Am I A Bad Person? What To Do When You’re The One Who Messed Up

Am I a bad person? I’ve asked myself this question countless times.

We love choosing sides. We feel happier when we root for the good guys. We’re on more sure ground when we can turn away from the bad guys. When something bad happens, we can panic and get defensive, wondering, “Am I a bad person?” We all have the potential to become Olympic-level gymnasts—bending logic, language, and even reality—just to prove that we’re still on the “good” side.

But this compulsion to define ourselves as “good” or “bad” is like watching only the first part of a movie before the characters and themes develop. Even if you feel bad about something you’ve done, you can certainly agree that the Harry Potter series is more complicated than your Hogwarts or Slytherin house situation at the beginning of the movie.

If you find yourself in the scene of a crime of passion, and you’re at all self-aware, it’s impossible not to wonder, “Am I a bad person?”

Here’s part of the answer to “Am I a bad person?”: People with emotional lapses can do deplorable things.

But being at the scene of a crime of passion doesn’t make you a criminal. If you notice a pattern of behavior that you question or feel ashamed of, it may be because you keep revisiting the same scene.

Emotional lapses aren’t the same as moral lapses. They don’t make you a bad person. We’re all unconscious to some degree—there are times when we don’t know why we do the things we do, why we feel the way we do, and how we can feel so confident about a decision in one moment, only to feel deeply regretted later.

Related : Should I Call Him? To Call Or To Not Call Your Ex Boyfriend

I’ve written about narcissists and egoists and how to break free from the traumatic bond of relationships with toxic people. When discussing these topics, it can feel like we’re reducing people to a set of characteristics and a pattern of behavior. The point is not to shame, attack, blame, or label people as “good” or “bad,” or “right” or “wrong.” Or “aggressors” and “victims.”

If these characteristics sound a little familiar, you might be wondering if you’re a toxic person or a narcissist. And if you’re asking yourself, “Am I a bad person?” — the answer is probably no. First, people who lack moral character don’t sit around wondering if they’re “bad.”

The reason we identify patterns of behavior is because they stem from untold stories. While neither of these stories is “good” or “bad,” they both reside in a silent, gloomy, unconscious place on opposite sides of two types of pain:

The pain of compulsively clinging to relationships.

The pain of compulsively letting go of relationships.

There are countless reasons why you might be feeling this kind of pain (all of which have to do with the beautiful ways your body has evolved to help you survive, up until this point). These reasons are your stories, your history, your twisted map, and even the genealogy that got you here.

For people who exhibit a pattern of compulsive clinging in relationships, becoming aware of their partners’ unhealthy coping patterns makes them more likely to question their tendency to stay in harmful situations, at the expense of their well-being. The hope is that they can peek through a tiny crack in an old, deeply fortified foundation built on thinking of themselves as unworthy of seeing: They have loved others unconditionally at the expense of their unconditional love for themselves.

We talk about the other side of this, those with “toxic” patterns and characteristics, as the people to be cut off and avoided at all costs. For those who compulsively cling, the cost is just that: giving themselves completely away to someone else. This is their pattern and their pain, leading to their regret, their mistakes, and their loss. In this scenario, there is no room for gray areas, for the benefit of the doubt, for endless attempts to understand someone else who has wronged them.

But what if you are the one who has wronged someone else? What if you are the one who has mistreated, betrayed, abandoned, ignored, lied to, or misled someone else?

What if you are the one who is wondering if you are the bad guy? Do you deserve the benefit of the doubt toward yourself?

Of course. Here are some ways to deal with regret.

1. Play uncomfortable story time.

Behind the mistake, pattern, or regret lies an untold story. Pathological liars don’t usually come with a narrator who interrupts them every time they lie, “You’re doing this because you didn’t feel safe enough to tell the truth about how you felt as a child.” If you don’t know why you feel the way you do if you don’t know why you did what you did, and if all of this seems so unfortunate now, know that there is meaning in what seems meaningless. It may not be obvious to you yet.

We like to think that we control our thoughts, but our bodies developed ways to protect us, long before we could think and reason our way through life. What’s more, the way our bodies react to certain situations has a much greater impact on our thoughts than we could ever know.

Unfortunately, we are all so desperate to “find meaning” for ourselves that we blame others for how we feel and what we do (even if those people don’t deserve blame)—all in an attempt to remain internally consistent. For example, if your body cringes or shuts down when you get too close to someone you love, who is not otherwise unpleasant or dangerous, your reaction would not make sense to you. We are trained and designed, however, to feel deeply uncomfortable when our emotions are out of sync with the situation we are in. In response, we are more likely to mistreat, lie to, betray, or abandon others when they trigger an internal alarm, even if we believe they deserve such treatment.

