Understanding Why

What's behind a person's actions, and can we ever reach them in the depths of their abyss?

Mar 31, 2025

Why do people do the things they do? And how can we meet them somewhere between their level and ours to give them some sort of hope? I think the majority of us, even if we don’t like to admit it, have looked down on another because in our mind, what they did was “wrong”. Whether it’s breaking the law, or just something they did that is frowned upon, we can tend to get on our high horse about it even when we really don’t have any right to judge someone we don’t know. I’m guilty enough of this, even with my perspective.

But what if it is someone you know? Well, then we tend to have at least some perspective on the reasons behind their inappropriate actions. That gives us an “out”-an excuse, of sorts, as to what motivated them. But why, then, is it deemed more acceptable when it is someone we know, and less so when it’s a stranger or someone in the news, to say “they had some bad things happen” and leave it there? That “criminal” in the news most likely had something lacking in their life that made them turn to what they thought was an answer to their problems.

Wait…we’re not the perfect family?!

Take my family, as an example. To get the picture, you have to know that both my dad’s parents were alcoholics, and dad was the oldest of six kids. He and grandpa never really saw things the same, and dad was the only boy; ergo, he should be the one to inherit the farm. But he just wasn’t really a farmer, he was more of a mechanic and engineer. From a very young age, he just couldn’t live up to expectations; so he turned to the bottle at the ripe old age of 7. He broke into the liquor cabinet; grandma took the blame. And there it all started to unravel.

Come to our family, mom came from a pretty steadfast upbringing in a non-alcoholic household. Not teetotallers, just not drinkers. So mom and dad get married, start the family; I’m the oldest. They lost their first boy at 5 months to what was called crib death back then, now is under the SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) blanket. I feel like dad never really came back from that; even mom of course still carries that (more in another post, much later in life).

Three more boys later, mom was done with that part of family. But things were crumbling; dad’s drinking was killing the farm (he had let grandpa convince him to go back to the farm, just three months short of getting his journeyman mechanic’s papers). We moved back to town; three years later, dad left for Vancouver in the hope of…I’m not really sure. I was just finishing tenth grade; my oldest brother, having had trouble in school, was in seventh grade at the junior high (I might even have that a little off, it’s been a while!). He was really having emotional issues that he didn’t know how to deal with because of the separation; he didn’t go looking for trouble but when it came to him he tended to blow up, and woe betide the one in the way. Nothing too bad happened though, not until a good deal later.

Life’s stumbling blocks.

It wasn’t until he finished his GED10 diploma so he could get into the welding course at the trade college that it was discovered he is dyslexic; no wonder he had academic problems. He started the welding course, the entry level stuff. Later wound up with some kind of work out in Lloydminster in the oilfield, met his future wife working out there (she ran dozers for her dad, building leases), things seemed to be looking up for him. But there was always a little shortage of funds to come back to Saskatoon to get his next level of welding classes completed. The two of them got married, had two girls, seemed to be going just fine other than of course…money always an issue. He of course was drinking, as was his wife; I don’t know when the drugs got to be an issue but they certainly did later on.

It took him years to finish his welding tickets, partly because reading blueprints was a big stumbling block for him, and partly because of the family situation and finances. He finally passed everything, but still relied more on just getting a feel for what someone wanted in a welding project rather than reading the numbers on the blueprint. But then the home life really unraveled; pseudo-separation, wife fooling around and got pregnant with someone else, all the fighting and drinking and drugs (he wasn’t big on the drugs himself, but the booze was not helping). He got out, but in the end could not save his girls even with our mom’s help and the help of a new girlfriend.

Could there be hope?

The new gal seemed great; canning, gardening, helping fix up the trailer mom co-signed on for them, all sorts of stuff. The legal fight over the kids took years and got nowhere. He only saw them a few times, then was never allowed to visit or have them come to his place again; never got school updates, nothing. He knew they were living in squalor, which is even worse. Then came the day the girlfriend just up and left with some other guy.

Coping with this sort of stuff would make anyone question their existence; on top of this, he just couldn’t make his own welding business pay regularly enough to keep it up; he had to take a regular job in the field instead just to have a decent living. Several years into this, he finds another girlfriend that seems to be good for him, and things look OK for the first time in forever. But unbeknownst to anyone, he was doing the same thing dad had done, fall into the bottle. Now, dad was a non-violent alcoholic; but John*, not so. That fuse was on a constant, slow burn. And one day, the charge cut loose.

John, his girlfriend, and our brother David were out at the bar one night and David could see that John seemed to be looking for a fight. He knew too well that could end badly; he tried to get John to leave the bar. They did get out the door, but John ended up turning around and going back in. David and Amber (John’s girlfriend) got him back outside, but John started in on pulverizing David in the process. Amber did her best to pull him off, but not before John had choked and pounded David into the ground and broken his glasses. They managed to get him into the car and get home; David now had a conundrum on his hands.

What can anyone do?

The next day, David went to the police to file a report; but he didn’t want to press charges. He told them he wanted his brother to get help, not get thrown in a jail cell where it would only let him stew and get even more messed up. So the cops did nothing. Fair enough, they are not mental health experts.

To this day, a couple of years after the incident, I don’t know where this has gone. David only ever wants an apology, but until then he was not going to speak to John. This of course puts a strain on family relations, and makes a missing man at holiday gatherings; if John is there, David won’t be. But now you can see how some people end up on the wrong side of the law in an instant of bad judgment after a life of things going wrong.

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Life gets stuck in a rut.

Most criminals don’t start out that way, it’s a question of circumstances and what choices they find before them that in the moment make sense but later on turned out to not be a good idea. If they have not been armed with enough knowledge and experience to know what choice is a bad one, they start down a slippery slope; often, they can’t find their way back up. Once down at the bottom, they are often so psychologically ingrained into that way of thinking that there is no other way out. Not that they can see, at least. They still have “choices”…but for someone else to make those choices for them simply does nothing. The only way out for anyone is to make the choice for themselves. Help along the way is important, but they have to really want to change their trajectory. Bombarding them with “you have to…” only makes them shut down. Someone else simply cannot hold them up, like a crutch, and expect anything to change.

I hope this gives you a little perspective into the life of someone who, when sober and having a life that is stable is just fine, but when things turn upside down ends up falling back to a near-feral reaction in the heat of a bad moment. So next time someone does something we consider “wrong”, take pause and ask yourself what might have got them there in the first place. There are so many things wrong with society nowadays that it’s inevitable we will have people that fall into the pit and don’t see a way out. Sometimes that pit they are in is designed such that there is almost no way out at all.