Whitney Hancock (00:00)
The work of being human is often the work of making meaning from pain. When people experience grief, betrayal, suffering, chronic fear, trauma, helplessness, the human mind almost instinctively

whose fault is this? Why did this happen? Who failed What does this say about And why would God allow this?

And usually we land in one of three

blaming ourselves, blaming another person, or blaming God, the universe, a higher power, or life, life itself.

And I think one of the things we really want to explore today is that blame is often not just a moral issue. It's frequently a nervous system strategy. And so today we have Jerry and myself, Whitney Hancock, and we will be talking about this idea of blame.

So Jerry, when you think about people navigating suffering or fear, where do you most commonly see blame show up?

Jeri Peterson (00:56)
emotionally trapped, maybe unable to influence what is happening, definitely disempowered. In intimate relationships, we have an intense need to explain pain. In parenting, parents blame themselves for their children's struggles.

⁓ because helplessness feels intolerable in that space. And in spirituality, if suffering has no clear meaning, we're reaching for that. And people often either condemn themselves or become angry at God.

Whitney Hancock (01:25)
Can you say more about feeling disempowered, what does that mean?

Jeri Peterson (01:29)
picture the self being backed in a corner up against a wall, against a formidable foe unseen or seen, that's a dangerous situation. There's a lack of safety. And so people can become dysregulated very easily in that space. If they're feeling emotionally trapped, they're back against the wall or in a corner or feeling unable to know what's happening.

Whitney Hancock (01:52)
We'll be in a minute.

Jeri Peterson (01:54)
it's easier to try to pinpoint your focus and target something else or somehow defend.

Whitney Hancock (02:02)
Yeah, so it's some way to deal with this intolerable emotion in the moment. And maybe a more simple example is...

Like at the end of the day, some people call it the witching hour between like five and seven p.m. if you have young kids before they fall asleep. And you know, it's chaos. People are trying to get homework done. We're trying to clean the kitchen. And all of that starts to build up in your body. And then we...

almost look for something to attribute that feeling to. it's the massive amount of dishes in the sink. And who didn't do the dishes? And even in that simple example, it's like trying to find, like you said, something to pinpoint.

the reason for why I'm having this bad feeling. In that instance, it's maybe like chaos and just ⁓ a lack of order or something.

Jeri Peterson (02:52)
Mm-hmm.

are maybe those times we describe ourselves as being thin skinned or over it or flooded. You know, we have our terms for describing feeling pinched emotionally and maybe there's a lot of ambiguity about what we're feeling or thinking. It's just there's too much going on at the same time and our body is flooding. So the most direct course of relief would be

to blame.

Whitney Hancock (03:19)
Do think people often realize they're trying to escape helplessness when they move into blame?

Jeri Peterson (03:24)
I don't think that's the first thing that crosses our mind when we feel backed in a corner. We might view ourselves as independent or not needing anyone or covering the sense of shame, feeling that we are disempowered. So we're going to appear tough.

I think our secondary and maybe other layers on top come out first.

Whitney Hancock (03:45)
Yeah. And we can think about the brain here and how it seeks safety, coherence, predictability, attachment,

and how uncertainty dysregulates the nervous system, and that our brain may prefer a painful certainty over helplessness or over ambiguity.

So back to my example, you know, clearly I feel this way because you didn't do the dishes. And we just simplify it into this We oversimplify it. And often that looks like pointing it toward another or toward the self.

Jeri Peterson (04:20)
Right, if we haven't been processing or been observant of what we're thinking, feeling and our behaviors beforehand, you know, that's the space where therapy is great for helping us slow that process down and begin to realize what are we saying and feeling and what is our behavior indicative of.

Whitney Hancock (04:39)
Yeah. And I tend to observe that people, when we move into blame as trying to find that reason or that certainty of why we're feeling something, again, whether it's chaos or shame or fear or grief, it seems like people tend to fall into one category more often than the other categories of

Blame toward others, blame toward self, or blame toward something larger, like we said, God, maybe even society or the government But can you talk a little bit about... self-blame and how you see that showing up.

