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March/April 2006 Featured Stories
Unlearning the Blame Game
An interview with Gay Hendricks

by Miriam Knight

Gay Hendricks

This is part of a wide-ranging conversation with Gay Hendricks, a highly admired author, relationship counselor and one of the visionaries behind such mind-expanding enterprises as the Spiritual Cinema Circle, the Transformational Book Club and the amazing game, Journey to the Wild Divine.

One of the hallmarks of your work at the moment seems to be finding creative, even ingenious ways, of affecting the global consciousness.
Yes, I really enjoy figuring out new ways to deliver enlightenment to people, you know, whether it’s by radio or print, games or internet – or whatever. Thirty years ago, when I was a starving grad student at Stanford, I remember one of my professors asking me, “What do you want to do as a career? Do you want to be a clinical psychologist or what?” And I said “Well, if I have to stay in an office 40 hours a week, I’ll just go ahead and shoot myself right now.”

Among all your activities, what are the ones that you are most excited about at the moment?
Oh, that’s a wonderful question. Well, I’m very excited about our relationship work that I do with my wife Kathlyn. We have, for the last 30 years, taught relationship principles that really increase the amount of love people can feel all over the world, and that’s still one of my great passions. The relationship work we do through the Hendricks’ Institute really is the foundation of everything.
Then she and I got interested in the movie world some years ago, and one of the reasons Stephen [Simon] and I launched the Spiritual Cinema Circle was because we felt that since everybody loves movies, it would be another way to help people around the world get a steady supply of really enlightening, inspiring, spiritual principles into their life in an entertaining way.
A third big passion is the Transformational Book Circle. In it we have been able to bring to life a number of books that have changed the lives of many of the people that you and I admire – Neale Donald Walsh, Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson and folks like that. We bring those books out in special editions along with a CD with experiential exercises, so that people could really have access to those incredible life-changing books. To me, transformational reading is one of the greatest things human beings can do.

Getting back to relationships, I noticed on your website you mention five questions to consider that could resolve most relationship problems. A big one for me was, “What have I been blaming others for that I need to own responsibility for creating?”  That blame game has been inculcated into us from childhood. How do we get past it?
Well, I remember vividly sitting in a big auditorium with about 3-4,000 people in the early 1970’s listening to a talk by J. Krishnamurti, who became a very important teacher. Krishnamurti was an Indian philosopher who passed away in 1986 who had a very profound influence on me. He made me think about this particular issue. I remember walking out of his talk feeling like a completely different person because I realized that starting when I was a kid growing up in my family, when something happened, the first thing was to blame – to figure out whose fault it was. No one ever took responsibility for things. In other words, it was always a big game of trying to point the finger and eventually it would lead to these big arguments which sometimes would go on for days.
I don’t think I’m alone in growing up in that kind of a family or neighborhood because I saw it happening a lot. It was something that went on a lot in my early relationships with women. We would get into some kind of a relationship issue and we would end up blaming each other for whose fault it was, for sometimes days at a time. Krishnamurti made me realize that – oh – there was another alternative. Whenever I see something that I feel like blaming, instead of wasting my energy blaming, I just take responsibility and assume that I had had some role in creating it. Rather than trying to get somebody else to accept the blame for it – which he said was never true – I would just go ahead and take responsibility instead for having created it. And that would end the blame game. Then if the other person wanted to take responsibility for it, great! But not even to worry about whether it was the other person’s fault or blame or anything like that…and it changed my life overnight.
It changed my relationships, and I began to teach that to corporations and to couples. It’s one of the hardest things to learn because so many of us have been taught to point the finger of blame at someone when something goes wrong, or to point the finger back at ourselves and blame ourselves. But instead, there’s so much incredible liberation in joyfully just taking responsibility for having created something, having brought it into your life. So, it’s been one of my life missions to help people who were interested to feel the power and the joy of owning something, of saying “Wow!”, regardless of whose fault it is, what did I do, how did I bring this into being, or how am I keeping this problem going? So this one thing has transformed my life, perhaps more than any other thing because I haven’t wasted 10 minutes in the past 30 years since I walked out of that auditorium blaming anybody. And instead, it’s created this tremendous amount of energy that allows me to get a lot done.
So Kathlyn and I essentially don’t spend any time blaming each other for anything. We’ve written 9 or 10 books together since we’ve been together, we’ve been on 500 radio and TV shows, we’ve been around the world thirty-some times teaching, and we haven’t wasted a split second blaming anybody for anything. I know that this is a kind-of long-winded answer to your question, but to me, it’s the most fundamental gift that needs to be made on this planet right now, because you have groups of people who have literally been blaming each other for thousands of years and nothing ever changes. And it’s not going to change until most people say, “Hmmm, what am I doing to keep this going.”

