Accountability & repair

You Can Be Loved and Still Be Wrong

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

A mother I worked with apologized more than any client I have ever had, and her twelve-year-old daughter was suffocating under it.

The pattern was reliable. She would lose her temper at the end of a long day, over something small. Then, within minutes, she would collapse — crying, telling her daughter she was a terrible mother, that her daughter deserved better, that anyone else would have done a better job. The apologies could run an hour. They ended the same way every time: with the twelve-year-old putting her arms around her mother and telling her it was fine, she was a good mom, everything was okay.

The mother experienced this as taking responsibility. She had admitted she was wrong. She had apologized. She had felt terrible about it.

Her daughter experienced something else. She told me, in our first session alone, that she had learned never to say when something hurt, because the price of saying it was spending the rest of the evening managing her mother’s feelings about having hurt her.

The apologies had become the very thing the child most needed an apology for.

Those apologies were not accountability. They were shame. And shame, however sincere, is not a way of taking responsibility. It is a way of escaping it.

Correction should threaten behavior, not belonging

The principle fits in six words, and almost everything else follows from it.

When a person is corrected, something should feel at risk. That is what makes correction correction rather than a suggestion. But the thing at risk has to be the behavior, not their place in your affection. A person must be able to hear I will not allow this without also hearing I do not want you.

The moment those two messages merge, only two survival strategies remain, and both are ruinous. You can accept that you are unwanted and build an identity around the defect — that produces shame. Or you can refuse to hear the correction at all, because hearing it means hearing that you do not belong — that produces the wall.

Neither person becomes accountable. One becomes ashamed. The other becomes unreachable.

Guilt and shame are not the same emotion

We use the words almost interchangeably. They are two different emotions with two different targets, and they send behavior in opposite directions.

• Guilt is a negative evaluation of a specific behavior. I did a bad thing.
• Shame is a negative evaluation of the whole self. I am a bad person.

The difference sounds small. It determines what happens next. People in shame hide, withdraw, defend, and blame. People in guilt feel empathy, confess, apologize, and repair. Shame turns a person inward, toward the self and its unbearable defect. Guilt turns a person outward, toward the other person and the damage done.

Which produces a result almost nobody expects: the person who feels worst about what they did is frequently the person least able to do anything for the one they hurt. A parent weeping on the kitchen floor is not, in that moment, thinking about the child. They are thinking about themselves. And they have become, without intending it, the person in the room receiving all the care.

Going easy on yourself makes you more accountable, not less

You would expect self-kindness to loosen the grip of responsibility. The research points the other way.

When people are asked to recall something they still feel bad about and then to write about it the way they would write to a struggling friend, they take more responsibility for it, not less — because they can look at the thing without being annihilated by it. In a sharper version of the experiment, people asked to recall an actual moral failure and write themselves a kind paragraph about it came away more motivated to apologize and make amends than people told to focus on their own good qualities, and more than people given no instruction at all.

Kindness toward yourself is not the enemy of accountability. It is what makes accountability survivable. Anyone raised to believe that feeling terrible is the same as taking something seriously will be suspicious of that finding, which is a good reason to sit with it a little longer.

Conviction and condemnation

The Christian vocabulary for this distinction is older than the psychology, and it is precise.

Condemnation says: there is something irredeemably wrong with me. It is a verdict on the self, final and total — shame with a theological accent.

Conviction says: something in me is inconsistent with God’s character, and it needs to change. It is a diagnosis of a pattern, held inside a relationship that is not in question.

The difference is not the severity of the truth being told. Conviction can say very hard things. The difference is what the truth is spoken in the presence of. Condemnation tells the truth in the presence of rejection. Conviction tells the truth in the presence of love.

Scripture gives the contrast in two men on the same night. Judas sold him; Peter denied him three times, with curses, to a servant girl. Both felt the weight of it. Judas “was seized with remorse” and could not survive what he had become. Peter “went outside and wept bitterly” — and then, on a beach a few weeks later, was asked three times whether he loved Jesus, once for each denial, and told three times to feed the sheep.

Notice what that morning did and did not do. It did not pretend the denials had not happened. Peter was made to face it, in the presence of a love that had already settled whether he belonged. He could be fully wrong and fully loved at once, and because he could, he could also be restored.

Identity in Christ is meant to create enough security for honesty, not immunity from accountability. The person who has understood grace is not the person who never needs correcting. It is the person who can be corrected without falling apart.

The sentence you use is the whole discipline

There is a practical version of this, and it applies to children, spouses, congregations, and the way you talk to yourself.

You hit your sister is a statement about behavior. You are a violent child is a statement about identity. You lied to me is about behavior. You are a liar is a verdict.

The first sentence in each pair names something specific that can change. The second hands down a judgment, and the only two responses available to a judgment are to accept it, which is shame, or to fight it, which is defense. Children corrected at the level of identity either live down to what they were called or learn that correction is an attack on the self — and start building the wall.

Discipline is supposed to build skills, not shame. The child told you hurt your sister, and now we need to work out how to make it right has been given something to do. The child told you are a bad girl has been given something to be.