Whom family members blame for their difficulties, and to what extent they blame them, is widely thought to affect their response to those difficulties. In addition, the extent to which parents experience themselves as being blamed by therapists is thought to influence their ability to make use of therapeutic intervention. Yet, despite frequent references in the clinical literature to the need to be sensitive to issues of blame, little attempt has been made to systematically investigate how blame arises naturally in therapeutic encounters. This article develops operational definitions of blame and of exoneration and uses them to undertake an exploratory study into how a sample of 10 families and their systemic therapists attribute blame and exoneration in relation to the presenting problem. Multidimensional scalogram analysis is used to explore how patterns of blame might possibly relate to service uptake. It is argued that as clinicians we may want to hone our sensitivity to the different ways that blame may be invoked in conversation in order to increase our therapeutic efficacy.
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