“Cause Less Harm”

There’s a saying in 12-step rooms—expectations are premeditated resentments.

It’s a good saying, and I’ve written about it before. Mainly, how so many people misinterpret it to mean they shouldn’t have any expectations, and how that isn’t possible. We are going to have expectations. Sometimes we’ll have them without even realizing it. The catch is learning how to deal with the feelings of anger and resentment that come up when our expectations aren’t met—which is, of course, what the program teaches us how to do through the fourth and tenth steps. We can however work on having fewer expectations, and we can work to have expectations that are more reasonable.

Thinking about all that got me thinking about the idea of causing harm. I have similar thoughts about that subject. The program gives us a way to deal with the harm we’ve caused, mainly through steps eight and nine. And, ideally, we should be causing a lot less harm if we are working to practice the principles of the program. We work to remedy the mistakes of our past; we ask for help from our higher power to not act on our character defects; we stay in touch with ourselves and what our motivations are.

Still, I think it’s important to remember how unreasonable it is to expect (ha!) ourselves to stop causing harm altogether. We are going to cause harm in our lives, sometimes entirely by accident, or without even realizing we had done so. Life doesn’t always give us the option of not causing harm. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where, no matter what we do, someone is going to get hurt. Our choice then becomes about how do we cause the least amount of harm.

Personally, I really hate the saying about ‘choosing between the lesser of two evils’. I don’t like the idea that, no matter what I do, I can still find myself in situations where others might be hurt. (By the way, ladies, this is one reason why a lot of men are commitment-shy; we know that most relationships end and we’re not eager to be a source of pain to someone we care about.) If life were easy, situations like these wouldn’t happen. But life isn’t easy. Life isn’t all neat and tidy, wrapped up with all problems solved at the end of the half-hour. A lot of life consists of making hard choices.

Those of us with the Disease come into the rooms being used to living our lives to serve our own selfish ends. Through working the program, we learn how to start balancing our own needs, wants, and desires against those of others. And make no mistake, my friends, this shit is HARD. It’s hard for normies. It’s hard for everyone. There do indeed come times in our lives where we simply gotta do what we gotta do, even though it means others will be hurt. Sometimes it’s because we let ourselves get into a situation we could have avoided; sometimes it’s because we had the best of intentions and it all went south through no fault of our own. Sometimes, we make a choice that hurts someone, but we make that choice because we know they’ll only be hurt more later if we don’t.

We’re none of us perfect. We’re human; we’re going to make mistakes. We’re going to cause harm. The program gives us a way to deal with the harm we cause. And it gives us guides for how to go about our lives in the meantime so that we can do our best to cause less harm.