Jeri Peterson (05:14)
Self-blame, there's a fantasy that we're preserving, I think.

that is that we are somehow in control. And if we're operating on that level and we haven't dug down to realize ourselves more fully, the way we're functioning and why, which again is the work of therapy, we dig in and find out.

Is it attachment? What's family of origin teaching you? What have you carried over? What's activating you in the present? So if we don't take the time to do that, then we're just preserving a fantasy of control. If I'm blaming myself, maybe I could have prevented it. So I'll try harder. Maybe I can stop it next time. Watch me go. Or maybe the world is still predictable when it's just not.

Whitney Hancock (05:56)
Yeah, and a lot of this, when we think of the attachment lens or think about children in particular, that when something happens to them, maybe abuse or neglect, children...

can't tolerate believing that their caregiver is bad or unsafe because they really need that caregiver to survive. And so instinctively the brain turns it inward of it must be me or I'm the problem or I'm the one to blame.

We see that a lot with.

Jeri Peterson (06:23)
you

Whitney Hancock (06:26)
kids who experience their parents going through a divorce, of course that has nothing to do with the kiddo, they often turn, painful things that happen into something that's their fault. And that's easier and makes more sense than maybe seeing their attachment figures as chaotic or...

thinking, know, something could just happen out of the blue. or randomly, that's a lot for a young brain to grasp, make sense of. and so the brain often, turns it inward. You know, if, like you said, control, if I can just be better or if I can just be quieter or better behaved, then maybe the world around me will.

be safe or feel safe. And it gives the child that sense of control as well, that feels better than things being out of control or helplessness.

Jeri Peterson (07:16)
Yes,

the first need, the primary need of the child is safety. So if they are not receiving that from their parents and environment, they will try to provide it for themselves by either blaming themselves and creating a rule that childhood wounding is the space where we create a rule that we will keep the rest of our lives until we discover it. If it is having some adverse effect on our lives as an adult.

And many times we can pull it back to preserve safety. And in order to earn love, I started to believe that I wasn't enough. So I had to try harder. I had to become a perfectionist. We make rules. And many times it's, I'm not enough. Therefore I have to try harder or be quieter or just get along. Or, you know, it's a myriad of things.

Adults often react to present pain from a nervous system conditioning from childhood or past relationships.

Whitney Hancock (08:07)
what's really fascinating is that the strategies don't disappear when we become adults. Like you just mentioned, we just get more sophisticated versions of them. How do you see childhood attachment wounds shaping adult reactions to suffering in particular?

Jeri Peterson (08:25)
let's relate it to the nervous system. Early attachment teaches the nervous system what to expect from others, what emotions are safe, whether vulnerability leads to comfort or danger.

adult suffering often reactivates old relational templates like those, not just present circumstances.

It's like we draw on the brain with an Etch-a-Sketch, there's lines and those pathways repeated over time with emotional and behavioral lines. They wire and fire together and they become deeply embedded. They're rooted and grounded on the brain.

And so it's of course under stress, similar stress, will revert back to the old pattern until we discover it and if we decide to change it.

Whitney Hancock (09:09)
Yeah, an example of that that comes to mind is I had a client a while back who was assaulted as she was walking back to her apartment. And as we were working through that memory in EMDR, it felt safer for her to feel like it was my fault.

you know as we explored that more my parents told me never to live in this part of New York City and I shouldn't have been you know walking at that time and it was a reasonable time you know 10 p.m. and and not too terribly of an unsafe area either

But just through that, we noticed how self-blame feels a little safer than accepting the powerlessness that we have in such a traumatic moment where you look down the street and you realize there's no one around and we are actually completely helpless.

And so it's so interesting how the brain took those patterns that actually were part of a lot of her relationships and entered it into that trauma experience even after that, that I'm the problem, as medical personnel are coming, I'm still the problem and I'm a burden to them for making them come out here. And you can just see how

that narrative about the self created in childhood continued into a traumatic moment as an adult.

