A Good Apology: Four Steps to Make Things Right
By Molly Howes
Introduction
The value of apologies is timeless and universal. Each time we face another person’s injury with courage and humility, we heal individual hurt. When we apologize, we restore damaged connections. We reduce our isolation and shame, and we make our relationships stronger.
So, if apologies are so useful and important, why are we so bad at them? For a myriad of cultural and psychological reasons, apologizing well is really hard to do. Human perceptual and cognitive biases make seeing our own mistakes and their effects on other people challenging. Most of us labor under misconceptions and myths about apologies, including the idea that our intentions determine our effects on other people. That is, if I didn’t mean to hurt you, you can’t be hurt. Or we subscribe to the now-historic Hollywood notion that “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Further, we rarely see public figures modeling good apologies.
Many of us make no attempt to apologize when we should, and when we do, it’s often in ways that inflame the situation or, at best, only partially heal the damage. But the good news is that each of us has the capacity to make an effective apology. One of the biggest, most universal roadblocks is a simple lack of technique.
Unhealed hurt between people hardens into bitterness and judgment. Unprocessed guilt darkens into chronic shame and low self-esteem. Rifts between people seemed impossible to reach across and so results in unhappiness and loneliness. At its worst, failing to mend relationships leads to dangerous levels of isolation.
In contrast to the dark and lonely outcomes from avoiding an apology or the messy blowback from an inadequate one, there is a deep spiritual lifting of burdens and an opening of hearts when people face a previous hurt with courage and humility. Their relationships don’t just recover; they grow stronger.
It is counterintuitive, perhaps, but the breaches themselves aren’t the real issue; our inability to fix them is what causes us trouble. It’s the failure to learn from one another and our missteps that keeps us from developing the resilient relationships we long for and need. We don’t really require a study or government official to show us that failure to mend breaks in relationships with partners, children, siblings, parents, colleagues, and friends hurts us in all kinds of ways. What we haven’t understood is how to fix the problem.
Ultimately, you can cultivate an attitude of more compassionate accountability, that is, holding yourself and others responsible for missteps while maintaining a kind and humane approach to the important people in your life.
The value of apologies is timeless and universal. Each time we face another person’s injury with courage and humility, we heal individual hurt. When we apologize, we restore damaged connections. We reduce our isolation and shame, and we make our relationships stronger.
So, if apologies are so useful and important, why are we so bad at them? For a myriad of cultural and psychological reasons, apologizing well is really hard to do. Human perceptual and cognitive biases make seeing our own mistakes and their effects on other people challenging. Most of us labor under misconceptions and myths about apologies, including the idea that our intentions determine our effects on other people. That is, if I didn’t mean to hurt you, you can’t be hurt. Or we subscribe to the now-historic Hollywood notion that “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Further, we rarely see public figures modeling good apologies.
Many of us make no attempt to apologize when we should, and when we do, it’s often in ways that inflame the situation or, at best, only partially heal the damage. But the good news is that each of us has the capacity to make an effective apology. One of the biggest, most universal roadblocks is a simple lack of technique.
Unhealed hurt between people hardens into bitterness and judgment. Unprocessed guilt darkens into chronic shame and low self-esteem. Rifts between people seemed impossible to reach across and so results in unhappiness and loneliness. At its worst, failing to mend relationships leads to dangerous levels of isolation.
In contrast to the dark and lonely outcomes from avoiding an apology or the messy blowback from an inadequate one, there is a deep spiritual lifting of burdens and an opening of hearts when people face a previous hurt with courage and humility. Their relationships don’t just recover; they grow stronger.
It is counterintuitive, perhaps, but the breaches themselves aren’t the real issue; our inability to fix them is what causes us trouble. It’s the failure to learn from one another and our missteps that keeps us from developing the resilient relationships we long for and need. We don’t really require a study or government official to show us that failure to mend breaks in relationships with partners, children, siblings, parents, colleagues, and friends hurts us in all kinds of ways. What we haven’t understood is how to fix the problem.
Ultimately, you can cultivate an attitude of more compassionate accountability, that is, holding yourself and others responsible for missteps while maintaining a kind and humane approach to the important people in your life.
PART I: APOLOGIZING IS TOO HARD TO DO AND TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO
Apologies Help Relationships
One of the most pernicious myths about saying “I’m sorry” is that good relationships of any type or scale do not require apologies. Proponents of this myth believe that if you’re in a good relationship, your mistakes, misunderstandings, and disagreements do not cause any harm. If you do hurt each other, you should somehow just understand the other person’s intentions and move on. It isn’t necessary to “go over the past.”
