Most people aren't walking around deliberately being assholes. 99% of the time, people have really good intentions but somewhere in the middle between thinking and acting, some miscommunication happens (either inside you or outside with someone else) and then it all goes downhill from there.
For example, the other day my precious 3 year old son decides to pour the rest of his milk into the tree in our living room because he thought the tree was thirsty. Cute right? The intention was good - the outcome was bad, because obviously trees don't drink milk. In his mind, he was coming from a place of trying to help, but the outcome... well, there's now sour milk in my tree. As an observer or someone who was adversely affected, I could either get mad because I'm focusing solely on the result, or I could re-frame the bad outcome and recognize the good intention behind it. See where I'm going with this?
There's this principle that states people are always doing the best they can in any particular situation. Sometimes, our "best" is like 1% and other times it's 150%. The intentions are almost always good, but that doesn't always translate into what the outcomes look like on the surface.
Watch this episode of Friday at Five where I talk about how to re-frame bad outcomes to the good intentions behind them.