The trouble with good guys
Feb 9th, 2008 by Jill
The trouble with good guys is that everyone is the good guy — or a sympathetic character who has reasons for making the choices they did — in their own story.
Everybody is a sympathetic character in their own story. A person who plays a bad guy in our story plays a good guy or at the very least a sympathetic character in their own story. And we often play bad guys — or at least annoying guys who just don’t get it — in their story.
As long as we’re trying to convince each other that our story is right and their story is wrong, we’re stuck. The conflict over whose version is right locks us in place and dooms us to more conflict. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. We can’t move things forward as long as we’re trying to force the other person to give up their good guy or sympathetic character role and take on the bad guy role in their own minds first.
We can’t make other people change their stories, but what we can do is slowly start to change our own story. If we can start to see a story in which both sides are “doing the best they can guys”, all of a sudden we are on much more neutral ground. It’s a much easier story for the other person to think about. It’s a much easier story for the other person to feel seen as a person in — not as a monster. It’s a much easier story to have a conversation about issues in. It’s a much easier perspective to work from together. We still can’t make anyone else see things this way, but it’s a much easier point of view for the other person to accept an invitation to enter, and it’s a much easier perspective to find some points of agreement in. It’s much easier to trade two opposing sets of good guy/bad guy stories for two overlapping “doing the best we can guy” stories where we both still see some things the other person isn’t seeing (like the blind men and the elephant poem) than to convince someone else they’ve been playing the bad guy to our good guy.
Thinking of both sides as doing the best they can doesn’t mean thinking people are equally right about everything or that everything everyone does is okay. It just means staying open to the possibility — even if it looks pretty remote from where we’re sitting — that somehow we both might be sympathetic characters and both valuable and lovable at our cores.
So true, Jill.
When I quit playing the victim role, I was able to see my part in the demise of the marriage and the rocky start of the relationship with ex-husband’s wife. For a while, I felt I had every right to be a raging, self-righteous shrew. That was not healthy, nor did it promote peace between our homes. It certainly did not make things easy for the kids.
When I accepted responsibility for my part in all of it, I was able to begin healing and start moving toward peace.
[...] read this post over at The DHX and started thinking about what I did specifically to change how I thought about my [...]