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Good Intentions?
“If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it is partly because that is the road they generally start out on.”
— Stephen Garrard Post
To navigate the world, for me personally and professionally, when it comes to both how we can support people after trauma and how we can support our horses in my primary field of work (equine and nature assisted interventions), this is on my mind a lot.
Good intentions. And how harmful they can be. As well as the question lingering behind that fact, what is driving people referring to good intentions? Is it goodness and altruism? Or sometimes something else?
I genuinely believe there are a lot of situations that have gone wrong, where there were good intentions behind the actions or at least, partly. But it is used as a wall to block what really is driving some behaviors. I wish people would look more closely at themselves when they say, “but my intentions were/are good”. The more I do that myself, I can see how what I sometimes do out of good intentions, sometimes is not out of good intentions, but something (partly) else. The important thing to me has become to not hide anything from myself. I have realized that I cannot lose face in front of myself. I can moan and squirm when I look closer at myself, exploring what I find, but I will not die from it (it has been a journey to arrive at this…
