Good People Sometimes Do Bad Things
How many times have you found yourself saying something like, “Oh, I really like him. He’s such a good person.”
In most cultures dominated by monotheistic religion and kept in-check by a rigid carceral system, we are often raised by well-meaning families, teachers and communities, to believe that good people do only good things. And only bad people do bad things.
Yet in my long and rather varied professional life (ranging from an assistant VP in venture capital, to non-profit consultant, activist, psychotherapist and somatic sex educator) it is the ‘good’ folks, the ones who mean well and are doing genuinely good work, who have caused the most harm.
I remember my very first experience with this. I was 23, living in Boston, unsure about what I wanted to do next in my life and I took a job as the ‘gal Friday’ assistant to a very well known author who had dedicated his life to writing about education, poverty and social injustice. He lived alone, with his old and beloved dog, in the country about an hour outside of the city. He was so dedicated to his dog that when he traveled – and he traveled a lot – he would pay me to come out from the city to stay at his house and keep her company.
When he wasn’t writing about important topics like the disparity in access to quality education and opportunity, he was speaking out against public school consolidation and redistricting and receiving such honors as the Robert F Kennedy Book Award and the National Book Award for Science, Philosophy and Religion. This was a truly, really, honestly, noble and worthy, tremendously good man.
Within two months of my employment with this genuinely, truly, good man I was in search of personal guidance and counsel to verify what felt, to me, like harassment. I was experiencing a slowly increasing pressure to spend more time at his house, with requests to stay over even after he’d returned from his work trips. When I awkwardly refused, I was subjected to outbursts of cleverly disguised threats that were aimed at disparaging the quality of my work.
Despite the fact that I was an ardent feminist, a rape crisis counselor, a fierce spokesperson for women’s rights in the workplace and so much more, I found myself second-guessing my experience, and hesitating to simply say ‘No. That doesn’t feel good’. My hesitation was borne directly out of my belief that this man was a good man. He was a dedicated man. He did good work in the world. ‘And Christiane,’ I told myself, ‘good people do not do bad things!’
One of the most harmful ethical falsehoods peddled by our carceral system – one that actually predisposes dedicated practitioners to harm their clients – is that good people don’t do bad things.
The other day, after I’d spent hours immersed in ethical breaches within one of my professions, my partner came home from work excited from having just had an initial session with a new client. He exclaimed, “I really like this guy! He’s such a good guy!” And I’ll admit, I snapped. “What exactly do you mean when you say he’s a ‘good guy’?! Tell me what I’m supposed to know about this person, now that you have told me he’s a ‘good guy’?!?”
What do we mean when we use this kind of language to describe someone? And what does it do to our capacity to allow for their humanness once we’ve placed them in the ‘good’ category? Genuinely good people do horrific things. And if there is such a thing as a genuinely bad person, I guarantee you, they’re capable of doing remarkably good, helpful things, and probably do these things with regularity.
If we dispatch the use of these categorizations, then what do we do about the fact that all people are capable of doing genuinely harmful things routinely? What structure will we rely on for our own important work, and the compasses required to help keep us operating within ethical parameters, if we are to dispense of the arbitrary categorizations?
In The Source of Embodied Ethics, our upcoming 8-week continuing education course for all healing arts practitioners, we will tackle these questions, and so much more. This is, perhaps, the most important course you will take. Beyond ‘right’ vs ’wrong’, the foundation of this course is the intimate terrain of our belonging; the relationship that brings us into a conscious dance with our power.
After we’ve removed the carceral scaffolding sold to us as ‘ethics’ we will begin building our own, living, breathing structural support that encourages us to acknowledge our wounds, biases and shadow while we identify and nurture the ways we are each here to serve.
We work intimately in small groups to give us all plenty of opportunity to wrestle with some specific and realistic choice points many of us face on a regular basis; where our next move holds the difference between harm or a deepening field of trust and healing for our clients.
We will not find our ethical self within a set of rules or a code of conduct. Join us for The Source of Embodied Ethics, beginning March 4th at 9am (Mountain Time) to explore, discover, challenge and grow the deeply ethical practitioner of you.