Kelly Inselmann

What’s the number one thing NOT to do when feeling blamed?

Don’t go in to “self attack!” Know that it says much more about the other person and perhaps very little about you.

Here are 3 other ideas:

1. Notice the impulse to blame yourself and see if you can wait for a moment before doing that.  Offer yourself understanding and compassion.

2. Identify your underlying feelings.

Ask yourself: What feelings am I avoiding by blaming myself? Anger about the intrusive or judgmental comment? Fear of disconnection? Shame for getting sick? Desire for more time or money?  Anger at having the disease?

Try to focus on the real feelings you are having and don’t camoflauge them by attacking yourself. These feelings are important signals that should not be ignored or stuffed. Give yourself permission to feel all of it. If you can, express it directly. Write about it or find a safe friend or therapist to talk things through.

3. If it’s not hurting you or causing you resentment, ignore it.   Sometimes the unhelpful comment comes from an awkward place of not knowing what to say.  Sometimes a person feels loving towards you but their comment but misses the mark and feels mis-attuned.

This next week, be aware of the moments during your day when you are tempted to blame or criticize yourself. Stop, breathe, feel, and offer yourself compassion.

I was lying on the treatment table for a lymphatic massage, naked except for the covering sheet, feeling open and relaxed. When my therapist came in, I shared I was feeling sad and worried that a family friend had a recurrence of breast cancer, this time stage 4, 12 years after the first time. She was in the best shape of her life, running with her husband, eating very healthy.

My massage therapist’s first response? “I wonder what she did to trigger it coming back.”

I tried to take that in, but ended up in furious tears, outraged at the blame and bewildered by the delusion that we humans can consciously control every aspect of our lives and health. Would she blame me if I had a recurrence? I felt no empathy from her for my friend, only detachment and judgment.

Why do people imply you are responsible?

It’s frightening to be faced with news of illness in another person. It can be hard to know what to say and how to connect. “In some cases the easiest way to approach the illness is to blame the victim” (Marla Morris, Teaching through the Ill Body).

Here are 5 of the reasons I believe people (often unconsciously) blame the victim of an illness:

1. They want to connect but don’t know what to say. They want an easy answer to the question of why scary and unpredictable things happen in the world.
2. They want to distance themselves from feeling their own vulnerability especially about their bodies and mortality. If they can assign cause, especially one not connected to themselves, they feel safe.
3. Unconscious Aggression. People walk around with a lot of aggression, often hidden, often unconscious. Here’s a moment when you are vulnerable and you can become a target. For example, when a friend was diagnosed, her mother’s best friend called her to offer “sympathy” and then exclaimed:,“See what happens when you don’t get over your anger towards your mother!”
4. It lets them distance themselves from you. Maybe your relationship was not very close or in a good place. It’s easier to move away emotionally if they can think of how you brought this on yourself.
5. They are angry (often rightly so) at how our environment and food has become polluted. They are trying to avoid contamination and if you are ill, it can be reassuring for them to think you must not have done a very good job of having a perfect diet or lifestyle that would protect you.
6. People like to feel one up. Look at how people delight in the struggles of reality show stars and celebrities. If someone is suffering and they can be blamed, people feel better about themselves and reassured that it won’t happen to them.

“People can’t give up the idea that the ill person is responsible for the disease.”
Marla Morris, Teaching through the Ill Body

Lydia uses tissue after tissue in my office as she tries to understand how the cancer happened. She is exhausted from lack of sleep, shock, and worry. Her usually bright brown eyes are full of anguish and barely visible in a face swollen from crying. She wants to know what she did wrong, why she is being punished, what hidden badness might have done the damage.

She read online that all cancer is the result of hidden anger. She’s feeling angry about her diagnosis and now is fearful the anger will make it worse. Does sugar cause cancer and baking soda cure it? Do people blame her for eating sugar?

An acquaintance who practices energy healing told her that it has something to do with abuse from her father. She wracks her brain trying to come up with what that might be but there’s nothing. She had a good relationship with her father, not perfect, but hardly abusive.

Why do people – often the “not ill” – project and perpetuate these rationales for why other people are ill?

You’ve likely found yourself trying to help an ill friend by making such off-the-cuff statements. But let’s probe a bit more deeply into why we make these claims, why they’re actually more harmful than helpful, and what we can do instead.

After years of dealing with my own cancer recovery and working with so many others in their healing journey, here’s what I’ve been thinking:

Like blaming the rape victim for causing the assault with her short skirt or the walk alone in a dark parking lot, or the drink at a bar, people not undergoing illness casually speculate on what the ill person did “wrong” in an effort (conscious or not) to identify that they are “not like me“ and therefore must have brought the misfortune on themselves.

