that it was obvious that I didn’t love him. When he said that I had to fix myself because I was broken and destroying us, I accepted it because that meant I had some control. If I fixed myself, then he would be OK too. This sort of twisted logic was oddly comforting.  Numerous psychologists, social workers, and other therapists have suggested that developing a practice of self-compassion could hold the key to my mental health. 

Throughout my experience in counselling, terms like self-compassion, gratitude, radical acceptance, and vulnerability have caused a seething fury deep inside of me. These concepts were being presented as the answer to my problems, but they were anathema to my mode of being. Engaging in any practice that did not verify the fact that I was a horrible, tainted person who caused problems in the lives of anyone I loved felt completely unsafe, because that would mean that I had no control over anything at all. I have resisted any form of self-compassion with a vehemence, because it was in direct conflict with my propensity for self-blame. So went the thought distortion. So went the inner critic who had been a constant presence throughout my life. Without the scolding, nagging, berating abuse it heaped on me, I would have never have accomplished anything. Or so I believed. So I knew. So it goes. 

I have finally managed to develop a modicum of self-compassion. It still feels unnatural and is a constant inner struggle but again, so it goes. (Some of that is detailed here https://wordpress.com/post/interrobangmehardbaby.blog/62 )

Being with a spouse who confirmed for me that I was, in fact, the architect of all of our problems, made sense and was comforting in a way that I now understand as a massive interrobang. 

Clinging to self-blame remains a distorted means of feeling some control; I can’t seem to quit it in most areas of my life. I was recently in a position where I had to acknowledge that there was literally nothing I could do to help my (now adult) child who is struggling with (another) serious mental health disorder. Letting go of the self-blame and acknowledging that I have done everything in my power to help my child feels like giving up. The idea that I could affect the outcome of a situation by trying harder, being smarter, or fixing my inherent defectiveness, has finally found its antithesis, and it’s not self-compassion. It’s Radical Acceptance. 

Garrett told me that our child was born with medical issues because I attracted negative energy from the universe by being a terrible person. Somehow that meant that if I could only become a better person, then my child wouldn’t have struggles. Garrett told me that he was bipolar because I was such a terrible partner that I drove him mad. That meant that if I could only be a good person, then he would be OK and we could be a happy family. If none of this was true, then I would have to acknowledge the fact that I had no real control over the circumstances of our lives. The fact is that as much as we can have influence over things through our choices and actions, none of us can control whether a baby will be born with a congenital birth defect, nor can we cure bipolar disorder in a spouse by being a better person. I accept the fact that I never really had the superpowers that I felt that self-blame had afforded me. 

I do realize that even though we may do our best, we won’t always achieve a desired outcome, yet I have never been able to apply this thinking to myself. If I can’t make things better for the people I love, it’s because I am a terrible person. This line of thinking led to a terrible mental health crisis for me about two and a half years ago. I had lost control of the suicidal thoughts I was having and had a plan to exit this world. The logical conclusion I came to when I realized that nothing I had ever done to try and fix things had worked was that if I ceased to exist, then people’s lives would be better. If I’m the problem, and I’m gone, then no one I love will have problems anymore. The ultimate expression of self-blame. 

I am learning to accept the fact that despite my best efforts and support, my brilliant child was unable to finish high school last year. Rather than being off at university now, it is struggling to accomplish daily tasks and following a few trips to emergency psych it is now attached to some different outpatient mental health clinics and on waitlists for others. There was nothing I could do to prevent this outcome. All of the time and effort I put into getting support and medical care was not wasted, in fact this has likely improved the chances of River being OK one day, but today is not that day. My heart hurts. Accepting that things are as they are ought to be a relief, but the fact remains that I have lost a major coping strategy by attempting to quit self-blame. If things are hard and it is not my fault, then I can’t displace my vulnerability and emotional pain into self-blame any longer. I didn’t understand the link between acceptance and feeling vulnerable. It seems illogical that for me, radical acceptance hasn’t come wrapped up neatly with inner peace, but rather with a new manner of feeling fear and chaos. 

Refusal to feel has been my other major coping strategy. The inner monologue being “This is not happening. If I refuse to feel this, then it can’t affect me. If it affects me, I will never get anything done. It is not safe to feel.” This has served me about as well as self-blame did, meaning not at all. My inner critic was strangely comforting, as was the physical intensity that came along with stuffing my emotions to the point that I couldn’t feel anything for a very long time. Fury was the exception to this rule; it would break through the numbness and grip me in a visceral rage. Despite my best efforts my marriage was not salvageable, and my child’s health issues have remained ongoing and been joined by significant mental health diagnoses. I could not let myself feel the fear, anxiety, and sadness that were ever present, as their repression seemed inextricably linked to my ability to accomplish anything. Unfortunately they were also inextricably linked to my ability to feel any positive emotions. In attempting to protect myself and those I loved, I had lost the ability to feel hope, joy, happiness, or even contentment. 

Today I (mostly) accept the fact that things are happening as they are happening thanks to a fight or flight response I had to feeling, of all things, happiness and love. As a result of this “flight” I broke my ankle and the first thing I thought was “THIS IS NOT HAPPENING!” and proceeded to think that if I ignored it and refused to acknowledge it, then I would wake up and discover that the swelling had gone down and it was perfectly fine. It wasn’t. It was broken in multiple places, I had bruised the bone and torn all of the ligaments and tendons. It took something that ridiculous for me to realize that despite my years of counselling I still had some major trauma from a lifetime of self-blame and refusal to acknowledge that awful things were affecting me. 

The dance between self-blame, vulnerability, and radical acceptance continues. The more I am able to titrate my feelings and accept that I have no real ability to control traumatic situations through self-blame, the more access I have to moments of happiness, peace, and joy. Self-compassion has played a small role, as it has helped me to acknowledge moments of suffering, but it is not the panacea that it was presented to me as for so long. I no longer feel as violently repulsed by the idea of self-compassion, but it’s still a lot of work to practise it. It was also a lot of work to twist my emotional trauma into the interrobang of self-blame, and at least this way I get to feel some good along with the bad. So it goes.