Yes, Intent Does Matter
Intent doesn't matter." That statement has cropped up in multiple conversations online and in person over the years. In this epsiode, Libby shares why that simply isn't true, at least not when it comes to a valued relationship.
Transcript
Basically the idea is you wanna remain in relationship with this person through and on the other side of an accountability and repair process with them. And so if that is the intention, then here's the deal. Even if you're the person who hurting in this moment, both of you matter. I'm gonna say that again, even if you are the person that is hurting in this moment, both of you matter.
When we have hurt someone or someone has hurt us and we want to seek accountability with the person that has caused us hurt or that we have hurt, you may have heard of this concept called intent versus impact. And you may have even heard that intent doesn't actually matter, only impact does and if you haven't heard about this, that's okay, because I'm going to explain it all. I really wanna talk about this concept- intent versus impact, because I see it showing up in various discourses where harm or hurt has been caused and you know, I actually disagree with the statement that intent doesn't actually matter, only impact does and I wanna go a step further and say that sometimes we're not actually responsible for the impact that we have on another person. I know this is controversial, but stay with me, okay? But before I go into my disputes with the intent versus impact discourse, let me zoom out and tell you a little bit more about what that this course means.
So when you're talking about intent versus impact, most of the time, it's in the context of a situation where someone has hurt someone else. And a lot of times, what happens, if you are the person who has hurt someone is you'll make this mistake of thinking. Well, I meant well and I was doing my best and if I just explained my intent to the person that I've hurt, then that will make them feel better and to illustrate how this is a mistake, o ften people use the, "you stepped on my foot" analogy. So in that analogy, let's say the two of you are dancing together and you make a misstep and you step on the other person's foot really hard and you break their toe. Well, that person is going to be howling in pain and they are going to probably need to go to the doctor and have their toe looked at x-ray, maybe put on in a splint or something like that.
Like they have a significant injury and they're really hurt. In that moment when they howling in pain and needing medical care, if what you are doing is to explain to them how it was an accident, how you didn't mean to and expecting that to take away the pain of the injury of their foot, well, it's not going to. And what would be the appropriate response when someone is having an injury is to say, "oh my gosh, I am so sorry", "Are you okay?", "What do you need?", "How can I help?", and yet, a lot of times when the hurt isn't a physical one, when it's an emotional or psychological hurt, we do this thing where we feel the need to explain our intent. And we think that by explaining our intent, we're gonna take away the impact or the hurt that someone is experiencing.
Now, a lot of of people have begun to say that intent doesn't matter at all, because you know what, no matter what you could have meant to step on my foot, you could have meant to not step on my foot, but it doesn't freaking matter because my foot hurts now and I need medical care. And I do tell people on the regular, when we're dealing with accountability for hurt, that intent isn't my first order of business. Even when it's, you know, a miscommunication or even when you know, you try to say everything right, and you try to be the nicest way you can and it's still taken poorly. Usually what I say is, let's understand the hurt first and get into that and see if there's any care or repair that is needed there. And then we can talk about intent. And I also usually tell people that when they are caught up in explaining their intent as a way of trying to stop the hurt person from being upset, that oftentimes what's going on is that the upset feelings of the other person are too much for us.
We have a really hard time being with that. And we have a really hard time accepting the story that they may have about us, which maybe that we did mean to, or, you know, maybe we didn't mean to maybe we were just being careless or whatever the story that that person may have about us and about why that hurtful thing happened, we're very preoccupied in correcting the story and, you know, getting the other person to see it our way and have them not be mad at us. And when we're prioritizing that over the hurt that is there, I think we're prioritizing the wrong thing because then what you're doing is you're turning the focus back on yourself, right? And think about this from the perspective of the hurt person, if you're hurting, if you're in pain and what the person who hurt you and who presumably you have a relationship with, maybe, hopefully this person is person who loves you.
And all they're doing is trying to tell you why you shouldn't be hurt and why it's not their fault. That's gonna make you feel pretty unheard and unseen and uncared for in that moment. The problem is that this whole discourse of intent versus impact has been carried a little bit too far to the point where when I see two people in a conflict and someone is really hurt, the person who's hurt will sometimes say your intent actually doesn't matter, "I don't care that you didn't mean to. I am hurt. And that is what matters. And you need to apologize. You need to make it better. You need to own what you did", and I'm gonna say in certain contexts that might be an appropriate response, but most of the time, and especially in interpersonal relationships, I don't think that's an appropriate response and I wanna tell you why now. Before I do, I wanna be clear that I am talking about a very specific context here, which is the context of an interpersonal relationship.
