The Downward Spiral of the Blame Game
in devoting our energy + effort to accusing others we starves ourselves of the nourishment of self examination we need to get closer to homeostasis or G-d
[audio clip of Jihadi Jew aka Lee Weissman from June 3, 2024]
Let's say a couple comes in from marriage counselling. And the first thing that they do is they tell their story. So she starts, do you know what he did? He did this and he did that and he did this and he did that and this is all his fault. And then the husband chimes in. And the husband says, you know what? Do you know what she did? She did this and she did that and it's all her fault.
Now a good marriage counsellor is gonna shut that down right away because they know their relationships just don't work that way. It's probably true that maybe one of them has some kind of personality flaw and may have something in their history, some kind of trauma, some kind of problem that makes them more responsible in some respect or maybe they started it or maybe—
All those things are possible, but the problem will never be solved by blaming and shaming the other person. The problem is solved by trying to find the common ground, by getting both sides on the same side, and that's the side of preserving the relationship or creating the relationship.
So.
All conflicts work the same. All conflicts work the same.
And if we spend all of our time trying to point the finger and trying to find out whose fault it is, we're never going to get anywhere. We're just going to stay in the same place telling our stories again and again and again to people who aren't listening. So maybe it's time to start listening, maybe it's time to start being on the same side and stop with the blaming and stop with the shaming. — Lee Weissman aka Jihadi Jew
Did you know that when you are in a threat state your ears have tuned themselves to a different frequency, so your brain will be listening for predators and scary things out to get you and not loving friends? When your brain is a hammer, when your amygdala has stolen the keys to your existence and is joyriding your nervous system’s commando mission circuitry, everyone is a nail. When your brain is in the green zone, peaceful pastures, then everyone is your friend or not-yet-your-friend. For the science nerds, here’s the academic explanation from a Dr. Porges paper about what happens inside the inner ear to trigger the change in sound perception.
Sound in our environment impinges on the eardrum and causes it to vibrate. These vibrations are transduced from the eardrum to the inner ear via the small bones in the middle ear known as ossicles. The stapedius muscle (innervated via a branch of the facial nerve) and the tensor tympani (innervated via a branch of the trigeminal nerve), when innervated, stiffen the ossicular chain and dampen the amplitude of the low frequency sounds reaching the inner ear. The functional impact of these muscles on the perceived acoustic environment is to markedly attenuate low frequency sounds and to facilitate the extraction of high frequency sounds associated with human voice. For example, our acoustic environment is often dominated by loud low frequency sounds that have the functional effect of masking the soft high frequency sounds associated with human voice. In humans, the ossicular chain is regulated primarily by the stapedius muscle and tensing the stapedius prevents this masking effect (see Borg and Counter, 1989). In fact, individuals who can voluntarily contract middle ear muscles exhibit an attenuation of approximately 30 db at frequencies below 500 Hz, while there is no or minimal attenuation at frequencies above 1000 Hz (see Kryter, 1985). — Porges 2007
Woah, what? Can we have that in English, Bad Hijabi?
Okay, Dr. Porges means that humans have diminished capacity for active listening of other humans in threat detection and threat state mode. We do not hear our interlocutor, ie The Other, as they are, when, from the emotional vantage point of unmet expectations, we view them as a threat. When you are mad at your partner you lose the ability to listen to them. When you are mad at anyone, you lose the ability to listen to them. Asking an angry human, asking a human in the throes of a threat state, to listen to reason is like asking a person with paraplegia to walk up a steep staircase — physically impossible! This includes you and I, we cannot listen at the level the social connection needs us to do in the moment. Also you can’t see your reflection in a pot of boiling water.
When the sympathetic system engages in response to a threat in our environment, our autonomic nervous system (ANS) diverts resources away from social engagement toward survival. So falling into a persistent social connection pattern of blame invites an interocepted (ie your perception of your internal body organs and systems and sensations) felt sense of discomfort and unease. You train your nervous system when you resort to this blame + shame threat response in your social connections, plasticity means you can un-train it by choosing a more healthy response. Designating a scapegoat limits your ability to see that person or group of persons you’ve blamed in a compassionate light. Often a swirl of emotion obstructs your mental vision — the more upset you become the more you shut yourself off from yourSelf, and the more you project your shame and upsetness onto your opponent. The more upset and filled with shame you become, the more you project. The relationship suffers and a downward spiral ensues.
Jihadi Jew has wise advice above, go listen again. Go read the transcript again.
What does that mean on the ground? How does one do this? How do we shift away from blame + shame? How do we get ourselves out of the downward spiral? How can we people a bit better?
[Audio Clip from Jihadi Jew from May 13, 2024 — Talk to not At People]
Far too often we talk at people instead of talking to them. We think that if they only had more information, they would think just like us. So we just keep adding more and more information. And did you know this? And did you know this fact? Do you know this fact? Do you know this? Do you know this? Do you know this? You know this and this and this and this. And we keep adding on facts thinking that if they just knew everything that we know, they would think same way that we drove, but that's not the way it works.
