Few of us make it through to maturity without leaving a mess behind themselves: a tangle of broken dreams, broken promises, and broken relationships. Each false step along the way and each wrong turn leaves its imprint somewhere in your psyche. Most of these faux pas are small and relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things, but, especially at midlife, they can add up. When you have collected enough of these sources of embarrassment, it’s only a matter of time before just one or two more can cause you to collapse into despair. It’s never too soon to tackle cleaning up the messes you’ve made.
First, though, a word about mistakes: little ones are not tragedies, nor are they insignificant; big ones are not unforgivable. Messing up is simply a part of life. To err is not only human, it is also necessary. You can’t do everything perfectly the first time (or the second). Occasionally, you may experience ‘beginner’s luck’ and accomplish something that’s beyond your level of expertise, but that experience seldom lasts. Eventually, you’re going to push your luck beyond the breaking point and, behold! you’ve made a mess! If you’ve been raised in a dysfunctional household, you may either feel as though you can’t do anything right and have learned not to try, or you may have numbed out your feelings to the extent that you just blunder on through, letting the chips fall where they may. Neither approach will work for you in the long run.
I’m going to approach the question of cleaning up life’s wreckage using the schema offered by Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas in their book, The Five Languages of Apology: How to Experience Healing in All Your Relationships (to give credit where credit is due). The first step toward cleaning up your mess is to acknowledge that you’ve created one. As I mentioned before, making a mess is not the end of the world. It doesn’t make you a bad person, even when the mess you’ve made is rather . . . shall we say . . . substantial. For many people, this is the most difficult step of all. Fearing shame, people very often go to incredible lengths to hide the truth and to prove to themselves and to others that they’re perfect, and somehow immune to the faults and failings that everyone struggles with. Gentle reader, this, in itself, is a tremendous mistake!
The first lesson that anyone in the midlife transition needs to learn is that a little guilt won’t hurt you. Guilt is that feeling that comes over us when we realize that we’ve screwed up. This is not a bad thing! Experiencing guilt can be a powerful motivator to do better (when we are able to accept it, rather than let self-centered pride keep us from experiencing it). We get a rude wake-up call when we see the results of our actions creating the opposite effects from those we wanted or expected. Then, there’s that nagging voice inside your head that keeps saying, “Whoa, Dude, you really screwed up this time!” What do you do then? If you’re wise, and if you’re spiritually connected to both the strengths and weaknesses of your humanity, you’ll listen. Where does that incredibly strong desire to ignore and to silence that voice come from?
It comes from shame. (Healthy) guilt says, “I did a bad thing.” (Unhealthy) shame says, “I am a bad thing.” Silencing guilt leaves a person incapable of learning from mistakes (it’s the underlying mechanism behind the sociopathic personality). Feeling shame, on the other hand, leaves a person incapable of accepting responsibility for his/her actions. That’s why, as a first step toward cleaning up your messes, it’s so important to silence your shame (it lies to you) and embrace your guilt (it motivates you). We might even say: “There’s no shame in admitting your guilt!”
Here’s where the real growth happens: admitting that you’ve made a mistake. Sometimes the results are so obvious that you (and everyone else in the world who experiences it with you) realize immediately that something’s gone wrong. “Oops!” you say, “that didn’t work out the way I planned.” Sometimes, the results aren’t so obvious, and it’s not clear that you’re the one behind what has happened. The temptation then is to keep the “Oops!” to yourself, even when other people have obviously been affected. Behold: shame doing its dirty work.
Here’s a vitally important principle that most people are not aware of: there’s no such thing as a solitary action. No matter how few people you may interact with on a day-to-day basis, your thoughts, words, and actions are never done in a vacuum. When you mess up, your actions have an effect on you: who you are today and who you will become in the future. To the extent that your life touches other people — your family, your friends, your co-workers, and even people you interact with in the most casual circumstances — to that extent your mess will touch and affect them, too.
Accept it or not, like it or not, your every thought, word, and action takes places within the context of the entire human family. It’s not enough just to own your responsibility in your own mind, or even just to admit it to God in the silence of your prayer. At some point, taking responsibility for whatever wrong you’ve done — intentionally or not — has to include the broader community of which you’re a part. This is (in my understanding) the first ‘language of apology’ that we need to embrace, saying to yourself, to God, and to another human being, “I’ve done wrong, and this is what I’ve done.”
One final caveat before we part: although if we want to clean up our mess, we have to come clean and accept our responsibility, we don’t have to create a bigger mess when we do that. It would be an even bigger wrong to compromise our own futures and the futures of those whom we care about and who depend on us by needlessly advertising the hurts we’ve caused. In many cases, we need ‘to let sleeping dogs lie.’ It will be enough to share our guilty secrets with a trusted spiritual adviser, therapist, mentor, or even a long-term close and trusted friend. If you’re unsure whether or not to tell someone who is unaware of what you’ve done to them, use this rule of thumb: when in doubt, don’t. Talk it over with your adviser first. Pray about it. Above all, be prudent: don’t compromise your life and others’ needlessly.
Next week: Cleaning up the Wreckage Part II, “I’m sorry!“
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown
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