Blame Shifting is an overt Narcissistic Abuse tactic, make no earthly or spiritually motivated mistake about it.
It matters not why a person chooses to blameshift or who they choose to accuse unjustly of being personally or lawfully responsible for a moral choice or physical decision another human being or pack of Cluster B human beings makes.
It matters not who they accuse and how (aside from the obvious rubric of hospitality betrayal leaving them morally culpable for the harm that they cause).
People who choose to avoid personal responsibility and believe they are dominating others by willingly trying to give away all their power reveal a Machiavellian and anti-social public and private component to their character.
By pretending they themselves are not personally accountable for the effects of their choices on society, on themselves, and on other people, the savvy social gaslighter chooses to point the finger of blame at people not responsible for their actions or deplorable behavioral choices in any way.
Do the people they choose to use as distraction tactics to avoid being held socially or lawfully responsible for their actions — and many times for their willful inaction at the time when other human beings should have had a reasonable expectation they would do or say the right thing at the right time for the right reason and to help — typically have liabilities and accountabilities of their own to reckon with personally as well as socially, professionally, and from a purely spiritual perspective?
Absolutely. We all do.
But “blameshifting” [blame shifting, as in the shifting of blame for cause and or for effect], when it happens, is not a question of saying something like I saw the man in that truck run the stop sign and t-bone the pretty lady’s cute little sports car when you were standing on the sidewalk innocently waiting to cross.
It’s more akin to the man in the truck, speeding while not paying a bit of attention, failing to observe speed warnings or the stop sign and causing the accident, then doing something like saying the other driver was at fault… followed by (if THAT does not work) blaming the person who witnessed or noticed his behavior and reported the incident accurately to the best of their ability for having caused him to choose to speed and to run the stop sign, harming his own vehicle, hers, and likely HER and by collateral damage her loved ones, co-workers, professional network, and society by compromising her time and causing her to be knocked off path in her trajectory.
Blame shifting feels like if that same man — showing reckless disregard for the law and others — chose to blame the person who blew the whistle on him for speeding and running the stop sign by saying something like, “I was driving along following the speed limit [lying], paying attention to the road [gaslighting], when this girl in a really short mini skirt standing on the street corner made me look at her instead of the sign [fallacy of false cause, appeal to irrational emotion]. She made me run the stop sign because she was wearing that outfit. It’s her fault I ran the sign, her fault I hit the other lady with my car, and SHE should be punished/stoned / arrested/shamed / held legally and morally and civically liable for my malfeasance while driving and my choice to commit a civil crime.”
See the problem?
When someone with a sense of entitlement chooses to act or fails to behave in an appropriate manner when anyone with a reasonably healthy level of pro-social emotional intelligence capacity would… they cause problem one.
When they fail to accept personal responsibility for their actions and moral choices, instead handing the locus of control over to an invisible deity with malicious intent they make up wholly to avoid being dealt with by other humans in a just and civilly appropriate manner, they con. That’s one branch of the problem.
Another branch is when they choose to blame a person or peer or circumstance not at all causally responsible for the original injury or immoral choice of activity or human conduct. Blaming an innocent party is in itself a civic violation of trust showing IMMENSE disrespect for the listeners and a willingness to harm an innocent party to self-promote.
Another branch shunts off of there, root causally connecting the false accusation to the direct social, emotional, and health harm of the targeted or preferred scapegoat individual to having been unjustly blamed for something they likely never had in their power to control, to prevent, or to do.
When someone blames the lady on the side of the road wearing a mini skirt for why they were speeding, failed to notice a stop sign, and committed a civic crime with reckless disregard for literally everyone but themselves, it’s really obvious who is and who is not the real person legally responsible for having caused the accident.
But when blame shifting is subtle or based on the word of someone prone to gaslighting — for instance during a he said, she said argument report where only the Abuser and his or her target are or were present, the success of the blame shifter depends on his or her audience.
If a person over the age of six chooses to lie to or about you or to and or about another person to you or to others in order to manufacture social chaos for their own personal pleasure or social profit, be mindful they reveal their core nature overtly, plain and simple.
It does not matter if your nine-year-old brother ate all the breakfast cereal but tells mom and dad or another sibling that you did it or a person who date rapes blames the attire of their victim at age 36 — it’s a major red flag of neurological disorder.
People who lack emotional intelligence on a neurological level — regardless of reason — are socially dangerous for several very specific blame-shifting prone reasons.
Lacking the ability to process complex emotions — hiding the deficiency under false bravado or using mimicry techniques to mirror speech pattern and behaviors of neurotypical people to hide dysfunction — tends to create personality types that reflect skill sets of Alpha predators. That does not mean an Alpha predator is always skilled at their behavior or that they are ever successful.
[Think of the character Dewey on the television series “Justified” to understand the difference between him and a Boyd Crowder for example.]
But a person in a social mix who is prone to gaslighting and given subjective credibility when they make an assertion is liable to lie whether they are pretending to be nice or when they choose to be hateful.
The tendency of a person to blame shift reveals character about the person doing the moral accountability avoiding.
Own your behavior to take back your power especially if you have been victimized.
Are you to blame for being mugged or raped by a stranger? Never.
Are you personally responsible for or in control of other people’s biopsychology? Not even under the best or most pleasant of circumstances.
Is “society to blame” for someone choosing to harm others rather than to choose to behave like a socially trustworthy or compassionate and forward horizontal or spherical thinking individual instead of someone behaving in ways that are socially discordant or devolutionary?
Human beings make up society collaboratively. That means each and every human is personally responsible for their own behavior and thought pattern cultivation.
Not some imaginary force that makes us use our free will to choose to intentionally gaslight, to make false accusations, to lie to friends, family, and or to authority figures, and that makes us no longer personally accountable for the consequences in OTHER people’s lives caused by our own egocentric behaviors.
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