Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [112]
When I decided to leave my husband of twenty years, that decision was right for one of my daughters—who said, “What took you so long?”—but a disaster for the other; she was angry at me for years. I worked hard in my mind and brain to resolve that conflict and to justify what I did. I blamed my daughter for not accepting it and understanding my reasons. By the end of my mental gymnastics I had turned myself into Mother Teresa and my daughter into a selfish, ungrateful brat. But over time, I couldn’t keep it up. I missed her. I remembered her sweetness and understanding, and realized she wasn’t a brat but a child who had been devastated by the divorce. And so finally I sat down with her. I told her that although I am still convinced that the divorce was the right decision for me, I understood now how much it had hurt her. I told her I was ready to listen. “Mom,” she said, “let’s go to Central Park for a picnic and talk, the way we did when I was a kid.” And we did, and that was the beginning of our reconciliation. Nowadays, when I feel passionate that I am 100 percent right about a decision that others question, I look at it again; that’s all.
Betty did not have to admit that she made a mistake; she didn’t make a mistake. But she did have to let go of her need to be right.
Mistakes Were Made—by Me
It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell upon them.
—playwright Lillian Hellman
Dissonance may be hardwired, but how we think about mistakes is not. After the disastrous bloodbath of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, in which more than half of his 12,500 men were slaughtered by Union soldiers, Robert E. Lee said: “All this has been my fault. I asked more of my men than should have been asked of them.” 12 Robert E. Lee was a great general who made a tragic miscalculation, but that mistake did not make him an incompetent military leader. If Robert E. Lee could take responsibility for an action that cost thousands of lives, why can’t all those people in traffic school even admit they ran a red light?
Most Americans know they are supposed to say “we learn from our mistakes,” but deep down, they don’t believe it for a minute. They think that mistakes mean you are stupid. Combined with the culture’s famous amnesia for anything that happened more than a month ago, this attitude means that people treat mistakes like hot potatoes, eager to get rid of them as fast as possible, even if they have to toss them in someone else’s lap.
One lamentable consequence of the belief that mistakes equal stupidity is that when people do make a mistake, they don’t learn from it. They throw good money after bad, and the con artists are right there to catch it. Do you know anyone who has been victimized by a scam? About a fourth of the entire American adult population has been taken in by one scam or another, some silly, some serious: sweepstakes offers of having won a million dollars, if only you send us the tax on that amount first; gold coins you can buy at a tenth of their market value; a miracle bed that will cure all your ailments, from headaches to arthritis. Every year, Americans lose more than $40 billion to telemarketing frauds alone, and older people are especially susceptible to them.
Con artists know all about dissonance and self-justification. They know that when people are caught between “I am a smart and capable person” and “I have spent thousands of dollars on magazine subscriptions I don’t need and on bogus sweepstakes entries,” few will