After a Break Up: The Blame Game and Why it Never Works

It all started so beautifully. You can almost hear a soundtrack playing behind the shared dinners, movies, and late nights intoxicated with the promise of forever. Then, little by little, the edges frayed, the music stopped, and eventually your relationship ended in heartbreak.

So, after all the promise and wonder, you stand facing a breakup. You feel all alone in the world. The things that once made you so happy now fill you with pain and regret. It looks like you have only two choices: to move on, or to reconcile.

The problem with this simple notion is that it hides the truth. In fact, there’s a third choice or path, and this third choice is your best option. You.

You are the third path, and the beauty is: you can still have option one or two if you start with the third.

Let me explain. You can’t blame your ex partner and truly move on. And, you can’t truly reconcile without understanding your role and responsibility in the success or failure of the relationship. If you’re willing to be honest with yourself, all paths lead to you.

There’s a reason you chose this partner. There are reasons for every action you take. There are even reasons why your partner’s behavior bothers you when it might not bother someone else. You cannot simply assign blame and miraculously move forward. If this is where you stop, this is where you stop. You will not get the opportunity to move beyond the same limitations that brought you to your current state.

Harville Hendrix, in his book Getting the Love You Want, describes relationships as mostly-unconscious dramas we create in an attempt to heal our deepest childhood wounds. We choose partners and scenarios in the present to mimic the conditions from our childhood where we were insufficiently nurtured. While we think we’re in control of the process, our unconscious mind does most of the choosing. We’re mysteriously drawn to romantic partners who embody just the right mix of the positive and negative traits of our parents or caretakers.

Have you ever wondered why you’re attracted to one person versus the next? Under the surface of conscious thought, a part of us remembers the way a certain parent smiled, squinted their eyes, or laughed at our jokes. The unconscious also remembers the way a certain caretaker might have withheld affection, was quick to anger, or betrayed us when we needed them the most. This composite mix of traits is always present beneath our conscious choices for romantic partners. If there aren’t enough commonalities in the traits, we won’t feel a strong connection to the person.

So, why would we choose someone who will inevtiably hurt us? At the core of Imago Therapy is the belief that our unconscious is motivated by the need for wholeness. Our unconscious chooses people and events with the right potential to stir up the past.

So, viewed in this new light, we can see that blame does not serve us. We must get to intimately know ourselves, our needs, and our pasts to understand the drama that’s unfolding on the surface. With this knowledge, we can co-create healthy positive relationships by honoring and understanding our wounds and becoming free of them. From this new perspective, we can begin cultivating happier, healthier experiences on all levels. And as we live more consciously, we can better understand our partner and their own, individual needs. We can actually begin the work of healing each other.