I answered a question on Answerology.com about what I would do if I was a third party to a relationship which involved infidelity, okay, cheating by one of the partners. Would I choose silence or would I intervene in some way, and if I did intervene, how would I do so without trying to hold another accountable, which, as I have spoken before, I really cannot do? That got me thinking about how I have chosen silence over workability in my relationships and then wondered what went wrong when those relationships all too often broke down.
To me, the question becomes “What causes unworkability in relationships?” Unworkability, I believe, is caused by a lack of trust and safety and that both trust and safety break down when I am not accountable for my actions, in the example of unfaithfulness I mentioned earlier, if I chose to remain silent or chose to blame or shame another into being accountable by making them wrong for it.
So how then do I keep my own integrity in check in this situation? One viable way is by a process we call in the Mankind Project™ as support accountability. In this process, while I cannot make another accountable, I can support another by inviting the other to look at the possibility of an accountability for their actions and with it, the opportunity to clean up the consequences for not keeping their word and for the person to see their own shadow in their lack of integrity, if and when that person chooses to entertain my invitation to do so. In this example of the unfaithful partner, I would speak to the perpetrator, bearing in mind that the perpetrator may or may not have the same grasp of what accountability is and what the impact of having integrity in one’s relationships has on the workability of a relationship when trust and safety are jeopardized by a lie, in this case, by cheating. As third party to this scenario, while I don’t have a same stake in act of cheating as the partner may have, I do have a stake in whether the trust and safety I have with the perpetrator can survive when I choose silence over speaking my truth or if I choose to make any denial of accountability the basis of whether the relationship can remain workable.
