Some spend their entire lives defending themselves against punishment and shame, seeing it lurking everywhere. Those with a tendency to engage in black and white thinking tend to either feel threatened and vulnerable or completely secure, with no in-between. So, they erroneously conflate blame and responsibility, terrified of the latter because of what the former entails.

To hold someone responsible is to explain a chain of events leading to some negative outcome, where one or more individuals are believed to have caused it. Responsibility can imply anger and a need for justice, or the desire for the culprit to make up for the misdeed. But responsibility also implies the ability to overcome past mistakes through sincerity and disciplined effort. Responsibility makes reasonable requests for redress. Responsibility cares about each individual involved. And responsibility concerns itself with fairness. Blame is something else.

While blame can be perceived as responsibility, it more often than not veils difficult truths. Unlike responsibility, blame doesn’t seriously consider justice, fairness, collaboration, and growth, even if it pretends to. Blame is poorly justified dominance. Responsibility means the feedback is limited to some moral error, or even a series of them, while blame assassinates character. And shame is blame’s main weapon of choice. While guilt may make us feel down, it nevertheless contains hope. Shame, on the other hand, is all-encompassing, expressed in such statements as, “You never do anything right.” Shaming is cruel because it derives significant pleasure from punishment. In that respect, punishment isn’t tempered by compassion or even concern for a relationship’s future because its expression is so intoxicating. Blaming and shaming are restrained when merely holding someone else accountable because responsibility doesn’t intend to destroy; its main goal, in contrast, is building.

Growing up in a household without this distinction, the child’s natural tendency to personalize, catastrophize, and engage in black and white thinking is reinforced. Black and white thinking, again, makes one feel that being held accountable is akin to being punished or treated as an inferior child. Yet, when the punishment is used to attempt to positively alter a behavior—at least, when it isn’t considered too deeply by the individual doing it because it doesn’t provide the adrenaline and dopamine rush experienced in addiction, and when it’s done rather sheepishly—its connotations can be positive too and less self-serving. So, we can disentangle guilt from shame, as well as the degrees and intentions of punishment.

But, on that black and white foundation, where one either feels safe or in danger, the individual fearing blame may then catastrophize, perceiving a criticism as a harbinger of further pain. They may believe that a criticism signifies loss of respect and loss of control (even if excessive to begin with) while portending complete emotional and physical abandonment, which, in turn, may lead to a sense of a complete loss of self. Therefore, these individuals often engage in perfectionism, defending themselves to “protect their peace.” Like an addict smoking one more cigarette, they fail to seriously address the meaning of their long-term solution—if you’re always defending yourself, and you’re never wrong, then that must mean you’re perfect.

But personalizing may be the most challenging of all of these distorted thought patterns associated with the terror of blame. So, if the worst-case scenario does come to pass, and the perfectionist is left isolated, their inner critic will arrive to fill the void. This means one will shame themself by essentializing (believing they’re wholly bad), which is the ultimate fear. While on the surface, the punishment may feel sufficient and even reasonable (depending on the misdeed), its footprints tell a different, horrible story. When we begin to distinguish between blame and responsibility, we learn that the former wasn’t effective because it was never meant to be. We learn that sadism, dominance, fear, and even envy kept us in place, which was always the plan. Blame wasn’t meant to bring us up, even if that’s what we learned; it was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, which still was a wolf. Blame wasn’t about us at all. It’s scary to think that while in its grip, we just didn’t matter.

In treatment, our patients often struggle to make sense of what others, especially their parents, wanted from them. On the one hand, they reinforced an overly harsh inner critic. On the other, they justified doing so. Inevitably, the individual becomes confused—“Why am I so afraid of criticism if it’s good for me?” And that’s because it never was. Learning to distinguish blame and responsibility often means coming to terms with one’s past, seeing it for what it truly was. Some of our patients fear holding their parents responsible, while some shame them in turn as a means of avoiding accountability as adults. Both extremes imply a warped relationship with responsibility. Some see it as too cruel for significant others, and of course themselves, and others preferentially and excessively wield it.

But responsibility isn’t a game, hence why most people hold others accountable only when needed. With that said, lastly, in order to distinguish the two, we need to trust that others do, too. This is the most difficult part of treatment, and life, for the perfectionist. Perfectionists often hold themselves to excessive standards because they believe that’s how things are, that if you were truly good, you’d be beyond reproach. Yet, the truly good are the ones who welcome it and put it in its proper place.