Is A to Blame? The Person Who Started the Chain Reaction

When we finished the story of A, B, C and D, there was an obvious question lurking underneath it.

Who is actually to blame for all this misery?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious.

A.

A loved B.

A ran.

A broke B’s heart.

A then married C — not because C was the great love of A’s life, but because C felt safe.

B, wounded by A, eventually became involved with D while still carrying feelings for A.

D got hurt because B couldn’t give them everything.

Four people.

Four wounds.

And if you trace the story backwards far enough, it all seems to lead to A.

But is that fair?

Or is there something more complicated going on?

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth.

Yes. A is responsible for the first major rupture.

That shouldn’t be softened.

A didn’t simply “have an attachment style.”

A made choices.

A met someone they loved deeply, experienced the terrifying vulnerability that came with that love, and chose to run rather than confront what was happening.

A disappeared.

A left B to make sense of something A wasn’t brave enough to explain.

And that matters.

Because understanding why someone hurts you isn’t the same thing as saying they didn’t hurt you.

A may have been frightened.

A may have been wounded themselves.

A may have learned somewhere along the way that intimacy was dangerous.

Perhaps A genuinely couldn’t tolerate the intensity of loving B.

All of that can be true.

And B can still have been devastated.

Explanation is not absolution.

That distinction matters enormously.

A didn’t create B’s wound.

But A found it.

B already had fears.

The fear of abandonment.

The fear of not being enough.

The fear that allowing someone close would eventually result in being left.

A didn’t invent those fears.

But A pressed directly on them.

Hard.

And when A disappeared, B didn’t simply experience the end of a relationship.

B experienced the confirmation of a story they had probably been carrying for years:

“See? I knew it. People leave.”

“See? I knew I wasn’t enough.”

“See? Loving someone means eventually getting hurt.”

That is where trauma can become generational in miniature.

Not necessarily from parent to child.

Sometimes it passes from person to person.

One person’s unhealed wound becomes another person’s wound.

And then that person carries it somewhere else.

Which brings us to D.

D didn’t deserve any of this.

D was the innocent casualty.

D showed up.

D loved B.

D was patient.

D was kind.

D tried.

But B wasn’t entirely free.

Part of B was still standing in the wreckage of what had happened with A.

And this is where we have to resist the temptation to make B either the victim or the villain.

B was both wounded and responsible.

That’s an important distinction.

B didn’t choose to be abandoned by A.

But B did have a responsibility for what they did with the wound afterwards.

And eventually, B recognised that.

B could have stayed with D.

B could have accepted the comfort.

B could have told themselves:

“D loves me. D is good to me. Maybe eventually I’ll forget A.”

But that wouldn’t have been fair.

So B let D go.

And that may be the most morally important act in the entire story.

Because B stopped the chain.

This is where A’s responsibility becomes even clearer.

A didn’t just hurt B.

A made a second choice.

A chose C.

But C wasn’t told the whole truth.

C became the safe harbour.

The person who wouldn’t trigger the same overwhelming feelings.

The person A could build a life with without having to confront the terrifying vulnerability that B represented.

The house.

The marriage.

The children.

The holidays.

The six-door Aga.

The fizzy water tap.

The picture-perfect life.

Except there was one enormous problem.

C wasn’t being loved with the whole of A.

And C didn’t know why.

That’s not just sadness.

That’s deception by omission.

Because C entered a marriage believing they were choosing a life with someone who was emotionally available to them.

Instead, they may have been chosen partly because they were safe.

And there is a profound cruelty in that.

Imagine discovering years into a marriage that the reason your partner was able to commit to you was partly because you didn’t frighten them in the way someone else did.

Imagine realising:

“I wasn’t chosen because you couldn’t live without me.”

“I was chosen because you could live without me.”

That could break someone.

So yes.

If we’re asking who started the chain reaction, A did.

But here’s where the story gets more uncomfortable.

Because blaming A for everything eventually becomes another form of avoidance.

A made choices.

B made choices.

C made choices.

D made choices.

And every person eventually becomes responsible for what they do with the pain they inherit.

That’s the part I think we sometimes miss when talking about attachment styles.

We can become so fascinated by why people behave as they do that we forget to ask whether the behaviour is hurting someone.

“They’re avoidant.”

“They’re anxious.”

“They’re traumatised.”

“They have abandonment issues.”

All potentially useful explanations.

But none of them should become moral exemptions.

You can understand someone’s wound and still say:

“You don’t get to use that wound as permission to wound me.”

A is not a monster.

And that matters too.

If A were simply cruel, the story would be easy.

But A isn’t cruel.

