#83 – Moving Beyond The Blame Game

[00:00] Paulette: Buen dia, mi gente, and welcome to La Vida Más Chévere de Childfree Latinas, the only Spanglish podcast for childfree Latinas y Latines, helping us liberate ourselves from the toxic cultural brainwashing we all grew up with so that we can design our best lives instead. I’m your host and resident childfree Latina, Paulette Erato.

[00:25] Ever been stuck in a situation where everyone is pointing fingers, but nobody is offering any solutions? It can feel like a tug-of-war game from when we were kids. You know, nobody wants to cede ground. No one wants to admit fault or take responsibility. Instead, everyone’s got their hackles up. They’re wanting to lay blame, but no one is actually being heard.

[00:49] Maybe you’ve been in a fight with your spouse where you call them on something you don’t like. Let’s say it’s something silly and low stakes, like they screw the lids on jars too tight. You ask them to stop doing that nicely. And instead of saying, sure, okay, their response is to get defensive and to put out something you do wrong, like forgetting to take out the trash or to replace the toilet paper.

[01:12] You know, and they know that this isn’t productive and it certainly isn’t helpful. So why does it happen? Remember last episode, I walked through the thought model and that how we react to our circumstances is an automatic behavior, but one that we can learn to change? Unfortunately, some people learned really early on that taking responsibility could bring them harm.

[01:37] An article in Psychology Today calls it a parental witch hunt when a child grows up in an environment where they’re subjected to punishment for even the smallest infraction. And then you end up with adults who are trying to protect themselves to the detriment of others, even when they’re in the wrong.

[01:52] So, as a grown adult, they tend to deny responsibility and deflect to avoid punishment, which is not a healthy behavior. But again, you can unlearn it. In my experience, the fastest way to defuse a situation like this is to simply acknowledge your own role in the incident. There may be no faster way to end an argument than these two little magical words.

[02:18] You’re right. Because no one expects it. What we do expect, what we usually get, is a fight. So being the one to accept responsibility is kind of like throwing water on a fire. A small fire, like a campfire. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned from growing up in California with our wildfires, is that sometimes adding water to the situation actually makes it worse.

[02:42] The heat generated from these fires is so intense, it can literally split the oxygen and the hydrogen atoms apart, which only creates more fuel for the fire. It’s frightening how that works! Turns out, we should pay attention to science! So maybe what you are is more like a fire extinguisher. The act of saying you’re right and accepting some responsibility short circuits that death spiral of anger and terminates that train of thought.

[03:13] Which again, we learned last episode is a really great skill to have. More often than not, it also alleviates other people’s fears of being wrong and prompts the other people in the room, or the other person in the argument, to come forward and take responsibility for their parts too. And then we can all move forward towards resolution.

[03:38] Let’s talk about why it feels good to blame someone. You’d think with how easy it is to point fingers that we’re biologically wired as a species to do just that. And you’d be right! An article in Fortune magazine from 2015 points to a research study that shows, quote, “The human brain is wired to react more emotionally to the bad things people do.

[04:01] That’s why we tend to assign blame much faster than we give compliments. People are more likely to assume that good acts of others are simply happenstance, but bad things are done on purpose.” Again, those primal instincts of ours are at play. All the armchair fire experts and the Faux News pundits have certainly had a heyday talking about our wildfires.

[04:25] Who’s responsible? Clearly it’s the woke idiots in California! Okay, great. So, what’s the solution for fixing this and avoiding it again in the future? Oh yeah, they don’t have any. No solutions, just finger pointing. So why does it feel good to blame someone? Because it gives us a person or something outside of ourselves to direct our feelings at.

[04:54] Whether that be anger or disappointment or betrayal or what have you. Especially in this new and increasingly horrifying normal that we’ve developed since we inaugurated a convicted felon, it’s easy to point fingers at everyone from the Democrats who stayed home on election night to the news media who’s given this orange clown all of their attention for the entire last decade.

[05:19] Hey, don’t look at me, I voted for her! You’ve undoubtedly heard this comment. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself. Denying our own culpability helps to diminish any guilt we might have from not doing more or disappointment for how it’s all turned out. Having a scapegoat and avoiding the burden of responsibility means we can claim our hands are clean.

[05:44] Because if we can find the people who are directly responsible, then we can force them to face the consequences and everything will go back to normal, right? Right? No! You know, that’s not true, but the delight at being right only offers a false sense of control and closure. The satisfaction is only short term.

[06:05] The German word for this, and my apologies to German speakers for butchering this pronunciation, but the German word is schadenfreude. What does that mean? The Merriam Webster definition is enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel kind of gross. We shouldn’t be getting our kicks at the expense of other people.