Jeri Peterson (10:32)
And I'm sure it probably served for her as further proof that she's right in blaming herself. And that gives her some kind of certainty, a target, and calms her nervous system. It doesn't mean that it's healthy, but it explains why.

Whitney Hancock (10:46)
Yeah, as it's easier for our brains, like you mentioned, to have that certainty as to why this happened, then sometimes terrible things happened beyond our control.

Jeri Peterson (10:54)
Mm-hmm.

Whitney Hancock (10:59)
Why does certainty calm the nervous system, even if, like you mentioned, it might be destructive or might be unhealthy? Why do we still do it?

Jeri Peterson (11:08)
Imagine a flood, you know, like there's a reservoir and we're on the other side of a dam and there is just a nice gentle spring there. But this being our nervous system, something too close to past trauma or past sense of non-safety happens. And so the floodgates are lifted all of a sudden and the whole reservoir floods in on us.

If we're going to regain a sense of safety, we might first reach for certainty. there's a log. Let's grab that. Certainty reduces that cognitive and emotional load. So if it were that dike being crushed or removed and the reservoir floods,

then our nervous system can relax a little more when ambiguity decreases or the threat becomes identifiable and reality feels more organized. We're reaching for survival again as that safety base as we reach for as children. So even destructive certainty can feel regulating because at least I know who the villain is. It's a narrative, a story we made up.

Whitney Hancock (12:18)
So then the vulnerable emotions that we try to get to in therapy, like grief, sadness, fear, abandonment, helplessness, are really difficult to sit with or sustain. And so our brains and nervous systems convert them into things like anger, blame, contempt, criticism.

And those can often feel more empowering as well. And they can be really empowering and helpful at times. So then why would we want to move into the more vulnerable emotions rather than blame or contempt?

Jeri Peterson (12:56)
So it feels more powerful. We often refer to anger as a shield. We feel more powerful when we get the validation of anger, for instance. We feel like there's force behind it, a righteous cause or just cause. And so we feel empowered to pick it up.

and that's much more tolerable with raw data of I'm drowning here, you know, I need to feel safe. That is a very easy go-to.

Whitney Hancock (13:27)
What happens to a person's capacity for curiosity when they become emotionally flooded?

Jeri Peterson (13:33)
So if flooding is like the dike breaking and the reservoir flooding in, that is definitely a picture of an unsafe situation where we are in survival mode. So we literally leave our prefrontal cortex and go to a more ancient place of the brain where we just need to sink or swim. So in that space, there's such intense emotional

data just coursing through our bodies. I think flooding really collapses complexity. So our ability to tell a story from beginning to end and look at consequences and outcomes just collapsed or dysregulated.

When emotionally overwhelmed, nervous system of course just towards survival and our ability to understand and appreciate nuance, it decreases. certainty increases, we're reaching for that log to grab onto to survive. And defensive interpretations dominate. So we are just in survival mode. So curiosity is not even.

Whitney Hancock (14:30)
Yeah, I really like how you said that. Was it flooding, collapses, curiosity?

Jeri Peterson (14:36)
Mm-hmm.

A complexity, As we're talking here in a regulated state and we're talking with most clients in a regulated state, they're able to look at complete stories, the nuances of them.

the complexity of a story and the reasons underneath the characters decisions, but flooding collapses the whole framework and you're just in a very simplistic place of survival.

Whitney Hancock (15:01)
What are the risks of that, of staying in that simplistic place

Jeri Peterson (15:06)
That's like, imagine what your brain is giving into your body. It's releasing cortisol and other very strong chemicals that we need to do like parkour if we need to, to get out of the situation. You know, stop, drop and roll. We can't live in that, chemical.

bath for very long, it will burn us out, And we see people go through burnout where they say things like, I'm just a nervous wreck, or they go into depression, you know, and someone said depression, depressed, deep rest is what's needed. And I don't think they're, they're very wrong. I think that

We can't live in that cortisol environment all the time. So to be dysregulated all the time, even though it can be addicting and habitual, ⁓ I'm just an angry person. That's the way I go through life. That might be your survival mode, but is it healthful? It explains why it doesn't say that's a good idea or that's healthy.