On the contrary, the more important the relationship, the more crucial making a good apology can be, and the greater the cost of failing to employ one. Love does not mean never having to say you’re sorry; love requires you to learn how to say you’re sorry well. Injuries that are not repaired or are inadequately addressed can erode the basis for a relationship. They rarely disappear fully. For example, one of the most common costs of an unrepaired injury shows up in repetitive patterns. The hurt settles into the fabric of the unfolding relationship, so that its overall pattern comes to resemble the original, unrepaired (sometimes forgotten) injury.
The ability to deliver a sincere apology to your partner can make the difference between a small disagreement and a long-standing conflict. If a good repair isn’t made, hurt between people can fester and build. Relationships can be lost.
Many couples have unproductive disagreements that are repeated for so long they become familiar scripts. If asked, they can usually quote “the fight we always have.” Over time, such arguments become automatic, like the “muscle memory” of actions you can do with your eyes closed. Unfortunately, unthinking routines keep you from noticing what the other person actually means or feels in a given conversation; you can’t see who they are in any particular moment if your eyes are closed. Alongside the rote arguments with a person you sincerely used to value—and still could if you were paying attention—grows loneliness.
Many people seek therapy because of injuries they’ve sustained, but many also come in carrying regrets or the burden of harm they’ve caused to someone else. Nearly everyone has been guilty of causing harm or pain to others, we don’t always live up to our wish for how we want to see ourselves in the world. In some instances, you know when you’ve erred—even if you aren’t willing to admit it. When you fail to follow your moral compass, when your arrows land wide of the mark, you feel it.
Guilt can be helpful when it informs you that something needs to be fixed. But when you don’t make something right, guilt accumulates, like silt in a river’s waters that ends up lining the banks. Leftover guilt can thicken into self-condemnation and distort your sense of yourself. If you haven’t been able to deal with something that you feel guilty about or if you’ve been forgiven too easily, you might find yourself avoiding the other person or distancing yourself from similar situations. You might become locked in repetitive conflicts in which you end up arguing your innocence, or stuck in a victim or aggressor role you don’t want.
Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy, wrote in the New York Times that “we can learn to let things go, but before we let them go, we have to let regret get hold of us.” For a person of conscience to feel better after regrettable actions, some form of repair or atonement is necessary. That is, until you somehow “fix” it, you carry the weight of what you’ve done wrong. When we don’t make wrongs right, we suffer.
In contrast, when we do face ourselves and our actions, psychotherapist and writer Avi Klein says that relief, honor, and a sense of purpose follow. He has found that he has to help his clients face their true, negative feelings about themselves regarding regrettable behavior. Only then does growth occur. If people avoid dealing directly with the harm they’ve caused, they don’t get better. When you are able to make amends for hurt in a relationship, you get to grow as a person. An accurate view of your responsibility can hurt, but it also expands your sense of yourself and enhances your personal and spiritual development.
You Need People
If you don’t repair rifts between you and another person, you will most likely lose the relationship. Aside from the specific people you’d hate to lose, you need people in your life for more reasons than you might think. You’re probably aware of the emotionally painful loneliness that can accompany loss and isolation. In addition, we are also learning more about the profound costs to your physical health. For the past several decades, many psychologists have studied the important role social connections play in people’s health. A 2010 review of research studies showed that lacking social relationships has an influence on the risk of death that’s comparable to smoking and alcohol consumption. Unresolved conflicts can lead to chronic dissatisfaction and consequent distance or estrangement.
Changing the Story
No one wants to be blamed for something going wrong. Most of us are inclined to shy away from accepting fault. The urge to argue or protect your point makes sense if the goal is to be right or blameless. But going to the mat insisting on your rightness works in the wrong direction in most human engagements. In relationships, you may be right, but you won’t be closely connected and ultimately you will lose. You won’t end up feeling like you’re on the same team. You won’t understand each other better.
Doing the right thing is what we’re talking about here, but it doesn’t always seem clear what that is. Rather than speaking directly to tragic errors and seeking to promote healing, people sometimes try to protect their own. In contrast, sometimes a quick, responsible reaction to a harmful mistake prevents a more serious negative outcome.
BENEFITS OF GOOD APOLOGIES
For relationships
It’s So Very Hard to Do
So, why do we, stay stuck in unhappy situations rather than fix them? Mending these breaches seems incredibly hard to do, usually for both parties. Most of us rarely consider apologizing when a rift has occurred. You may sense you’ve played a part, but it’s especially hard to apologize when you’ve been hurt yourself. Deep down, you might believe that there’s more than one side to the story, but you still stay stuck. If you have trouble taking responsibility for mistakes or hurts or conflicts that have more than one side, you are not alone. Because of the way our brains work, we are biased to have hardwired limitations in the awareness of our errors. Further, loads of societal rules and cultural norms operate directly against our being able to make amends.
