Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [92]
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Thus far in this book we have been talking about situations in which mistakes were definitely made—memory distortions, wrongful convictions, misguided therapeutic practices. We move now to the far more brambly territory of betrayals, rifts, and violent hostilities. Our examples will range from family quarrels to the Crusades, from routine meanness to systematic torture, from misdemeanors in marriage to the escalations of war. These conflicts between friends, cousins, and countries may differ profoundly in cause and form, but they are woven together with the single, tenacious thread of self-justification. In pulling out that common thread, we do not mean to overlook the complexity of the fabric or to imply that all garments are the same.
Sometimes both sides agree on who is to blame, as Jim and Diane did; Jim did not try to shift the blame, as he might have done, by claiming, for example, that Diane drove him to have an affair by being a bad wife. And sometimes it is all too certain who the guilty party is even when the guilty party is busy denying it with a litany of excuses and self-justifications. Enslaved people are not partly to blame for slavery, children do not provoke pedophiles, women do not ask to be raped, the Jews did not bring the Holocaust on themselves.
We want to start, though, with a more common problem: the many situations in which it isn’t clear who is to blame, “who started this,” or even when this started. Every family has tales to tell of insults, unforgivable slights and wounds, and never-ending feuds: “She didn’t come to my wedding, and she didn’t even send a gift.” “He stole my inheritance.” “When my father was sick, my brother totally disappeared and I had to take care of him myself.” In a rift, no one is going to admit that they lied or stole or cheated without provocation; only a bad person would do that, just as only a heartless child would abandon a parent in need. Therefore, each side justifies its own position by claiming that the other side is to blame; each is simply responding to the offense or provocation as any reasonable, moral person would do. “Yeah, you bet I didn’t come to your wedding, and where were you seven years ago when I was going through that bad breakup and you vanished?” “Sure, I took some money and possessions from our parents’ estate, but it wasn’t stealing—you started this forty years ago when you got to go to college and I didn’t.” “Dad likes you better than me anyway, he was always so hypercritical of me, so it’s right that you take care of him now.”
In most rifts each side accuses the other of being inherently selfish, stubborn, mean, and aggressive, but the need for self-justification trumps personality traits. In all likelihood, the Schindlers and Michael Schiavo are not characteristically obstinate or irrational. Rather, their obstinate and irrational behavior in relation to each other was the result of twelve years of decisions (fight or yield on this one? resist or compromise?), subsequent self-justifications, and further actions designed to reduce dissonance and ambivalence. Once they became more and more entrapped by their choices, they could not find a way back. To justify their initial, understandable decision to keep their daughter alive, Terri’s parents found themselves needing to justify their next decisions to keep her alive at all costs. Unable to accept the evidence that she was brain dead, Terri’s parents justified their actions by accusing Michael of being a controlling husband, an adulterer, possibly a murderer, who wanted Terri to die because she had become a burden. To justify his equally understandable decision to let his wife die naturally, Michael, too, found himself on a course of action from which he could