Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Falsely Blamed? How to Protect Yourself and Respond
Transcript
- Speaker 1: Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those that involve someone who may have a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter, and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie. Speaker 2: Hi everybody. Speaker 1: We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California, where we focus on training, consulting, and educational programs and methods, all to do with high conflict. In today's episode, we're going to talk about whether it's possible to avoid becoming a target of blame, and also whether you can influence the level to which you are targeted if you do become a target of blame. But first, a couple of notes send your high conflict related questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast where you'll also find all the show notes and links. Alright, bill, well, here we are again, and we're talking about blame, which is kind of the, Speaker 2: It's not my fault, it's not my fault, Speaker 1: It's not my fault. It's your fault. It's your fault. Blame, blame, blame. That's Speaker 2: It's all your fault. Speaker 1: Yeah. So why don't we start with kind of explaining where that terminology target of blame came from. Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting. I'm not sure if anyone else had used it, but I remember starting to use it when I started trying to define high conflict personality, high conflict people. So in my very first book I basically wrote about, you have at least four parties. I was writing about it in the legal context, and you have at least four parties. You have the high conflict person, you have their target of blame, the person they say it's all their fault. You have negative advocates, which I also put in my first book, which I should probably just say the name of it is High Conflict People in Legal Disputes, and you have a decision maker. So in the legal system you basically have these four parties at least, and they each have different roles. And the high conflict person preoccupied with blaming others has a target of blame. And people say, can that be more than one person? Absolutely. Can it change? Absolutely. Can it be a group of people? Absolutely. So basically you always have a target of blame when you have a high conflict person. Speaker 1: And if you've been a target of blame it. And the things that can result from that are first level is a reputation. Smear is a campaign to destroy you to your friends or your family or even to the public. And especially now with social media and telling lies perhaps about you and just constant chronic awfulness. And then second level, it can be such an extraordinarily stressful and debilitating role to be in this target of blame. So you have to have good support and you have to have good self-care if you are the target of blame. So let's go on to talk about whether it's possible to avoid becoming one of these targets. In some circumstances the answer might be yes, and in some circumstances it might be a surprise that you didn't anticipate. So what do you think, bill? Speaker 2: I think you can minimize the risk of becoming a target of blame, but you can't eliminate it. And so what I picture the most is high conflict court cases is they get started often with a high conflict person putting blame on somebody else who doesn't deserve it. And let me just fundamentally say, no one deserves to be a target of blame. That when there's a problem, when there's a conflict, you address behavior, you address issues, you don't make the whole person all evil in your eyes and in other people's eyes. But that's what high conflict people do is they try to go, okay, this person over here is all evil. It's all their fault with an emotional intensity that you feel it as the target of blame. You feel it in your gut and it's like, oh my goodness, you feel kicked in the gut, you feel anxious, nervous, what can I do? Speaker 2: What did I do? All of that. So I think the first thing is just become aware of high conflict personalities, that there's people out there who blame the whole person totally inappropriately, that they shouldn't blame a whole person, but often their target of blame is completely innocent of what they're being blamed of. And that's what the average person doesn't realize. Oh, well there must be something you did. No, this isn't something I did. This is somebody who has a high conflict personality and this is what they do. And they pick on often innocent victims and tell the world that this is the terrible worst person in the world. So first you have to know that dynamic exists Speaker 1: And kind of fight against that right within your mind because it gets in your brain and you do start to doubt yourself and think, boy, I mean, yeah, maybe we have some role in what happened or what you're being blamed for. Not always, but sometimes. So we have to really focus on, have some discipline and talking to ourselves and reminding ourselves that, look, I am not this individual, this target that this really awful person that they're making me out to be. So I've got some thoughts about how to do that. And things I've heard people do is just even put a reminder on their calendar to remind yourself that, Hey, I get along with people in general. I don't blame people. And just to get your head right for the day, what do you think, bill? