Guilty as Charged

Most of us feel a sense of regret, guilt or even shame when we look back at some of the incredibly foolish or ill-advised things we’ve said or done.

Perhaps, in our zeal to be clever, we said something that we knew we shouldn’t have said, the moment the words passed our lips.

Or we’re struck by the memory of an incident that occurred far in the past when, seemingly out of nowhere, it sneaks up on us and reminds us of the ways in which we missed the mark.

Since most of us have lived our lives in the presence of other people, we’ve likely said or done something that resulted in another person’s being hurt or another’s interests being harmed. That’s just a fact.

Because we are thinking creatures who must live with ourselves, to say nothing of those we’ve hurt, we need to develop ways that allow us to move past our own failures that are neither flippant gestures nor a performative donning of the hair shirt.

In other words, overcoming a sense of guilt or remorse is not, nor should it be, simply a matter of shrugging one’s shoulders and saying, “Well, that just happened.”

But neither should it require condemning oneself to months or years of crippling misery.

Getting to the right place involves, first, getting into the right headspace. This means acknowledging that you’ve done something that doesn’t meet your own standards for how you believe you should have behaved.

While this may seem obvious, many of us have a remarkable ability to excuse our own behavior or to justify it based upon something that was done to us first.

Getting past the oppressive weight of remorse — which we feel because our own moral compass is spinning — requires an acknowledgement first to ourselves that we did something that we shouldn’t have done.

In short, we have to own it.

If we can do that, if we can find ourselves in a place of honesty and integrity with respect to our own behavior, then we can move on to more proactive and thoughtful means of reestablishing a kind of balance between ourselves and those whom we’ve harmed.

Whether the person whom we’ve harmed is ready to hear from us is another matter.

But if one of our goals is to help create a world in which we not only behave better, but can at the same time reduce the level of sadness, anger and hurt in those around us, it seems a small thing to begin by looking in the mirror.