Whitney Hancock (16:05)
Yeah, so your body eventually says no and can't do it anymore. And then also we can't just parkour off of everyone around us. know, they're going to be lying on the ground and want to get away. And so there has to be another way.

But before we get to that, I'd want to think about maybe when we're critical in relationships, maybe that there's fear underneath that, or how do you see maybe the role of criticism in relationships?

Jeri Peterson (16:36)
It's a faster way to become regulated. It's maybe not the most healthy thing to do, but to blame someone else or to criticize someone else. I wonder if that is the opposite of curiosity. And I wonder if that might be a good inrode in.

It would be difficult to be critical and curious at the same time. One describes a dysregulated state of other blaming or self blaming if we're criticizing ourselves. How many of us have an inner critic, you know, or walk around with this sense of being judged? That voice can be turned on ourselves and it's very destructive as it is when we turn it on someone else.

I think still we're reaching for regulation, but maybe in a maladaptive way.

Whitney Hancock (17:17)
Yeah, the blame temporarily regulates our anxiety.

But humans were never meant to endure suffering or pain or fear alone. We often talk about trauma being not just what happened to us, but that it happened to us while we were alone. And you might think about some of your own memories, some of your

hardest memories, and you're probably alone in those scenarios. And so interpersonal neurobiology really emphasizes co-regulation that we've talked about in another episode, attunement, secure attachment, but essentially emotional regulation through relationship. And so that without the safe connection,

Grief becomes shame or anger. Fear becomes rage or criticism. Suffering becomes isolation and deep pain.

And what do you think about the idea that pain that cannot be shared often becomes distorted?

Jeri Peterson (18:15)
Thus the phrase is like, we always hurt the ones we love.

We want an explanation for the pain and we're turning and looking at them or we're turning inward and blaming ourselves.

pain that cannot be shared often becomes distorted. That's a lot to chew on.

Whitney Hancock (18:28)
What does it mean to share pain with another person?

Jeri Peterson (18:32)
There's, it depends what our system is like. If we don't have the knowledge or understanding, we might do that in an unhealthy way and simplify the process and safety by targeting someone or ourselves. If we've done a little work, then it might look differently there were a group of nurses in wartime that were

attending to patients that had lost limbs or they were about to lose a limb in the hospital from war injuries. And they discovered through experience that nothing they said, nothing they did was as effective as just being there, presence. So they they named themselves something like that, like standards, and they just were present.

So I think there's a lot of power in presence.

Whitney Hancock (19:18)
Yeah, and maybe this idea that pain that cannot be shared often becomes distorted. It implies that we're always sharing our pain with others. It's just what changes is how we do it.

when we're sharing our pain in an unhealthy way, it might become protest or panic or blame, like we've mentioned, when we're sharing another unhealthy way and we all do these things in different ways. But for more avoidant attachment styles, our pain can be shared by withdrawing and by numbness or

⁓ Pain can create chaos, fragmentation, push-pull, I want you but I don't want you. And we're always gonna be sharing our pain. But the question kind of comes to how do we do that in a healthy way or in a way that actually heals that pain rather than distorts it and causes pain for others.

Jeri Peterson (20:12)
Why do you think we have such a low tolerance for ambiguity, the space in between? We want to fill it. It's like silence.

Whitney Hancock (20:20)
I think our brains love black and white as kind of as we started that our brain likes certainty for safety and it

It feels a lot better.

You can think of the most common cognitive distortions

Black and white thinking, all or nothing thinking, generalizing. A lot of these are just about establishing clarity within our minds, again, creating order out of chaos.

⁓ And so I think it's something that's just a part of being human.

Jeri Peterson (20:52)
It

Mm-hmm.

Whitney Hancock (20:57)
And then I think it's something culturally too.

I think the reason we live in a very polarized political time is because of some of the chaos that is happening. And it feels better if we can cling to one side and have the black and white thinking. And so I just think it's something, again, that humans are always going to do when there's suffering, chaos, fear.

I'm going to try to look to something that is certain.