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that in many ways that's the best protection is what you tell yourself, which is going to be different from what the blaming person tells you, the high conflict person. So we teach a lot of short phrases. The first, my favorite of course is it's not about me. It's not about me. Remember Bill, it's not about you. This is what's going on in the other person. And either it's more extreme than the situation is, or they're exaggerating something I did or I totally didn't do something someone may just come up with, it's all your fault Bill Eddie. And it's like, my son kicked my dog and it's all your fault, bill Eddie. It's like being able to tell yourself it's not about me, it's about them. Whatever it is that's going on is going on inside of them, Speaker 1: Which is easier in a professional setting, I think when you're helping a client who might be blaming or a customer or someone. But when it's a friend or in your family, in your personal life, I think you get a bit more gutted and it takes more discipline and probably more support from other family or friends or even therapy. Speaker 2: Exactly. So it is harder the closer it is to you. And yet we teach people this in our new Ways for Families method. We teach people encouraging statements to give to themselves, and we do a practice exercise where somebody says nasty things to you, and while they're saying them, you're silently telling yourself you're encouraging statement. And people say it really blocks out the power of what's being said to me. So someone's saying, it's all your fault, bill. And I'm sitting there going, it's not about me. It's not about me, it's not about me. You're Speaker 1: A horrible, horrible, horrible person, bill. Yeah, right? I mean, so you're in response to that. It's not about me, it's not about me, it's not about me. And Speaker 2: You don't have to say that out loud. Speaker 1: It's mostly in your head. And it's not always going to be a blame of it's all your fault. It's just maybe just something negative that's being said about you, which someone without a high conflict personality is not going to be saying those things. So if you're hearing that, okay, that's my cue to remind myself this isn't about me. 90% of other people in my life would never say I'm a horrible, rotten person. Wouldn't spread lies, wouldn't target and focus on me in these ways. So I think it's a good way. I think it's just so simple. It's not about me. Speaker 2: And you may come up with a new phrase, maybe something else. Well, I'm not responsible for the outcome here. Now that's often in legal cases where people are saying, this has to happen. I can only give advice, I can only give guidance, I can only share information, give choices, all of that. But if a client is going to do something, I can't prevent that or overcome that, but I can do my part. And so I think so much of the time, and I think parents feel this with kids, it's like kids are going to do not do what you say, but you can do your part, but you can't totally control other people's behavior. I teach this to judges. Judges say, I know they're not going to follow my court orders. And I'll say, well say out loud, look, you have a choice. You follow my court orders or you don't. And I can't control your behavior, but I can control the consequences for your behavior. And that's the same with kids. And so not owning what doesn't belong to you will help you not get hooked and help you not become a target of blame. Speaker 1: And I'm thinking about some consultations I've done and people I've talked with, and it's really hard to not engage and get hooked into defending yourself and coming back with engaging in some way that's just going to blow it up when you are that targeted blame because it's very stressful and we might be busy or we're hurt or it just don't want to be disciplined that day. And there's probably going to be a consequence from engaging in the wrong way, but things can be repaired. Speaker 2: And so just really keeping ourselves calm with all of this, telling yourself this not engaging and the point you made about defending yourself, it's so important to know you can't successfully defend yourself with a high conflict person because it's not about you in their head. It's the story of you that they have. It's not you, the real person. And so when you say, well, that's not true about me, I'm always on time. How could you say that I'm always late. They don't hear that. And that's how I know I'm dealing with a high conflict person is I give them feedback on a specific thing. I say, you're accusing me of doing this thing and I'm not doing this thing. And they keep saying the exact same thing. Yes, you are, and you're this, that and the other. Oh, it's a high conflict person. I can't convince them of anything. So we're going to have to figure out what else to do here. And that's where keeping the situation calm, not engaging, but also not doing behavior that invite people to blame you. And that's something I want to make sure we talk about is how to behave. Speaker 1: Yeah. So let's talk about that. I think the two question of this is whether you can influence the level to which you're targeted, and I think that's how you behave fits in Speaker 2: So well, actually two steps. One is to prevent becoming one if possible is find out what the rules are for the situation you're in. So a lot of times where your target of blame is like at work or in a family matter, and it's usually because you violated some kind of rule that you may not have even known about. So find out what the standards are and follow the standards, find out the policies and follow the policies. And if you think something needs to change or there's a reason not to do it, be prepared for people to push back on you and have your calm matter of fact answer ready. And I think of situations where you're going to have a difficult conversation with somebody and they're going to blame you for stuff is anticipate what are they going to blame me for? How can I respond on that? Speaker 