A forgotten birthday. A career setback. A terrible mistake made with money.
These things can be crushing, within a relationship. There is one habit that makes such a problem far worse, and it is the guilt trip.
When we hold against a person something they already regret, and use it to vent our anger, over and over, it can be devastating. Very few things, in fact, are more egregiously harmful to a relationship.
The blame game shatters the balance that every good relationship relies on. It replaces love and kindness with judgment and cruelty. In my experience working with couples, I have encountered, over and over, the wreckage this form of lashing-out can cause.
I am currently coaching a couple, let’s call them Tina and Manoj, who have been married 20 years. Her inability to let something go is currently threatening his ability to function in the world, and endangering a relationship they have tended to so carefully for years.
Manoj runs his own consulting company; Tina is an executive with a software firm. Three years ago, he loaned a large sum to a former college mate who was starting a new venture. Tina was aware of the loan.
A few months later, it turned out that the venture was a scam. There was no company; there were no returns. The ex-classmate vanished, with money he extracted from a number of friends and acquaintances.
Two years on, Tina continues to raise the issue of the lost money and accuse Manoj of destroying their lives with “his huge mistake”. He has derailed her plans for herself, she says. She hoped to take a two-year sabbatical, and now that is out of the question.
In our sessions, I can hear and see how this has crushed his spirit.
He was always careful with their money, he tells me. He worked hard to invest their savings, and their lifestyle benefited from it. The money lost was a fairly large sum and he felt a sense of horror when he realised what had happened.
It would have been hard enough for him to recover, if Tina had eventually reconciled herself to the loss. The constant reminders have made him doubtful and anxious. He feels less and less like himself, he says.
The crucial element we are now working on is what Tina hopes to achieve by dwelling on the loss. We have discussed in our sessions that the incident meets all the parameters for simple forgiveness: the harm wasn’t deliberate; it isn’t likely to recur. Most vitally, there is no way he could have known what would happen; and there is nothing he can do about it now.
What concerns me in such cases is the essential lack of empathy.
Think of a terrible mistake made, let’s say, at work. Perhaps you broke a precious object on someone’s desk, or vomited on someone’s expensive shoes. Imagine if, every time you walked into the workplace, there was a chance they would yell at or berate you about it. Imagine if this went on for years.
But few would dream of doing such a thing.
I often wonder why we treat our loved ones so much worse than we treat our colleagues. Part of it, of course, is familiarity. The old adage isn’t wrong.
But another aspect of why we do this is simply because we can. Those who love us, we know, will put up with a lot. And so it is that we vent anger at our circumstances; vent rage from baggage dating to years ago.
This is what makes the guilt trip so harmful; the other person is essentially a punching bag, and they invariably know it.
It isn’t the blame they are assigned that does the worst damage. It is the realisation of a deeper, darker truth: that the person they love doesn’t care enough about how they feel.
To those wondering right now whether they are the guilty party in their relationship, I offer a simple test: Ask, in the next angry moment, is there an objective to the rage? Is there something fixable to remedy; something of the moment to address?
If there is, ask yourself: Is there a kinder way to do this? (There always is.)
If there isn’t something you are trying to fix, but the rage persists, I would recommend you see an expert. Because anger like that tends to go back decades, to early hurts and childhood trauma. And your partner doesn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of it.
Sometimes, it isn’t trauma but temperament. One person in the relationship has become manipulative, and is now accustomed to getting their way by pulling out their “trump card”.
In some cases, the anger can be displaced rage within the relationship: a fight about a forgotten anniversary because the person can’t bear to mention the real issue, an affair they found out about years ago.
Whatever the reason, such rage needs to be addressed. Because, left unchecked, it will erode empathy and carve a chasm between two people. And the wider that chasm grows, the harder it will be to build a bridge across it.
(Simran Mangharam is a dating and relation-ship coach and can be reached on simran@ floh.in. The views expressed are personal)
