Whether we are the one on the receiving end of harm or we are the one causing harm, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of using our intentions or someone else’s intentions to try to minimize the perceived impact of the harm that is done. And contrary to what it seems like, doing so can be very damaging, which is why today, I’m going to explain this behavior in depth and explain why you should steer clear of it. 

In general, intention matters. One of the most important things to become consciously aware of is the WHY behind whatever you are doing. Most people are simply not consciously aware of the WHY behind what they are doing, even though their WHY accounts for a very big portion of the energy behind their action. Everything you decide and say and do serves a purpose. The purpose behind your decisions and behind what you say and behind your actions is critical to become aware of.

But neither neutral nor positive intention negates the damage that is done or the pain that is caused to someone. Never the less, people act as if it does. You will hear things like this all the time: “oh, he or she didn’t really mean it”. Or “they didn’t do it consciously.” Or “they meant well”. Or “they did it because they thought it was the best for me.” Or “they didn’t do it on purpose”. Or “they did the best they could”. etc. 

The reason that we feel the need to negate and minimize the negative impact something had by pointing to intention is multi fold. 

1. We hope that by pointing to our positive intention, we are establishing ourselves as an ally rather than an adversary, which we hope will repair the rupture between ourselves and the other person and as a result, we can be and feel socially safe as well as maintain a sense of confluence and connection.
2. We can use it as a strategy to avoid looking at the damage caused because we are afraid of looking directly at it. We fear that doing so will lead to some kind of consequence we are unwilling to experience. 
3. We feel doing so will allow us to maintain relationships with and remain close to the people who have harmed us, whereas we worry that looking directly at it would compromise those relationships in some way. 
4. We cannot see ourselves as bad or wrong. This is the ultimate threat to our self-concept. And so, we must establish a neutral or positive intention in order to feel good about ourselves.
5. We don’t want to put energy into creating repair and righting wrongs. So, it is easier to simply try to cancel out the damage done by pointing to the intentions behind it.
6. We like to point to intention when we are trying to defend someone who is being accused of having caused damage (ie. done something bad or wrong). And we may have all kinds of reasons for doing this.   
7. We like to point to intention when we are trying to justify the things we or other people say and do. 

Neither neutral, nor positive intention cancels out or takes away the damage that is done. For example, if a parent is so inconsistent and unpredictable that they are unable to create a secure relationship with their child, regardless of whether the parent was intentionally not there for the child when the child needed them, or was inconsistent due to subconscious patterns and struggles within themselves. Neither changes the fact that the child is now an adult with an attachment problem who now needs therapy and who is struggling in their adult relationships badly. Or for example, if a person shot someone else to death, regardless of whether the person shot someone intentionally or whether it was an accident, the person is still dead and massive negative impact to everyone who loved that person still occurred.

So, what does intention change, if it doesn’t negate the impact or the damage done? That is perhaps the most important question you can ask yourself. In each situation, you’ve got to get into the habit of really questioning what you think this intention vs. that intention would or should change? This is the only real way to decipher if the way we are siting intention is healthy or not. 

Knowing the intention behind someone’s words or actions changes the meaning we assign to an experience and our interpretation of it. Both are important things. Both can make us feel better or worse about the things that have happened and therefore, change the kind of impact they have on us. This is undeniable. For example, knowing that a person lied to us because they were so terrified of losing the relationship with us by telling us the truth vs. knowing that a person lied to us because they wanted to manipulate us into doing what they want definitely changes the way we feel about that situation and that person and even ourselves. But we can use intention in a shadowy way. We can use it to stay unconscious and dysfunctional.    

Using intention to try to minimize or negate impact is resistance to acknowledging the impact. And refusing to deeply acknowledge impact, is an avoidance mechanism that can get us into big trouble. If we do not look at reality, and impact is a big part of the reality of a situation, we cannot respond to what is real. We will be acting out of reality and we will be unable to create healing for ourselves. When we use intention to negate impact, we can easily betray ourselves by defending the person who harmed us against our own pain. In this same vein, we can easily start to defend the person who caused harm against the person who has been harmed.   

So that you can understand this better, meet Jane. Jane comes from a status-oriented family that really emphasized being the best. They sent Jane away to a boarding school when she was nine years old so she could be on track to be a professional tennis star. This was a huge trauma. Regardless of acting like she was on board with the decision (because she was so desperate for her parent’s approval), the reality is that she was far too young to be without her family. The reality is that there was no one truly caretaking her and none of her emotional needs were met. Being there, she learned to suppress emotions. She became attached to places rather than people. She developed a cut throat competitive edge and not just on the court, but in all areas of life. She felt so utterly unwanted by her father and so worthless at a subconscious level, that she developed an obsession with needing to be daddy’s little girl, but in her romantic relationships with men. She would exclusively date men who were at least 20 years older than she was and who were very cold, dismissive and demeaning men, like her father. She ends up feeling demeaned and not good enough and discarded in every one of her relationships. And every time she gets into a new relationship, she moves to live with the new man and throws away all of her friends. So, she ends up alone. She has an eating disorder, which she uses to try to cope with the emotional components of this whole dynamic. 

The problem is, Jane refuses to acknowledge the damage done. She loves to maintain the story in her own head that her parents sent her to boarding school to help her pursue her own dreams. She tells people that her parents had no way of knowing that she would be so unhappy being sent away, after all, they thought they were setting her up in life. She says “it wasn’t that my dad didn’t love me, it’s that due to his parents, he never knew how to love and so, his way of showing me love was with money and opportunities.” 

When Jane does this, what she is doing is avoiding. She is avoiding looking at the reality of the damage her parents did to her and the lasting impacts of that damage. She is trying to make her own pain go away by negating it with the idea of her parents having good intentions for what they did. She is also afraid that she will harbor negative feelings towards them, which will put a further distance between her and them, when their closeness (especially her father’s) is the thing she is most desperate for in this world. Jane is also betraying herself by defending the people who harmed her against her own pain. And she is also gaslighting herself, hoping that if she doesn’t perceive harm being done, she won’t feel the effects. In all of this, she can never hope to heal from the experience. She will never actually recognize what has happened and what needs to be done about it so as to experience a genuine improvement. She will never become aware of the full scope of her patterns, so she won’t be able to change them. She will also never become aware of what dysfunction needs to change in her relationship with her parents. Instead, she will stay an accessory to the family dysfunction.  

Intentions matter. But in the context of this conversation, they don’t matter more than impact and it is the impact that must be addressed. Positive intent does not trump everything. Good intention doesn’t minimize or erase the impact of what you do. And this is why they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.