So something bad happened. You might have offended someone. You might have made a choice that you wish you could undo. It might have been something bad that happened to you. You’ve got regrets. You’re in a rough place now. What do you do? Well, there are a lot of choices here. All of them will change the situation in some way, and they all have their own goals. The trick is thinking through far enough to see what it is that you want as an outcome, and picking the right path to get there. I’m going to do my best to break the options down below, and what good and bad can come from each one.
Denial. “Nothing happened. Nobody made a mistake. Nothing’s wrong. I would never do that. There’s nothing to see here.” This is an old favorite, and may very well be the number one response in terms of frequency. It’s about getting your message to everyone before the truth gets to them, and hoping yours sticks. If you don’t get this one going fast enough, you might just have to try yelling it loud enough to drown out the truth.
What does this one accomplish? Well, if the people in question are apathetic or uninterested, it can “solve” the problem instantly.
What’s the drawback? Well, if the damage done was sufficient, you face not only the negative effects that occurred, but also the damage to your reputation for lying about it. Also, this one only works if nobody is paying attention well enough to notice. Of course, you can just make your denial louder and more emotional, and eventually the problem will be “solved” because the person will give up and not want to interact with you anymore. I’m putting this in the drawback category since I can’t imagine anyone who’s not a sociopath would want to drive away worthwhile people out of fear or unwillingness to acknowledge the truth.
Place blame (external). “It was John’s fault! He didn’t do his part so I couldn’t possibly do my part because it relies on his!” This is your standard buck-passing. Find an external entity (bonus points for using whoever noticed the problem) and make up some tenuous logic to tie it around their neck.
What does this one accomplish? It takes the focus off of you, and if played right it can even move you into the next category (victimhood). You are exonerated, and maybe even damage the reputation of someone who you don’t like. If you are the one who originally noticed the problem, you’ve got a decent chance of passing this off as truth. Hell, in a lot of cases it might be based on truth.
What’s the drawback? Your audience might not be stupid. They might recognize the poor logic you used to tie this one off to someone else. In that case, you’re not just dishonest, you’re also a back-stabber. Who wants to deal with you once that gets around? If you weren’t lying and the entity you’re blaming really did cause the problem initially, you’ve still wasted time and emotion on blaming when you could have been working on actually solving the problem.
Claim victimhood. It was my upbringing! It was societal pressure! It was my disability! You’re only saying I did something wrong because I’m [insert victimized group label here]!” This is an additional twist on the standard external blaming. Here we take the game to a whole new level. Not only are you not at fault, but you deserve special treatment because of a victimization. Maybe you shouldn’t have even been given any responsibility in the first place, because asking you to do [insert whatever you don't like doing] was just unfair to begin with.
What does this one accomplish? Not only are you no longer in trouble for whatever it was you were in trouble for, now you can ask for special treatment! Plus, there’s much less of a chance that you will be questioned, because it’s socially unacceptable to question the story of a victim. Also, you don’t have to take any responsibility for solving the problem, since you are just the victim of it, and so everyone else owes you something now, and they should take care of it, right?
What’s the drawback? This one has the same risk as the previous method, in that the holes in your logic might be spotted. It’s a little less likely, though, since victims are a protected group, so whoever notices your B.S. is running the risk of not convincing enough people, and therefore ending up looking like a villain themselves. The real risk of this one is that you start to believe your own story. It’s human nature to only work as hard as you have to in order to accomplish what you want. If you manage to get away with calling yourself a victim, you have just put a roadblock in your own path to happiness. It’s no secret that your perception of the world is an important part of how much you enjoy it. If you can convince everyone you’re the downtrodden, and get rewarded for doing that, you run the very real risk of spending the rest of your life playing miserable. Pretty quickly, that playing colors your view of life, and you really will become miserable. Is that worth it just to avoid having to take part in fixing the problem?
Lash out/redirect. “How dare you question me!? You do worse than this all the time!” This is mostly for problems that originated from you. Make it a competition of who has done more bad things. If you’re lucky (or talented at arguing) you’ll manage to convince the person that your transgression was inconsequential compared to their flaws.
What does this one accomplish? It gets people to stop talking about whatever mistake you made, since they recognize quickly that you’re just going to point out their flaws and make them feel bad for as long as they are talking about it.
What’s the drawback? This one can go bad one of two ways. Either the folks buy in/play along, and they end up not wanting to spend time with you anymore (since you are always making them feel bad about themselves), or they are willing/able to ignore your deflection and point out that their faults don’t negate your mistake (at which point this method fails miserably, and you’re left falling back to a different one).
