Whose Fault Was That?: A Journey into Blaming and Other Musings

By Bard Schachtel

Have you thought of evaluating your current marriage/relationship recently?

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Have you ever thought that you're too important to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bard Schachtel
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087934358

Book preview

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Author Disclaimer: The conversational vignettes described in the text (as well as the character Johnny Whomsoever) do not represent actual people. They are solely products of the author’s imagination.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my beloved parents, Rabbi H. J. and Barbara L. Schachtel, Ph. D.

Thank you to my wife, Dinah. Thank you also to our dear friend, Angela, for her invaluable support.

Table of Contents

Introduction

What’s Next?

Perspective

Eddie and Max

Chapter One

Capturing Feelings, Thoughts, and Actions

The Log

Messages and Timelines

My Thoughts/Journal

Chapter Two

Look Out! Here They Come

Preview of the Six Constructs (Known as the Seductive Six)

Look How Important I Am

Comparisons

Work Place Environment

Loss and Grief

Let’s Pray About It

Maybe Later

The Three Cs: Defenders Against the Seductive Six Constructs

Control

Change

Choice

Using Control, Change, and Choice

Introducing Interrogative Snapshots

Meet the Blamers and the Blamee

The Habitual Blamer (HB)

The Whatever Blamer (WB)

The Innovative Blamer (IB)

The Calculating Blamer (CB)

The Blamee

More About the Blamee State of Mind

Chapter Three

Musings and Improvisations on a Blamer Theme

Blaming in Sports – Rules and Regulations

How Did It Happen?

This Is Who I Am/This Is Not Who I Am: Ego Syntonic and Ego Dystonic Behavior

Dichotomous Thinking: Black and White – All or Nothing

The Always/Never Trap

A Musical Side Trip on a Blamer Theme: A Personal Interpretation

Chapter Four

Six Psychological Constructs

Exposition: Constructs One and Two

Construct One: Look How Important I Am

The B.F.E.

Are the Blamers B.F.E.s? If So, What Kind?

The Bullshit Challenge (for B.F.E.s and Others): An Exercise in Self-Awareness

Congratulations, Really?

Smooth as Silk: Casuistry and Sophistry

It’s Gotta Be Right Now

The Instruction Manual (For Some of Us)

Knowledge – Insight – Action

Fame and Blame

The Credit/Debit Card Fantasy, Part 1

How Are the Blamers and the Blamee Reacting So Far?

Dialing the Three Cs in a Look How Important I Am Setting

Construct Two: Comparisons

The Traffic Light Dilemma

A Moment at the Classic Driving Range

Comparisons in Relationships

Relationships and the Blamer Syndrome

Sand Traps in Marriage

Experts in Life and Marriage?

Priorities

Forgiveness

Freedom

Musical Freedom

Is That Right Person Really Out There?

Personal Track Record (PTR)

After the PTR

How Are the Blamers Reacting?

Revisiting the Three Cs in a Comparisons Setting

Exposition: Constructs Three and Four

Construct Three: Work Place Environment

Contrived Urgency

Groupthink – A Good or Bad Idea?

Don’t Catch the Ball

No

The Boundary Striker

Revisiting the Three Cs in a Work Place Setting

Construct Four: Loss and Grief

The Mental Museum

The Grief Barrier

Sublimation, Parallel Grief Process, and Intermittent Reinforcement

Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Anhedonia

Moving the Furniture

Personal Growth Process

Psychological Critical Spot

The Historian

The Three Cs in Loss and Grief

Exposition: Let’s Pray About It and Maybe Later

Construct Five: Let’s Pray About It

Ninety Degrees

Dialing the Three Cs in a Let’s Pray About It Setting

Prayer + Good Deeds = Potential Accomplishments

Construct Six: Maybe Later

The Entitlement/Enabling Masquerade

The Fermata

The Baggage Carousel

Dialing the Three Cs

A Train Trip

Chapter Five

The Enlighteners

Exposition: Creative Present (CP), Practice New Behavior (PNB), The River of Influence (ROI)

The Creative Present

The Passive Present

The Developmental Present

The Creative/Productive Present

A Slice of Cake

A Personal Bookshelf

Internal Messages/External Perceptions

Do It Yourself Metaphysical Salad

Practice New Behavior (PNB)

Two Metaphors

The Trombone

The Driving Range and Beyond

Back to the Blamers and the Blamee

They’re on the Golf Course: Fore!

The New/Old Behavior Trap

A Method of Evaluating Progress

Personal Activity Tracker: Another Approach to Organizing and Analyzing Potentially Red Flag Problems (watch out for B.S., E.B.S., and U.B.S.)

The Credit/Debit Card Fantasy, Part 2 – Revisited in a New Context and in a New Key

The River of Influence (ROI)

Epilogue

The Story of Each of Us Is Unique

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

Well dressed, not a hair out of place. Johnny Whomsoever sees himself as the man who will get it done for you. He prides himself on being on time, to the second. Right now, Johnny and his wife are in the car on their way to the theater. He has managed to acquire premium tickets for one of the newest and hottest musicals in town. Johnny has his eye on a possible promotion at the company and his annual review is coming up so he wants to hand the tickets over personally to the boss and the boss’s wife. He has set it up so that they’ll all meet in the lobby. To Johnny’s horror, he’s running late, something that isn’t supposed to happen to him. His keys were missing and his wallet wasn’t where it should have been. What’s even worse was that the four tickets were buried in his wallet for safe-keeping. Tickets, wallet, keys – shouldn’t he have expected that they’d be in their designated spot so that he wouldn’t have to waste time searching for them?

