I once had a parent ask me, “if you could only give us one piece of advice to support our daughter, what would it be?“ I thought about it for a few seconds and said, “compassionate curiosity.” So often, when we do something that we wish we hadn’t, we say to ourselves, “why did I just do that?” (or something along those lines). However, instead of finishing the phrase with a question mark, we end it with an exclamation point - ! Why did I do that!
Whenever a client says this phrase to me, my response is, “that’s a great question. Did you answer it?” Generally, the answer is no. We tend to ask ourselves that question as though it is a statement that is rooted in negative judgment (i.e. “what is wrong with me!”) If we were to actually answer that question, we wouldn't have to feel bad about ourselves, and we would get some helpful information.
The same idea holds true if you are asking the question of somebody else. If you ask it from a place of negative judgment, you are not likely going to get an answer and could cause tension between the two of you. Add to that, you still don’t know why they did what they did.
It's important to remember that when someone does something that they either immediately or later regret, it’s not because they knew ahead of time that it wasn’t the best thing to do. So have some compassion for yourself. It’s important to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt – we did what we thought was best in the moment, or we just didn’t think it all the way through. Either way, if we feel regret, we likely did not have any mal intent, and therefore Compassion is warranted – and the only way to understand why we did or said what we did, is to be Curious.
