Not Everyone Who Hurts Is a Bad Person Why understanding harm doesn’t mean excusing it

We, as humans, have a natural tendency to divide the world into good and evil. It is simpler. Clearer. At first glance, even safer. It allows us to quickly decide who is “on the right side” and who should be avoided.

Yet this very need for sharp boundaries often pushes us into extremes. We like to say that no one is perfect — but when we encounter imperfection in real life, it tends to unsettle us. And very quickly, we place it into the category of “evil.”

Perhaps the problem is not that the world fails to divide neatly into good and bad actions, but that we wish it would. Maybe what truly exists are actions born from different intentions — from fear, ignorance, pain, the instinct to protect, and sometimes from the desire to harm. The consequences may be equally painful, yet their inner origins are rarely the same.

Harm rarely emerges from empty space. More often, it grows out of stories that accumulate within people over many years — sometimes beginning in childhood. Parents pass on patterns they themselves inherited, because these are the only models of love, control or communication they know. What once felt normal to them quietly becomes normal for the next generation as well, without conscious choice or reflection.

At other times, we hurt others in emotional overflow — in unprocessed anger, in the struggle for self-worth, in the defense of an ego that feels threatened. And often the impulse is not a desire to cause pain, but an inability to carry one’s own. A person who does not know how to hold fear, shame or helplessness will unconsciously transfer them onto others.

Understanding these mechanisms, however, does not erase responsibility. The fact that someone did not know a better way does not mean their behavior was not harmful — nor that its consequences simply disappear. Pain does not vanish just because we can explain it psychologically. Wounds carry their weight regardless of original intention.

This is why it can sometimes be legitimate and healthy to remove someone from our lives, to create distance, or to withhold forgiveness when we do not yet have the emotional capacity for it. Not as punishment, but as protection of our boundaries. As a way to interrupt a cycle that would otherwise continue. Such a decision can become a lesson for both parties — for us, in learning to honor our own safety, and for the other, in recognizing that behavior has consequences.

At the same time, ending a relationship does not automatically make the other person “bad.” Not every conflict needs a villain. Not every separation is proof of moral failure on one side. Sometimes it is simply a collision of unresolved patterns, different emotional capacities and incompatible boundaries — ones that can no longer coexist without causing further harm.

Imagine a situation in which one person takes another person’s life. In one case, the act is driven by personal gratification — by a desire for power, control or the suffering of another. In the other, a person is forced to choose between their own death and the death of an attacker. On the surface, it is the same act. Yet in its essence, these are entirely different stories, motivations and inner circumstances.

This is where the fragility of dividing actions strictly into good and evil becomes evident. It is not the act itself, but what led to it, that often carries the true moral weight — and even that “what led to it” is rarely black and white.

When we view the world exclusively through rigid categories of good and bad, we naturally drift toward extremes. We begin to believe that we must either fully understand and forgive someone, or completely reject them and withdraw their humanity. As if there were no space between these two poles.

But what if, in some situations, we were capable of doing both at once? What if we could recognize the pain from which someone’s behavior emerged — while still maintaining the boundaries that protect our own safety? What if compassion didn’t automatically require reconciliation, return or justification, but only a quiet acknowledgment that even a person who caused harm remains human?

The hardest thing is not to hate. The hardest thing is to see the pain in someone who caused it — and still consciously choose to walk away.

Sometimes a dynamic forms between two people that slowly wounds them both. Psychology recognizes this pattern — a space where old traumas, defense mechanisms and unconscious needs are repeatedly triggered until the relationship gradually becomes toxic – even if neither person originally intended harm. This does not mean that these people lose their humanity or no longer deserve understanding. But it also does not mean they are obligated to keep forgiving each other endlessly and sustaining a relationship that is damaging them. Not every cycle can be healed from within. Some can only be stopped by leaving.

Forgiving someone who hurt us does not automatically mean returning to them. Just as choosing not to forgive does not mean stripping them of their humanity. Between these two positions exists the space of mature boundaries. Hatred, in the end, rarely harms the other person as much as it harms us — it settles into the body, the mind, the way we perceive the world. Ultimately, we are the ones who carry its weight. This is why it is dangerous to think about people and relationships exclusively in terms of good and evil. Such thinking pushes us toward extremes and often keeps us trapped in dysfunctional patterns.

