5 Give Them the
Benefit of the Doubt
One of the most misleading of lies to which the good-guy identity easily falls prey is: give them the benefit of the doubt. It is misleading because it seems so benign. It is misleading because it comes off as a kind of mercy. And it is misleading because it makes the giver of the benefit into a good guy.
First let’s talk about what the phrase really means. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt primarily means that there is a doubt. That doubt is coming from internal responses to external stimuli. Very commonly, these doubts are thoughts that come from intuition, observation, discernment, or some difficult emotion, such as fear. Doubt means that we are not certain that we trust someone or something. Doubt is meant to make us stop, look, and listen so that we can be sure before getting involved with someone or something.
Doubt can be very important to our safety and our well-being because it can inform us that someone is being sneaky or is presenting an image that is false. It can inform us that a situation is not what it seems. It might inform us of some concern that what has been presented as fact is not a fact at all. Doubt informs us of these things because we need this information in order to make wise choices to take care of ourselves.
When we give the benefit of the doubt, what we are doing in many cases is ignoring that information in the name of being benign, merciful, or kind. We are allowing the intellect to take over, so rather than processing the information that has been given to us by our emotional, observational, and intuitive responses, and doing some experimentation to find out what is true and false in the situation, we just tell ourselves that we are being unfair, judgmental, unkind, or otherwise “bad” by continuing to doubt this person or situation.
Giving the Benefit of the Doubt Seems So Benign
What can it hurt, really? You give someone the benefit of the doubt, it’s a little like giving them confidence in themselves, right? They don’t believe in themselves—you can feel it—so if you give them the benefit of the doubt, they’ll become more confident. It’s a kind negotiation, a no-harm deal. Sometimes this is how the good guy thinks.
But giving someone the benefit of the doubt means that we are ignoring information that stands before us, calling us to look at it clearly. That information could come from our emotions, such as in the case of fear, resentment, or anger—which we will learn much more about later in the book. That information could be coming from tones of voice, eye contact, body language, and other messages being sent to us by the person to whom we are giving the benefit. That information could be coming from our own intuition. But we are not in tune with these things when we live in a good-guy identity. Rather, the good guy’s whole effort is all about tuning in to what the other guy needs from us in order to see us as good, kind, caring people.
As good guys, then, we sometimes give the benefit of the doubt even when the doubt is screaming at us to attend to it. We reduce the sound of the scream to a low hum by telling ourselves that giving the benefit of the doubt is just an exchange between good people. Yet, when we get burned by these exchanges, we simply cannot understand how this happened. We cannot understand bad people who take advantage of good people, because being good is all we know. We blindly live into our goodness, while getting taken by others.
When we get burned in this way, it should wake us up. But all too often we don’t wake up because we just blame the person we gave the benefit of the doubt to, assuming that they are the opposite of good—bad people just do bad things. Good people, on the other hand, do good things. We can now dust our hands of it—the time for learning something from this experience has come and gone.
Giving the Benefit of the Doubt Seems Merciful
We are often compelled by our identification with good to give someone the benefit of the doubt because giving the benefit of the doubt feels like a kind of mercy. Merciful people are good people, and we want to be good above all else. So we are compelled to be merciful when mercy is really not the best option.
Mercy is always an option, but it is just one of many. To choose mercy when discernment would be a better option is foolish. But it doesn’t seem foolish to the person who gives it because her identity requires it. It seems right to her identification with goodness—very right. The opposite of right is wrong—leading to guilt. The feeling of guilt is what the good-guy identity is trying to avoid, but at the same time she is taking on the responsibility for other people’s mistakes, their happiness, and their well-being.
Mercy is a kindness we give to someone who has done something we don’t agree with or approve of. Say, for example, that a child has stolen some goods from Carl’s store, but has been caught in exit with the goods. “He’s just a child,” Carl thinks. “Why would a child steal?” So, he tells him that he is going to let him off the hook this time, he is not going to call the police. What Carl is going to do is give him a little lecture about right and wrong and just let it go. “But if I ever catch you again in my store … ” Carl believes that he has been merciful to his little thief. As he observes the boy as he grows up, he believes that maybe he’s had a hand in teaching him a lesson.
But what if our young thief grows up to be a car salesman who frequently exaggerates the value of the car and its capacities because he thinks this gets him the sale? And now Carl is about to sign on the dotted line. Something in his gut tells him that that car is a lemon and he is about to be taken. But he decides, instead, that those are not very nice thoughts. Besides, he remembers this kid from his younger days, and look, he’s grown up to be such a nice young man. Stop being so judgmental, Carl tells himself. And he signs on the dotted line, drives off the lot in his newly purchased lemon, and spends the next several weeks with the mechanic talking about how he can’t even imagine how this boy could have grown up to be such a shyster.
What has happened here is that Carl talked himself out of the truth. Information was given to him in the form of intuition. If he had spent some time with that intuition, he may have been able to pick up on some observations or some emotions—all of which present a conscious awareness in the form of a doubt—that he ignored in order to be merciful yet again to the young man from the store.
Giving the Benefit of
the Doubt Makes Me a Good Guy
But if I give someone the benefit of the doubt when they haven’t earned it, then I am a good guy for not being judgmental. I’m being loving and kind. That’s what good people do for other people, right? The good guy wants to prove himself good. Of course, others are kind to people, but they are not always kind to people that haven’t done much to earn it. The good guy wants to be very good, good beyond question.
This works to make the good guy feel good. He goes home after such an encounter, in which he’s given the benefit of the doubt, in a very pleasant mood. All of his fears about whether or not he is worthy are assuaged by this single act of giving the benefit of the doubt. He might even sleep well tonight. People frequently say that doing good things makes them feel good. For the good guy, each good deed that he does makes him feel just that much more distant from the hound of unworthiness nipping at his heels. That’s why there must be another good deed tomorrow, the day after, and the day after. There’s no rest for the weary here. For if he stops too long that old feeling of unworthiness will overtake him again.
Besides, if I’m being a good guy, surely this person I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to won’t be unkind to me. This kind of naiveté rules the choices of the good-guy identity. She assumes that good deeds will get her good rewards. Even though she has seen that many of her good deeds are used, abused, or not even noticed by others, she bargains time and time again with the idea that maybe this time she will get the reward of being liked, feeling worthy, or some other similar reward.
The good guy is trapped. He is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If he doesn’t give the benefit of the doubt, he feels condemnatory guilt. If he does, he continues to get used or abused. But he is often very familiar with abuse and being used. It is the terrible feeling of guilt that he has betrayed his role, his place in the family trance, which is so much worse than being used or abused. That guilt absolutely rules him. All it has to do is raise its ugly head and say, “If you don’t do this, you are going to feel really bad later,” and the good guy is bound to do it. Guilt is always the trump card—that is until and unless one is willing to allow oneself to wade through the guilt long enough to stop giving the benefit of the doubt and start living from the authentic Self.