REGRETS
It turns out that everything we do is an attempt to get a need met.
In the second edition of his book Non-Violent Communication: A Language Of Life,
Marshall Rosenberg says that everything we do is an attempt to meet a need.
He says to think about something you regret doing and ask yourself,
"What need was I trying to meet when I did that?"
I was very surprised by the answer when I did this exercise.
I was not consciously aware of the underlying need I was trying to meet.
In hindsight, it was pretty obvious to me that the method I had chosen would never have worked,
but I did not know any better at the time. It made me realize that I had not really learned
many healthy ways to get my needs met.
And then it dawned on me that a whole lot of other people in the world are in the same boat as me -
they did not learn healthy ways to get their needs met either, and they probably are not
aware of what their needs even are that they are trying to meet.
Therefore, when people harm others in an attempt to get their needs met, very often, they know not what they do.
If they knew a better way to get their need met, they would probably use it.
Many of us with unresolved childhood trauma grew up in environments where unhealthy methods were modeled for us,
or we were left to our own devices to invent our own strategies for getting our needs met.
Those methods/strategies do not work well in a normal, healthy environment.
They fall short of meeting our needs now.
(They probably fell short back then, too, but they were all we had.)