CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - When Your Family Runs On Blame

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Something goes wrong at home. A glass tips over. Someone forgot to change the laundry, unload the dishwasher. The dog escapes. Within seconds there's a full trial underway about whose fault it is. Whitney breaks down what's actually happening in families that run on blame.In this episode, you'll learn:Why blame feels like accountability but actually prevents itHow the scapegoat and golden child both learn about faultThe three-part anatomy of real repairWhat to do when you can repair and your family can’tHow to stop the cycle blame with your own kidsWhitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Calling on Podcast. I am Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and this is the podcast for people that are breaking patterns of dysfunction in their family and building better family relationships. I have been noticing an influx of posts about stop blaming your parents. Stop talking bad about your parents. You know what I'm talking about. Like there's a certain type of creator that keeps popping up and talking about how all we do is blame our parents. We're going to zoom all the way out first because honestly, we've been doing this forever as humans. We are always trying to pass the blame. And I think accountability is a big issue for a lot of people.

Sometimes it's even an issue for me. And looking at the big picture will help you understand what's happening. at your kitchen table. And then I want to zoom all the way back in and talk about what's actually going to shift the culture in a family and make everyone stop pointing the finger at one another. And this episode is not for anyone who has the power and did something bad and wants to take the blame off of themselves. It's also not for anyone who wants a permission slip to never look at themselves again. This is for anybody who is looking at their family and thinking, gosh, we have a real issue with accountability and blame. And I do not want to hand this down. And before we get into it,

just quickly, if what we talk about today sounds like the work you've been trying to do on your own or with your therapist and you're looking for more support and more resources, you do not have to do that alone. The Family Cycle Breakers Club is our membership community at Calling Home. And we have a ton of resources to help you with this topic. We have a group for adult children of emotionally immature parents where we talk a lot about building emotional maturity skills, like accountability and deciding when blame is appropriate for you and for others. We've also covered how to be more emotionally mature, how to take accountability. We've done all of that inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club. So if you join, you'll get access to

worksheets, videos, courses, everything that you need. And it's a great. companion for therapy if you're working on this with your therapist. A lot of therapists and clients tell me that they take our resources to their sessions and that they've been very helpful. The link is in the show notes. And as always, if you have a question that you would like me to answer on a Thursday, send it to Whitney at callinghome.com.com. All right, let's go ahead and get started. I want to start with a scene that I think a lot of you will recognize. Okay? Something small goes wrong in the house. A glass gets knocked over, a kid forgets to do something, somebody is late. Think of like one of these small everyday moments that happen in a house with a family.

And this is the kind of thing in some families that are on the healthier end of the scale lasts for about four seconds and then everyone moves on from it. But in this family that we're talking about today and maybe this is your family, the glass tips. over and there's immediate tension because now the question is whose fault is this? And everybody at that table knows on some level that if it's you, it's going to be a problem. So everyone starts kind of moving into their respective roles. There's the kid that's like, that's not my, it's not my fault. She bumped me. I didn't do it. You know, the parent that starts blaming the child, well, if you had been paying more attention, you wouldn't have knocked. You wouldn't have knocked

over that cup and then your parents are arguing because you shouldn't have given the kid a glass cup and put that much water in it and everyone is just trying to figure out who they're going to saddle with the blame. And you or this person in your family might even be the one that just finally puts their hands up and says, it was me, it was me. I'm so sorry. And so it's profusely apologizing. If you kind of can tell who is who in this scene, definitely leave it in the comments of this episode, if you can relate to this in your own family. But in a matter of like 90 seconds now, if you have ever experienced this, you know that there's like a full trial going on here about who spilled the glass of water. And maybe nobody knows who it was because

they're not even sure if it was them. They don't know what happened. Maybe it was the dog. But there is no one that is just saying that was me. my bad, let me clean it up, or even someone saying like, hey, guys, it's all right, whoever did it. Let's clean up the mess. And it's not that in these families, everyone is necessarily like cruel or they don't love each other. Like sometimes when this happens, we're talking about a narcissistic family structure. Sometimes we're talking about a family where one person is always at fault and they're the scapegoat or there's one person that no matter what they do, they never have to take on the blame. But there's also families where blame is just something that everyone avoids for a variety of reasons.