Shut down/give up. Don’t do anything or make any decisions. This tends to be based on a fear of making things worse. You just stop trying to do anything, and you start coasting instead of having the drive that is an integral part of living people. You’re not living, you’re just surviving. This one can be silent or loud. The silent types become hermits. They stop interacting. The loud ones want to argue with everyone about how meaningless and hopeless it all is. Some folks switch between loud and silent (or just turn loud when someone tries to get them going again). Generally (in my experience) if a person started out as an introvert, they’re silent, and if they started out as an extrovert, they’re loud. In devoutly religious people there’s an interesting crossover between this and victimization, since the hopeless situation must have been created intentionally by a deity.
What does this one accomplish? It gets you pity and sympathy. It can get you a lot of that, actually. People stop asking you for things when they see you’re no longer even doing things for yourself, and some types of people will start doing stuff for you out of a hope/belief that this is temporary and you’ll snap out of it.
What’s the drawback? Ummm, you stopped living. You’re still technically alive, but you’re missing out on all the great stuff that life has to offer. Plus, there’s no guarantee that things will ever get better (or even not get worse) if you just sit there. People might try to help you at first, but their willingness to do so is finite. You can’t fix a physical black hole by dumping material into it, and that applies to emotional black holes, as well.
Place blame (internal). “It’s all my fault. I’m a terrible person. I mess up everything.” This is another pity-seeking behavior. If you say enough bad things about yourself, certain types of people will start to argue with you. At that point, you’ve got them suckered in (because nobody likes to lose an argument). You keep saying bad stuff about yourself, and they counter with nice things about you.
What does this one accomplish? You trick someone into saying nice things about you.
What’s the drawback? Remember the emotional black hole thing from above? Eventually people get tired of being your cheerleader, and they give up and move on. Maybe you’re even good enough at arguing that you manage to convince them you’re not worthwhile. Then you actually win by losing. Cute trick, you can enjoy the hell out of your success while you sit alone and miserable.
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Okay, I think that covers the wrong ways to handle problems and mistakes. What’s the alternative, though? There are four parts to properly handling bad stuff that has happened, whether you caused it or not.
1. Acknowledge it. If you screwed up, admit it. Don’t add unnecessary emotional words, and don’t be dismissive. Be sincere, and apologize if it’s appropriate. If something bad happened that’s not your fault, acknowledge the problem, but don’t go looking for where to place anger. Emotional reactions don’t solve problems.
2. Analyze the situation. Figure out the chain of events that led up to the negative event. If it was caused by a person, try to get to the root of why that individual made the decisions they did. This is easier if it was you, but can be done with anyone if you can gather enough information. Think about the motivations and the information available to that person at the time. People’s decisions are always based on the information available to them and their desired outcomes. Sometimes it’s as simple as adding more information into the situation in the form of the results of the action/decision. Whatever the decisions/actions/etc. leading up to the event, try to understand what took place well enough that you can move on to the third and/or fourth steps.
3. Fix the problem. This might actually happen before step two, depending on the situation. If someone falls off a balcony, you don’t need to investigate the handrail before you take them to the hospital. In less emergent situations, though, you will find you can often fix the problems more effectively if you know how they originated.
4. Learn from what happened. Once you’ve pieced together how it came to pass, and dealt with the present problems caused by it, now’s the time to start integrating that new knowledge into your future actions. Can this problem be prevented next time? Can you plan in such a way that even if it does happen again, the effect won’t be as negative? Don’t assume that you can change people’s motivations, but rather work on finding solutions where more people can get what they want out of the situation.
What are the benefits of this method? Well, like I said earlier, in a lot of cases we can fix problems better if we know how they occurred. Also, doing things this way, we can actually start to prevent the negative events from happening in the future, and therefore can derive more happiness from our lives. We also avoid the traps of the “quick fixes” that I talked about above. There’s great power that can be derived from taking responsibility for a situation and working to improve it.
What are the drawbacks? This isn’t an easy transition to make. Those less ideal behaviors are learned and used for a reason. They’re effective at what they do. In many cases it can seem (and even be) easier to take one of those shortcuts, especially if you have a lot of experience doing it. It’s hard to change your behaviors.
I’m not claiming to have all the answers here, or to be an expert at handling things as they should be handled, but I thought maybe this perspective on life and how to handle its challenges might be useful to some folks. If it was beneficial to you, great. If not, I appreciate your patience and I apologize for taking up so much of your time.