Holding People Accountable for Their Actions

People will often come to therapy and describe being in a relationship that they would never recommend being in to someone they love. Yet, they have slowly made excuses over the years for that person's behavior. “Well, he didn’t mean it. He had a really rough childhood.” “What is my part in this?” “I can’t be angry at my parents because they didn’t have a good childhood or were more abused than I was.” These are all really common phrases to justify someone's bad behavior in a relationship.

Here is the thing- a resounding yes to whatever happened to someone in childhood was not their fault and in many cases is absolutely valid and worthy of compassion. The danger is we conflate compassion with permissiveness and that can be very dangerous in a relationship. It is possible to love someone, have compassion for the ways in which they were hurt, AND hold them accountable for their actions in your relationship. We know that this can sound cold when you are used to being in a codependent relationship- being hurt yourself as a child or not having had a good role model is not a justification for perpetuating that cycle of harm onto others. The irony is that the codependent person in the relationship actually knows this. Many codependent people also did not have good childhoods but they learned to keep themselves safe by disappearing and becoming people pleasers. They would never dream of treating their children the way they were treated. 

That reality is the same for the person on the receiving end of an unhealthy relationship. Patterns actually often don’t change until someone is held accountable for their actions. We don’t have full influence over whether or not someone will get help but we can have standards for how we are willing to be treated in a relationship and boundaries around what we will or will not tolerate. It is okay to walk away from a relationship where someone is unwilling to change their harmful behaviors toward you even if they have valid trauma from their childhood. You being willing to be treated like a doormat is not going to help them heal, it is not going to help any children involved, and it is going to cost you greatly. Oftentimes people need to work through pre-programmed guilt in order to be able to step into their power and walk away from an unhealthy relationship. You can wish someone well and even love someone and walk away from a relationship because you also deserve to be a priority, valued, and safe in your relationships.