Why are we wrong?

And why did I just get involved in this project! exclaims 23-year-old Pavel. “I thought I could show my best to the authorities, but now I can hardly cope.”

“I should have immediately understood: something is not clean here,” 45-year-old Ivan grieves, recalling how he sold the apartment in order to participate with partners in a business that soon went bankrupt, leaving him with debts.

“I warned her that she was making a fatal mistake!” rages Elena, 55, whose daughter married a Congolese despite family protests.

“I don’t even know what I was thinking when I got this dog!” – 28-year-old Alla scolds herself: she took a puppy to please the children, and he grew into a biting dog that no one in the family can handle.

How is it that we make bad decisions and fail? Is it about us or the circumstances? And is what we consider a mistake really a mistake?

Not an easy life

Let’s start with the fact that we are complexly organized creatures. “Many animals already have a program by the time they are born: how to find food, with whom to breed. But a person does not, notes psychotherapist Karina Karamyan, the main part of neural connections in our brain develops after birth. Our behavior is determined mainly not by instincts, but by the experience that we acquire throughout our lives.

Society, culture, traditions of the parental family, own thoughts, desires, values ​​- all this is intricately intertwined in the psyche. And each of these instances has its own rules about “what is good and what is bad”, and its own requirements.

“Therefore, they often come into conflict,” continues Karina Karamyan. – Let’s remember adolescence: physiology made us acutely experience our physicality, be interested in issues of sexuality. From the point of view of biology, we became an adult, focused on reproduction, and from the point of view of society, we remained children who must obey their elders and learn.”

What is perfectly correct from one position may seem disastrously wrong from another.

Evaluation criterion

Representatives of different generations, cultures and subcultures have different rules of conduct. Even politicians who obey diplomatic protocol behave differently: for example, during an official visit to the King of Saudi Arabia, Angela Merkel did not cover her head, and Valentina Matviyenko put on a headscarf in the same situation. Each has its supporters and critics.

We can be condemned not only by the bearers of values ​​that differ from ours, but also by ourselves: after all, we comprehend our actions and can look at them through the prism of different attitudes. “Error” is a subjective judgment in cases where it does not apply to mathematical examples and other systems in which there are clear rules. We know that ticketless travel in public transport is a violation, and the rules indicate the amount of the fine for it. But was it a mistake to enter a company from which you had to quit with a scandal six months later?

“I found that my new job had endless hours of planning meetings that didn’t help the cause,” recalls 32-year-old Evgenia. – When I proposed to limit the time of discussions, it was perceived as an attack on the authority of the leader, I started to get into trouble. If I could have imagined that this would happen, I would never have gone there, despite the high salary.”

If only I knew in advance! But the point is, we don’t know. “After some time, we begin to consider as erroneous those actions that did not bring the results we expected,” explains Karina Karamyan. “The decision seemed right in the situation in which it was made, and we judge it in the light of new experience that appeared later.”

Measure of responsibility

The consequences of some actions are indeed dire. “A man was carried away by a young girlfriend, his wife found out, left him, met another person. But his romance did not work out, he feels that he loves his family and has lost something precious … The family emigrated to another country, but they cannot live there, the children do not want to learn the language, they ask when to go home … The surgeon touched the facial nerve during the operation, doomed the patient to suffering, – gives examples from the practice of Gestalt therapist Victoria Dubinskaya and continues: – We can experience such mistakes at the deepest level of conscience.

They teach us humility and purify the soul from arrogance and a sense of omnipotence. How to live on? Can we do something, or the only thing that is available to us is to leave the offense in the past, understand ourselves, and maybe even forgive. I will paraphrase a well-known expression: every adult who has not hidden from life has his own small cemetery. There are failed relationships, offended friends, forgotten important things, broken promises, ingratitude, irresponsibility and various other things.

Forgiving yourself is not an easy task. Many “bite themselves” even for what someone else would consider a trifle, not to mention serious misconduct. And if in official jurisprudence there is a measure of punishment, a way to atone for guilt, then in our inner reality we can be incredibly cruel and sentence ourselves to life imprisonment in suffering.

Measure of responsibility

“The feeling of guilt can be very strong and destructive,” says Karina Karamyan, “but it is not connected with objective reality, but with the attitude towards mistakes that we learned in childhood.” A four-year-old girl broke her mother’s favorite vase. “Are you on purpose?!” yells the angry mother, forgetting that the child is not yet in control of the body, its movements are not coordinated enough to avoid colliding with the rickety shelf on which the vase was standing, and that it is actually mother’s task to put the vase out of reach.

“Shame on you to do this”, “how could you do this” – in kindergarten or at school, and sometimes in the family, elders shame the child, humiliate and punish for mistakes. “The entire educational system is built on testing and assessing the number of mistakes,” emphasizes Victoria Dubinskaya. “In our mentality, error is the opposite of right, correct.”

Once we adopt this attitude, as adults we begin to shame ourselves, viewing our actions as catastrophic and unacceptable. But another attitude is also possible.

“Once I met a bearer of the culture of North American Indians, and he was amazed at our exactingness towards ourselves,” says Victoria Dubinskaya. “He said, ‘We treat mistakes with respect. If we make a mistake, we thank heaven for the opportunity to learn something new, to get a lesson. The mistake is the teacher.”

Not demanding perfection

“I told myself that I should have noticed the warning signs right away,” says Oksana, 29, who broke up with her husband after she found out about his regular cheating, “and my friends added fuel to the fire: “How could you be so naive ?! » It was only during therapy that I realized that when I got married, I was young, inexperienced, and very much in love. I don’t have the gift of foresight. So I stopped blaming myself.”

What if we do not consider mistakes and omissions as a characteristic of our entire personality, but treat them as signs that will help us choose the way?

“The one who is tolerant of himself, recognizes the right to make a mistake, learns, changes thanks to this experience and looks for a way to correct it or avoid situations where it could happen again,” says Karina Karamyan.

“I know my habit of being late,” 36-year-old Vladimir admits, “and if there is an important meeting, I add half an hour to the time needed for the road in reserve.”

Recognizing our imperfection, we become more free. “Being overcritical is a form of vanity,” notes Victoria Dubinskaya. — In my practice, I see how the fear of making a mistake interferes with self-embodiment. Creativity requires spontaneity. And this is impossible if you do not give yourself the right to be inaccurate, to miss. Experience the happiness of the creator is very difficult for people with a strong inner critic.

We try and make mistakes – this is our, human, way of knowing. We do not always have enough experience to do everything “right” the first time. Sometimes people around us report that they do not approve of our actions. It will be difficult for us if we feel obligated to meet the expectations of others.

But if we have a clear idea of ​​our own values, we can rely on them to understand what is right or wrong for ourselves. And in the second case – to look for new ways.