Assume negative intent! YEAH!

In which I torch the practice of assuming positive intent

It has been a trope for several years: Assume positive intent.

I know — it’s a lovely objective! It reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s suggestion to smile at strangers. First, because smiling activates good feelings in you. And, second, because it activates good feelings in others. Win-win!

(He apparently called this practice “mouth yoga.” Easiest yoga I’ve ever practiced.)

So I get the pros of assuming positive intent. They are, as far as I can tell,

• recognizing and counting on a basic human desire to be good

• embodying that desire in yourself

• deciding to view others benevolently

• disrupting automatic, uncharitable interpretations

These are such nice moves! Like Thich Nhat Hanh’s smile, they fill one with good feelings that can then infuse our next steps with others. That’s good.

But what about the cons of assuming positive intent?

• denial of reality

• avoidance of the negative

• inaccurate seeing

• reinforcement of a binary approach to “intent”

• perpetuation of conflict-aversion

• willful blindness to actual malice

• superficiality rooted in semantics

Get ready. Get yourself a drink. Find a comfortable place to sit. We’re goin’ in. And we’re goin’ deep.

Denial of reality

Sad but true, people: Reality can really suck. It can be very positive, yes! People can be kind and good! They can be that way by mistake, and they can be that way intentionally.

But negativity also exists in reality. It is negative, yes, but that does not make it bad. Negativity is interesting (often more interesting than positivity). It can be extremely useful (to people who know how to do emotion work) because negativity is a magic portal to psychic reality. You feel angry? A good sign that some injustice or boundary breach has occurred. The injustice or boundary breach might have occurred with the best of intentions, but it still leaves you seething. Rather than stew in your anger or pretend it doesn’t exist, you can figure out what the problem is and decide how to address it. That’s good work coming straight out of negativity!

Developing the capacity to deal with the negative — the difficult, the chaotic, the unexpected and unwanted — is a good way to define a healthy person. Whereas denial of reality is a very primitive psychological defense. It works really well! But it means you’re detached from reality and quite possibly engaging in toxic positivity. To put it bluntly: “Assume positive intent” all to often means “go into denial.”

Avoidance of the negative

It goes along with acceptance of reality: Embracing the negative within yourself and within others neutralizes it. That is, confronting negativity, accepting bad feelings in yourself and evidence of bad feelings in others, trusting that you can survive the feelings and even convert them into world-saving relational moves, gives you a fuller grasp of reality, which allows for a fuller experience of life. Which, in my view at least, is a desirable outcome.

Avoiding the negative amounts to self-protection. Good on you, if you need protection from reality. But hear me: If this is you — if you have suffered trauma, are hobbled by behaviors and expectations of the world that limit your ability to relate to others or be true to yourself and your talents, if you are prone to take things personally without any psychic recourse from the resultant pain — then get help. Avoidance of the negative is learned. So it can be unlearned. Assuming positive intent does not help with the unlearning process.

Inaccurate seeing

I gotta start by questioning our apparent assumption that intention even exists in certain interactions. When I spew venom on you because, I don’t know, I fear you think I’m stupid, which is a chronic basically unconscious fear of mine, am I acting on intention? Is it positive? Is it negative? My answer is no. Neither. What I’m acting on is instinct. It’s the only response my particular organism, driven by my psychic structure, can come up with to help me maintain my equilibrium. For you to assume positive intent when I have just slammed you because of my own psychic reality would be a disservice to you and to me.

The first disservice would be to yourself. Why would you want to assume that my hurtful behavior came from a positive place? You’d have to tie yourself into psychic knots to believe this.

The second disservice would be to me. Because you’d have to deny me entirely, see me totally inaccurately, to put a positive spin on what I did. Being seen inaccurately is something no human being can stand. (Many are so accustomed to it that they expect nothing less. But that doesn’t make it OK.) In fact, bad behavior can often be seen as a test of a relational partner’s ability to see the negative in a particular person or reality. And, if our relational partner fails the test the first time, behaviors can escalate. You didn’t see me accurately then? OK. How ‘bout now? (Crash!!)

