Accountability: Relationship Repair
Anyone who has sat in a therapist's office can tell you that a lot of the time is spent auditing relationships, from parents, to lovers, to friends, to enemies, to coworkers. And a lot of the work you will be doing with your therapist will be in recognizing where wrong was done in those relationships, how to go about identifying and freeing yourself from the toxic ones, and how to set up goals to begin repairing and building healthier versions of the others.
The entire world is made up of relationships in some way or another. It is the focus of every song ever written...even the Psalms in the Bible, Buddhist Monk chants, and Beethoven’s “Ode de Joy.” Because relationships are everywhere. Even an agnostic, solitary hermit in a forest will have them with the way they interact with their food source, favor a certain tree to sit under, or book that they read.
We have relationships with inanimate objects (your phone, an heirloom, or your kid’s favorite stuffed animal), we have relationships with non-corporeal ideas (personal faith, politics, social media), and relationships by not having relationships (like your Ex.)
...This is all to say, you can’t get away from them, even when you do get away from them, because they are an intrinsic part of who you are, what you’ve experienced, who you love, or once did, what you believe in, and how you spend the precious moments of however long your life is, on this planet.
So when we say that relationship repair is a huge part of personal accountability... it’s kind of the pinnacle of importance.
Because what you say and do not only has consequences to you, they do to myriad of others as well. Parent’s choices can haunt the life of their children forever. A loss of a lover’s trust can feed cycles of mistrust for decades after. One bullying moment can ride in the victim's psyche for the rest of their lives. Along with our capacity for great good, we come with an equal capacity of great destruction...a power we are not always aware of, but for which we are liable, whether we meant to cause harm or not.
Intentions do not relieve your responsibility.
Just because you didn’t mean to cause hurt doesn’t mean you aren’t responsible for it or that you don’t have to own your mistake and make amends. Ignorance of a law does not spare you from serving a sentence if you have broken that law. Ignorance of your capacity to hurt, doesn’t give you the right to continue the cycle, once your mistake is brought to your attention.
Alcoholics Anonymous utilizes an excellent example of this idea into their disciplinary self-treatment by the act of “Making Amends.” It is a specific practice of acknowledging your wrongdoings to others and voice your regrets for the harms you have done.
Not every relationship is repairable, not even with a genuine apology. Not every relationship would be healthy to continue. But to admit a wrong to retain a relationship, and yet continue to re-abuse is as toxic with words as it is with physical injury. Perhaps even more so. What the injured party then carries with them goes deeper than the bone.
...Which is all to say, admitting an error is not enough. Making moves to repair and prevent ongoing hurt is how you truly rebuild trust again. It means hard, honest work ahead.
But then, nothing truly great ever came easy.