A case study on the negative person who makes you feel like you’re always to blame and it’s always your fault
by Catherine Pratt
For this case study on negative people, let’s talk about the negative person who makes you feel like you’re always to blame, it’s always your fault and nothing you do is ever right!
Most likely after many of your encounters with this person, you end up feeling guilty, upset, emotionally drained and confused. You may even feel like you’re completely useless or incompetent.
The most difficult times to deal with this type of negative person is when they’re in the role of your boss, your parent, or your significant other.
This type of person isn’t always easy to identify at first. For ease of reading this article, I’m going to use “he” throughout but a blamer can be male or female. The blamer can be very charming and likeable yet also have this darker side. When you’re dealing with the darker side, it will feel like the rug is always being pulled out from under you and nothing you do is ever right, or you get blamed for his mistakes or his deceptions. Trying to be rational with him doesn’t work. Trying to get him to see how hurt you feel by what he’s doing doesn’t work. In fact, these two tactics will make it much, much worse.
So, what should we call this particular type of negative person? I tend to call them blamers because they always blame someone else for anything and everything. They are never the one at fault. This is one of the main clues to identifying this type of personality. They always blame everyone else but themselves when things go wrong.
They are extreme blamers though in that this blaming aspect is a main part of their personality. They’re not someone who just occasionally blames others when they get frustrated.
You’ll sometimes hear what I call “blamers” also being referred to as “narcissists” by psychologists. When I first heard this description of them, I didn’t associate it with the type of personality I was constantly encountering. I thought of narcissists as meaning people who are basically in love with themselves, only talk about themselves, and don’t care about anyone else. But, this is only one very specific type of narcissist. There are many different layers and levels to narcissists and you’ll find that they can come across as very caring towards others in certain situations, seem charming and interested in you when you first meet, talk about other people and just do not seem to match the most well known description of a narcissist. They can come across as truly nice people in the beginning, and it’s not until later that you suddenly realize you feel like you’re trapped in a nightmare and also that you’re now very much involved even though you may not want to be.
Whether they’re called blamers or narcissists, I think this is one of the most destructive types of negative people you can ever deal with. They can have an extremely negative effect on your thinking and your own behavior. They can actually cause such intense anguish and distress, it will last a lifetime until you gain the awareness that it wasn’t you, it was the situation that you were (or are currently) in.
If you’ve been a victim of this type of negative person, you may feel like there is something wrong with you and that if only you were better, or smarter, or nicer, or more competent at your job, or just did the right things for once then the situation would be better between you and the negative person. You end up feeling like it’s all your fault which can end up causing depression, self loathing, or other self destructive tendencies.
It’s a very different reaction from the view point of the narcissist (or blamer), as he really doesn’t see anything wrong with what he does. The fact that you the victim are so upset or feel terrible about things, is simply due to his believing you’re wrong and he’s right. She/He also thinks it’s his duty or that he’s “helping” by putting others down, telling them what they’re doing wrong, or blaming them for things. She/He often doesn’t respect other people’s boundaries (walks in without knocking, borrows your stuff, takes credit for your work). In his eyes, he can do no wrong. He also likes to be admired or envied.
Defending yourself from this type of person will only make the situation much worse and you’ll end up being attacked even more. If you point out how you’re innocent and didn’t do anything wrong or that he’s really to blame then an explosion of anger will most likely occur. Then the tables will be quickly turned on you and the blamer will make it appear that everything is entirely your fault. She/He’s innocent and you’re the evil one.
You’ll also find that he expects you to do things “exactly” as he would do it. This is because she/he doesn’t see you as a separate person. You are a reflection on her/him. Nothing you do is ever right though and she/he’ll constantly criticize you and belittle you. Micromanaging is something she/he loves to do as well.
A clue that you’re dealing with this type of personality is that he tends to show different sides of his behavior to different people. For example, one child may be treated differently than the others. In the situation of a blamer boss, he’ll be very nice to his superiors or certain colleagues yet absolute “HELL” to work for. He can also be very hot and cold in his relationships in that one moment everything is fine and then the next he’s intensely angry at you. This is one of the reasons it can cause such mental distress for the victim. Other people don’t understand what it’s like because they can’t always see what’s really going on. The blamer will be highly admired by some as they never see this dark side of his behavior.
On the flip side, he’s very sensitive to any perceived criticism from others and may even start to attack or say he’s been deeply hurt even when no true criticism has been said.
With some blamers, they are deceptive and manipulative all the time. Their philosophy tends to be “attack others before they attack me” which means that if they’ve made a mistake they tend to blame others or start to attack others before they can be caught. Often, they see nothing wrong with lying and will lie even if there’s no need to. Another interesting characteristic they tend to have is that they tend to project any of their own wrong doings on to someone else.
