Connor BeatonFound of ManTalks | Empowering Men to Build Better Lives, Relationships, and Minds

Confusion Creates Self-Blame

13 May 2026 · 1 min

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Connor Beaton explains how children in chaotic or abusive homes blame themselves because their developing brains can't understand that a parent's behavior comes from the parent's own problems. A confused kid assumes they caused the instability and spends years asking what they did wrong.

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what ends up happening in the young psyche is that gets personalized because for a young brain and for a young nervous system, it doesn't yet have the understanding, hmm, maybe dad's just being an asshole or maybe mom's having a really bad day. The young brain and mind and nervous system can't figure that out. Anything that happens with mom and dad and in the environment, anything that's confusing about the family system, about punishment, about discipline, about love, about affection. And so you start to take on this deeply confusing question that says something along the lines of, "What am I doing to cause this? I'm not causing the chaos to happen. I'm not causing the unpredictability and the instability and the fighting and the violence and the abuse." What happens to a small mind is that when those things happen and they are confusing, it tells the child, "I must be doing something to cause this."