Recognizable Questions

- Do you recognize that after a painful reaction from family or friends, you immediately start looking for what you did wrong?

- Have you ever felt that you are responsible for the distance others create, while they themselves decided how to respond to your choice?

- Do you sometimes think: if I hadn’t changed, none of this would have happened?

- Do you notice that guilt is sometimes easier to bear than the idea that you had no control over someone else’s reaction?

- Do you find it hard to be honest about what you believe for fear of losing relationships?

- Can you examine your own role without automatically taking all the responsibility onto yourself?

- Can you acknowledge that your choice had consequences without concluding that all the consequences are your fault?

What is victim blaming?

Victim blaming means that someone who has been subjected to something painful or harmful is made wholly or partly responsible for what happened to them.
For example, someone is bullied and is then told: ‘You shouldn’t have acted so differently.’
The focus then shifts:

What did the other person do?
        ↓
becomes
        ↓
What did you do that caused
the other person to do this?

That does not mean someone is never responsible for their own behavior. The important question is which responsibility belongs to whom.

What is self-blame?

With self-blame, you place that responsibility on yourself.
Thoughts may be, for example: ‘If I had kept my mouth shut, I would still have my family.’ Or: ‘If I hadn’t started doubting, none of this would have happened.’ Or: ‘I tore the family apart.’
Sometimes such a thought contains a kernel of truth: if you had made a different choice, the situation might have unfolded differently. But that does not automatically mean that you are responsible for all the decisions other people made afterward.

My choice influenced
what happened

        ≠

Everything that happened afterward
was my responsibility

Cause is not the same as responsibility

This distinction is important.
Suppose someone sets a boundary. The other person responds by cutting off all contact. Without that boundary, that reaction might not have happened.
You could then say that the boundary was the trigger for what happened next. But the decision to cut off contact was still made by the other person.

My decision
      ↓
the other person's reaction
      ↓
consequence

The events
are connected

but they are not
the same decisions

That difference between cause, trigger, influence, and responsibility can prevent everything from being reduced to one person.

Why do people so eagerly look for blame and cause?

People try to make events understandable and predictable. When something painful happens, we look for an explanation.
In doing so, the just-world hypothesis, the belief in a just world, can play a role. People tend to want to believe that the world is predictable to some extent: sensible behavior protects us and bad outcomes have an explainable cause.
That can be reassuring. But it can also lead to the person who experienced something being searched for what they themselves should have done differently.

Something painful happens
        ↓
Why did this happen?
        ↓
If I did something wrong,
maybe I could have
prevented it
        ↓
sense of control

This is not to say that every case of self-blame is caused by belief in a just world. Self-blame can have different causes.

Self-blame can provide a sense of control

A thought like ‘It was my fault’ is painful, but sometimes it also contains a hidden form of control:
‘If I caused it, then I could also have prevented it.’
The thought ‘I couldn’t determine what the other person would do’ can be harder, because it contains less control.
That does not make self-blame rational or irrational in itself. It does explain why people sometimes keep searching for what they should have done differently, even when other people made their own decisions.

An example from everyday life

After years of unhappiness, someone ends a relationship. The partner says: ‘You destroyed our family.’
The decision to end the relationship was indeed that person’s. They can take responsibility for that.
But then all kinds of other decisions follow: who stays in contact, who gets angry, who tries to mediate, who takes sides, who cuts off contact?

My decision:
ending the relationship

Other people’s decisions:
becoming angry
staying in contact
taking a step back
taking sides
breaking off contact

So you can be responsible for your decision and the way you carried it out, without automatically being responsible for every reaction to it.

How can this be relatable for (ex-)Jehovah’s Witnesses?

For some Jehovah’s Witnesses and former Jehovah’s Witnesses, this can become especially complicated when faith, family, and social relationships are so closely intertwined.
For example, someone may come to the conclusion: ‘I no longer believe certain things.’
Family members may respond from their own religious convictions by distancing themselves or limiting contact. The person who changed may then think:
‘But I left. So I chose to lose my family.’
It helps to make the separate decisions visible:

MY DECISION

I can no longer say
that I believe something
I do not believe

        ↓

THE OTHER PERSON’S DECISION

I limit or break off
contact because of
my beliefs

        ↓

CONSEQUENCE

loss of contact

The first decision may have been a condition that led to the second situation. But both people still made their own decision.

