The Extreme Fear and Pain of Being Criticized

Key points

People often fear being held responsible because they conflate it with being blamed and shamed.

While responsibility entails guilt, blame is a weapon used to unfairly attack another's character.

Accepting that our parents may have not always wanted what was best for us helps us disentangle these ideas.

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