Don't let your reaction become their excuse
A personal note on blame-shifting — keeping what happened separate from how you reacted, so your reaction doesn't become someone else's excuse.
There’s a quiet trick I’ve been noticing in difficult conversations. Something hurtful happens, I react — maybe too sharply, maybe too honestly — and then the conversation stops being about what happened. It becomes about my reaction.
It’s clever, because it feels like a fair point. Yes, I could have reacted better. But that doesn’t change what came before it.
I’m trying a small pause now. Not to win the argument, and not to pretend I’m calm when I’m not. Just to ask myself: what actually happened here, separate from how I responded? That pause has helped me stop apologising for the whole story, when I only need to own my part of it.
If you’ve felt this too, you’re not imagining it. And you’re not the problem just because you reacted.