Dear Dr. Norquist:
I need your advice. My boyfriend of nine years has been constantly blaming me for so many things: his health (his belly fat), he lost his friends – especially his female friends – because of me, he can’t get his master’s degree because of me, and how I have ruined his life. He feels he has nothing and no one to live for. He picks a fight over small things. I sometimes wonder how he will deal with life’s bigger problems if he can’t deal with the small things. He will be 35 years old this year and wants to start a family and have a baby because he feels he’s getting old. For me, I am a traditionalist in that sense – marriage, then children. This has been bothering me for quite some time. It hurts me when he is blaming everything on me. I invested nine years of my life with him, and I feel it is not going anywhere, and now the constant blaming. What should I do? Do I need to give him time? Is he going through a mid-life crisis or something? Thank you for your time.
Dr. Norquist responds:
How can you be responsible for another person’s health, relationships, and education? In viewing it this way, your boyfriend is disempowering himself. If you accept his blame, you are disempowering yourself.
You are each responsible for your own lives. This is a basic building block of your relationship with yourself as well as others. Your life is your own work of art, your own creation. There is much confusion about this in relationships. Trying to control or manipulate or take responsibility for the actions of significant others (including children) distorts and limits so many relationships. It’s easy to forget that we do not have control over someone else’s life. That’s their work of art, so to speak. It’s hard enough to learn how to create our own lives! Clear boundaries regarding what’s your responsibility and what’s your boyfriend’s responsibility is essential here.
Time is not necessarily going to make a difference here. Change happens from the inside. If your boyfriend continues to believe that you are the problem (i.e., that the problem is outside of himself) then things will stay the same. Until someone is able to own responsibility for their own life, change cannot occur. You can share this understanding with him, but this will not necessarily lead to change in his behavior. What you can do is focus on the life that you are creating. What do you want and how can you go about creating it? Waiting for him will just stall your own life.
(Dr. Sallie Norquist is a licensed psychologist (NJ #2371) in private practice and is director of Chaitanya Counseling Services, a center for upliftment and enlivenment, in Hoboken.)
Dr. Norquist and the staff of Chaitanya invite you to write them at Chaitanya Counseling Services, 51 Newark St., Suite 202, Hoboken, NJ 07030 or www.chaitanya.com or by e-mail at drnorquist@chaitanya.com, or by fax at (201) 656-4700. Questions can address various topics, including relationships, life’s stresses, difficulties, mysteries and dilemmas, as well as questions related to managing stress or alternative ways of understanding health-related concerns. 2010 Chaitanya Counseling Services