In the West, particularly in the United States, our dominant culture values a posture of rightness and certainty, which doesn’t lend itself to paying attention to how we might have hurt someone. Because our models of psychological strength lean toward competitiveness and independence, relationship repair barely makes a blip on our radar. We also have sparse models and receive almost no instruction about how to make mistakes or wrongs right.
Unfortunately, we’re not likely to witness many personal apologies, whether effective or not.
Naturally, it follows that most of us don’t know what a really good, thorough apology looks like.
Given all these limitations, it’s kind of amazing that anyone ever apologizes in a meaningful way. So let’s talk about why a simple apology is so challenging. First we’ll look at neuroscientific limitations, then we’ll move on to aspects of current culture that contribute to the difficulty of apologizing, and finally we’ll discuss the dearth of good models.
Cognitive and Perceptual Biases
Some of the challenge in making a good apology stems from the way our brains work. At a biological level, our perceptual equipment is geared toward simplicity. Considering another person’s point of view or inviting a more complex understanding of events requires acceptance of in-between, gray tones.
Under conditions of stress or threat, though, we can all return to narrow, yes-or-no thinking. Life seems clearer if we settle on a basic matrix, such as “Someone’s right and someone’s wrong… and I’m the one who’s right.” If the stress is extreme, we are reduced to the fight-flight-freeze options you’ve heard about. These reactions are driven by the limbic system, not the cortical, cerebral regions of the brain. You might say we don’t think; we just react.
But, even under the best of circumstances, our senses are routinely subject to a surprising degree of distortion. Our perception—the way our brains decipher sensory information--and cognition—the way we think—follow suit. That includes outright fabrication and misremembering.
In theory, we’d all agree that everybody makes mistakes. But, in the heat of a moment, we rarely believe that applies to us, or to the present situation, or under these particular conditions. This inability to see our own mistakes appears to be a genuine, brain-based limitation in our perception. In general, we’re all probably wrong a lot more often than we think. We are biased to see other people’s mistakes and remain blind to our own. This strong, innate tendency in all of us illustrates what we’re up against when we try to take responsibility for our mistakes in the world.
Beyond the inevitability of both our making mistakes and our blindness to them, specific cognitive patterns create additional problems for us.
Linking all these cognitive and perceptual biases are two basic tendencies: You can’t help but perceive the world from your own point of view, which can lead to misconceptions, and you are driven to continue thinking and doing what you have already thought and done. Change can be terribly challenging. To consider our unintended, unwitnessed, untoward effects on other people is, for many of us, brand-new. Taking on any new approach (such as learning to apologize) can add biological stresses to the already loaded brain.
When people face uncertainty, strong feelings can swamp considered reasoning. As a result, there’s always a risk that rising emotions can derail a more thoughtful repair process. By all that, I mean that you can lose your head and forget that your most important goal might be reconnection. To learn any new skill involves some missteps and frustration. The unfamiliar terrain of making amends can lead to discouragement, doubt, and pessimism. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Cultural Factors
APOLOGY MYTHS
Following are some of the most popular misconceptions about the nature of apologies. Do you recognize your own resistance in any of these ideas?
One of the most pernicious myths about saying “I’m sorry” is that good relationships of any type or scale do not require apologies. Proponents of this myth believe that if you’re in a good relationship, your mistakes, misunderstandings, and disagreements do not cause any harm. If you do hurt each other, you should somehow just understand the other person’s intentions and move on. It isn’t necessary to “go over the past.”
On the contrary, the more important the relationship, the more crucial making a good apology can be, and the greater the cost of failing to employ one. Love does not mean never having to say you’re sorry; love requires you to learn how to say you’re sorry well. Injuries that are not repaired or are inadequately addressed can erode the basis for a relationship. They rarely disappear fully. For example, one of the most common costs of an unrepaired injury shows up in repetitive patterns. The hurt settles into the fabric of the unfolding relationship, so that its overall pattern comes to resemble the original, unrepaired (sometimes forgotten) injury.
The ability to deliver a sincere apology to your partner can make the difference between a small disagreement and a long-standing conflict. If a good repair isn’t made, hurt between people can fester and build. Relationships can be lost.
Many couples have unproductive disagreements that are repeated for so long they become familiar scripts. If asked, they can usually quote “the fight we always have.” Over time, such arguments become automatic, like the “muscle memory” of actions you can do with your eyes closed. Unfortunately, unthinking routines keep you from noticing what the other person actually means or feels in a given conversation; you can’t see who they are in any particular moment if your eyes are closed. Alongside the rote arguments with a person you sincerely used to value—and still could if you were paying attention—grows loneliness.