[06:27] That’s toxic. And we don’t do that here. Just like doomscrolling, which we also know is bad for us, the good feels don’t last long enough. So blaming others feels validating in the moment, but it doesn’t lead to meaningful progress. Which is what we’re here for, mis amigues, improving ourselves beyond the basic human who hasn’t evolved past their most primal instincts.

[06:53] Remember that quote from Governor Pritzker last episode? We’re not basic. We’re evolved. Some might even say extra. And as we watch all our sacred hallmarks of democracy being trashed in real time by an immigrant who came here illegally from South Africa with daddy’s emerald mine blood money to shield him from consequences and what Yahoo!

[07:16] News is calling his goon squad, a group of college age hackers, wannabe hackers, whose brains aren’t even fully developed yet, so they don’t realize they’re actively committing treason, who is there to blame? Who allowed this to happen? How about a story? I’m going to tell you about two different times when I was blamed for work situations that were outside of my direct control.

[07:44] My previous career was in event management. I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before. And after events, we have what are called post-mortems to address what worked and what didn’t. You probably have these in your jobs too, you call them debriefs or reviews or audits. Anyway, in both of these situations, something went sideways.

[08:03] Let’s travel back in time to around 2008. I was in my first role as a manager, overseeing a team of people in an area I was not too familiar with. Audio visual tech. Anybody who’s worked in corporate knows how common and yet how stupid this kind of org chart is. Anyway my team of three men and I were responsible for setting up educational webinars.

[08:26] This was way before Zoom had its foothold in everything and we all knew how to use it. And on our first attempt at making these webinars, the tech failed. Of course it did, because Murphy’s Law. I don’t remember the specifics, this is like over 15 years ago, but I do remember my boss and her boss were angry and they wanted a sacrificial lamb.

[08:47] Someone had to pay the price for this screw up. That was not a particularly good work culture, clearly. They were not leading with empathy or emotional intelligence or even curiosity. So knowing that my team were, if not at fault, at least responsible, I walked into that meeting prepared to accept the blame and then just move on.

[09:09] Cause you know, tech shit happens. We’ve all been there. So I was in this meeting getting yelled at for embarrassing the company, and all I could say was, “yup that was our fault.” And suddenly something interesting happened. The air in the room seemed to shift. Apparently this was an unexpected move for them. I think I might have short circuited their brains because they were likely expecting me to blame something, anything, to get out of being in trouble.

[09:39] That’s how they were used to people operating, since that’s the basic human response. Your girl’s not basic though. So I told management, we’d look into the problem. We’d develop some solutions and fail safes to avoid it happening again. And then I asked, is there anything else you need from me? Y’all, I was barely in my twenties.

[09:59] I don’t know where this wisdom came from, but in that moment, I felt like a genius. Suddenly everyone calmed down and I went from being the scapegoat back to being a trusted team member again. And that felt good. Now, do you think I turned around and then yelled at my own direct reports? Okay, maybe a teeny part of me wanted to, but of course not!

[10:24] What would I have accomplished from passing the buck and taking my frustrations out on them? I had a team of dedicated professionals who knew their jobs a hell of a lot better than I did, and my role was to support them, and also shield them from the shit that usually rolls downhill. So our little team debrief was more of a, “Hey, you guys know management is mad.

[10:46] So tell me what you think went wrong and how are we going to avoid this in the future?” And from there, two beautiful things happened. One is that my team learned I had their backs and they could trust me. And they’d go to bat for a manager like that. That’s a motivated employee. The second thing that happened is, since we’d already failed, things could only get better.

[11:10] So, we looked for solutions, we tested them again and again, and then we never had that problem again. I’m not saying we didn’t have other problems, but that one? Mm mm. That’s how you manage situations like that. Do I wish my managers had treated me the way I treated my team? Yes. But I wasn’t that lucky back then.

[11:32] What about when you aren’t at fault and no one else is willing to take responsibility? That’s what the second story is about. Let’s fast forward to 2016. You remember that year, right? I had just gotten married and I was in a very different job by that point. This job, I managed a very large tradeshow and conference for thousands of people down in San Diego.

[11:55] It was a big annual event that took months and a team of people to organize. And we’d gotten new management at the company, and those cost cutting MBAs did what all MBAs are trained to do. Cut waste. Be more efficient. Sound familiar? Except these people had real credentials, and fully formed brains. So new management had a brilliant cost savings idea that seemed to work at other, smaller events.

[12:22] After probably a decade of wasting money on postage by mailing out name badges, they decided we’re going to print those on site instead. My boss and I knew this was a terrible idea and not to bore you with details about arrival patterns and all that, just trust this wasn’t going to work. And we tried to tell them. But management refused to consider any outside perspectives because they’re MBAs, their fully formed brains knew best.

[12:53] But hey, they decided that sending the vice president of IT along would be a good use of their money instead because he could oversee the whole operation. No worries. I don’t want to be sued for slander, so I’m not going to say nothing about this man’s reputation for partying, but let’s just say it wasn’t a great reputation.

