We all grow up with strong messages from family, society, and—help us if we were raised in a religious community—that we need to be good people.

In simple terms, growing up, being a good person meant never lying, never hurting other people’s feelings, never making mistakes, never failing. Of course, being a good person is a lot more complex than that. It’s a choice we make every day, rooted in our values, and yet our humanity makes it impossible for us to always make the best choice.

But our childlike understanding of what it means to be good stays with us. And it can make us incapable of hearing someone else’s reality if that reality somehow suggests that we might not be a perfectly good human.

These are not conscious thoughts, of course. They’re running the programming in the background as we go about our daily interactions.

If my being late upset somebody, my almost immediate reaction is to make an excuse. I might decide that they are too sensitive or too rigid, or quickly explain that there was traffic and therefore they shouldn’t be upset. Maybe they just need to be more flexible.

The reason we have such a hard time allowing for other people’s truths—especially when those truths paint us in a slightly negative light—is, in fact, because of our deep-seated, simple, childlike belief that being a good person means being perfect.

And this is where our need to be good can actually make us into liars.

Because if I cannot tolerate the possibility that I hurt you, disappointed you, failed you, or simply behaved badly in a particular moment, then I have to change the story. I have to explain why what I did wasn’t actually wrong. I have to make your feelings unreasonable, your expectations too high, your memory inaccurate. I may even need to convince myself that what happened didn’t happen quite the way you say it did. Not because I am intentionally trying to deceive you, but because my sense of myself as a good person depends on it.

And perhaps this is also important to remember when we are on the receiving end of it. Someone who changes the story, becomes defensive, or even seems to be gaslighting us is not automatically a narcissist or a sociopath. Sometimes what looks like manipulation from the outside is a person desperately trying to protect themselves from a version of themselves they cannot tolerate. Underneath all that defensiveness may be something much more ordinary and human: insecurity, shame, and a deep difficulty accepting their own flaws.

This doesn’t mean that their behavior doesn’t hurt us, or that we have to accept it. But understanding where a behavior comes from is different from excusing it.

Ironically, it is only when we become willing to accept that we are capable of being selfish, insensitive, dishonest, thoughtless, or just plain wrong that we become more honest people. I can hear that I hurt you without having to decide that I am a terrible person. I can say, “Yes, I did that,” without needing to run away from what it says about me.

Maybe growing up is realizing that being good was never about being perfect. It is about being able to see ourselves truthfully, take responsibility when we get it wrong, and try again.

So darling, repeat after me:

“I can be selfish. I can be lazy. I can be inconsiderate. I am capable of not hearing somebody, even though I desperately value being able to hear others. I am capable of not understanding somebody, even though I desperately crave being understood. I am capable of allowing my traumas and my emotions to get the best of me, even though I work very hard not to. I, too, can have a limited viewpoint and limiting beliefs, even though I deeply value open-mindedness. I, too, can be judgmental, even though I dislike it when others judge.”

My darlings, let us see and understand that we, too, are human beings—works in the making, full of wounds, projections, unconscious beliefs, spilling ourselves onto others and distorting reality left and right.

No matter how much work you’ve done on yourself, how much therapy you’ve had, how self-aware you believe yourself to be, or how well you think you understand yourself and others, you are not perfect.

But the great news is, you don’t have to be.

And the more you allow yourself and others their humanity, the less defensive you will need to be. The less judgmental you will become. The more tolerant you will be of your own flaws and the flaws of others.

And perhaps the closer we will come to bridging the enormous divide we see in our society today—a divide that, ultimately, begins with the divide within our own psyche.

Because when I no longer need to divide myself into the parts that are “good” and the parts that are “bad,” I also no longer need to divide the world quite so neatly into good people and bad people.

I can simply be human.

And so can you.