Who threw the first rock?

"Blame the other person back": this is the solution to being blamed?...too funny.

Maybe your partner is responding to your blaming them by blaming you (a very common response to receiving blame is to start blaming: as this article demonstrates).

How about focusing on partners improving communication skills rather than encouraging partners to call each other names?

You 'blamer' you (feels good, name calling, doesn't it?).

- mike

Comments for Who threw the first rock?

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Feb 23, 2014
 Different Type of Person
by: Anonymous

I took a "How to Get Along with Difficult People" training seminar once and the answer there was to do exactly what you seem to be suggesting --put yourself in that difficult person's shoes, develop some empathy for them and their situation, try to understand why they might be moody or have poor communication skills, etc., and don't just reject them out of hand.

That works with normal people who might have a slight skill deficiency in getting along well with others or who might be experiencing a difficult time personally or something reasonable like that, but when you're dealing with character-disordered individuals who really have no conscience and no sense of consequences and who bully others just because they feel no qualms about it, to me that's an entirely different matter and it's those people that this article is discussing. This type of person should be handled with the narcissist-handling tactics--wariness, avoidance, protection, preparation. There's a huge difference between the blamer personality type and someone who's just troubled or is lacking communication skills.

With a healthy individual who's just circumstantially behaving in an unfriendly way, the tactics of empathy, etc., do work. I've had great success with them. Then you run across other people and you'll be totally mystified as to why the same tactics don't work. Not only do those tactics not work, they end up making the situation much, much worse. The difference is that you're probably dealing with a character-disordered person who needs to be handled in a much different way.

People need to be taught how to spot the character-disordered who won't respond to positive tactics as opposed to the healthy who are just having a temporary or social problem that can be dealt with positively.

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