My next course, Learning From Mistakes, begins 9/25/25! If you have a few minutes…
I’ve never told anyone this story.
This memory from my childhood has returned to me, unbeckoned, and more often than I’d like. It’s usually accompanied by a surge of embarrassment. But recently, it came to me I think for a different reason: so it could finally resolve.
I was about six or seven years old the day when my parents took me to watch an annual canoe race on a river in my hometown. It was an unusually brisk day in October. I was underdressed, cold, and bored. I was bored for a lot of my childhood, and would later see it more clearly as a downstream expression of depression which was the realer truth.
My mother paddled in the race the year before in a large “war canoe” with eleven of her coworkers. I think we were there to cheer for them as they paddled without her this time, because we did that for the twenty seconds they could hear us. I do remember marveling for a moment how the boat didn’t sink as it sat so low in the frigid, black water, and it made me feel afraid.
Almost all of the boats we’d seen were teams, but then I saw a single man coming, far in the distance, rowing a small craft. I instantly hated this man. He didn’t fit in. He was alone. Who did he think he was? This race is supposed to be for teams in canoes, not single rowboats. I didn’t know why I hated him and as a child I did not question the feeling. But I know now.
He was me. As a child I never felt I belonged. I felt horribly alone almost all the time, but I didn’t have a reference point so I didn’t really know what I felt. And as I was both consumed by, and unconscious of these feelings, the only thing I could register was that I was bored. I couldn’t tell anyone that I felt this way because I didn’t understand it myself, and I didn’t have parents who knew how to ask in a way that would help me express how I felt.
We stood a few feet from the river on coarse gravel that the railroad used for the nearby train overpass that spanned the river. I began to secretly collect them, hiding them in my hands. I was just old enough to remember what I was doing, but not old enough to register why. I walked to the water’s edge as the lone rower approached us. He glided past us and I threw two hands full of rocks at his closest oar as it recovered, and there was a brief clatter and splashing. I was surprised to have succeeded.
My parents reeled on me and pulled me away from the water, looming over me, furious, but I could tell somehow that what they felt underneath was embarrassment. There were other people nearby who saw the whole thing. “why did you do that?” they asked several times, but I could feel they didn’t really want to know. I could feel it was about their anger and embarrassment and not about me, so I just kept saying, “I didn’t know,” which was largely true but I wasn’t really trying to answer. I was just hurting even more than before.
I was unconsciously triggered by that rower. His aloneness was my aloneness. He didn’t fit in, it seemed to me. I projected the essence of my pain as a child onto him and could not bear to look. And some part of me felt weak that I felt so much pain, that it was my fault that I was this alone, and wanted to punish him for it as I was already learning to punish myself.
These are not rational thoughts. We are not rational creatures. We are emotional ones. We largely pretend that we operate from clear thinking and impeccable reason, but this is a thin layer atop an unpredictable sea of emotion. It took me decades to realize why I did this. My unconscious kept serving up the memory until I figured it out. What I did was not okay, but why I did it was understandable, and that is how I can forgive myself now. As an adult, I needed to feel that loneliness, that estrangement, that I could not as a child, that was underneath the bad action.
Since the Charlie Kirk assassination, there has been a raft of understandable outcries about how political violence must end, “We must do better,” etc. These are, in essence, calls for the conscious mind to do a better job of controlling the unconscious, emotional realm. The problem with this ancient strategy is that it works just enough to make us think we can use it to become mature people, but fails long before that milestone.
Raging at and casting aspersions at people who do bad things is understandable, but it is not productive or mature. There are people who celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. And there are people who tell those people they are bad for saying it. Both positions have the first amendment right on their side, and both are driven by unconscious emotional pain when they say it.
Declarations about how “We need to come together as a country” are good intentions, but they do not address the actual problem and so are impotent. We have a maturity problem and that maturity problem is a result of emotional wounds.