Everybody thinks
Everybody thinks differently. No two people think exactly the same. So asking a person to think like you is like asking them to change their face. Imagine pointing to somebody and going, I don't like your face, change it. No, it doesn't work that way. Your face is individual. It's part of you. It's part of who you are in the same way. The way you think is also part of who you are. And just keeping information on a person is not going to change every way that they imagine the world. Okay, so you have to deal with people where they are and actually learn to talk to each other, not at each other. — Lee Weissman aka Jihadi Jew
Peopling begins with your connection to yourSelf. Everything we do with others happens through the lens of ourselves, that means it happens in conjunction with the state of our nervous system, which is the conduit to your body’s systems. So, begin with you, how does your gut feel? Your face? Your chest? Your heart?
Praying is a thing we do for ourSelves and not because G-d needs us to do. God has no need, we do. We have a need to connect to our higher + compassionate + safe self. We can only meet God in that state of being. We pray in order to fulfill our need to connect to Self.
Pause. Say nothing to anyone when your heart is racing — shhhhh and calm your frenetic heart. Listen to the thing your gut tells you. You wear your heart on your face: your facial innervation and your heart innervation are connected. You send safety or danger cues to others without knowing, we do this as we move through society effortlessly. Humans come into this world hard wired for social connection, so we really suck at masking our emotional states. This is a superpower and also a vulnerability. Remember the rebellion COVID-19 forced face masking triggered? What if that was fear at having a major means of coregulation and receiving danger + safety cues taken from us? When feeling angry and agitated we signal this in our vocal prosody, in our facial expression, and we perceive our interlocutor differently, through the lens of fear/rage or shame/blame.
The way we show up to the relationship connection determines the success or failure of the connection. Talk to your interlocutor, not at them. Remember that more might not necessary equal better. More persuasive facts + information, more vocal volume or speed — these most likely will hinder not help your connection. Are these behaviours—ie talking too loud or too fast or too much—part of your threat response? What’s going on there? Much of this response happens below the level of our conscious awareness.
Talking to someone means considering your impact on the other person. Think about how you would like others to connect with you. What vocal intonation and prosody and the like give you safety cues? What gives you danger cues? Consider that others feel this way too, and refrain from doing to others what you do not like others doing to you. Maybe talking to loudly or quickly or too much, or speaking with staccato or monotone prosody might seem like threat cues to others in the conversation. Talking to someone means considering how they receive you. Talking to someone means NOT treating the person like a projection screen for your ego or like a Saveaday for your projectile vomiting ego.1
This all points in one direction — KNOW + OBSERVE YOURSELF first and foremost. You know how the flight cabin crew instructs you to put your own mask on before helping others? Imagine that instruction works in relationships too — observe and assess your own internal state and take appropriate care to get yourself at balance before reaching out to connect with The Other to resolve the conflict.
We can only fix the problems we acknowledge, accept, and understand. This includes problems about ourselves and how we connect which we want to fix.
What if you could TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for YOURSELF when you wanted to GIVE BLAME and SHAME to OTHERS?
[Audio Clip from Jihadi Jew dated May 24, 2024 — the story of Jonah “this is my fault”]
I want to share a little teaching that I saw just yesterday from Rabbi Yisfak Zev Soloveitchik, known as the Griz, on the Book of Jonah, on Prophet Jonah, or Yunus. And in his commentary, he says that we notice in the text that the moment that the ship starts to flounder and the captain of the ship comes, goes down, into the hold and he wakes up Yonah. Yonah's first response is, this is my fault. I did this. This is because of me. Now, this is a very curious response because we're told a few minutes later that all of the—or maybe just before—that all of the sailors called to their gods, which means this was a, this was a ... a ship full of idolaters.
So why in a ship full of idolaters, a ship full of people who are not necessarily, there's sailors on top of that, right? Sailors not known for their great moral turpitude, you know, not known, you know, for their incredible moral behaviour, a bunch of sailors and they’re idolaters. And he says, no, it's my fault.
So what, what the Griz said, is that we have to take responsibility for ourselves. The first person that we should look at is ourselves. Now, you could argue that this only applies personally, that this applies only when it's us as individuals. But maybe it applies communally too. It's not okay to keep blaming everybody else for our problems. It's … to constantly be a victim is not healthy. The only person you have control over is you. You have control over your behaviour. You have control over what you do. And I will add that once you start using power, once you start using power, especially when you start using the power of violence, your responsibility becomes all that much greater.
And...
There is no way to squeeze out of that responsibility by saying that I am the eternal victim. We are not eternal victims. Once you've taken power into your hands, you have to take responsibility for that power. So as we go into Shabbat, I wish everybody a beautiful Shabbat. But I also wish that we open our hearts and we examine ourselves and instead of looking around at everybody else and try to figure out what they've done wrong, we should look at ourselves, figure out what we've done and more importantly, what we can do to fix it. — Lee Weissman aka Jihadi Jew
The internet is a wealth of information at your fingertips. Here’s a lovely video about the Vagus Nerve and the science of social connection. Go learn about how your nervous system works, take responsibility for yourself!
When asked for advice on how to covert to Judaism, Hillel responded, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another; that is the entire Torah. The rest is interpretation. Go study.” — Shabbat31a