And there are families where somewhere along the line, being wrong or being the one that made a mistake got associated with danger. Maybe you were hit, screamed at, you got the silent treatment for days, you were laughed at, or you had now this was going to be a story about you that was being told to embarrass you. And whatever it was, everyone learned in that house. And this might be the home that you live in now with your partner and your own children or it might be the home that you grew up in with your parents, that when something goes wrong, you need to get the fault off of you before it lands. Because when it does, it's going to get ugly. And your parents may have experienced this in their own families. And you may have experienced this in your own family. And so now you're freaked out by accountability and not wanting to feel those bad feelings. But in a family that can repair, a mistake happens. Somebody owns it. You reconnect and it's over. In a family that can't repair, a mistake happens,

and there is no way to own it safely. So the only thing left to do with it is to try to move that blame to someone else. And often it gets pushed on to the person with the least ability in the family to fight back. And in a lot of dysfunctional families, that is the child, the youngest one, the smallest one, or a woman a lot of the time being the mother in that family. And now I want you to kind of hold on to that example because what is happening in this family that we're talking about, here happens on a much larger scale every single day, especially when someone is scared, suffering. And the actual cause of that suffering is too big or too complicated or just too, like, spread out

to do anything about it. And we see this constantly throughout history, right? And I'm going to get a little bit political here. But I think that we can see many, many times over the last six years where there has been a large, complicated issue. And politicians have tried to just fill in the blank with something or someone. Okay. So it's immigrants.

It's this type of people. It's whatever you want to put in the blank. That they are the reason that this huge complicated issue is happening. And that feels really good for us because if we can just pinpoint the one reason why this is happening, we can do something with it. We can be angry at them. We can give our pain a direction. And we have a very simple solution to a very complicated problem that is bothering us here.

And I want to make sure that you don't think I am drawing like an equivalence here. that is false. A society scapegoating a group of people who did nothing is not the same thing as a person naming real harm that was actually done to them by a specific person in their family. It's not the same thing. But we can see how when blame becomes sort of like a functioning disease within the family that you're no longer able to actually hold people accountable either because you're constantly just blaming everyone and everything and it just becomes this way to avoid accountability, even for people that are being harmful because blame is always utilized and weaponized in the family even when the blame is being pointed in the wrong direction.

And so the underlying move is what is important. to focus on here. I am in pain, and the real cause is too complex to metabolize. So let me try to find a single place to put all of that. And that process is pretty identical, whether it's a frightened country or a family or a person. And every time we do this, especially every time we do this, like as a society, it feels like accountability, right? It feels like, oh, we're finally naming the problem. We're going to hold somebody responsible for it. But it's not accountability, especially if the person or the group of people that we are

holding accountable for something is not the one that did it, right? And when we look at the wrong thing on purpose, when we say like, hey, look over here, that's the problem. a lot of the time we are just trying to cover up for something over here. And we do that in our families all the time. The scapegoat is really how you avoid solving the problem while feeling like you did something. And blame in families or systemically feels like it's going to get you accountability or

change, but it's often the thing that prevents it. And in a family that runs on blame, there's usually a scapegoat that is responsible for everything. And you might be that person. You know, the parent that had a brutal day or a bad marriage or horrible childhood of their own. And then their child becomes the place that all of that lands. And the family feels more stable, actually. they achieve that homeostasis with the problem child in the family because they get to point at it. And for some of you that can relate to this, you know, you might have been the child that was

always in therapy, the one that was always having behavioral issues, that always was a problem. And your parents would use that word or even your siblings. You've always been difficult. You've always been hard on mom and dad, especially when you have siblings that are like the golden child or the more accepted one, then it is very easy. and they almost don't want you to get better or to improve because they need you to be the one that holds all of the pain and the blame for the family. But it never gets better because the actual thing is never the child, right? It's the system. It's the ways that that child is being

impacted by the system. And I think a lot of children and scapegoated children that are raised in learn that they are bad and that fault is dangerous. And that child has been blamed their entire life. And so some of those scapegoated children become adults that are tired of absorbing the consequences of everyone's mistakes. They may also learn children in this family, particularly golden children, children who are told that nothing is ever their fault, that they can do no wrong, they can also learn that accountability is optional. And for that child, they're constantly trying to dodge being blamed.

And so the teacher has it out for them. The boss is threatened by them. Every ex was crazy. You know, their friend group turned on them for no reason. Like, none of it was ever theirs. And I think if you fall into one of these camps, you know, I think a lot of people who never blame themselves are probably not listening to this show. But if you are, that is a very good sign. It's usually the people that always blame themselves. But I think both of those polls are not good, right? We have to find a way to say, I can hold myself accountable and not everything is my fault. and you have to also see that the adults around you were holding themselves accountable when you were a kid. I think for those scapegoated kids, you're like, wow, my parents never held themselves accountable.