Knowing how to mirror back the good, yes, but also the bad is a crucial skill that assuming positive intent both overrides and atrophies.

Reinforcement of a binary approach to “intent”

Intentions can be good. And they can be bad. But, as I stated in the previous section, they can also be neutral. They can be unconscious. They can be nuanced. They can be confused and confusing. They can be ambivalent and ambiguous. They can be irrelevant. Where they exist, they are always meaningful. Committing to uncovering the motives, the “good” reasons, underlying negative behaviors and experiences always yields deeper understanding, which can trigger authentic compassion, which can lead to data-based plans that offer corrective action where needed.

Corrective action being one of the great boons of relationships, an extremely effective means of teaching and learning: being honest about impacts (without making any assumptions at all about intentions); wondering about the magma that underlies the offensive behaviors, magma being the miasma of emotions, beliefs, and expectations of the world that can erupt into surface behaviors; and being willing to work out ways of avoiding such undesirable behaviors and impacts in the future. Don’t like how I treated you? Address it. Describe it and its impact on you. Ask me questions about my experience. Insist on an agreement we will both rely on to address similar future enactments so that the learning, the relational training, can continue as long as it needs to.

Going binary on intentions obscures the rich repertoire of reasons why people treat each other badly. Go for the concrete reasons! Go for the needs the behaviors reveal (in the mysterious language of the embodied psyche)! Embrace the negative!

Perpetuation of conflict-aversion

Sometimes we just gotta wade in. As I’ve written about here, here, here, and here, conflict-aversion, while understandable, is nonetheless a scourge. If, that is, you want to be a whole, healthy human. If you want assholes to continue doing whatever they want unabated, then by all means: avoid conflict.

And, while you’re at it, assume positive intent. Which also lets assholes off the hook. Once again: Negative behaviors are, actually, negative. Whatever the intent is. Addressing negative behaviors calmly, realistically, compassionately, and with authentic curiosity allows for accurate mirroring, honest connection, productive problem-solving, and ongoing corrective action. To avoid conflict by assuming what is not true — that there’s anything positive in a negative behavior — just kicks the developmental can down the road.

Willful blindness to actual malice

Some people are cruel. Abusive. Usurious. Ruthless. Controlling. Psychopathic. Despite the extreme words used to describe them, they can also be tough to pin down. Because they can also be charming. Loving. Seductive. Intelligent. Believable.

If you’re someone who is inclined to forgive terrible behavior, who questions your take on reality, who is susceptible to gaslighting, then assuming positive intent is most definitely not for you. Rather, you should squint your eyes at the possibility of negative intent and get the hell out of there. And get help from someone who can hold you while you forge a more accurate relationship with reality.

Superficiality rooted in semantics

What does the phrase “assume positive intent” even mean? How does it apply to someone who constantly interrupts you? To a co-worker who gives you the silent treatment? To a roommate who ignores your requests that they clean up after themselves? Really to any negative behavior or treatment?

To me, it just means you’ve decided prematurely what the answer to the problem before you is. And it’s a semantic solution, a solution that relies on a bunch of words you put together that, frankly, sounds good, makes you feel like a better person, and paints bad behavers in a flattering light. But it doesn’t get you any closer to the complex, at some level negative, but possibly transformable reality (transformable through what I call emotion work). Assuming positive intent invites a terrible mismatch between your approach and the reality. Which could be disastrous. But which definitely sounds nice.

By all means, smile! But my hope is that more of us can embrace the negative, learn to honor it as incredibly precise information about complicated internal experience, recognize it as symptomatic of all-too-human psychic structure, and use it to strengthen our connections to each other. To assume nothing; to look for the emotional and relational data; to ask questions and make good guesses; to enact data-based plans of action that offer corrective experience — to do all this is harder than to assume positive intent. But it can change your relationships, and it can change the world. Which assuming positive intent most definitely cannot.