On Deserving To Be Punished

Thoughts are powerful things.

Ideas slip quietly into ideologies and then become identities before anyone's even noticed.

And we so seldom notice the impact they have on us.

What follows is an exploration of the thought, "I deserve to be punished."

The World With The Thought Of Punishment:

You’re going to fuck up.

You’re going to do something that hurts somebody someday, if you haven’t already.

They may or may not forgive you.

When I was younger, there was a time when, to my knowledge, I’d never really hurt anyone and was not hated by anyone. Those days are long since gone. I miss them. I miss the innocence I felt (even though it was a cover and a lie in itself in many ways).

When we’re tempted to feel superior to others, Wayne Dyer reminds us, “Always remember. There’s someone in therapy because of you.”

You’re going to behave in ways that are selfish, unkind, cruel, rude, oppressive, mean spirited and callous.

You may never say it out loud. But it will be there.

And, when it does, if you were raised in this modern world, there’s a good chance that you will find the following thought appear in your mind as soon as the deed is done, “I deserve to be punished.”

And that thought will go unquestioned. It will seem as natural as running rivers and as a part of the natural order of things as tornadoes or volcanoes and inspire the same level of terror.

With that thought you will feel likely feel defenseless. Scared. Collapsed. Sad. Waiting. You may, and it is strange to say, feel guilty when you’re not being punished… like you’re getting away with something you shouldn’t be getting away with. You may feel like you should confess your sins to everyone so you can receive the public flogging and humiliation you deserve.

Others may find out and love you still. And this may surprise you. But you may find that you are unable to receive the gift of their love at all, feeling yourself unworthy, that you went too far, that you have finally had the long known truth exposed… that you are a bad person. You may feel that there’s something broken inside of you because, as far as you know, no one else would do this thing. At your heart, you are selfish. A hopeless case. And, now that the deed is done, that there’s nothing you can do. It’s a sickening, helpless feeling this kind of regret.

And with the thought, “I deserve to be punished” comes this sense that, were you to not be punished, were you to, somehow, escape it, you would be participating in society’s moral decay and breakdown. Even opening to the notion of seeing the world without this thought may bring up an incredible amount of resistance because surely we need to punish people who do bad things. If we didn’t, society would collapse. And we don’t want to be weasels trying to get away with something. We want to be responsible.

Also, coming from the same understanding that has us believe children aren’t motivated to learn unless we bribe them with gold stars, comes the deep fear that, if it weren’t for fear of punishment we would continue to do the same, bad things. And you may find yourself suffering one of the hardest fears there i—the fear of yourself.

And, when you sit with it, you may come to the sobering realization that, even if no one were to ever find out what you did, that you are already punishing yourself inside (because, remember, you deserve to be punished). You are, in every moment, piling the punishments you believe you deserve over the rest of your life (which may shock you in how severe they are). Stated differently, you may experience a whole lifetime’s worth of punishment in every waking moment. Your life may become a living hell from which you won’t even consider escaping because “you deserve to be punished."

It’s amazing the impact that one thought can have on us as people.

And as a culture.

This thought is a central toxin pumped daily out of the factories of illegitimate hierarchies and power brokers of our Churches, industry, government and what passes for culture.  It is the water our entire culture swims in. And, because of this, you can now you can be fairly certain that others, should they hear about what you did, would have to agree that punishment is what you deserve too. A full consensus.

Woven into the fabric of this thought is the notion that taking abuse and punishment for our mistakes makes us a good ally in the movement for a better world. That, if we really care about this world, then we should allow ourselves to become a receptacle for other people’s anger, derision and shaming forever and ever. At least in that way we can contribute to a better world.

This is how good our hearts are. If we believe that taking abuse would be an act of good we will do it.

Lacking the ability to go back in time means that you will never, ever be off the hook no matter how much you grow and heal as a person. Even if you become someone totally different - you still did that thing and, if you believe that ‘you deserve to be punished’ you won’t do anything to change that.

When I believe that I deserve to be punished (forever) then I have to carry the shame around with me forever. There’s actually no way out.

"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.”

Rumi

The World Without The Thought Of Punishment:

But… if you’re able to set that thought aside and just be with what happened you might find yourself seeing in a new way. Of course, setting aside such a profoundly and deeply entrenched cultural story is not so easy. You may find that it is actually a deep amount of work to even consider the possibility of what the world could be like without this thought.

How strange it is, that when I do something I regret that hurts another I can take that one isolated event and be so sure that it means I deserve to be punished but I don’t do that with good things I do.