That does not mean the other person is a bad person

Separating responsibility does not have to be a judgment about someone’s character.
A Jehovah’s Witness who keeps their distance from a former fellow believer may sincerely believe that this is religiously right and at the same time feel sadness over the loss of the relationship.
Psychology therefore does not need to determine who the ‘good’ person is and who the ‘bad’ person is.
A more precise question is:
Who made which decision, and for what is each person responsible?

When is it not victim blaming?

Not every question about someone’s own role is victim blaming.
It can be healthy to ask yourself: Did I hurt someone? Did I overstep my boundaries? Could I have said something more carefully? What am I willing to take responsibility for?
The difference is mainly in what happens next:

HEALTHY SELF-REFLECTION

What was my part?
What can I repair?
What can I learn?


SELF-BLAMING

Everything is my fault
I should have prevented
all of this

Taking responsibility for your part is something different from taking responsibility for the entire event.

Victim blaming and self-blaming are not the same

The concepts overlap, but they do not mean the same thing.
Victim blaming is about assigning responsibility to someone who has been harmed. Self-blaming is about the responsibility someone assigns to themselves.
That is why, for example, after a family loss following a change in faith, self-blaming is sometimes the more precise term. Whether victim blaming is also involved depends on the specific situation and on what someone is actually being blamed for by others.

Separating responsibility

A simple distinction can help:

WHAT IS MINE?

my words
my behavior
my choices
my boundaries
my mistakes


WHAT IS THE OTHER PERSON’S?

his or her words
his or her behavior
his or her boundaries
his or her beliefs
his or her choice
about contact

There is also a third category:

WHAT NO ONE HAD
FULL CONTROL OVER?

emotions
circumstances
the past
other people’s reactions
loss
the consequences of
multiple decisions together

That third category prevents every painful outcome from having to be placed on one person’s shoulders as blame.

What can you do with this?

When you notice yourself thinking ‘This is all my fault’, you do not have to immediately convince yourself of the opposite. First examine the thought.
For example, make three columns:

1. What did I do or choose?

2. What did the other person choose?

3. Where did no one have
complete control?

Be honest in both directions. Maybe there are things for which you want to take responsibility, apologize, or repair something. That can be healthy.
But you may also discover that you are taking responsibility for decisions that were ultimately made by other people.

Questions to reflect on

- What exactly do I feel guilty about?

- What did I actually do or decide myself?

- What decision did the other person make independently?

- Did I really have control over the other person’s reaction?

- Am I confusing influence or trigger with full responsibility?

- Would I blame someone else in the same situation as much as I blame myself?

- Can I acknowledge my own part without taking over the part of others too?

Summary

Victim blaming and self-blame are both about the question of where responsibility is placed.
It is healthy to take responsibility for your own words, behavior, decisions, and mistakes. But responsibility has limits.

My choice
can have consequences

        and

the other person remains
responsible
for their own reaction

For people who change beliefs or leave a close-knit faith community, this distinction can be especially important. The thought ‘If I hadn’t changed, this wouldn’t have happened’ may be partly true factually, without implying: ‘So everything that happened after that is my fault.’
You do not automatically have to clear yourself of blame. But you also do not automatically have to declare yourself guilty.
The more precise question is:
What am I truly responsible for — and what responsibility might I be carrying that actually is not mine?

Sources and further reading

Melvin J. Lerner – The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion, 1980. A classic work on the need to experience the world as orderly and fair, and its possible relationship to blaming victims.
Melvin J. Lerner & Carolyn H. Simmons – Observer’s Reaction to the “Innocent Victim”: Compassion or Rejection?, 1966. A classic experimental study on reactions to people who suffer undeserved harm.
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman – Characterological Versus Behavioral Self-Blame: Inquiries into Depression and Rape, 1979. Distinguishes between blame focused on specific behavior and blame directed at the person or their character.
June P. Tangney, Jeff Stuewig & Debra J. Mashek – Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior, 2007. On, among other things, guilt, shame, and responsibility for behavior.
Edward B. Kubany et al. – Development and Validation of the Trauma-Related Guilt Inventory, 1996. Research into feelings of guilt, responsibility, and hindsight thoughts about what someone could have prevented.

Also read

Self-blame – When you keep looking for the responsibility in yourself.
Self-reflection – Examining your own part without condemning yourself.
Learned guilt – When guilt is linked to rules, expectations, and beliefs.
Loyalty conflict – When loyalty to yourself clashes with loyalty to people you love.
Rumination – When thinking no longer leads to insight but keeps going round in the same circle.
Healthy selfishness – Weighing your own interests without making other people’s needs unimportant.