The Space Between Blame and Responsibility
I’ve been thinking about responsibility.
Not necessarily the big moments when someone has clearly done something wrong. I’ve been thinking about the smaller, almost insignificant moments when something lands uncomfortably within us and, before we’ve even had time to sit with it, we’ve found somewhere else to put it.
Someone else caused it.
Someone else made us react.
The circumstances left us no choice.
They misunderstood.
They shouldn’t have said it that way.
And sometimes the explanation may even be true.
But somewhere along the way, have we become so uncomfortable with the feeling of being responsible for something that we’ve learned to redirect it before we’ve even had the opportunity to ask:
What part of this is mine?
Because perhaps accountability doesn’t disappear all at once. Perhaps we practise our way out of it.
It happens in small conversations, small defences and small justifications. In moments when we could pause and feel what is happening within us, but instead move quickly to explain it away. The more often we redirect, the easier redirecting becomes, until eventually there isn’t much of a pause at all. There is simply the automatic response.
And I wonder what happens when that moves beyond the individual. What happens when patterns repeated by individuals enter families, workplaces, churches and communities? What happens when they become so familiar that eventually they become part of a culture?
When a Pattern Becomes a Culture
There is a line at the end of Judges that has stayed with me in Judges 21:25
“Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
What strikes me isn’t simply the behaviour of one person. It is what has happened throughout a people.
Judges shows deterioration across leadership, morality, relationships and community. And it doesn’t arrive neatly packaged in one enormous moment where everyone suddenly decides to abandon responsibility. There are patterns and cycles, responses repeated often enough that what once might have caused people to pause begins to feel normal.
And I wonder whether that is how it happens within us too.
We don’t wake up one morning and decide that nothing will ever be our responsibility again. It happens in the smaller moments: when we’re corrected and immediately explain why we did it; when someone is hurt by something we’ve said and our first response is to explain why they misunderstood us; when something goes wrong and our attention immediately moves towards who or what contributed to it before we’ve asked what part might belong to us.
Perhaps initially we feel the discomfort, but rather than staying with it, we redirect it. Then we do it again. And again.
Eventually the explanation comes automatically. The defence comes automatically. The blame comes automatically. What began as a way of avoiding an uncomfortable feeling becomes a pattern of responding.
And patterns don’t remain contained within individuals. They enter relationships, families, workplaces, churches and communities. Eventually they can become part of a culture.
Maybe that is one of the warnings we can take from Judges:
The greatest breakdown isn’t always where the story begins. Sometimes it is simply where repeated smaller patterns eventually lead.
What If Responsibility Isn’t Primarily About Blame?
This made me wonder why responsibility can feel so uncomfortable in the first place.
Perhaps one reason we are so quick to redirect it is because of what we have learned responsibility means. For many of us, somewhere beneath the conscious response may be a much older association:
If I am responsible, I am to blame.
If I am to blame, I have done something wrong.
And if I have done something wrong, there may be punishment, rejection, shame, disappointment, conflict or the possibility that someone might see me differently.
So sometimes the instinct to say “but…” may not simply be an unwillingness to take responsibility. Sometimes it may be protection.
Don’t let this land on me.
When we’ve practised that protection often enough, we may not even notice ourselves doing it anymore.
But there is a cost.
Because if everything is someone else’s responsibility, what exactly is left within my power to change?
We can become so focused on avoiding blame that we unknowingly hand away our agency with it.
Responsibility doesn’t have to mean, “Everything was my fault.” It can simply mean,
“This is the part that belongs to me.”
I can acknowledge what happened to me without taking responsibility for another person’s actions. I can understand why I responded the way I did without pretending my response had no impact. I can recognise the circumstances that influenced me while still asking what choices belong to me now.
Maybe ownership isn’t condemnation at all, maybe sometimes ownership is the moment we realise:
If this part is mine, then this is also the part I have the power to do something with.
When Responsibility Feels Different in Different Bodies
I didn’t begin writing this thinking it would become personal. I wasn’t thinking about myself or my daughter. I was thinking much more broadly about responsibility, accountability, community and what happens when redirecting becomes a pattern.
But somewhere in writing it, I had to ask myself the same question:
What part is mine?
Because I can see this cycle within my own family, including in me. Interestingly, it doesn’t look the same in each of us.
For my daughter, who is on the spectrum, being challenged can become a whole-body experience. What might look from the outside like justification, needing to be right or needing the last word isn’t always simply an unwillingness to accept responsibility. Sometimes the need to explain and keep explaining seems to become part of how her system tries to regulate itself when something feels threatening or unresolved. For me, it can look almost opposite.
I can sit with something. I can recognise where I was wrong and apologise. But when I can’t immediately repair what has happened, another pattern can appear. I avoid. I hide. I can become overwhelmed and almost frozen by the fear that whatever I do next could make things worse.
One person keeps talking while another goes quiet. One fights to explain while another retreats. From the outside they may look completely different, but perhaps both can interrupt what needs to happen next.
And that has made me think differently about accountability.
Accountability isn’t only being able to say, “I was wrong.” It is also having enough capacity to remain present with what comes after those words: to listen, to tolerate being misunderstood for a moment without immediately correcting, to recognise impact even when our intention was different, to make repair where repair is possible and sometimes to accept that we cannot immediately fix what has happened while still resisting the urge to disappear from it.
There has also been another uncomfortable question for me as a parent.
I can be incredibly quick to recognise these patterns in my children. I can hear the justification, see the avoidance and point out the lack of ownership.
But where have I actually modelled it?
Have my children seen me take responsibility without collapsing into shame? Have they seen me apologise without needing to immediately make everything okay? Have they seen me remain present when someone is disappointed with me? Have they seen me acknowledge my part without adding a but?
And perhaps most importantly, have I shown them that being wrong doesn’t make someone bad?
That responsibility doesn’t automatically mean punishment? That we can make a mistake, own what belongs to us, repair what we can and continue forward?
Maybe we don’t teach accountability simply by asking another person to take responsibility.
Maybe we teach it by showing what it looks like to survive the feeling of responsibility ourselves.
And Then I Went Looking for Someone Who Did the Opposite
After sitting with all of this, I found myself wanting to find someone in Scripture who visibly showed another way. Someone who didn’t simply redirect.
And I came back to Nehemiah.
When Nehemiah heard what had happened in Jerusalem, that the walls were broken down and its gates had been burned he didn’t immediately begin looking for somewhere to place responsibility.
He stopped. He sat down, wept, mourned, fasted and prayed.
Before rebuilding anything externally, there was a pause.
Within that pause there was recognition. Nehemiah acknowledged what had happened and allowed himself to feel the weight of it. He didn’t separate himself from the collective responsibility of his people, even though he hadn’t personally caused everything that had brought them to this place. In his prayer he includes himself and his own family: “I and my father’s family have sinned.” (Nehemiah 1:6)
And then he moved, not from denial or blame, and not from pretending nothing had happened. He moved from recognition into action.
Perhaps that is why Nehemiah stood out to me so much while writing this, because suddenly I could see something incredibly familiar in his response.
Pattern interruption.
It is so much of what I do in my work with women: helping someone recognise what is happening before the automatic response takes over and gradually building the capacity to create a pause where previously there wasn’t one.
And while writing this, I realised I was doing exactly that myself.
I could keep having the argument internally. I could keep noticing the response in my child. I could decide who was right and who was wrong. Or I could become curious about the pattern that was showing itself to me.
What is happening here?
What am I feeling?
What am I trying to protect myself from?
What part actually belongs to me?
Is there something here that still needs my attention?
Creating a Pause Where There Wasn’t One Before