Related : 7 warning signs your partner is emotionally manipulating you

This is just an example. If you feel remorse, if you notice yourself making the same mistakes if you don’t understand why you are doing what you are doing in hindsight… it’s because you don’t. You are emotionally unconscious, and it is your responsibility to wake up.

There is nothing easy about this. There is nothing clear about this either. The patterns you are aware of may not be your own—they may have been passed down to you through generations. There is no “beginning” to anyone’s story, so start somewhere. If you’re very open to this, there’s a book called It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolin that might be helpful. But again, this is just a book, and it doesn’t have all the answers. The onus is on you to become more aware of your patterns, to tease out the reasons, and to bear the uncomfortable witness of your reactions—both to yourself and to others.

2. It won’t be different next time.

Some of the biggest lies I’ve ever heard and some of the biggest lies I’ve ever told are that I’ll know better next time. You probably won’t know better. You’re a soul made of stardust, but you’re also a human being programmed for your survival. Your survival is a very low bar and does not include your flourishing, let alone anyone else’s.

There is absolutely no guarantee that it will be better next time, even if you acknowledge your past mistakes. The pull toward the familiar is powerful. The pull toward the familiar will feel like destiny; the pull toward anything else will feel like a grave mistake. A quote attributed to Freud says, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it destiny.” Until you take responsibility for your story, you will continue to live the same life, struggle against the same dangers, feel crushed by your old patterns, and call it destiny.

3. How you treat others is how you treat yourself.

If you lie, betray, abandon, ignore, abuse, or mistreat someone else. If you are indifferent to their feelings, insult them, ignore them, close your heart, condescending, judgmental, or unkind—you can be sure that you have done the same things to yourself. One more step forward – if you have a pattern of doing these things to others, you are almost certainly doing them to yourself daily.

If you are regretting your mistakes, if you are now feeling compassion for someone you have hurt – start with yourself first. Pay attention to how you treat yourself. At a basic level, you are simply being aware of the life you are living. Become a scientist, a collector of evidence of your self-talk and your reactions to your daily life. Analyze and analyze it. You can only make changes with others when you change your relationship with yourself first.

4. Stop using others as prototypes, trying to get closer to the life you want to live.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as “complete healing”. We grow and heal in loving relationships with others. If you make a mistake, it does not mean you are not worthy of love. However, no one should be a racer trying to try and make mistakes with your life.

If you gain some understanding of your patterns, even if you share this with someone else – it is still your story. Stop using others to experiment with what will or will not work for you in a relationship. The best we can hope for is that our friends, partners, family members, or coworkers will support our attempts at self-reflection and self-awareness.

We are not really “puzzle pieces,” looking for the right match. Understanding your patterns, fears, and coping mechanisms can be a beautiful process of compassion in which you finally see yourself as a fully developed person who is neither good nor bad in your own story. It is not a task to find other people who can or should fit perfectly into your newfound contours to make a relationship work.

5. How to Say “I’m Sorry.”

If you want to express regret to someone you have hurt, think about what you might say to yourself after you have hurt yourself. What do you say to yourself when you betray yourself? When you sabotage yourself, how do you apologize?

When you feel sorry for yourself, you realize that there is a precious soul inside of you who has been hurt, who should have been cared for, who longs for your love and understanding. You don’t want to hear excuses, false promises, or grand gestures. I bet you want to hear an honest acknowledgment of the hurt you’ve caused and an affirmation that the hurt was undeserved. When a breakup occurs, a sincere apology will attempt to restore love to where it should have been, where it wasn’t.

Despite all this, we all commit emotional crimes against each other and ourselves regularly. It’s part of being human. This truth is rooted in the loss, grief, and loneliness we all feel—and which we desperately try to avoid, as if it were avoidable. It’s natural for us to reflexively avoid this pain, to float unconsciously through life, from drama to drama, constantly blaming others, without realizing it ourselves. It’s much easier to be an unconscious human being than to be a human being aware of how our survival mechanisms are causing harm to others. Making mistakes doesn’t make you a bad person. You might be an unconscious person, driving home every night, with no memory of the journey. Making mistakes can pull you out of this trance so that you no longer want to drive blindly towards your destiny. So that you can take the longer, harder, more conscious, and sometimes more painful path, to your new home.