Is There A Cost to Hiding Our Mistakes?
By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)
Should we always admit our mistakes, sins, and bad decisions and accept responsibility for them, or are there times when we should simply move on and try to forget they happened?
The decision is probably easy when the stakes are small, but what about when we run into one of those situations where accepting responsibility would change our lives…and not necessarily for the better.
In the first season of Battlestar Galactica, two storylines look at both sides of this dilemma.
Captain Sharon Valerii (call sign “Boomer”) wakes up one day soaked with water. She doesn’t remember what happened, and she discovers explosives in her duffle bag. When she investigates the small arms locker, she finds six more detonators are missing. When Galactica’s water tanks blow up, leaving the entire fleet with a critical water shortage, Sharon and her lover cover up her role, sure she’s been framed.
Except Sharon wasn’t framed. She’s a sleeper agent who doesn’t yet understand (let alone accept) what she is. Because she and her lover lied and hid what they knew, Sharon is able to try and nearly succeed at assassinating the commander of the fleet. I’ve always wondered—if they’d confessed right away, would Sharon have fallen that far? Her character shows great ability for change and loyalty. Could her path have been different if they’d been honest instead of trying to hide? Or would they have immediately executed her as a cylon infiltrator without giving her a chance to redeem herself?
Unlike Sharon, Dr. Gaius Baltar is never caught for the part he played in the cylon destruction of the twelve human colonies. (Though, in his defense, he didn’t realize he was helping the cylons. He thought he was breaking the rules to help the beautiful woman he was sleeping with win a defense contract.) He even eventually becomes president of the remnant of humanity. In a lot of ways, he seems to benefit from hiding his past mistakes.
But watching what he has to do to keep his secret, you have to ask if it was worth it. He leaves a potentially innocent man to die to cover up for the fact that he doesn’t know how to build a cylon detector. He advises that the passenger ship, the Olympic Carrier, be destroyed, saying it might be carrying cylon infiltrators, when in truth he’s afraid one passenger (Dr. Amarak) might have evidence of the role Gaius played in the cylon invasion. Almost every action he takes is to cover up something else he’s done.
He never faces the consequences of his actions and never becomes a better person.
Where’s the line between what we should admit to and what it’s alright to make private?
If a husband or wife cheated on their spouse 10 years ago and wasn’t caught, should they confess now to ease their conscience or stay quiet and spare their spouse’s feelings?
What if you bump into another car in the parking lot and no one is around to see it? Do you leave a note? Does it change things if you are barely paying your bills and don’t know how you’ll manage to repair their car or pay a higher insurance rate?
And what might be the emotional costs of hiding our past mistakes?
What do you think? Should we always confess our wrongs? Are there times we should stay silent?
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Image Credit: Matteo Canessa (from sxc.hu)
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Four Reasons Battlestar Galactica Isn’t Just for SciFi Fans
Jan 21, 2013 @ 13:37:05
In fiction they should never confess until the end. Bad choices= good fiction. In life? It’s dicier. I feel we need to weigh the options and look at what is good for others, not just ourselves. Is it just us wanting to unburden our conscience with no consideration to the devastation we can create? If a spouse cheated 10 years ago, but has been loyal ever since and learned his/her lesson, then confession could likely bring divorce, ripping apart a family and doing irreparable damage to the children. Part of the reason for confession, at least in a Christian context, is that we can’t change what we fail to admit. God can’t change us if we won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem. In this context we see that confession has more uses than just “making us feel better.” Pain is there for a reason. It teaches us not to touch hot stoves and to be careful how we shut doors. A burdened heart, likewise, can be the same pain, that reminds us to make right choices.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 17:44:48
I couldn’t have said it better myself. From a Christian perspective, we need to confess to God even if we don’t confess to anyone else. That’s the first step to forgiveness and change.
As for confessing to other people, I do think it’s situational. We don’t need to share or confess every mistake we’ve made. Sometimes we’re better to just learn from what we’ve done and spare others the heartache we’d cause by confessing to them.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 13:38:01
And as my grandmother taught me, “Never do anything you have to explain.” 😉
Jan 21, 2013 @ 17:42:08
Love it!