Jeri Peterson (21:22)
I agree.

Whitney Hancock (21:23)
So what

should we do instead?

Jeri Peterson (21:26)
I think it's interesting what you said about needing to process suffering as a co-regulation, that biologically as a human being we're relational. And does it occur to us that automatically, and I don't think so, I think it takes some discovery and curiosity again that in less dysregulated times we can look at the idea

that our nervous system was never designed to metabolize, overwhelm, and distress entirely alone. We are community creatures and it's not only words that create community, it's presence. And safety isn't just internal alone. As an island, it's communicated through attunement.

You know, we are best friends, our best loved ones, our closest inner circle, our babies. That attunement produces safety and facial expression. We look for that reassurance, tone, presence, just the physical presence, and also nervous system resonance. People like to use the word empath in our generation today.

And when we are dysregulated, we might just need presence. You might need someone's presence right there.

whether it's our person or a person. If it's a national tragedy, it doesn't matter who it is, we need people. And you can see it clearly in trauma response. Just being there is enough.

Whitney Hancock (22:48)
And I think in just being there, that we also have to be aware of how we are being present in other people's suffering.

a calm presence is going to require some tolerance for complexity, some tolerance for things that happen with no answer and maybe no way to fix it. It's going to require a presence that can hold that pain without immediately demanding a villain.

And that can be really hard. Sometimes we think that that's not helpful at all, just to be present and just to be with this suffering or this pain that there really is no answer for why it happened. It just did.

Jeri Peterson (23:29)
Do you think people underestimate how physically regulating it is just to feel emotionally understood in a space like that?

Whitney Hancock (23:37)
And I think it could also be terrifying. Most people, when they think of grief, they probably think of themselves alone. And so bringing this sadness or grief to someone else.

feels really scary and we probably don't expect them to be able to do anything about it like back here all the time like why would I like why would I bring my sadness to them and like they they didn't cause it or they can't fix it and so I think we severely underestimate just how much a calm presence does soothe

ourselves in the pain or in the suffering or the fear.

Jeri Peterson (24:09)
Yes, and I think we don't like to feel vulnerable. We know we are vulnerable, but we like our armor. So if you contrast anger, like we were saying earlier, anger feels like armor, and it presents as armor.

Grief is more vulnerable. It's softer. So anger is hard. You know, it has hardness and grief is soft. And maybe we're afraid if we acknowledge grief, we will just cease to exist. We'll just die. You know, we'll just cease to exist. And anger, at least we're fighting, at least we're trying to feel powerful as we can.

Whitney Hancock (24:44)
Yeah, there's also a lot of fear around if I let myself feel this grief, it's going to overwhelm me. And you mentioned cease to exist. And I hadn't thought of it that way. I've thought of it as like, and then I'll kind of cease to function if this grief is so overwhelming. But there is probably something deeper there, like a...

Jeri Peterson (24:50)
Mm-hmm.

Whitney Hancock (25:02)
essentially what will happen to me if I entered into this. And then on top of that is this other person going to be safe and care for me. You know, the common couple conflict is like, I didn't want you to fix it

And so it can be hard to come to someone hoping that they'll show up in the way that you need and maybe being hypervigilant for the ways that they're not showing up exactly as you wanted. And so.

Jeri Peterson (25:22)
Mm-hmm.

Whitney Hancock (25:30)
I think in bringing our pain or suffering or grief to someone else, we have to feel safe, but we also have to let down our vigilance for the way they may not show up perfectly.

because they may not and they may be trying the best that they can.

Jeri Peterson (25:46)
That's true. And sometimes we don't identify what we actually need in the moment. And that's a good question. So in working with couples, that's a great way to address that issue of when I, you know, we need to spell it out. Are we needing a venting session? Are we needing advice? Are we needing that chest in those arms, you know, and to be able to say, can we talk and this is what I need.

It really helps because we're automatically going to know all the time. There's not really much magical space in there and it's much kinder of a relationship if we can say, I feel sad or I feel all of this grief and they're just, you what can, what do you need right now? I just need that chest and those arms. Okay.

