I’ve been thinking about the worst things I’ve ever done.
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Dick was a mid-fifties single man who signed up to be part of a small group program we started in the church. We had trained the leaders for a year, then invited whoever was interested to participate. He was assigned to a group of ten, two of whom were our trained leaders. For the first few months, he dominated the group with his wounds, and couldn’t control his constant interruptions of anyone else’s story. In weekly meetings with the leaders, we conceived every sort of intervention, none of which worked.
So after four months of this, I visited Dick at home, told him I was going to remove him from the group but assured him that I’d find another place for him in one of the church’s several ministries. He was crushed, but accepted my decision. Two weeks later, I got a phone call from his brother, with whom he lived, telling me that Dick had killed himself and that, according to his brother, the thing that pushed him over the edge was my visit with him. His brother never returned to church, and I’ve lived for nearly fifty years with Dick’s death on my conscience.
And as horrific as that is, it's not the worst thing I've ever done. I was married in 1963 and ordained into the Presbyterian ministry in 1966. By 1981, both commitments lay in pieces because of my bad behavior.
My infidelity to both promises cost me my career, clubbed my wife and three children with shame and retribution that should have been limited to me, and sent a vibrant, visionary congregation reeling for years. For the remainder of the 1980s, if someone had asked me who I was, I would have pointed to those events as the most honest and essential truths about me. I had become, in my own opinion, the worst things I’ve ever done.
There are these things we do that cripple us and others. And then there are the things we don't do, that may also cripple us and too often cripple people we care about.
I did several hundred marriages during my years as a pastor. It was my rule that I’d spend six marriage-counseling hours with a couple to plan the service but also to assess the character of their relationships. Looking back, I should have intervened to postpose or cancel maybe thirty or forty of those weddings. But, well, you know, the invitations were sent, the reception was planned, the parents were excited, and to try to delay or stop it would be like stepping in front of a runaway train. Maybe they’d figure it out on their own. Maybe not.
Did they survive their limitations? Or did they have two children, get a divorce which traumatized the children, and wind up wounded and bitter at least in part because I did not have the courage to raise the STOP sign? It is against this backdrop that I’ve become much more direct with couples as a therapist. Whether in preparing for marriage or trying to rescue one, I’m much more willing to say, There are serious problems between you, and you have to work them out or this marriage will fail.
In my personal life, I occasionally get so caught up in my desire to be noticed that I sometimes say stupid, unnecessary things that wound my friends. Four or five years ago I was in a group of my closest male friends telling stories and teasing one another. In a moment in which my desire for attention was greater than my integrity, I edged too close in telling a story about one of these friends that he had confided in me with the promise that I could be trusted with his secret.
He waited a week before calling me. I told him that I knew as soon as I said it that I’d crossed a line with him, and that I was very sorry. Then why didn’t you call me to apologize? he asked, sensibly. I thought maybe you didn’t notice, I said, meekly. I noticed, he said.
And you? What’s the worst thing you ever did? Egregious behavior, with devastating consequences, can become the signature of our worst selves. But these active, blatant transgressions are not our only failures. There are moments when we might have caused damage we had no intention of creating, moments where we did nothing and allowed some distress or disaster to occur.
Perhaps you stayed too long in a dead marriage and subjected yourself and your kids to months or years of conflict and the absence of love. If so, what are the scars all of you carry? Perhaps you were an absent father – I’m busting my ass to see that we have enough money to fund this family project, and I just cannot make it to your soccer game! – or a mother who needed your kids’ attention and kept them from developing their own independent personal agency. Perhaps your unwillingness or inability to deal with your own depression or anxiety have made you painful to live with in ways you refuse to accept.
Have you recognized and owned up to the damage you cause to others and to yourself?
Many of us – most of us? – believe deep down that we’re good people. Yes, we’ve made mistakes, and sometimes had to suffer the consequences for them. But if you add it all up, we imagine that our plusses far outnumber our minuses. So why focus on what went wrong?
Look, it’s okay to fail. Perhaps most of us fail at modest to moderate levels, and only a minority of us ruin a family or traumatize a friend or cheat with money or betray a love. But all of us fail. And rather than deny it and get stuck in some false sense of our goodness, we can move beyond our failures by owing up to them and doing something to correct them. That’s basically what I’ve spent the past forty years doing: working to understand myself and why I was so harmful to others and to myself, repairing where I can the damage I did, and learning to govern my impulses and my cowardice in ways that keep me and my Beloveds safer than we used to be.
Each of us is some mix of muck and glory. When we camp out in our glorified self and ignore the muck that rises above our ankles, we fail to pay adequate attention to our complicity in the pain of others. Or, as I once did, you can define yourself by the worst thing you’ve done, and spend more time in self-flagellation than in repair.
Here’s a better plan than self-celebration or self-flagellation. Pay better attention to who you really are, own up to your transgressions, take the consequences, fix what you can, and move forward.