From the Archives: Intent Vs. Impact
This might hurt: your intentions don’t matter.
Have you ever been harmed or impacted by someone only to be told that “wasn’t what they meant”?
Have you ever felt the need to make sure the person we hurt knows we “didn’t mean to”?
When we make a mistake and hurt someone we care for it can feel like a matter of life and death to make sure they know we’re a good person, that we didn’t mean to, that our intentions were good. This desire to make sure they know we’re “good” can drive us to over-explain, apologize too quickly or insincerely and erase the other person’s experience altogether as we fumble over our good intentions.
I am definitely guilty of the all of these.
Here’s the thing we most often forget in that situation: most people are inherently good.
I know I surround myself with people who are kind-hearted, compassionate and make generous assumptions and I bet you do too.
So what happens to this knowing when we f*** up?
Why do we jump so quickly to defending our good intentions?
The answer is varied and nuanced:
Our past has a lot to do with it; perhaps we felt our life was actually in danger when we messed up as a child and we needed to “take responsibility” quickly.
The human need for acceptance and inclusion has a lot to do with it; “will this mistake have me pushed out of the group?”
The fear of being seen as something other than good which has a lot to do with colonialism and the patriarchy plays a part: only the “good” deserve to survive.
Our drive to repair at the expense of hurting the person we’ve already hurt even more is harmful. It takes commitment to change that behaviour.
And, if we’re in the healing and helping professions or want to hold space for others we must learn how to be with our shame, guilt, embarrassment and fear as we attempt repair our wrong.
“That wasn’t my intent” is a quick way to whitewash our behaviour, erase the other’s experience and allows us to do it again.
And I don’t know about you but when someone says “that wasn’t my intent” to me, I often think, “I could care less about your intent right now, this hurts.”
We must be generous in our assumptions of others.
They are usually well-meaning and good and they will usually accept our mistakes as just that.
Intention matters but impact matters more. It’s helpful to keep this in mind.