[13:11] By the way, this is the same company where people would leave for lunch and never come back to work. That’s how they quit. I heard one coworker was caught embezzling funds, so that should give you a peek into the culture. And you can probably see where this is going. Cue to 7am on the first day of the show, thousands of people are in a massive line, trying to get through registration to get their damn badges printed so they could get inside to their meetings.

[13:41] And they were all very angry that they were being held up. It was a giant clusterfuck. That was only resolved when my boss’s boss made the call to bypass security and just let everyone in. We’d sort it out later. But for about 30 to 45 minutes that morning, we had thousands of angry people who were grossly inconvenienced because there was a lot of money on the line for them.

[14:06] And they’d expected, they’d become accustomed to a certain level of ease, of stuff just working. When the company failed to deliver on that, they were understandably furious. And my company lost a lot of goodwill. Customer satisfaction plunged deep into the crapper. The situation was so bad that hours later, an attendee went to the registration staff and still raging in his anger, demanded to see me so they could quote, “rip Paulette a new asshole.”

[14:38] Since my name was on the event as the manager, clearly I was at fault, right? Yeah, that was a fun discussion. Okay, so that situation was outside of my control, right? Want to hear how that debrief went? Imagine it’s the day after the election in November 2016. Yep, that one. That’s the date they chose for the post-mortem because again, the company’s corporate culture had the sensitivity of a chainsaw.

[15:03] And I knew this one was gonna hurt because we were dealing with egos here. Egos. that could not admit they were wrong. So, no one was looking for resolutions because they already knew deep down inside that their decisions had created this fuckup. But no one wants unclean hands, right? So, just like the spouse who responds to your reasonable request to stop over tightening jars by reminding you that you suck at chores too, management only wanted to point fingers at each other and at me!

[15:32] Little old me who had no say in this event because we tried to warn them. Luckily, once again, my boss’s boss knew how to shut it down. He stood up for me, he stood up for the department protocols, and he protected me from the shit rolling down him. What would have been great is if the adults in the room had any self-awareness and recognized their own contributions to the clusterfuck publicly. And we agreed to listen to the people who had the most experience in this specific thing before making sweeping decisions that didn’t work for all the shows.

[16:04] Imagine if that’s what we had done instead. It would have cost a little bit more money, sure, but we wouldn’t have lost all those intangibles, the unquantifiable qualities that are equally as important like trust, authority, brand loyalty, and attendee confidence in our organization. This post-mortem held on what was already a difficult day was an utter waste of everyone’s time.

[16:28] They weren’t working to find a solution. They just wanted someone to blame and absolve themselves of responsibility. So no one came out of that meeting feeling better, because there was no scapegoat to project their feelings on, only mirrors. No relief for the guilty. And that’s not a worthwhile use of anyone’s time.

[16:49] It was a missed opportunity to solve problems, to band the team together on what does and doesn’t work, and attack the issues instead of each other. These finger pointing tendencies from our baser instincts hinder collaboration. They break down trust and can irreparably damage relationships, not just in the office.

[17:11] But also at home, the relationship with our partners, with our families, with our friends. We’re not designing and certainly not living our best lives when we’re stuck inside the blame game. I don’t know that this would have ended the way it did if I didn’t have a champion in the room. I could have been fired for all I know.

[17:34] So I’m immeasurably grateful for him and I hope he’s living his best life. The rest of them though? I’d rather set myself on fire than ever be in a room with them again. So, now what? What’s the moral of these stories? What do we do when we don’t have a champion? What do we do when it’s all on us to fix a mess we didn’t make?

[17:57] I imagine that this is a lot like having children. When a toddler breaks something, it’s on the parents to pay the price. For our country, who is acting as the parent right now? Who can stop this illegal and treasonous power grab that’s costing people their jobs and their livelihoods? Well, at least there’s some good news on that front out of right here in California this week, where a federal judge has put a temporary restraining order on any more firings.

[18:26] Yay. There are adults in the room. So. What’s next? I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that at this moment, we have to stop pointing fingers and work against the actual problems, whether we like it or not, we are in this together. I’m not advocating that we give the people responsible for this mess a free pass.

[18:53] There are some people who are never going to learn to be better, or be best. But we also can’t simply punish them and then do nothing else because the problem still exists. How do we fix the problem without continuing to attack one another? How do we do that? I firmly believe that it starts at home. It starts here.

[19:16] It starts with you. Can you have a healthy relationship with yourself or are you allowing fear and negative thoughts to rule your head? Yes, that is natural, but you also have to give yourself a break, mi amor. The last episode is all about this. And what about your partner? If you have one, can you have productive conversations or do arguments devolve into finger pointing and trying to assign blame?

