Articles exploring the negative consequences of self-blame are everywhere. It’s unsurprising, given its strong link to a number of negative outcomes outcomes including guilt, worthlessness, distress, and an number of mood disorders (Jannati et al., 2020). But why is such a supposedly negative behavior so prevalent? Is it just some error in judgment, a mere symptom of “the depressed brain?” Or, is it a surprisingly adaptive coping mechanism within certain social contexts?

In my years as a psychologist, I've come to believe it's the latter. Self-blame isn't a flaw to be corrected; it is a nuanced emotion regulation strategy that demands contextual understanding. Shifting the narrative to acknowledge its adaptive role allows us to better grasp its benefits, weigh its drawbacks, and approach its treatment more effectively. Shifting the narrative is also a crucial step towards breaking the cycle of blaming ourselves for blaming ourselves—a vicious spiral indeed!

So, what exactly is self-blame? Self-blame is a multifaceted response to threat, intertwining cognition, physiology, and emotion. It provides a highly effective, short-term coping mechanism which helps regulate emotion. When faced with a threat, directing blame inward can "dial down" the intensity of a painful feeling. By providing a cognitive explanation—whether accurate or not—self-blame helps us reinterpret the situation's meaning, distracting ourselves from the most aversive parts of the threat and engaging higher brain regions. This cognitive engagement also serves to inhibit deeper brain regions responsible for intense emotions. Shifting our focus away from the immediately threatening stimuli in this way distracts us and creates psychological distance from the source of distress.

What is particularly useful about self-blame in many environments is that is something we can do entirely on our own. That is, self-blame does not require the presence of external resources or outside support. By directing our energy inward, we are spared from relational feelings like anger, disappointment, and hurt. This helps prevent us from relying on others who may not be available or who are themselves threatening. This is particularly helpful in family or social systems in which relying on others is associated with negative consequences or in which there is little emotional bandwidth or capacity for co-regulation between family members. In this way, self-blame is particularly helpful in that it can be hidden from others and does not draw further attention to us. Moreover, the physical manifestations of self-blame—closed-off body language, avoidance of eye contact, subdued speech—further camouflage one's distress, signaling unavailability and minimizing unwanted attention.

But one of the most compelling, and most insidious, aspects of self-blame is its ability to hide itself even from the person who engages in it. Because it provides a logically consistent interpretation of negative events (e.g. “I’m bad,” I’m too lazy,” “I’m just not smart enough,” etc.), overtime, self-blame develops into a pattern of “being.” That is, our experience of the world is shaped by a chronic, lived experience of self, others, and the world around us rather than being a conscious process at all. Because self-blame is a strategy that does not allow us to point the finger in the right direction, we don’t even realize we have settled into a sort of comfortable discomfort of familiar suffering. Instead, we just sort of get the sense that this is the way the world is. Despite our own profound suffering, we shrug our shoulders and tell ourselves to “get over it,” which of course is itself a process entirely consistent with a pattern of self-blame. “This is just the way the world is, and if you were better at managing it you wouldn’t feel this way.” And so the suffering continues.

Because self-blame conceals itself even from us, the symptoms associated with self-blame are not typically so simple as “I am to blame for my suffering” (though someone who tends to blame themselves may endorse such a statement). Instead, self-blame often presents as a set of related cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. For example, someone who engages in frequent self-blame is likely to believe that “unless I have done everything in my power, I am to blame if something goes wrong.” They may also agree that “I am not ‘okay’ (or enough) unless I am totally exhausted.” They are likely to have feelings of chronic sadness and frequent longing. They are also likely to suffer from frequent fatigue and habitual patterns of alternating between “rising to the occasion” and working quite hard and resulting exhaustion and emotional withdrawal.

Rather than blaming ourselves for blaming ourselves, it can be much more helpful to celebrate the amazing power self-blame has in making sense of things in unsupportive environments. By celebrating its adaptive capacity, we can also begin to have empathy for the person who has needed to employ it! If you are struggling to have compassion for yourself as someone who tends to blame themselves, you’ll get no judgment here! Instead, please reach out for help from a supportive other or contact us directly; we’d be honored to join you.