I was always the one that had to be held accountable. And for the one in the family that was never at fault, you're also watching your parent and being like, well, they never think anything is their fault or they never say anything is my fault. So they're probably right. And I think that, you know, there are, of course, adults who have turned, like, blaming their parents into their identity or the past is like the reason that nothing in their present can be their responsibility. And I think that that person is real. You might be related to that person. You might have dated them.

I'm not going to pretend that that doesn't exist. But I also find that that type of person is usually still in very close contact with their parents. They're not always the ones that are cutting their parents off. And this is in my experience as a clinician over the last decade. If that type of person comes into my office and they're saying things like, my parents won't give me money for this, it's their fault that I couldn't get this job, they're blaming like, not even just their parents, but the entire world. I often find that that person is in relationships where they have never had to be accountable.

They are being enabled by a system at large, societally, by their parents, by their partner. Oftentimes, you know, they are people that have gone through life being given things because of, who they are, what they look like, their family name, their access to resources. And there are no boundaries or limits. There are no consequences in that person's life. And we all probably know somebody like this, right? That is not typically the adult that is standing up and saying, I don't want any contact with you. It's a very different set of behaviors. And I think that that oftentimes those adults learned that fault is something you move off of yourself before it lands on you in their own families and in their own communities, from our parents, from media, from the way that

certain people get to navigate the world. We learn this as children from watching who gets to escape consequences and who has to pay for them. And in certain families, you learn that Oh, mom always gets out of consequences if she cries. Dad gets to avoid all of his consequences because he makes the money for the family. You know, there's all of these types of gender norms and societal norms that we have that allow people to evade certain consequences, right? And I think most people assume that the goal here is to totally stop blaming your parents, just to get over it, to decide it wasn't that bad.

it and move on. And I don't really think that that is the goal. It's not necessarily about blame. You have to recognize first where you learned to connect with other people, where you learned about consequences and accountability, and how did your world shape the way that you approach those issues? Because again, for some of you, it is that because I am a woman and I have this role in my family, everything is my fault and my responsibility. Because I am a man, these are the only things I am responsible for. Or because I am the oldest sibling, I have to take a lot more accountability because that's what happened in my family. Or I am the scapegoat. Everything is my fault. And so you have to look back at these patterns in order to understand how you got here. People who are

just saying, like, I washed my hands of what my parents did to me when I turned 18 and I moved on, those people are not being honest. You know that they're not. That behavior is coming out in other areas of their life and they are just not connecting it back to that. The people who are actually able to move forward and take accountability have addressed how those patterns are coming up in their life. We can put the responsibility where it belongs and take accountability for our actions.

And changing the culture of blame in a family is about refusing to put all the blame on one person or thing and to learn that everyone in the family needs to show accountability in developmentally appropriate ways. So how does a family that runs on blame become a family that doesn't? The thing that ends a blame culture is not better communication. It's actually repair. And that is a skill that you have to learn. So first, somebody has to be able to let fault land on themselves without it being an emergency. And I always say that like the elders in the family, the parents, you know, of young children, you guys have got to model this. You cannot expect children to pick this up without teaching it. So this is you having the capacity to hear that hurt me or

you got that wrong and not have your entire nervous system go into like a fire drill. in a blaming family, being wrong feels like dying. And so people defend like they're fighting for their life, right? And in some sense, they kind of are because it feels like that to them. And changing the culture starts with one person being able to feel that surge, you know, what I'm talking about, like the urge to explain to bring up what the other person did, to feel all of it and not act on it. Just let the fault when you've done something wrong sit on you for a second without trying to fling it on to someone else. The second thing you need to do is name your

part without performing it. So real repair is actually specific and pretty boring. And it sounds like this. I snapped at you this morning and that wasn't fair to you. That's it. You don't have to make it like a big performance every time and make it where you're actually asking the other person to rush in and say, no, no, it's fine. You're not a bad person. That's not repair. Own the specific thing that you did and then get out of the way and let the other person have their actual reaction to it. And the third thing is to do it without requiring them to do it back. And I think this is where a lot of people get really stuck because I know it feels unfair and it is sometimes. The blaming family kind of runs on this belief that I will only own my part after you own yours.