And most of the time, an intimate relationship and intimate doesn't have to mean just, you know, romantic sexual partners... It could be a very close friendship. It could be a family member, et cetera. But basically the idea is you wanna remain in relationship with this person through and on the other side of an accountability and repair process with them. And so if that is the intention, then here's the deal. Even if you're the person who is hurting in this moment, both of you matter. I'm gonna say that again, even if you are the person that is hurting in this moment, both of you matter now, again, there's an order of operations here. If you are the person who hurt someone, even unintentionally, even completely and possibly just through complete and total whackadoodle misunderstanding, it's still important that you're prioritizing understanding the hurt that happened and perhaps providing support and care.
If that's available before you begin to clear up what your intention actually was. And again, the reason for that is just, it's just like what I would call an emotional right of way. If someone's howling in pain, you gotta deal with that first. The other person who's hurting isn't really even gonna be interested and wanna hear you, if you are so focused on clearing up your intent, or the other thing that might happen is that if the person is hurting and you are so focused on stopping them from hurting, by sharing your intent, then what that may do is it may make them feel like their pain is irrelevant, or it might even make them feel like they shouldn't be feeling the pain in that moment and cause them to bury it. And that's gonna leave it unhealed. So really, I just want you to hear this, that when you prioritize intent, first, it's gonna derail any kind of repair process.
However, in order to have a complete repair process, I do think that you need to understand what was going on with the other person. Why did they do the thing? Why did they step on your foot? Why did they say the thing that sent you into a deep shame spiral or whatever it might be? And the reason why is that at the end of the day, you wanna remain in relationship with this person and this person wants to be seen by you, even though they hurt you as a good person, as someone who means well, as someone who can be taken in good faith and be given the benefit of the doubt. And when you insist on either just ignoring their intent, or if you insist on what you believe their intent to be, which was to be hurtful or to just be careless or to not understand them, et cetera, then you are projecting an image of them and who they are that is probably not gonna line up with their image of themselves and that's gonna make them feel profoundly unseen.
They, and it's gonna make them feel like you don't understand them. And I mean, obviously it can be pretty harmful and even toxic to like be in a relationship with someone who you believe has intent to cause you harm. But you know what? It can also be pretty harmful and toxic to be in a relationship with someone who believes you have intent to cause harm, who doesn't believe in your goodness, who doesn't believe in your well meaningness. And in fact, ascribing intent to someone else and insisting that the impact that they had on you is also their intent and that they accept that assessment that you have of them can be a form of gaslighting and abuse. In fact, it's really common for abusers to put themselves in a position of power over their partners, not through outright control and intimidation, but by perpetually making themselves the victim and making their partner out to be this harmful, hurtful person.
And if you are perpetually reflecting back to someone else, this version of them, it can undermine their own ability to trust themselves and to see themselves in a good light and believe in their own worth. And goodness, you know, if someone just tells you over and over that, you're a mean horrible piece of dirt, then you might start to believe that about yourself. And again, that puts that abusive person in a position of power where they're like, you're lucky to have me. And you're so lucky that I'm willing to forgive you. And, you know, putting that person in a position where they're apologizing all the time for even existing, because they just don't feel like they can do anything right with the, with their partner. And the truth is you, if you are ascribing an intent to someone else, you need to know, you can't actually ever know what someone else's intent is.
You can believe what they tell you, or you cannot believe what they tell you. And I'm not gonna say every time someone said they had good intent that they actually did. And it's possible also that someone might think they have good intent, but they haven't really deeply examined their actions or why they did what they did. And they might not realize that they didn't have good intent. But also I do hold generally speaking, that most people do have good intent, that most people are doing the best that they can. And if they fucked up with you, then it's usually because there was information they didn't have or a guilt they didn't have, or a blind spot that they did have at et cetera. Now, what I teach people when they mess up is that one of the best ways that you can show that you did have good intent is to be with your impact, try to understand it.
And again, try to do better, try to repair, try to acknowledge what the person's experience was of you, and really try to figure out how not to have that happen again. But I'm gonna tell you something else. You're not always responsible for the impact you have. You may not know that something you did could have caused harm until it happened, or even if you could have known the impact of your behavior, if you thought about it, maybe you weren't thinking, or maybe you were in a stress response or just not at your best, in some other way. And you just weren't capable in that moment of doing the thing that you would've preferred to do. And instead you did the thing that hurt your partner, and now it's had that impact. And also sometimes the impact of your behavior is really about what someone else projected onto your behavior.