[19:45] Can you work against problems together or do you allow the problem to pit you against one another? And once you have that figured out, do you have healthy relationships outside of the home with extended family, with friends, with coworkers, with neighbors? I know that this is a hard time right now. It’s too easy to be suspicious of one another, and if that’s how you’re feeling, that’s not surprising.

[20:10] We’ve been manipulated to end up here, so I need you to remember that you can change your thoughts and reactions. All of this has been planned. If you’re feeling angry at the people around you, who you think failed you or actively chose this, that’s on purpose. It’s all part of the playbook. I’m not saying you don’t have reason to be suspicious, but it’s being ramped up right now on purpose.

[20:36] We need to open our eyes to the bigger picture instead of getting trapped in these petty fights and the chaos, because creating chaos is a key part of the fascism strategy. While you’re distracted being mad, the fascists are making their plays. Their goal is to stress you past the point of exhaustion, because if you’re too tired to fight, you’ll stop resisting.

[21:02] So, how do you avoid that? How do you keep yourself sane? How do you stop the doom scrolling. How do you interrupt the angry thoughts in the death spiral? I’m going to give you some advice on that in a second, but I’d love to hear some of your thoughts. Did you know that you can text me? There’s a link at the top of the show notes.

[21:22] If you click it from your phone, it opens your texting app and you can send me a text telling me what you think. The one caveat though is I won’t know it’s from you. So please include your name and even where you’re from. So if you’re Jackie from South Carolina, say so. I’d love to hear from you. The question I want you to answer is, “How do you stop your thoughts from spiraling when you’re in a negative headspace? What do you do to interrupt that train of thought?”

[21:52] And if I get some responses, I’d love to read them on future episodes. That way we can share ideas, which is how you solve problems. So here’s my advice to you for now. Don’t forget to rest. Take your breaks, mi amor. You are not a machine. You are a human being and you need rest.

[22:16] And when I say rest, I don’t mean go have a nap. Although those are nice, please do that too if you can. I mean a break from the news, from what you’re consuming online, an emotional break. Personally, I am no longer interested in blaming people for where we are right now. It doesn’t even feel good anymore.

[22:36] The schadenfreude has passed. After all, people are people and we can always be duped into moving against our own best interests if we aren’t aware and discerning. In service of that, I’m going to link you to a piece my friend Heidy De La Cruz wrote about media discernment. I think you’ll enjoy it, and we all desperately need it.

[23:00] So, if people didn’t believe all these side effects of their votes were going to happen, well, too bad. We’re here now. Let’s grieve it and then we can move forward. Because that’s what I want to do. I want to move forward. Past blame. Blame is basically irrelevant now. So how are we, the people who are affected going to move forward in spite of all of that?

[23:25] How are we going to keep from continuing to be manipulated, from being sucked in by misinformation? Those of us who have the privilege of feeling safe right now may not be safe in the future. So we can’t take that for granted. How are you preparing? I know some people are saving up to leave the country, while others are digging in their heels and gearing up for a fight.

[23:48] Some of us are using our voices to gather community in protection, in mutual aid. There are so many ways to approach this, so many lanes for each of us to lean into our own talents to, as they say, fight the good fight. So which one will you choose? We’re here to design our best lives in spite of the cultural brainwashing we’ve all grown up with.

[24:14] So you know what I want for you? I want you to be the kind of leader that employees and community members go to bat for, not the kind who would rather set themselves on fire than ever be in a room with you again. Yes, it would be great if only the people responsible for where we are now were the ones to suffer the consequences and the rest of us were left untouched.

[24:35] Unfortunately, that’s not how things work. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. We are all the parents of the toddler who broke something. So to recap, assigning blame is a thing we all like to do, but it’s actually not productive to solving problems. Schadenfreude is short lived, and it’s icky anyway.

[24:59] Fearmongering is the playbook, but it’s also unsustainable for your emotional well being. So please take rest. And let’s end the tug-of-war blame game spiral by becoming the fire extinguisher. I want for you to be the kind of leader, the kind of human who owns up to their responsibilities instead of denying and deflecting.

[25:20] Who is curious and operates from empathy and works on their emotional intelligence. Who improves beyond their most basic primal skill set. And who knows was at stake so you make time for rest. How about we stop adding fuels to the fires? We stop laughing as people get burned and we get out of the blame game.

[25:43] Yeah, I believe in you. Don’t forget to text me. And that’s a burrito.

[25:50] Hey, mira, if this episode made you feel some kind of way, dígame. DM me on Instagram. Or, send me a text! You can do that right from your phone. If you want to be a guest on the show and put your story out there too, check out the guest form on my website at paletterato. com slash guest.[26:09] Yep, just my name. And don’t forget that there are more perks when you join the newsletter. All these links are in the show notes. Muchísimas gracias for your support y hasta la próxima vez, cuídate bien.