It’s so hard to know how to respond when faced with the suffering or misfortune of a friend or loved one. Frequently, even well intentioned people try to identify what mistakes the ill person made: wrong diet, expressed too much anger or held in their anger, ate non-organic food or had a sweet tooth, took birth control pills, enjoyed red wine, or any other of a hundred lifestyle choices. Maybe, if they can point out something that the ill person did that they did not, they can relax in their own safety.

What makes well-meaning people say these things?

Sometimes it seems as if we are praised and appreciated if we appear healthy, physically strong and happy, slim, youthful and energetic. We are blamed, disparaged, or ignored if we are not.

You want to know the cause of cancer. You want to feel in control of your life and health. But the answers are not always apparent or available. Feelings of sadness, anger, fear and bewilderment get triggered when you hear of a terrible incident or illness. This notion that things happen outside your control and bad things can happen to anyone, even the innocent, can be terrifying. The mind searches for ways to explain the misfortune that don’t include it easily happening to you.

If you can come up with a psychological theory, you “gain immunity” (to use a term from the show Survivor) from feeling how vulnerable your own body is, thereby distancing yourself emotionally from the painful knowledge of its inevitable demise.

But blaming the ill person, however subtly, can be toxic to her recovery. It adds to shame and self blame. Here’s how to respond more sensitively:

1. Respond with love and empathy to her fear and uncertainty. Be willing to listen and ask questions about how she feels and what she needs. One wise yogi friend told me he’s had many people in his family be diagnosed. He asks them, “Do you want me to talk, listen, hold you while you cry, or cry myself? I can do all of those.”

2. Tell her it’s not her fault.

3. Be honest with yourself about how much you can help. Don’t offer meals, visits, or support that you can’t follow though.

If you are a caregiver, pace yourself, and seek emotional support with others so that your loved one with cancer isn’t regularly taking care of you emotionally.

4. Be willing to hear about his or her fear and pain. Once s/he gets that part out, s/he will also want to talk about the hope and the humor in life as well.

5. Do not second guess or disparage medical choices (“I would never in a million years have done chemotherapy!” You never know until you are in it.) Especially do not criticize treatment choices already made.

6. Don’t give lectures on Big Pharm or say that there are cancer cures out there being hidden. If you genuinely have some important information based on science to share, wait to be approached and asked.

And most importantly, be a friend. Remember your loved one is more than her cancer. Be ok with not being perfect yourself and not having the answers. Don’t let fear or anxiety, desire to “fix it” or hope of saying just the right thing keep you from sharing love and connection.

Reflections on Blame and Shame: Part 1

Annabelle has a gorgeous mane of thick dark hair, even at age 63, and bright blue eyes. She exercises and has always had a healthy diet. Every week she’s at yoga class and is beginning to meditate at home.

She knows what it’s like to feel blamed for her illness. “When old friends hear I have lung cancer, they ask, ‘Did you smoke?’ What I say now is ‘Yes, and I quit 40 years ago.” She smiles, “Just like you did.’” She doesn’t have the type of lung cancer that has been linked to smoking.

Jessica worries that her yoga friends and facebook community secretly blame her imperfect diet for her breast cancer diagnosis. Indeed, she blames herself. She knows a lot about healthy food and tries to buy local farm fresh and organic. She avoids GMOs. But sometimes she eats ice cream or chocolate. And “sugar feeds cancer!“

Her facebook feed is full of friends who have not had cancer sharing with confidence about the ways diet causes cancer and how baking soda and going vegan offer protection from illness. In our session, she says she feels ashamed when she sees the posts and wonders if her friends blame her for her misfortune or for using western medicine. Compared to the vast majority of Americans she has had a very healthy diet. The breast cancer gene runs all through her family.

Judy longs to re-engage in her career, now that the ovarian cancer is in remission. She is only 30 and wants to live life to the fullest. She confides that she feels blocked in moving forward because she has gotten the message from her family that stress is toxic and her ambition may have contributed to her illness in the first place. She worries that “stress,” even positive stress related to exciting job interviews, will cause a recurrence and her family will believe she caused it.

If you have lung cancer, people want to know if you smoked. If you have colon or stomach cancer –what kind of diet did you have? If you have breast cancer, who are you angry at, did you have an abortion, drink too much, care too deeply, think negative, wear deodorant, an underwire bra, not do self massage, get a root canal?

Have you experienced stress in your life? Well then, your lack of ability to manage it could be to blame for your cancer.

Never mind that in most cases there is no certainty as to cause and most people never develop cancer, even with the exact same human behaviors, habits and emotions.

Genes express themselves over time, according to genetics, diet and environment and rarely is the cause obvious and direct. Instead, it is an intersection of many factors.

I challenge this new age notion that we have conscious control over every cell and its mutation and that illness is a spiritual failure of some sort, usually associated with lack of self discipline or poor choices.