Life & Therapy

Yesterday, my daughter was in a terrible mood.  She didn’t eat enough, and she skipped her nap.  The littlest things would trigger the biggest tantrums.  Whoever happened to step on the landmine of her bad mood was the person she thought was causing the bad mood.  For a three-year-old, this makes perfect sense.  Screaming from being too hungry and tired is too abstract of a concept.  A more concrete concept is: you did something I didn’t like and now I am screaming at you, therefore it is your fault I am screaming.  We repeated this pattern throughout the day.  One of us would do something that our daughter thought we should know she didn’t like, and she’d scream.  I told her it isn’t okay to scream at people just because you don’t like what they are doing, and  that the reason she was doing so is that she didn’t get enough sleep.  She’d respond by saying, “No, that person did this thing and that’s why I’m mad.”  She really wanted me to accept that holding the door for her when she wanted to hold it herself merited a screaming tantrum.  I wanted her to understand that she wouldn’t be having screaming tantrums if she just ate some food and got more sleep.

We ended the day at an impasse, but the whole situation made me think about how, as adults, we sometimes mirror this same behavior.  Sometimes we just want something to be someone else’s fault.  In the short term, it feels satisfying to have a villain to blame.  In the long term, there’s no real way to fix things if our emotional state is someone else’s fault and responsibility.  I will share a personal example.  I was once in a relationship with an emotionally distant man who was never going to be able to give me the committed relationship I wanted.  He provided me with multiple opportunities to feel horribly wronged, and I got a sense of satisfaction from complaining about him to my friends.  This went on for quite some time, until a very wise friend pointed out that this particular man was very predictable in his behavior and she wanted to know why I continued to see him, knowing just what I could expect from him.  I had no answer to this question.  I could no longer blame him for my unhappiness.  I realized that the fix was my responsibility, not his.  The relationship did not last much longer after that moment.

When I stopped blaming someone else for my unhappiness, I was able to see what was truly making me unhappy, which turned out to have nothing to do with any relationship.  I was deeply unsatisfied with many things in my life that needed changing, but it had been much easier to find a scapegoat.  Easier, that is, until I discovered that having a scapegoat meant nothing ever changing.  Dating a scapegoat meant dating a deep feeling of dissatisfaction.  Discovering that the problem was within myself to fix was terrifying and wildly exhilarating, and most importantly freeing.  I am hoping that one day I can teach my daughter in very small ways that she is free when she stops blaming others for what she can fix herself.  I’m starting with these smaller causes of her emotional state in the hopes that she can apply this lesson to the bigger things later.