But, if you’re able to do it, to catch a glimpse of a world not run by the insistence on punishing people you might see that many of the people who know about what you did, did not, in fact, punish you at all but offered you love and forgiveness. You might see how you’ve been punishing yourself already on behalf of everyone else who might possibly find out (whether or not they would, in reality, have any desire to punish you at all).

You might find the fear melt away and yourself becoming more present. You might find your level of self concern drop and a natural rise of concern for the people you may have hurt - a sincere hoping that they’re okay. You might notice how much you’ve grown and learned from what you did. You might find a deep curiosity blooming inside of you in the form of a question like, “How is it that I came to do this thing? How is it that anyone does?” Perhaps you were born in such a time, swimming in these waters, so that you might help find the pipes pumping their toxic effluence into the water and be of some use in shutting them off.

Without this thought you may be shocked to see how blind selfishness can make us to consequences for ourselves and others. We may come face to face with how, under the right conditions, all of us are capable of whatever we did... and worse.

You may also be faced with the reality that the consequences of your actions may last for the rest of your days. But that the need to punish is entirely the business of other people. It’s none of your business what they do. Your business is circling around the question of how to be faithful to what happened and turn it into something beautiful as a gift for the community. In a way, you are on the receiving end of your own actions as much as anyone else. And so, in a way, they are a gift you give to yourself. Your business is how to proceed in such a way that wholeness is restored in that situation (if possible) but, even more so, so that the rest of your life adds more wholeness to the community so that others would be less likely to do the thing you did.

And you might see the sobering truth that even if you were to be punished in the most extreme, painful and humiliating ways you might believe you deserve that it would do nothing to rectify the situation at all. It won’t undo it. It won’t unfuck the situation.

And, hand in hand with that realization, is seeing how self-centered this thought is. How when I believe, “I deserve to be punished” that all of my attention goes onto myself and not the one I hurt. Not the community. You may come to see that self hatred is a form of self absorption.

Without the dogma of punitive justice on your back and slowly grinding you down into nothing, you might actually see how punishing the experience was by itself. And how much less likely you are to ever do anything like that again.

Tom Watson, the founder of IBM found himself sitting across from an employee in the early days of his company who’d just made a mistake that cost the company $10,000. A lot of money at the time.

“I suppose,” said the man. “That you’ll be wanting to fire me.”

“FIRE YOU?!” bellowed an incredulous Watson. “I just spent $10,000 educating you!”

He knew that this man was the least likely person to make that mistake again.

Perhaps most beautifully, when you’re able to see the world without the blinders of punishment, you may find in yourself a desire to free those who would punish you of their desire to punish anyone because you know that they too have things they are deeply ashamed of and that they secretly fear being discovered and punished for their own thoughts and actions.

So much fear everywhere.

From this one thought.

Without the sense of deserving punishment, a new possibility emerges - that you might actually be the perfect person to become a champion and defender of the kinds of people you’ve hurt in the past. You might actually be incredibly qualified to be an advocate for them. Once you’ve had your feet held to the fire of consequence you know something. To others it’s still just theory and politics. But you know. And if we destroy you with our punishments, then we lose the possibility of a skillful defender of our community.

Without the idea that we deserve to be punished for the damage we do (and the unsaid part of that sentence is, in my experience, ‘forever’) there is a possibility of creating structures in which those hurt by our actions can express what they need to so that we can hear them and create a way to make meaningful amends and then… have it be done. There’s a possibility of engaging the real and meaningful high drama of human relationships instead of the melodrama and posturing of self-righteousness.

Without the thought of deserving punishment, we don’t need to defend ourselves. We don’t need to be scared. And that means we can learn from it.

And imagine the impact on the person you hurt to know that this incident had been a catalyst for your personal growth. That, because of the way it went down, you actively began to make changes in your life. And imagine processes that actually resulted in a community where such behaviour was less likely (from anyone). The meaning of what happened isn’t inherent in the situation - most of the real meaning of any event is actually in your hands and the hands of the community. The meaning of what happened needs to be wrestled out of it. You can make it mean something beautiful by the way you wrestle with an engage with what brought you there.

Without the thought that “I deserve to be punished” I can see the poverty of our culture’s approaches to (and even capacity to approach) transgressions in a community.

Punishment is only a natural consequence in a culture steeped in punitive justice as the only possible model for making our communities more whole and safe. Punishment isn’t actually natural. It’s just normal. And its normality doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it the only way to deal with things or the right way. Or the best way to respond to damage.

