Relationship

Things we wish we hadn’t done: what I’ve learned might help you get through the holiday season | Eleanor Gordon-Smith


If you are going home to family this Christmas odds are good that you’re returning to the scene of an emotional crime. A vicious remark or six, a falling out over money, the mutual memory of the time you said what you really thought: the family dinner table can be a mental inventory of the things we wish we hadn’t done. And this year, after this much financial stress and global uncertainty, it would be astonishing if our tempers didn’t fray. This December may be an all-time record setter for making new mistakes, or having fights about the old ones.

I have spent a lot of time with mistakes. I write an advice column for this newspaper, so every week I read long and beautiful letters about the moments people feel like they need help getting out of. I am a professional ethicist, so my day job is to measure the distance between how good we could be and how we in fact are. This year I combined those threads by producing a documentary podcast about the things we wish we hadn’t done.

I talked to people about the moments that still make them wince to think about: a student who knowingly led someone he knew into a bad investment so he could make some money he badly needed, a woman who walked out of a seven-year relationship without stopping to explain, a checkout kid who watched an assault and didn’t intervene. I’ve become a sort of taxidermist of mistakes.

The lessons I’ve learned might help you get through this holiday season – whether you are the mistake-maker, the mistake-victim, or one of the few among us who can admit that all of us are both.

Fear is a barrier to learning

People conceal their mistakes. Like all profound realisations this one sounded so obvious as to be boring when I first thought it: what else would you do with a mistake? But seriously entertaining that question made me realise the revolutionary possibility of the alternative: we could learn not to fear the thought of our mistakes being visible to others.

Educators have known for a long time that fear is a barrier to learning. Students who are happy and having fun process faster and retain more. Most of us say we want to learn from our mistakes – but we live in the worst possible learning environment for doing so: a world where mistakes are often steeped in fear and adrenaline.

When we are gripped by the fear that our mistakes will become known, it is harder to get close enough to them to see what went wrong.

If we want to be understood we need to give others something to understand

When we ask for forgiveness we often ask for understanding and just get stuck here. We goldfish-mouth our way through explanations and the person we hurt folds their arms and says they “can’t even imagine” doing what we did. So the trick is to find a level of description that they can imagine – a way of talking honestly about what happened that lets them see a more familiar pattern emerge through the details. One of my favourite interviews was with a woman who took some things from a subletted apartment without telling the woman who owned them. The owner was furious; called her a thief; it was a disaster. But the woman who took the stuff doesn’t put much stock in possessions – she’s lived her life in share houses and artists’ circles, and if a friend looked good in a T-shirt of hers she’d expect them to treat it as their own. Now, can I understand taking someone else’s things without asking? Not really. But can I understand taking it as default that other people will share my values, turning out to be wrong, and realising I’ve accidentally hurt someone terribly? Absolutely.

Beware the people – including ourselves – who want to define us by our worst

I spoke to many people whose mistake became a defining feature of their personality; a thing that turned up again and again in their relationships as a mark of who they “really” were.

Sometimes that’s because the people around us keep us perpetually punished. But just as pernicious are the people who keep us perpetually forgiven. Loving relationships have to have room for our mistakes – but “having room” for a mistake is not the same as making it a centrepiece. If it has been seven years and mother is still reminding you of what she forgave, at a certain point forgiveness is indistinguishable from punishment.

The people who recovered best from these moments were the ones who allowed them to fade. As a man who tried to punch a catcaller told me: “I regret it the way one regrets an error, not a transgression.”

Not all our mistakes deserve to be concealed. Not all our mistakes deserve to be judged. We may find that by treating them matter-of-factly and as things that can be understood and laughed at, we can teach other people to do the same.

• Eleanor Gordon-Smith is a writer, philosopher and fellow of The Ethics Centre. She is currently at Princeton University and is the host of a new podcast, Little Bad Thing



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