And of course, the other side of that coin is once you acknowledge your power, your role in creating that thing, that we’ve been creating negative things, you also acknowledge your power in creating the positive things.
Oh, that is so, so important because, in fact, I would say that it’s the major thing that keeps people from feeling the presence of divinity in their lives all of the time. We’ve been brainwashed from an early age to think of divinity as something outside of ourselves, and to do this move that I’m talking about of taking responsibility gives you the power to actually heal on a moment-to-moment basis the actual organic divinity that human beings are a part of, and you can’t do that if you’re always pointing toward something outside yourself, whether positively or negatively.

Yes. Well, then that comes to another one of your questions, which is, “What am I not facing?”
Exactly, and here, let me give you a great example of that. I can pretty much remember the moment of first discovery of the power of this question. I was working with a couple in Colorado in the 1970’s. They moved to Colorado and built a dream house, and the whole time they were building it they were thinking, “When we finish the dream house, then our lives are really going to work because we will have everything we want.” And they found after they built the dream house that they still continued exactly the same types of arguments that they had before they moved into it. They then had one child and they had that same kind of thinking, “Wow, after we have a baby, then everything is going to be happy in our relationship.” Then they had another child and had the same kind of thing. Well, finally they came in to do some relationship counseling and I realized that for the past 12 years they had not being willing to face their core issues inside themselves and in their relationship. And because of this, they threw themselves with a kind-of neurotic energy into building their dream house, having children, all the worst kind of things, and none of those things ever made them happy. So, I remember asking this question, “What is the one thing that you really have been trying not to face in the past 12 years?”, and there was this kind-of long, awkward, painful silence. Finally one of them said, “Well, I don’t think I really love you” to the other one.

Hmmm, wow.
So this is the kind of issue that people will go to great lengths to avoid facing. The happy ending of that story is that once it surfaced and they both opened up and were able to express these things to each other, (they looked 10 years younger for one thing) they had a rebirth of themselves overnight. But the second part is they had quit avoiding facing these things, so they were able to create a whole different kind of marriage that was based on some real rock-solid feelings about each other.
That’s a long example of something that human beings face constantly, that we do things out there in the world to try to change the world to avoid facing something inside ourselves. You know, I’ve had famous anti-war activists in my office who spent time at peace rallies and even organized huge peace rallies, but yet they couldn’t control the anger and rage at each other around the house. It’s very sobering to confront that kind of issue in yourself. I remember this one peace activist who talked with tears in his eyes about how frustrating it was to spend all day talking to 5,000 people in an auditorium about peace and then come home and explode with rage at his wife and kids. He wasn’t able to be that peace that he was talking about all day. Very few people know how to let go of being right, or to let go of the primal urge to be right, and until we understand these principles, I don’t think we have any chance of creating peace in the world.
What I’m feeling now though is a great deal more hope and possibility than I felt, say, 10 years ago, because wherever I go in the world I see people better able to let go of being right and ask the bigger questions about how can we support each other. Because I float around the world a lot and touch into different communities, I tend to have a bigger hope than I did 10 years ago, when I saw much more attachment to people’s points of view and many more people saying, “Now it has to be my way or it has to be my guru’s way, or my guru is the only path,” those kinds of things. I just don’t hear people talking that way much anymore, so I feel that quite a bit of genuine progress has been made toward unity and integration.

Thank you, Gay. Let’s close on that positive note, and we will hopefully be speaking to you again soon.

Gay Hendricks and his wife Kathlyn have authored more than twenty books, including Conscious Loving, The Conscious Heart, Lasting Love and the new Attracting Genuine Love. Their book Conscious Loving is used as a textbook in many graduate programs throughout the country. Kathlyn and Gay have also appeared on Oprah, CBS’ 48 Hours, Sally Jesse Raphael, CNN and 500 other radio/television programs. Their work can be viewed in more detail at www.hendricks.com.