Without this thought driving the car of our guilt-driven amends, we see how important it is for any culture, if it’s going to be a worthy one, to have paths that can lead back into the community instead of one way roads that take us further and further from it. Punishment and exclusion aren’t the only tools we can use.

Punishment is a last ditch attempt to keep a community safe and it’s a sign of the poverty of approaches in action.

Punishment is an attempt to solve a problem.

What is the problem?

It is the fracture made by our actions and an attempt to answer the question, “How do we restore balance, harmony, wholeness and safety?”

And yet punishment restores nothing.

A hole is made in the community by someone's actions. And then the one who made the hole is killed. That might feel immensely satisfying in the short term but it’s the misguided notion that killing the person means that the evil and selfishness in the community was killed with it. But it hasn’t been. All that’s happened is that now even more fear has entered the community. This may create more obedience but it will not create a more whole or healthy culture.

A rupture in a community is a powerful, teachable moment about the values and needs of a community. That moment is utterly lost by punishment.

The only thing punishment teaches is obedience.

Punishment is a superficial way of dealing with transgression. It robs the community of the food it might have otherwise provided.

So, what do we do?

It’s clear that trying to avoid dealing with the issue doesn’t work for the victim, the abuser or the witnesses). Trying to pretend that it never happened isn’t much better than pretending that it’s constantly happening forever (which is what I’m doing inside of my head when I believe that I or someone else deserves to be punished - I am constantly punishing myself or them).

Without the thought that “I deserve to be punished” I can see that, approached in a certain way, transgressions can actually be the most powerful of village making affairs.

One understanding of cancer is that it’s a personal event. Isolated. Discrete. Another understanding is that the whole community has cancer and this person is simply where it’s expressing itself. I think it’s the same with transgression. It’s easy to want to simplify and to say, “This bad person did this bad thing.” But where’s the labour in that? It’s much harder to wonder about how it came to be that it occurred in our midst. It’s much harder to understand the systemic, institutional and cultural forces at work that brought us here.

Instead of holding onto the idea that we deserve to be punished, what about holding fast to the idea that the person we hurt deserves our faithfulness to learning from it and to making it mean something through our action in the world?

Collapsing in shame doesn’t require any work on our behalf. It’s easy. There’s no labour in it. And it’s easy to spend the rest of your life either wallowing in it or trying desperately to escape it and be anywhere but there. Either way, the orientation is entirely about us still. Us and our ease and comfort.  And where’s the gift to the community in any of that?

The irony: We think that the hard labour required of us is that we are hard on ourselves; that we beat ourselves up (again - forever). But sometimes the hardest labour there is is touching the hem of our worthiness and letting ourselves be loved in spite of our mistakes. Finding our love for ourselves again - that’s hard work.

Separating out the healthy shame from the toxic shame - that’s hard work. Shame can teach us so much about life, but we need to work with it. The role of shame isn’t to get us to hate ourselves or to see all of our faults and failings. The role of shame is to get us to see more. The opportunity is to come to see life more clearly.

Shame is something to wrestle with and learn from. Shame can be like a kind of fire that burns away everything that isn’t really you. Shame can be a thread you follow to the heart of a culture that needs to be unwoven. Shame can be the rock bottom from which you build something solid and beautiful. Shame can be lead that you turn into gold.

Shame is, always, the opportunity for redemption. Shame is the chance to walk out of the story of original sin from the inside and understand that all there’s ever been is original forgetting… and the chance to, over and over, remember life - to put it back together.

Shame can be felt as personal darkness, but it’s actually a light we can follow to find out where we’ve been placed in this world and what particular wound we are here to minister to by learning how to heal it in ourself.

The thing you’re most ashamed of may yet, with work, become the thing for which you are most grateful. It may become the source of your greatest gifts.

Shame is the place where you were blind, but you may yet learn to see.

Shame isn’t something to be forgotten and moved on from.

When we’ve caused harm to others, we have a very important job, to look around, to know where we are, to feel the burn of consequence, to know every detail of that place and the path that led us there so that we might yet be of some use to those yet to come.

Shame can be the education we would never have asked for in the school of becoming fully human because shame wants to be the most beautiful of human things - grief, love and beauty. But it never has the chance of that unless we work it with our hands and mouths to articulate the hidden craving inside it to be something finer.

Shame is the invitation to a human-making kind of work, a work that might not only restore the person but the community as well. Punishment seeks to destroy those who might yet become good humans before they get the chance.

Do we deserve punishment? I don't know.

But I think we all need a lot of chances to learn and even more support in doing it.