For a long time, I had a tendency to forgive everyone. I focused on the good in people — their potential, their vulnerability, their effort. The problem was that I often recognized goodness that was not good for me. I stayed in relationships that made me unhappy simply because I could understand the reasons behind the other person’s behavior. Over time, my understanding began to turn into self-abandonment. Compassion without boundaries quietly became a form of self-harm.

Gradually, I learned that we must consciously build our lives around people with whom we naturally feel safe, respected and free. Not because others are bad — but because each of us has different capacities, different limits and a different sense of what is healthy and sustainable. Not every story is meant to teach us how to stay. Some are meant to teach us how to leave.

Perhaps the very idea that we, as humans, can definitively determine what is good and what is evil is an illusion. Each of us grew up in different environments, shaped by different experiences, values, wounds and boundaries. What still feels acceptable to one person may already be an uncrossable line for another. Moral boundaries therefore never exist as a universal map, but rather as a collection of individual compasses that only partially overlap.

When we remain in a toxic relationship simply because we are able to see some good in the other person, are we not ultimately the ones harming ourselves? Goodness that disregards our personal safety ceases to be good in any practical sense. And this is precisely where the danger of black-and-white thinking becomes visible. It pushes us to seek absolute answers in places where only individual boundaries and personal responsibility truly exist.

We can observe a similar principle at the societal level. The existence of different political directions is not evidence of chaos, but evidence that people understand “good” differently — shaped by their experiences, fears, priorities and values. Every political movement has its committed followers precisely because there is no single definition of a “right” world that everyone agrees on.

Yet when we believe in a black-and-white vision of reality, we naturally hand over enormous power to those who claim to know exactly what is right and what is wrong. And no one can carry that power perfectly — because none of us sees the entire picture. Absolute moral certainty is not a sign of wisdom, but rather a dangerous illusion of control.

This is precisely why it is important to think of ourselves first — not out of selfishness, but out of responsibility. There is a reason people say that someone who cannot love themselves cannot love another person in a healthy way. If our own boundaries, sense of worth and inner safety are not grounded, our relationships easily become spaces where we disappear, justify other people’s chaos and suppress our own needs.

The fact that each of us perceives good and evil differently also means that almost nothing in this world carries a clear, one-hundred-percent label — even though we often pretend it does. This need for simple judgments holds our society back more than it moves it forward. It pushes us to look for culprits instead of understanding, certainty instead of truth, and quick answers instead of mature questions.

For me personally, this means learning to love myself enough to recognize the humanity in another person — while still allowing myself to acknowledge that their behavior may be unsafe, painful or unsustainable for me. Someone being “bad for me” does not mean they are a bad human being. It simply means that our boundaries, values and ways of moving through the world no longer meet in a space where staying would be possible without further harm.

Perhaps this is why it makes sense to return to a simple yet profound principle: live and let live. Not in the sense of indifference, but in the sense of respecting the fact that we never see the full story of another person — not their inner battles, nor the boundaries that shaped their decisions. When, instead of understanding and responsible boundaries, we reach for judgment and labeling, we create a dangerous narrative. From it naturally grow bullying, polarization and further layers of suffering — instead of the genuine healing of relationships and the return to a healthy balance that we need as individuals and as a society.

Every person who has ever lived on this planet — even those whose actions we consider the worst — has done at least a few good things in their lifetime. Even in such a person, there is no absolute, one-hundred-percent evil. What becomes radicalized and simplified is not human nature itself, but the story we tell about the world. It is precisely this black-and-white vision of reality that creates fertile ground for dehumanization, fear and further violence.

If we can accept that the world is complex, that people are contradictory, and that morality is fragile, perhaps we will learn to judge less and take more responsibility for our own choices. To protect our boundaries without hatred. To see humanity without naivety. And to build relationships not on the illusion of perfection, but on a conscious respect for life — in ourselves and in others.