Shankar Vedantam

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

I'm a good person doing the best I can in difficult circumstances.

If that's something you've thought or said to yourself before, welcome to the club.

Most of us think of ourselves as good people.

Psychologists sometimes refer to this as our moral self-concept, and it's a process that can be important to our self-esteem and mental health.

But it's also one of the reasons it can be really hard to say, I'm sorry.

After all, we're good people and we have intimate knowledge of our own thoughts and emotions.

We know what we meant to say, even if the other person heard it differently.

And yet, as difficult as it can be to apologize, doing so can break a cycle of bitterness and blame in romantic relationships.

Psychologist James Cordova refers to this as eating the blame, and many of our listeners had follow-up thoughts and questions about this idea.

James, remind us briefly what you mean by eating the blame.

In some ways, I think sometimes this comes to us naturally.

I'm thinking about the way parents sometimes deal with a small child.

The child's upset about something.

The parent often doesn't get into a blame fight saying, you really have to get your impulses under control.

And even if the parent actually doesn't feel like the blame is on them, it's sort of easier in some ways to eat the blame when it comes to dealing, for example, with a small child.

We received a question about eating the blame from listener Monique.