And yes, the impact that they felt as a result of that projection was real. The hurt was real. The feelings are valid, but without literally being them or reading their mind, there's no way you could have known that that impact was even possible based on what you did. So what do you do when you, when you're in a situation where you've caused harm, but you didn't intend it, you don't even understand how it happened and you really meant well, well, again, the first thing to do is to just in that moment, let go of the need to convince the other person of your intent. There is a right of way here. Like I said, you deal with the person with the injury first, and then you deal with clearing it all up and clearing up your intent second. And then third, hopefully you talk about how to avoid repeating that harm in the future, which, hopefully will be a collaboration rather than just the person who caused harm, changing their behavior all alone.
So you gotta listen actively to the harm that someone experienced. And that might be hard if it really doesn't feel like it lined up with anything that you did. So you're gonna have to breathe, especially if in their upset feelings, they're gonna characterize you in ways that feel unfair. It can be helpful to put your hand on your chest and say, in your own mind to yourself, I know I did my best. I know I meantb well, I may have hurt someone, that doesn't mean I'm a hurtful person. And this is so important if your partner is perpetually putting themselves in a victim position with you and they have no interest in redeeming you or honoring your good intent, you still need to hold onto that yourself. And sometimes that can feel really lonely, honestly. And in those moments, even with someone who loves you, who generally sees you well, when they're hurt, sometimes they just don't see you well in that moment.
And so it's really important for you to keep like a thin barrier between what they say about you and what you know to be true about yourself. No one else can to tell you what you meant or what you felt or what you thought only, you know that. So if someone says something to you that doesn't feel true. You keep it just on the outside of you. If someone says something about you that does ring through you can take it in and you can let them know and acknowledge that. But anything that sounds like a distortion or projection, don't argue with it, just let it be something you don't take in or feel responsibility for, or apologize for, or beat yourself up about now for the things that are true; be accountable, own them. It can be powerful to not just own the things that the person is telling you about what happened.
That feel true to you, but also even the things that you know about yourself that may have led you to act the way you did. And as an example, you know, I might say something like, yes, I yelled at you and I am so sorry. Sometimes I really do lose control of my voice when I'm upset. And I know that's upsetting and it's not cool and I am really working on that. For the things that don't feel true, aain, don't fight them in this moment, accept that someone else is feeling them. Instead of trying to say things like, I'm sorry, you felt try saying, "I see that my actions resulted in you feeling x. I see that when I abruptly shut down during our conversation and walked away, that made you feel punished and abandoned, I'm so sorry that you had that experience of me. I don't want that.".
Make sure that the person who feels harmed gets fully heard, but then after that, it's okay and even, I think necessary to ask for a turn to talk about how you are feeling now, this may need to be a two part conversation. If it was a really difficult and painful thing, sometimes the person who's hurt might need some time to just allow their nervous system to recover and allow themselves to fully come back to baseline before they can hear you out. But sometimes it can come right afterwards, right after you've owned your part. You can have an opportunity to say something like, "You know, I hear that I really hurt you, but hearing you characterize my behavior as selfish really hurt me. I can see why I came across that way. And I hope you know that that's not how I see myself.
And I hope that's not how you see me either. Can you reassure me that you don't believe that I'm a selfish person?" I think this piece is essential to accountability with people that we're close to. Yes, you need to hold yourself in loving and warm regard when you mess up. But of course, we also want the people who love us, who know us well to see us clearly and to see us in the positive light that we are hoping to be seen, even when we mess up. But also sometimes you may have to wait for it. While I think it's important over the aggregate that your partner generally sees you as good, or maybe even better than you see yourself. Everyone has bad days or days where something just really hits you wrong and you get caught in a bunch of projections and they just can't see you clearly in those moments.
And sometimes they even get stuck there. And it's so important not to have the expectation that your loved one is going to see you perfectly 100% of the time. I'm gonna say if you're generally getting about 80%, that's pretty good. But if someone is really insisting that you accept their intent, that they're ascribing to you. If they're insisting that you accept the attributions that they're making about who you are and what you meant and what kind of person you are and you know that's not true for you, that is not okay. You don't have to apologize and shouldn't apologize for anything that you're not truly sorry for. You shouldn't own anything about yourself that you don't believe is true. And if your partner is consistently and repeatedly misunderstanding you not seeing you forcing their projections onto you, that's a relationship that I don't think can remain a healthy place for you to stay.