Jan 21, 2013 @ 13:42:23
I start by confessing everything to God and then he’s pretty good about letting me know what other folks are on a need to know basis.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 17:41:31
Indeed. That’s the best guidepost.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 14:13:16
Speaking of hitting a car in a parking lot, I once came out of Target and found two people hovering around my car. I didn’t think anything of it until they glanced down, then at each other, then back at me. They confessed they’d hit my car with their door (it was really windy that day) and would I like to exchange insurance information. They looked so nervous and worried…and I just laughed and told them not to worry, that every car has dings and mine was no different. I just don’t care about tiny dings. They said are you sure? It’s not that tiny. I didn’t see much to worry about, and it didn’t scratch the paint, so I told them no worries, and encouraged them to go on about their day. They looked so relieved and happy, it made me happy. They did the right thing and I rewarded them for it.
Now later when I got to really looking at the car, I realized the dent was actually quite large and I’d have to repair it sooner or later. Oops. But….then karma came and kissed me in the form of the car getting hit by a tire flying off an 18 wheeler on the highway. It hit the same side of the car, near the old dent, and ripped off part of the fender. The insurance company assessed the damage, and repaired it all…including the old dent from Target! So all’s well that end’s well 🙂 Just odd, isn’t it? How things work out sometimes.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 17:40:38
You definitely did the right thing by forgiving them the dent. You must have made their day.
I remember one time I was in university and I smashed up the license plate on someone else’s car. They were visiting one of my roommates, and our driveway was on a slant. I came out of the house distracted because I was headed to a funeral, hopped in my truck, checked my mirrors (and didn’t see anything because of the slant and how small the car was compared to me and how close they’d parked), hit reverse, and hit the gas. Kerthunk! I was already emotional, and I burst into tears. I went back into the house and cold the visitor who owned the car that I’d warped his license plate with the hitch on my truck and offered to take care of it. He took pity on me and told me not to worry about it. It was dented anyway and he’d been meaning to replace it. The kindness of strangers 🙂
Jan 21, 2013 @ 17:03:24
Kristen pretty much summed up my opinion: we need to consider *why* we want to come clean with something that happened years ago. If it’s simply to absolve ourselves, we need to consider how it might affect others.
I recently found out someone I was unkind to many years ago is a writer – even hangs out on a couple of the WANA blogs (but isn’t one himself). I thought about contacting him to say I’m sorry, then decided not to – because I’m sure he would rather not hear from me, even with an apology.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 17:47:28
I started writing this post after hearing about Lance Armstrong. It made me wonder why he lied for so many years, and why he chose now to confess.
I’ve had a similar experience as you a couple times where I’ve run across someone I’ve hurt in the past and I don’t know what to do about it. Should I apologize? Do they even want me to or would they rather we pretended it hadn’t happened so we could move forward? Would they rather I just left them alone? In those cases, it needs to be about what’s best for the person we hurt, not what’s best for us.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 18:08:06
I kept something hidden for years, and the logic behind it is complex, suffice to say, I did not confess–I literally didn’t think I needed to.
Which is what many addicts do, they rationalize all their deeds. I wasn’t a drug addict, but I had an addiction. My husband found out and it nearly cost me my marriage.
I received help–I was ready to get help. Which is key, so often we hide things because of some flawed logic–or we see nothing wrong with our actions or we think something will happen and make it all go away.
The first step really is acknowledging that you have something to confess.
Now, our marriage is stronger than it ever was, we are more honest with each other and can have healthy arguments–I thank God every day we were able to work through it.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 18:13:50
I’m with Kristen. I do think, as someone who was frequently hurt by others growing up (bullied a lot, abused) that having someone come back and sincerely apologize would be awkward, but depending on the hurt freeing at the same time. I guess I would consider the motivation behind the confession. A family member confessed to an affair he’d had 5 years earlier as a way to get back at his then wife, and convince her to get a divorce.
Jan 21, 2013 @ 20:47:26
There are so many situations in life where it’s hard to know what the right choice is. All we can do is pray about it – and hope we make the right decisions. One of the things I struggle most with is being in a position where I know too much, but if I open my mouth, it will make an already bad situation worse. In that case I struggle with the question, is it my place to confess the ‘sins’ of another? And then I think…would I really want someone else doing that to me? I don’t rob banks or anything, but like most people, I’ve done things I’d prefer to keep private.
Jan 22, 2013 @ 04:51:49
“Should we always admit our mistakes, sins, and bad decisions and accept responsibility for them, or are there times when we should simply move on and try to forget they happened?” Hmm. This is a huge topic Marcy. One could say both, depending on the situation. “Pride comes before a fall”. And admiting a mistake takes humility. There is no trust without honesty. So I would have to agree with Kristen’s grandmother. “Never do anything you have to explain.”Cause if you do, you may just have to explain it. 🙂