They’re almost there. Johnny sends a hurried text to the boss that their ETA has been delayed for just a few moments. Regardless of the car’s excellent air conditioning, he is sweating profusely by now, agitated and distracted, when he should have been happily anticipating the pleasures of being at the theater. He is trying to convey his outrage to his wife, who, instead of listening to him, is oblivious, texting on her cell phone. Johnny fumes to himself. What a mess. Why will the boss be seeing me in such a disheveled state? I need to look like I have it together. It is so not my fault that we’re late.

They arrive, valet park the car, and rush inside to meet the boss and his wife. They get to their seats just in time for the overture to begin. But, after all that, there’s an announcement: THERE WILL BE APPROXIMATELY A TEN-MINUTE DELAY TO FIX THE AUDIO AND LIGHTS. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

Really! Audio and lights! Who is at fault here? Who is to blame?

For a moment, let us investigate the journey that lies ahead. What will the mental weather forecast be? Will it be fog lifting later or continuing overcast skies? Will there be sun with possible thunderstorms? What about rain, maybe a rainbow? A therapeutic metaphor? As the old Rodgers and Sondheim song goes, Do I Hear a Waltz?

Back to the performance. Problems fixed. The orchestra is tuning up. The theater grows dark except for the stage footlights and the lights on the music stands. The conductor enters the pit and steps up on the podium. He accepts applause and turns back to the orchestra, raising his baton.

Overture – Warning – Beware of musical references sprinkled throughout!¹

1 Franz Liszt: Les Préludes and Other Symphonic Poems in Full Score. Dover Publications: New York.

Musical motifs are introduced about a story yet to be told. Here’s the French horn surrounded by shimmering strings and a harp outlining the Blamer Syndrome followed by saxophones and brass representing the Seductive Six. Flutes, clarinets, and strings play the capricious melody of I’m All Over It. Oboes and bassoons join in hinting at possibilities of control, change, and choice. Cellos, basses, and timpani add variations of Whose Fault Was That. The trombone echoes the Blamer Syndrome theme in a different rhythm and key. There’s a crescendo from the orchestra, a soft roll from the timpani as the overture concludes.

What’s Next?

Entrances and exits are part of our lives. They may form and reform as mosaics. We will be driven by the following five disciplines: music, psychology, philosophy, and theology. Experience has a role and a few diagrams will appear here and there. Some experts will be called upon for clarification or confusion depending upon how you interpret what lies ahead.² If you have ever gone to a workout class, in order for the instructor to get your attention, one of them might say, Right here, and you look to the front of the class as the instructor demonstrates what you should be doing.

2 Observations here are mainly from a qualitative phenomenological perspective based on personal knowledge and interpretation. It’s about lived experience.

Do you dislike being told to follow certain rules, especially rules you think are not important? Do you sometimes make up your own rules? Do you ever say, That’s a stupid rule when you hear something with which you disagree? Do you follow that rule or not? Are you sneaky? And, by the way, which subject would you guess might be the fifth choice? If you were paying attention, you would have noticed that only four disciplines were actually mentioned. The answer is in the footnote below.³

3 The fifth discipline is sociology.

Like Johnny Whomsoever, do you avoid being caught looking unprepared? Do you ever blame others for what you should have done yourself? Is the answer:

a) Yes

b) Maybe

c) No

d) All of the above

There is no right or wrong answer but I imagine that most of us have been caught offguard in a blaming context at one time or another.

Right here! Look up from your phones or tablets for a moment. You don’t really need to take that call right this minute! Stop texting; put aside your technological, social media world. Are you annoyed yet? Relax. Allow your senses, your mind, and your imagination to be open.

Throughout the process, you are encouraged to participate by writing about thoughts, beliefs, opinions, expectations, relationships, happenings. They may relate to your present circumstances, those from the past, and how you perceive the future.

Raise your hand if you have ever felt like a sucker/schmuck. At different times in our lives, most of us have felt that we have been taken advantage of. Without warning, we have become members of the Putz Club. We have taken the blame just because. We can be hoodwinked by a blamer and, as a result, become, let’s call it, the blamee – the (dutiful) sucker. We have been left holding the bag, having been tricked. We can become members of this club without much effort. Blaming is found all over. Different cultures may or may not factor in. Variations of both blamers and blamees can move in and out of our lives like improvisations on a blamer theme.

Perspective

An orchestral conductor includes his/her perspective in interpreting a musical score. It’s like a leitmotif, discernible if we are tuned in. Perspective will make an appearance here and there in subjective and objective settings.

Have we been paying attention to whether our values, decisions, and actions are being compromised from time to time? Be careful if you’re saying, That sort of thing wouldn’t affect me, or That’s just not who I am. Denial has often infiltrated our thinking, putting up imperceptible roadblocks. It’s like slipping on black ice; the danger lurks.

Eddie and Max

Here’s how it all began for me.

I was running in my neighborhood one day when a dog rushed at me from across the street so that I had to stop suddenly, hoping that the dog would not attack. I heard a child yelling at the dog, Max, Stop! Stop! Bad dog! The mother/adult appeared, grabbed