It’s pretty safe to say that we’ve all been on both sides of this. You say something you think is perfectly kind, maybe even helpful, and you watch it land like a slap. Or someone says something to you that they clearly meant in a positive way and it stings for a week. You know they didn’t mean to hurt you. And somehow, knowing that doesn’t help at all.
What gives? Why can we communicate something we think is supportive and have it be received as anything but? The answer might feel a little confronting: people don’t experience our intentions. They experience our impact.
One of my all time favorite quotes comes from Maya Angelou when she said that people will forget what you said, and forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Sit with that for a second, this is a famous quote that we’ve all heard many times so it’s easy to gloss over the deep meaning of it.
Not what you meant. Not even what you did, exactly. How you made them feel.
Other people don’t have access to your heart. They can’t see your good intentions, your careful reasoning, the version of the story where you were completely justified. The only thing anyone actually experiences is the effect you had on them. And where intention and impact are concerned, the difference between the two can be far more disparate than we’d like to admit—or than we’re even aware.
That’s why we have a phrase for the distance between them: unintended consequences.
We’re Accountable for More Than We Mean
This is a concept my husband Michael has taught for years, and I don’t think we sit with it nearly enough: spiritually, we’re accountable not just for what we mean but for what we cause.
That’s a hard teaching, and I understand the resistance to it, because I feel it too. But it’s connected to something much bigger than just saying the right thing in the wrong way. We speak often about being “the driver” when referring to the Kabbalistic understanding that the world is our responsibility. Not in a guilt-ridden, everything-is-your-fault way but in a power way. It means really grasping and understanding our reach. That our words, our tone, our energy land on real people and ripple outward and shape the reality around us far more than we could ever realize.
The Kabbalists take this even further. They teach that when a righteous person lives near something that has gone wrong, they take it as their responsibility. Not because they caused it, but because they understand how far their light actually travels and if negativity has popped up near them, it’s their responsibility to turn inward and ask how they contributed. And then ask how they can contribute to the repair. That’s how much our presence affects the people around us.
And honestly? If we lived with this understanding every single day, we wouldn’t even whisper half of the negative things that come out of our mouths. We wouldn’t hurt ourselves or each other the way we do.
None of It Is a Lie. But It Is a Partial Truth.
Here’s where it gets subtle.
You may see yourself as honest but someone else experiences you as harsh. You may see yourself as helpful but someone else experiences you as controlling. You may see yourself as shy and someone else experiences you as distant.
None of these are lies. They’re partial truths. You’re not wrong about your intention. They’re not wrong about their experience. Both things are real at the same time. And the spiritual work is not to figure out which one is “right.” It’s to learn from the gap between them.
Now, I can already feel the pushback.
So I’m just responsible for how everyone chooses to take things? I have to manage everyone’s feelings? What about being honest? What about my truth?
Not at all. However, if you felt a little bit of this in response to the above, take it as a real-time example of how much our egos want things to be black or white. Our soul however is right at home in the gap between and this is where the real truth lives. Because it isn’t about walking on eggshells or abandoning your experience in service to someone else. You can be completely right about the facts. Your argument can be airtight, objectively correct, unimpeachable.
And yet: being objectively correct is irrelevant if it causes someone else pain. You may have been right but that doesn’t mean the other person isn’t allowed to have been hurt.
Closing the Gap
So what do we actually do with this?
First, we stop treating our good intentions as the end of the conversation. The next time you’re certain you were right in the face of someone’s hurt, pause before you rush to defend yourself, and get genuinely curious about what the other person actually experienced. Not so you can grovel, collapse, or take it all back. Just so you can see the whole picture, the part your intention was blocking from view.
Their experience is information. It doesn’t erase your intention. But it can teach you something your intention never could.
Remember, the people in our lives won’t remember our intentions. They’ll only remember how we made them feel. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to upset others or that we need to manage their feelings. It means that when we intend one thing, but they experience another, we have an opportunity to get curious, to grow, and to nurture our connection to each other… and ourselves.
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