2: Lemme give a quick example actually. So I had had a divorce client, a father, and he was moving out of the house, has a three-year-old daughter, and he wants to start having his parenting time. And so he says, I've got an apartment. And I said, tell me about it. And he says, well, it's a one bedroom apartment. That's all I can afford right now. And I said, how many beds are you going to have? She's got this three-year-old daughter. She says, well, she'll just sleep with me for a while and at some point I'll get another bed. And I'll say, absolutely worse than the world idea. You got to get a separate bed for her. You're going to be so susceptible to an allegation of child sexual abuse if you're sleeping with your three-year-old daughter. And you might say, well, she sleeps with her mother all the time. Speaker 2: And I'm going to say, that's a whole different world there. Father's sleeping with a daughter is going to just set off all kinds of alarms and make you susceptible to allegations at family court. So that's the kind of thing you want to consult with somebody and say, what's my risks here? And especially in divorce cases, there's so many little landmines you can step on is anticipate those so that you don't step on those. Same thing in the workplace. Find out what's the standard, what's the culture here? What do you say? What don't you? Can you swear in this office? What about teasing? What about this, that, and the other thing. So find out kind of how things work and be prepared to either not become a target of blame or if you're going to do something that you get attacked for, be prepared or respond to it. Speaker 1: What would be an extreme level of being a target of blame? What's the worst you've seen that comes to mind? Speaker 2: Well, high conflict of worse is God just about, oh, false allegations of everything. False allegations of domestic violence that totally weren't true. False allegations of parental alienation that were really domestic violence, false allegations. Oh, false allegations of child sexual abuse. That's probably the biggest one in family court in divorce. And that's why I was so concerned with my client. Don't get anywhere near being accused of doing something inappropriate, but no, I've had those child sexual abuse cases go on for months and sometimes they can really avoid it. And sometimes it really totally comes from the other person that absolutely zero that they're doing. And of course, sometimes people are being inappropriate and don't realize it. Family standards, giving baths, all that kind of stuff. Cultures are different, families are different, but that's one of the ones being a target of blame in family court for child abuse, child sexual abuse is one of the worst things in the world. Speaker 2: And avoidable, and I did a survey on that. We came out with a third, were true, two thirds were not true. A half of those two thirds were believed, but honestly believed and weren't true. And about a third of them were knowingly false. I got sanctions in a court case because of that once. So you don't want to get into tricky situations, but if you're in them, you also have to work to get out of that. And that's a lot we get into providing information and stuff. If you are a target of blame, you have to be prepared to stay calm and give information that counters that and be really assertive about that. Speaker 1: And beyond that is to provide documentation where you can, I mean, you really need to be solid with your documents. Any kind of records that you can show it to prove this, you may really need that down the road. You may have to show it to a judge someday. Speaker 2: Right, right, right. So much, and we talked a little about family law, but in the workplace and communities, a paper trail that protects you. Now let me switch to being a therapist. So therapists need to keep good notes, keep good records, and they sometimes get involved in legal cases. And the best way to not be a target of blame is to have good notes, good records. Red flags come up, somebody says something in a session that's a red flag. Oh, maybe there's a problem here. You make a note of that and then you say how you addressed it. I told the client they've got these three different options. My client says that she's been beat up by her husband. And so I said, here's some resources, blah, blah, blah, things like that. And that therapist isn't going to get in trouble. Sometimes a therapist, Ooh, I don't want to write that down. And that's when therapists are vulnerable. I tell therapists the notes protect you as much as they protect your clients, things like that, Speaker 1: Right? So true. You just don't know what you're going to have to come up with, but you're going to have to prove something probably at some point. And it can be hard because you may not get to prove it if someone's just spreading malicious gossip and misinformation through your company, which gets you in trouble with hr. Or you might even lose a job over being a target of blame. And it can be tough to find documentation when somebody's making false allegations against you or drum up things. And it's tough because often when you are a target of blame, that person is so obsessed with targeting you. It's all they can think about and they're stuck in the past and they just keep blaming you for something that happened or didn't happen and they've gone on to create this whole big story around it and then go and spread the news around. Speaker 1: So if you are one of those people that's hearing this news about someone, I think there are some red flags. We should all be listening when someone's complaining about someone else. If they're saying, well, I never did this and this person always did this, oh no, let me