A is frightened.

A probably has their own history.

A probably believes, somewhere deep down, that running is protection.

Perhaps A genuinely thinks they’re doing the sensible thing.

Maybe A believes that choosing C will finally give them peace.

Maybe A even convinces themselves that what they felt for B was unhealthy, dangerous or impossible.

That’s what makes avoidance so tragic.

Sometimes the thing you’re doing to protect yourself is precisely the thing that guarantees the outcome you’re terrified of.

A runs because A fears abandonment.

But running creates abandonment.

A avoids vulnerability because intimacy feels dangerous.

But avoiding intimacy creates loneliness.

A chooses someone “safe” because losing them feels less frightening.

But eventually C may discover that they were never truly being met.

A escapes pain.

And creates pain somewhere else.

But B has responsibility too.

This is important.

B cannot spend the rest of their life saying:

“A ruined me.”

At some point, B has to say:

“A hurt me. But what I do now belongs to me.”

That’s the turning point.

And that’s what happened.

B went to therapy.

B stopped trying to decode A.

B stopped asking why they weren’t enough.

B stopped trying to extract an explanation from someone who couldn’t give one.

And eventually B realised something enormous:

A’s inability to love B properly was not evidence that B was unlovable.

It was evidence that A couldn’t meet B where B needed to be met.

That’s a very different thing.

And D gets to have responsibility too.

D doesn’t have to wait indefinitely for B.

D doesn’t have to prove that they’re better than A.

D doesn’t have to compete with a ghost.

D is allowed to say:

“I love you, but I deserve someone whose heart is actually here.”

That isn’t selfish.

That’s self-respect.

And perhaps that is the lesson D and B eventually share.

Sometimes love isn’t holding on.

Sometimes love is admitting that the person in front of you cannot give you what you need — and refusing to turn that into a war.

And then there’s C.

Perhaps C is the person we forget about.

Because C looks like the winner.

C got the marriage.

C got the house.

C got the family.

C got A.

But getting someone isn’t the same as being fully loved by them.

And C has a choice too.

C can spend years asking:

“What’s wrong with me?”

Or C can eventually ask:

“Why am I accepting a relationship in which I have to beg someone to emotionally arrive?”

That question could change everything.

Because C didn’t fail because A couldn’t love them properly.

C simply can’t make another person emotionally available.

Nobody can.

So is A to blame?

For starting the chain? Yes.

For every consequence that followed? No.

A is responsible for A’s choices.

B is responsible for B’s choices.

C is responsible for C’s choices.

D is responsible for D’s choices.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson of the four people.

We don’t get to choose every wound we receive.

But eventually, we become responsible for whether we pass it on.

A passed the wound to B.

B almost passed it to D.

But B stopped.

And that is why B’s story ultimately isn’t about A at all.

It’s about breaking the chain.

Because this is how misery travels.

Someone hurts us.

We don’t process it.

We carry it.

We find someone else.

We make them pay for something they didn’t do.

They become wounded.

They carry it somewhere else.

And before long, everybody is standing around asking:

“Who did this to us?”

Maybe the better question is:

“Who is going to stop doing it?”

That’s where healing becomes more than a nice word.

Healing isn’t just feeling better.

Sometimes healing is the moment you decide:

“What happened to me stops here.”

I won’t punish the next person for what the last person did.

I won’t keep someone beside me because I’m frightened of being alone.

I won’t marry someone because they’re safe while secretly longing for someone else.

I won’t stay with someone simply because leaving would make me the bad guy.

I won’t make another human being responsible for repairing the wound someone else gave me.

And I won’t spend the rest of my life waiting for the person who hurt me to finally understand what they did.

Maybe A isn’t the villain.

Maybe A is the first person in the chain who didn’t know how to stop.

Maybe B is the first person who learned how.

And perhaps that’s why B eventually ends up in the garden.

Not because everything that happened was fair.

It wasn’t.

Not because A didn’t hurt B.

A did.

Not because B doesn’t remember.

B does.

But because B finally understands something that A never did:

You cannot build a peaceful life by running from pain.

Eventually, the pain follows you.

And if you’re lucky, you turn around and face it.

If you’re brave, you stop passing it on.

And if you’re really healed…

You don’t need anybody else to lose for you to win.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

“Is A to blame?”

Perhaps the question is:

“What did A’s choices set in motion — and who finally had the courage to stop it?”

And maybe that’s the question we should all be asking about our own lives.

Not:

“Who hurt me?”

But:

“What am I doing with what happened to me?”

Because we may not be responsible for the wound.

But sooner or later…

we become responsible for what we do with it.