And we see this a lot in comment sections, especially when like estranged parents who are stuck will comment on my post saying something like, well, what about that? What are they going to take responsibility for? you know and since everyone is always waiting for everybody else to go first nobody ever goes and then the standoff lasts for decades and i have to be honest with you if you're in a family system and you have someone in your family particularly someone that was a child at the time that is used to always having to take their responsibility always having to say sorry like they're tired of it they want you to do it they want you to go first and i know that's hard but they've been doing it for a long time

And so now it's time for you to kind of pick some of that up and it will get better. So the only way that this breaks is if someone goes first with no guarantee. You name your part and you do not make their response the condition of you having done it. And remember that repair takes two people. So you can become a person who repairs and discover that the people you are related to cannot do it with you. You go first with no guarantee and it doesn't come back to you and they double down and they tell the rest of the family that you're the one with the problem and that happens. If that's your situation, going first does not obligate you to keep going first forever,

like into a wall. Sometimes you do all of this and the healthiest version of repair available to you is the distance itself. Blame culture is the reason some families can never repair in the first place. And I know I just mentioned parents, but I want to talk to the parents for a minute because I hope you're here and I've been seeing that more of you are here, which is, it's really wonderful. If you grew up in a blaming family, you did not get handed this repair skill. You probably learned a lot about deflection and ways to keep yourself safe by avoiding accountability.

So now when your child at any age comes to you and says something you did hurt them and you feel like that old surge, you know, to defend and to remind them of everything you did right and to bring up what they did, I want you to know that that feeling isn't evidence that you are. are a bad person or a bad parent, you will get through this moment. And I need you when that feeling comes up to like hold steady because it will make your relationship better. The next time your kid comes to you and gives you like this piece of fault, don't just throw it back. Just let it sit there for one second. You don't have to explain contextualize. Don't balance it with like anything else. Just, you're right. I did do that. And I know that you might feel like you're losing something when you do this, but you are not. You are becoming someone in your family that is able to admit blame, C-fault without letting it turn like into a war. And for a lot of your kids,

I promise you, they have been waiting their entire lives to find out that you are capable of that and you are capable of it. They're not asking you to be perfect at it. They're just asking you to be able to be wrong. And that is being human. You know, I hear a lot of you say like, I'm only human and you're right. You are human. Those are very different requests, not being perfect, being allowed to be human. That means that you have faults and that you need to admit fault and be accountable. And that is still very, very much achievable today. And if you grew up in a family that ran on blame,

being able to look at what happened and name that honestly is a very difficult skill to build. And because this is a show about taking accountability, I want to leave you with a question here, okay? Is there anywhere in your own life right now where you are doing the thing that you learned at home, where the fault is always landing on someone else, in your marriage, with your kids, at work, with your friends?

And what happens when you constantly bypass that accountability? And I think most people who do this work have to ask themselves that, right, have to be able to say, is there anywhere in my life where I maybe need to take more accountability? And again, for some of you, you're taking way too much accountability for the things that have nothing to do with you. And that's when it's also important to note that, like, my childhood is, is, you. over not everything can be my fault and this is even true true for parents like deciding what you are going to own and what you're not going to own but you can at

least own like hey I missed that I didn't see that I didn't know that that was a problem like really just owning that you are able to cause people your children to feel things that you may have not intended to feel Blame is something that is used in families to try to avoid pain, but nothing changes when all we do is blame each other. And accountability is uncomfortable and it means that somebody has to change. And often the person who least wants to take accountability is the one who needs to do it the most. and you don't get to choose the family that kind of created these patterns, but you do get to choose whether you hand that down. And the way you stop that handoff is just about becoming the person

in your lineage who can be wrong, even about the simplest of things. And I think that's what it means to be like a cycle breaker, right? Is that I can be accountable. I can be mature. I can recognize when I was contributing to a dynamic. And I can also recognize when I have been the one that has been taking the blame about something forever. Okay.

If this is something that you want to keep working on, I would definitely check out our how to be more emotionally mature content on the Calling Home website. site joining our group for adult children of emotionally immature parents. We also have stuff on parenting after trial to trauma, which can be very, very helpful for those of you that want to lessen this culture of blame with your own family. You can join any of our groups. You get unlimited access as a member, and you can join at calling home.com. Thank you so much for being here. please like, subscribe, leave us a review, comment on this episode. That's what helps me keep the podcast free and happening every week, twice a week for you. I will see you again on Thursday for a Q&A episode.

Thank you so much for listening and have a great rest of your day. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist patient or other treatment relationship between you and Collingholm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes terms of service linked in the show notes below.