Why do I end up apologising when they were wrong?

What does blame shifting actually sound like?

Your complaint is accepted in form and handed straight back in substance, so by the end you are the one answering for something. It is rarely a flat denial, which is most of why it is so hard to object to.

• The counter-complaint. You raise one thing, a larger thing arrives from your side of the ledger, and yours becomes the smaller matter.
• The tone objection. What you said is granted as fair, and how you said it becomes the subject instead.
• The corrected memory. It did not happen that way, and after a few rounds you are no longer sure it did.
• The reversal. By the end you are reassuring your partner about how hard it was to be accused.
• The conditional apology. Sorry arrives attached to something you have to concede first.

What you notice afterwards is the tiredness rather than the injustice. You sit on the edge of the bed with a flat, scooped-out feeling, and the thing you came in to say has gone. Read more about the 4 horsemen of relationships.

Is this ordinary defensiveness or a pattern?

Ordinary defensiveness flares, passes, and the first subject comes back an hour later or the next morning. A pattern replaces the subject every time, and the first subject never returns. Most couples do some of this, which is worth holding on to before you conclude anything about yours.

Deflection of this kind is named as one of the 4 communication habits that mark a relationship in trouble, and described there plainly as a way of blaming your partner¹. That tells you the behaviour is common and worth taking seriously. It does not tell you which of the 2 you are living in.

Something else is worth knowing, because it cuts against reading blame as proof of character. When a couple is unhappy, the same lapse gets read differently: an unhappy partner takes it as deliberate and selfishly meant, where a contented partner takes it as circumstance, tiredness or bad timing². Which way the causation runs is not settled, so blame travelling hard in both directions tells you a couple is under strain and little more than that. The part worth watching is whether it only ever travels one way.

What I can offer here is the shape of the thing. Which of the 2 you are in is a judgement that needs your particulars and somebody in the room with you, which means individual or couples work with a therapist, and your own sense of your week counts for more in that judgement than anything on this page. Read more about why the same argument keeps coming back.

What is all that deflecting protecting?

In my clinical judgement it protects against shame, and it is rarely about the dishes. Watch what happens in your partner the second a complaint lands: the heat in the face, the voice going up a tone, the hands. The argument that follows is downstream of that.

• Fault heard as verdict. The question stops being what happened and becomes what kind of person this makes them, and the whole self goes down with the complaint.
• Quick and effective. Deflection ends the conversation fast, it works, and the cost of it lands on the other person.
• Learned somewhere. Most of the people I see who do this grew up where mistakes were punished and never repaired, which explains it without excusing it.
• A version told too many times. Some partners have told their own account so often that it has become the thing they genuinely remember.
• What it costs over years. When this runs unchecked I see contempt on one side and resentment on the other, both harder to work with than the original complaint.

Responsibility is no punishment. It is what makes repair possible at all, and a relationship where one of you carries all of it is out of balance however much affection is in it. Read more about contempt in relationships.

When does blame shifting stop being a fair fight?

When every confrontation finishes with you cast as the offender and your partner as the injured one. That sequence has a name, taken from what it does in order: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender, shortened to DARVO.

• Deny. The behaviour did not happen, or did not happen anything like that.
• Attack. The person who raised it becomes the subject: their motives, their history, their state of mind.
• Reverse. The 2 roles swap over, so the person who raised the harm is the one who caused it.
• What your own doubt is. Leaving these conversations unsure of your own account is what the sequence does to a person. It is not evidence that you were wrong.

That last point is not only my reading of it. People shown this sequence in a written exchange judged the person describing the harm less believable, and people given a short description of the sequence first judged that same person more believable again³. That is a finding about onlookers in a study, not about your household. What it tells you is how easily this reorders an argument for anybody watching, yourself included.

If you keep leaving these conversations doubting your own memory, take it seriously and take your time over what it means. Where a partner controls or frightens you, couples therapy is the wrong room and individual work comes first, separately. That is my clinical judgement rather than a research finding. Read more about gaslighting in a relationship.

How do you hold the first subject in place, and when is that not enough?

You stop arguing about which of you is worse and keep the first subject in the room. You will not win the argument about who is worse, and it was never what you were after. What you wanted was to say that something hurt without the evening turning into an account of your own failings.

• Decline the new subject. When the complaint comes back to you, notice the swap and choose not to follow it.
• Say it once more, the same way. Repeat your original sentence in the same words, once, and then stop talking.
• Watch what survives. You are finding out whether the first subject is able to stay in the room at all, which is worth more than winning the evening.
• Ask for one specific thing. Small enough to do this week, concrete enough that you both know afterwards whether it happened.
• Say it out loud outside. Tell one person what an ordinary disagreement looks like in your house, for a second reading rather than for advice.
• If you are the one deflecting. Notice the reflex to explain, to correct a detail or to produce something your partner did, and say the one true part back first.

In my experience a third person in the room gets through this faster than another year of the same evening, and couples work does not run on deciding who was at fault. Read more about how to stop being defensive.

Those are aids to seeing the shape of it and not a verdict on your relationship, and they run out. When the first subject is replaced every time however calmly you repeat it, when you no longer trust your own memory of the week, or when you are frightened of your partner, this article is the wrong instrument and individual work with a therapist, for yourself, is the next step. What stays open is whether this is a pattern that shifts under attention or one that does not, and nobody can answer that from outside your house.

Questions people ask

Does couples therapy work if my partner never admits fault?

Yes, for most of the couples I see, because a third person changes what goes unnoticed and the work does not run on allocating fault. The exception is where one partner controls or frightens the other, which in my judgement needs individual work first, separately.

Should I come on my own if my partner will not come?

Yes, and with this pattern it is one of the more useful things to do. Individual work gives you a clear view of what happens in these conversations and what you want to do about it, without having to persuade anybody to attend.

What happens in a first session about this kind of argument?

Mostly a slow walk through one recent argument, line by line, with my questions about where it turned. One argument in that much detail tells me more than a general account of several years.

Will the therapist decide which of us is right?

No, and if a therapist starts allocating fault then the pattern has simply moved into the room. My work is to make the sequence visible to both of you, so that going on does not depend on a verdict.

How do I choose a therapist for a couple who argue like this?

Look for somebody who works with couples and who will hold one subject in place rather than letting the session roam. Ask how they handle a session where every complaint is answered with a counter-complaint, and listen for whether the answer describes a method.

If you always end up saying sorry, therapy for people pleasing is where I help you see where your own needs got lost.

Sources

1. The Gottman Institute, The four horsemen: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling
2. Bradbury and Fincham, Attributions in marriage: review and critique, Psychological Bulletin, 1990
3. Harsey and Freyd, Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender (DARVO): what is the influence on perceived perpetrator and victim credibility, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, 2020

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.