It’s the practice of taking praise or blame for something good or bad a person does.
As kids we blamed most, if not all of our mistakes on something or someone else.
We either pointed out what someone else made us do, or blamed someone who snuck into the house virtually unseen before breaking something, and then snuck back out while remaining unexplainably invisible.
If we did something that went well we were quick to take the praise, though.
If we were consistent and put the responsibility for anything we did or did not do on some outside force, then we could avoid having to deal with the consequences of our own actions.
And if we could convince other children that every idea or decision to act was put in our heads by that outside force, we could be seen either as the victim of some other entities malevolence and garner empathy, or being selected by that entity to do good things, be considered somehow chosen.
The difficult moment was when it became clear not only to others, but more importantly to ourselves, that we were responsible for our own thoughts, words, and deeds.
And for some, that moment can be crushing, especially for those who have lived their whole lives under that delusion.
I channel surf while I do my artwork just to have other voices in the room, and occasionally I will stop if something catches my attention. Religious channels are included in this process.
One common theme in every religious show I have listened to is that none of the people doing the talking ever say they have decided to do something. Everything they do and every thought they have, no matter how sublime or mundane, has been given to them by a God who incessantly speaks to them.
If I decide to go to the store or just into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee, I accept that these decisions were my own, arrived at by necessity to get food or that second cup of coffee.
But for the religious folk it was God who directed them to get that second cup, thereby bestowing on that mundane act a greater meaning, and themselves a higher position than most because God even directs them in the simplest act.
I know a woman, a state Representative in another state, who claims God told her to be a virgin missionary until He changed His mind and told her not only to get married, but whom she was to marry. He told her to have and raise her children, and then, when they were older, to get into teaching to bring Him back to the classroom. Following this He told her to run for state representative. No decision in her life was ever made by her, and no legislation she proposed could be discussed because it had come directly from God. If her legislation failed, it was not because it was bad legislation, but because Satan had entered the hearts of her opponents.
She lost on a number of issues, and this she could not understand.
When desired appearance meets reality it can be bewildering.
And so this moment came to the Duggars.