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When you realise you have made a mistake, do you focus on what needs to change, or do you find yourself judging your entire character?
There is a difference between getting something wrong and believing that you are wrong. It sounds like a small distinction, but it can make a considerable difference to what happens next.
Imagine that you have said something hurtful to someone. Perhaps you were impatient, dismissive or simply not paying enough attention. Afterwards, you realise that your words caused more harm than you intended. What happens next matters. You might acknowledge what happened, listen to the other person’s experience and consider how to put things right. Or you might become so preoccupied with feeling bad about yourself that the original problem gets lost.
You might defend yourself, explain why you behaved as you did or turn the conversation towards how awful you now feel. Before long, the person who was hurt may find themselves reassuring you. The mistake has become a story about you, and the opportunity to learn from it has been pushed aside.
When Feelings Become Evidence
We all have ways of interpreting what happens to us. Sometimes those interpretations are useful. Sometimes they lead us astray. Emotional reasoning is one example. It occurs when we treat our feelings as evidence that something must be true. I feel ashamed, therefore I must be a terrible person. I feel guilty; therefore I must have done something unforgivable. I feel inadequate; therefore I must be incapable.
The feeling is real, but the conclusion does not necessarily follow. Feelings can draw our attention to something important, but they do not establish the whole truth of a situation. A mistake can be painful to acknowledge. It can challenge the picture we have of ourselves as reasonable, considerate or competent people. We might discover that we have behaved in a way that conflicts with our own values, and that discomfort can be useful if it helps us recognise what needs to change. But when we turn it into a sweeping judgement about our character, we make the problem harder to address.
Instead of asking, ‘what did I do, and what can I learn from it?’, we may become occupied with the much larger question of whether we are good enough. One is a question we can work with. The other can leave us defending ourselves against an imagined verdict.
Guilt, Shame and Taking Responsibility
Guilt and shame are often used interchangeably, but there is a useful distinction between them. Guilt tends to focus on an action: I did something wrong. Shame tends to involve a more global judgement: there is something wrong with me. Neither experience is identical for everyone, and neither automatically produces a particular response. Guilt can prompt repair, while shame can sometimes prompt reflection. Both can also lead to avoidance and defensiveness. The important question is: what do we do with the discomfort?
If we have caused harm, feeling bad about it is not the same as taking responsibility for it. We can feel dreadful and still refuse to acknowledge what happened. Equally, we can recognise our mistake without spending days condemning ourselves. Responsibility involves looking honestly at what we did, considering its effects and taking appropriate action.
Sometimes that means apologising. Sometimes it means making amends. Sometimes it means changing a behaviour that we have repeatedly excused, and sometimes it means accepting that another person may remain hurt or disappointed, even after we have done what we reasonably can to put things right. We cannot insist that an apology produces immediate forgiveness. Our responsibility is to make a sincere attempt at repair, not to dictate how the other person responds.
You Are More Than Your Worst Moment
One of the difficulties with self-judgement is that it tends to magnify whatever we are looking at. We make a mistake and begin collecting evidence to support the idea that we always get things wrong. We remember other occasions when we disappointed someone. We reinterpret past events through the lens of our current feelings. Before long, a particular incident has become a defining story about who we are.
But people are more complicated than that. We can be thoughtful and inconsiderate, courageous and fearful, generous and selfish. We can behave well in one situation and badly in another. Recognising this complexity does not excuse harmful behaviour. It allows us to examine it more accurately. If we are to grow, we need to be able to see ourselves clearly enough to recognise both our strengths and our shortcomings. That means neither exaggerating our goodness nor exaggerating our faults. A mistake is something to examine. A harmful pattern is something to address. Neither requires us to abandon the possibility of change.
The Next Time You Get Something Wrong
Try slowing the process down.
Separate the event from the judgement. What did you actually say or do? What do you know about its effects? What might you be assuming?
Identify your responsibility. Is there something to acknowledge, apologise for or change? Is there uncomfortable feedback worth considering?
Choose a constructive response. You might need to listen rather than explain, make amends rather than defend yourself, change a pattern or seek another perspective before drawing conclusions.
Allow yourself to learn from the experience without turning it into a permanent identity. You do not need to convince yourself that everything is fine. Nor do you need to pretend that your behaviour does not matter. You need to be honest enough to see what happened and steady enough to do something constructive about it.
The aim is not to avoid an uncomfortable truth, but to keep our judgement proportionate to what happened.
When you get something wrong, what helps you recognise your responsibility without turning the mistake into a judgement about your whole character?