When I looked at the mugshot of Tyler Robinson, the primary suspect, I saw a deep depression and a smoldering rage. He may not know he’s feeling either of these things. I didn’t know my depression for a very long time, and the anger I harbored took even longer. Many people are going to ask him why he did it, but probably no one will do so with authentic compassion and a sincere desire to not only understand, but to feel that depression and anger with him, which I’d assert is the cause of his action. Of course, he’ll have some conscious reasons for why he did it, but the real reasons are at best semiconscious.
If we are to change as a society, this is the realm where we must go, and the only way to get to this realm is with sincere curiosity that can make an “and” between a bad action and understandable albeit distorted and wound-based reason for doing it.
To do this, we must heal away ancient, distorted notions like that there is such a thing as a “bad person,” or that there is such a thing as evil. These are pre-psychological ideas that were part of a more ignorant, but necessary phase of development before we had an understanding of how the unconscious works. People only do things that make sense.
That sense-making can involve distortions of reality and projections, but they make sense on some level. For things to change, we must desire to feel and understand our way through that sense. There is no such thing as a “senseless act,” only an act we’re so triggered by we can’t find the heart-curiosity to explore.
If we’re too busy blaming each other and indulging our reactions to the bad action, then we cannot care enough to get to the wounded reasons behind those bad actions. In one way, then, we are just as lost as the bad actor, and certainly cannot be of service.
If convicted, Tyler will be eligible for the death penalty. Utah state officials and Donald Trump already advocate for it. What will that accomplish? To me, the death penalty is a projection of evil to be eliminated that is an admission that as a society we know very little about emotional health and cannot admit it.
What he needs is an emotional healer to help him understand why he did what he did, how it made sense for some unconscious part of him, and to feel with him the wounds from his childhood that he couldn’t bear, causing the expression of rage. This is what we all need.
How do you make it work to kill someone for killing someone else when the a priori assumption is that killing is bad? You have to assume the killer is essentially bad and/or can’t be helped. There are religions that support this, but the separation of church and state should keep such notions out of the law, and secular psychology, which does have a place in our judicial system, would say you cannot really know a person is unhelpable without years of therapeutic intervention.
Which would be more healing for Kirk’s family: witnessing Robinson’s execution or his heartfelt, tearful apology where he rawly shares how his inability to manage his emotional pain caused him to lash out against another? What resource would a rehabilitated murderer like that be in our prisons? Our society? What might Robinson’s parents learn about themselves and their mistakes?
Just to be crystal clear, I am not saying that what Robinson (allegedly) did was okay in any way. I cried when I heard Charlie Kirk was killed. Not because I subscribe to his views, but because I greatly respected him as a critical thinker, a powerful debater, and a passionate man with vision. And I was also sad when I saw the picture of his alleged assailant: a depressed kid who is so angry he doesn’t know what to do with it. He has his entire life in front of him, but clearly doesn’t want to live it and doesn’t feel that he has much to lose. I can relate to that. I’ve been there. Have you?
The concept of the unconscious is about 130 years old. There may be a time in the future when our species looks back at this time and marvels at how most people went about their lives without any curiosity about their unconscious drives. We may marvel the same way we do about when surgeons didn’t know to first wash their hands (before 1847), or how homosexuality was considered a mental disorder in the DSM until 1973. We’re all learning and yet somehow in any given time most of us think we have everything figured out. We don’t.
Many people want our society to change, but there is no society. There are only people, people on an evolutionary path, learning from their mistakes. In my lifetime, I’ve discovered the limits of mind- and will-based change that declarations are a subset of. It’s just control we don’t have and won’t work. Good intentions are not going to do it. Blaming others is not going to do it. Gun control is not going to do it, because guns don’t cause violence, emotional wounding does.
We need to learn a completely different way of processing reality, to eliminate the divide between our unconscious and our conscious selves. It’s the last thing most people want to do. It’s difficult, it’s scary, and you never know what you’ll find in the recesses of your own being. It’s to this that I’ve dedicated my life.
My next course, Learning From Mistakes will explore the limits of mind- and will-based change as well as many other common mistakes. But don’t let the title fool you: strictly speaking there’s no such thing as a mistake…unless you miss the lesson, but there are always more!