tell you how horrible this person is. All the awful things they've done well, those are little red flags that, Hey, I need to pay attention here. Get your radar up, get your antenna up and pay attention. You may be falling into the trap of believing a high conflict individual who's focusing on a target of blame that isn't in reality doing anything wrong. Speaker 2: Yes. And the world needs to become aware of that. We didn't used to have to worry about this, but with modern communication, people not knowing each other that well, it's really easy to spread rumors that totally aren't true. And so two aspects to this. One is you need to not if you can get emotionally upset about it because that feeds high conflict people. So if you start yelling at them or getting angry or crying or pleading, all that emotional stuff feeds them. They want emotions. They want emotional response. What you want to do, and we talk about this, is you want to be boring, but also present your information. And so if you're dealing directly with the high conflict person, just like with any bully is that's not true. That's not true. I don't agree with you, I'm ending this conversation. But with other people is explaining to other people need to let them know this is the real information. Speaker 2: What you're hearing is not accurate, and you have to keep an open mind. And here's the real information. I always in my own mind have three theories when someone tells me somebody else is acting terribly badly, they're abusive, they're drunk, they're whatever. Three theories in my mind. One is it might be true and I need to look into that. Second is it might not be true at all, could be a high conflict person blaming somebody, a target of blame who doesn't fit the description at all. And the third is maybe both people have a problem, and it could be partially true and the person making the allegation maybe partially true, the high conflict person, but nowadays you can't just take stuff at face value. And it shocks me how much people do. Maybe I've been working in this field too long that I'm just, I'm always a skeptic, but I think I'm a healthy skeptic. I sleep better at night knowing I'm kind of keeping track of stuff. So nothing's going to surprise me. Speaker 1: So I'd like to circle back for just a second to kind of correcting the record. So how do you find that balance between making yourself boring so you can influence the level of target you are with correcting the record, sending someone one a document, let's say a contract that they said they never signed and you have proof that they signed it and they're telling this maybe around the organization or the family or community. How do you correct that? Do you make yourself boring and just say, okay, I'm going to have to take this one on the chin, or do you send it out to a few people that you think it might matter? Speaker 2: That's a judgment call. And I want to say the thing about being boring is just like a general principle with other people's conflicts that you don't want to reinforce too much, but you want to be assertive if you're the target of flame. And assertive would be who needs what information. That's the big issue. If like what I like to say is if someone sent a hostile email to you and they said something false in it and they send it to 20 of your friends and family, or this happens in the workplace, stuff like that, and it's not true, is you want to send to the same 20 people. The factual information is actually, you may not be aware, X, Y, Z, you were making a ruckus and noise yesterday and distracting all my phone calls. And so you send back rather than saying you're an idiot and you don't know what you're talking about is you send back to your email which says, actually, I was out of town yesterday. Speaker 2: I got back last night, so it wouldn't have been me or whatever the accurate information is. I was in a meeting in another building or whatever. Rather than saying, criticizing what's been said is to say what's really happening? And that's the Biff Method, brief, informative, friendly, and firm, which we've talked about recently. The thing is accurate information and getting it to the same people that have had the inaccurate information. And if you're in a court case is the judge only knows what the judge is told or what the judge reads and people think, well, the judge will just know that my ex-husband is lying and I'm telling the truth. And I'll say, no, the judge only knows what you tell them. And the judge has to weigh all of that stuff. So it's situational, but keep yourself calm and provide information. Don't get hooked by the high conflict person, but make sure you inform the other people before they become negative advocates. Or if they are negative advocates is inform them the reality if you can. And then sometimes just getting away from the situation is the best answer as well. Speaker 1: Very good. Well listeners, thank you for listening to us talk about being a target of blame and influencing the level if you are one, you know exactly how tough it can be. So we hope this is helpful in the future to all of you, next week we're going to talk about how to end a hostile conversation, whether it's one-on-one or within a group or even standing in front of an audience. Send questions to podcasts@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast and tell all your friends about us, and we'd be very grateful if you'd leave a five star review so we can keep growing and helping more people around the world. Until next time, keep learning and practicing so you can be confident in your human interactions. In high conflict situations. As you do, your life will become more peaceful. It's all Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.