We all need relationships where our partners, again, at least 80% of the time, see us as good, see us as well-intentioned. And if that's not happening for you, that's probably not a safe relationship to be in. I hope that I have shown you how nuanced the intent versus impact conversation truly needs to be. And I wanna give you an example, actually in my own life, how intent versus impact can work out really well in an intimate relationship that honors both people and works towards repair in a relational way. So one of my partners, as a stress response has this tendency to go cold and robotic and emotionally disconnect when they're upset. Now, as someone who's root to feeling safe and loved is through connection and closeness, when this behavior happens, it feels like a punishment to me, but for them, it's a trauma response.
And it's actually very hard for them to do anything else when they're triggered or hurt. So not the moment, not when it's actively happening, but after I've had this experience of them, I share with them that the impact that behavior is having on me, I told them I feel punished. I feel like you've just abruptly cut off communication with me and that really, really hurts and I feel scared. What they do is they held space for it. They honored that their withdrawal made me feel abandoned and unsafe and powerless and punished. And they apologized that that was the experience I was having. And then they explained how and why it was just what their body and brain did in the moments of disharmony, because in their upbringing, disharmony was just an unsafe place to be. So the only safe thing to do was to disconnect and disassociate.
Together we were able to hold each other's experiences with love and compassion, and they were able to be with the impact their behavior had on me. And I was able to be with their intentions. As we talked more about it, what we were able to see is that this kind of pattern of behavior of me upsetting them and them going cold was something that would probably happen again. I know it's not realistic that I would never upset them, and they know it wasn't realistic to expect that they could just not react with that withdrawal just because they knew it was upsetting me. So what we did was we talked about how we could deal with that differently when that pattern happened, I agreed to be more patient with them. If they had to shut down and withdraw, and I would back off to give them space.
And I would tell them that I'm doing that. And they agreed to work, to come back to connection with me as soon as they were able to, and to express to me that they wanted to do that. They also agreed to work on sometimes trying to stay in connection even when their body was telling them to shut down. And they also agreed to try to give me better signals if I was getting close to a trigger for them so that maybe we could course correct and I wouldn't provoke that shutdown experience to begin with. It's still not perfect. You know, sometimes I upset them and sometimes they still withdraw and sometimes I get hurt and upset by that, but we're both able to honor both the intent and the impact, which makes us better able to come back together and hold each other with loving compassion and the belief that we are both doing the best we can and that we want to love each other well.
Now, I wanna say one last thing, which is sometimes, someone's good intentions just may not outweigh their impact. I'll say there are people in my life who I know mean well, and they care about me, but they just aren't capable of showing up for me in a way that I need them to. And so I just can't be in a close relationship with them. And I wanna say to you, even though I think it's important to accept someone's good intent doing that doesn't mean you have to continue to subject yourself to their impact. I think it's really loving when someone's impact is really just too much for you. And you know, that it's going to continue to happen, to lovingly set some appropriate boundaries or even leave the relationship. But I think that even in those cases, it doesn't hurt you at all to hold them in loving compassion and understand that they don't mean to do it, that they don't mean to hurt you or step on your toe.
And it's okay to say, you know what, if you're gonna keep stepping on my toe, I'm not gonna keep dancing with you. So to recap, yes, intent matters. It's not just impact that matters, intent also matters, but there is a right of way for the impact to come first. So if you wanna enter into a repair process with somebody set aside your intent for the moment and just be with the impact that you had, and after you've done that acknowledging of the impact, and after you've done the acknowledging of anything that the person is saying to you about the hurt that they're experiencing that's true for you, then you can take the next step and ask them to hear you out about what your intentions were. I think it's important when people mean well that they be seen as meaning well that is important in relationship, and it is important to the repair process.
And also, I think one of the ways that you demonstrate that you have good intent is by collaborating with your partner, to help the hurtful thing not happen again. And I do think that's a collaboration. It's not just something that you have to go and fix all by yourself. If someone is insisting that you accept what their story of your intent is, please know that that's not okay. And also, you know, if someone's good intentions, don't outweigh the impact that they're having on you, it's okay to say that that person isn't going to be able to meet your relational needs and to set some loving boundaries or even end the relationship, but honoring both intent and impact when repairing from a hurt is I think essential, if you are going to move through and make things better on the other side, when things go sideways, it's important to honor the hurt. And it's also important to honor that both people are probably doing the best they can and they're worthy of compassion and being given the benefit of the doubt.