Is there anything else? Yes, tell me it's going to be okay. Okay, it's going to be okay. Thank you. That's it. So we teach each other also, but being willing to be vulnerable and realizing that it actually does work. If we will do the work to identify what we need in our pain in our suffering, and be able to be vulnerable with someone.

and allow their presence and say if we don't need advice or if we just want a listening ear and that's all, you know, to be able to say it.

Whitney Hancock (26:59)
Yeah, you gave a beautiful example of how to stay relational while hurting. I think we often think of the blame or the anger or the criticism, it's kind of inherently relational. Like we need someone else there to then attack or to put it on. And I don't think we think of grief.

or suffering or pain in the same way. We think of those as isolating emotions. so maybe healing is not about making those go away or even making the blame and anger totally go away, but increasing our capacity to remain connected and be present with someone else in our own suffering or pain.

or lack of connection or chaos.

Jeri Peterson (27:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, we try so hard to find our person in marriage, for instance, and then we find them, and then we find that we also don't have a manual. So we're having to learn how to have someone that close, that intimate, how to get what we're actually looking for. And the work is vulnerable.

But I think in the beginning we do revert to blame or protesting instead of getting down below that to the more vulnerable emotions.

Whitney Hancock (28:11)
So maybe one of the deepest forms of healing is learning to stop asking only, whose fault is this? Why did this person do this or why did God do this? And begin to ask different questions entirely.

And that question being, who can I go to that could be present with me in this really bad feeling I have? Who can I go to for soothing, for comfort? Just be there in it.

And can I trust that that's gonna help and that this feeling isn't gonna last forever?

And one place for that, you know, if you don't have a safe partner or spouse or best friend, therapy can be a place that you experience that for the first time.

So what do you think would change if people understood blame less as a proof of badness or who's in the wrong and more as a signal to themselves of their own dysregulation, their own pain?

Jeri Peterson (29:04)
So seeing blame as a signal of pain doesn't mean that blame becomes healthy or harmless. I think that's important to differentiate. It means we become more curious about what the nervous system is trying to say and what it's trying to manage underneath. And that distinction is important. Being able to see the signal.

as a flag that something more vulnerable underneath is trying to be seen or heard and then becoming curious.

Whitney Hancock (29:29)
And that we can even be curious towards ourselves. It doesn't always have to be toward another person.

we can notice that feeling that we're having in our body and turn toward that and ⁓ gently ask that feeling in your body, what's going on here? If it's me and I fast, we'll notice it as a part of ourselves. We can imagine sitting with that part on a park bench and

Jeri Peterson (29:43)
Mm-hmm.

Whitney Hancock (29:58)
coming up to it, asking it if it wants to talk, and getting to know that part of ourselves and just what it's experiencing. That's one way that we explore parts of ourselves or turn curiosity toward ourselves. Which for those who aren't therapists, that might be a weird or interesting concept.

But it's a lot of what therapy is and I think a lot of what can help us get to those softer emotions underneath and those emotions we're probably a little more scared of. But in a way that feels safe and comfortable and tolerable.

Jeri Peterson (30:33)
Yes, the parts work opens the door to and statements and and questions because we can feel many different things at the same time and it's okay. We can feel intense anger and recognize we're shielding something and look at a different part and realize that we are feeling helpless. And so then we can generate self-compassion instead of self-judgment.

so the work becomes more constructive, moving from self-criticism, self-judgment, more toward a supportive friend.

Whitney Hancock (31:03)
blame often emerges when the nervous system cannot bear helplessness But healing tends to happen through safe connection, attunement, integration, and discovering we don't have to carry suffering in isolation.

So this episode resonated with you and you're realizing how much fear, grief, or shame might be shaping your relationships or nervous system. You can learn more about our work at Dynamic Counseling, where we offer trauma therapy, couples counseling, intensives, and attachment focused work in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Thanks so much.

Jeri Peterson (31:37)
Okay, this is me leaving. Bye.

Whitney Hancock (31:39)
Okay,

bye.