Many people seek therapy because of injuries they’ve sustained, but many also come in carrying regrets or the burden of harm they’ve caused to someone else. Nearly everyone has been guilty of causing harm or pain to others, we don’t always live up to our wish for how we want to see ourselves in the world. In some instances, you know when you’ve erred—even if you aren’t willing to admit it. When you fail to follow your moral compass, when your arrows land wide of the mark, you feel it.
Guilt can be helpful when it informs you that something needs to be fixed. But when you don’t make something right, guilt accumulates, like silt in a river’s waters that ends up lining the banks. Leftover guilt can thicken into self-condemnation and distort your sense of yourself. If you haven’t been able to deal with something that you feel guilty about or if you’ve been forgiven too easily, you might find yourself avoiding the other person or distancing yourself from similar situations. You might become locked in repetitive conflicts in which you end up arguing your innocence, or stuck in a victim or aggressor role you don’t want.
Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy, wrote in the New York Times that “we can learn to let things go, but before we let them go, we have to let regret get hold of us.” For a person of conscience to feel better after regrettable actions, some form of repair or atonement is necessary. That is, until you somehow “fix” it, you carry the weight of what you’ve done wrong. When we don’t make wrongs right, we suffer.
In contrast, when we do face ourselves and our actions, psychotherapist and writer Avi Klein says that relief, honor, and a sense of purpose follow. He has found that he has to help his clients face their true, negative feelings about themselves regarding regrettable behavior. Only then does growth occur. If people avoid dealing directly with the harm they’ve caused, they don’t get better. When you are able to make amends for hurt in a relationship, you get to grow as a person. An accurate view of your responsibility can hurt, but it also expands your sense of yourself and enhances your personal and spiritual development.
You Need People
If you don’t repair rifts between you and another person, you will most likely lose the relationship. Aside from the specific people you’d hate to lose, you need people in your life for more reasons than you might think. You’re probably aware of the emotionally painful loneliness that can accompany loss and isolation. In addition, we are also learning more about the profound costs to your physical health. For the past several decades, many psychologists have studied the important role social connections play in people’s health. A 2010 review of research studies showed that lacking social relationships has an influence on the risk of death that’s comparable to smoking and alcohol consumption. Unresolved conflicts can lead to chronic dissatisfaction and consequent distance or estrangement.
Changing the Story
No one wants to be blamed for something going wrong. Most of us are inclined to shy away from accepting fault. The urge to argue or protect your point makes sense if the goal is to be right or blameless. But going to the mat insisting on your rightness works in the wrong direction in most human engagements. In relationships, you may be right, but you won’t be closely connected and ultimately you will lose. You won’t end up feeling like you’re on the same team. You won’t understand each other better.
Doing the right thing is what we’re talking about here, but it doesn’t always seem clear what that is. Rather than speaking directly to tragic errors and seeking to promote healing, people sometimes try to protect their own. In contrast, sometimes a quick, responsible reaction to a harmful mistake prevents a more serious negative outcome.
BENEFITS OF GOOD APOLOGIES
For relationships
- Healing from hurt
- More positive feelings, greater closeness between people
- Higher “relationship esteem”
- Increased confidence about facing the next conflict
- Enlarged future possibilities
- Retaining relationships
- Personal and spiritual value of taking responsibility and addressing guilt
- More oxytocin in your system
- More social connections, leading to positive health outcomes
It’s So Very Hard to Do
So, why do we, stay stuck in unhappy situations rather than fix them? Mending these breaches seems incredibly hard to do, usually for both parties. Most of us rarely consider apologizing when a rift has occurred. You may sense you’ve played a part, but it’s especially hard to apologize when you’ve been hurt yourself. Deep down, you might believe that there’s more than one side to the story, but you still stay stuck. If you have trouble taking responsibility for mistakes or hurts or conflicts that have more than one side, you are not alone. Because of the way our brains work, we are biased to have hardwired limitations in the awareness of our errors. Further, loads of societal rules and cultural norms operate directly against our being able to make amends.
In the West, particularly in the United States, our dominant culture values a posture of rightness and certainty, which doesn’t lend itself to paying attention to how we might have hurt someone. Because our models of psychological strength lean toward competitiveness and independence, relationship repair barely makes a blip on our radar. We also have sparse models and receive almost no instruction about how to make mistakes or wrongs right.
Unfortunately, we’re not likely to witness many personal apologies, whether effective or not.
Naturally, it follows that most of us don’t know what a really good, thorough apology looks like.
Given all these limitations, it’s kind of amazing that anyone ever apologizes in a meaningful way. So let’s talk about why a simple apology is so challenging. First we’ll look at neuroscientific limitations, then we’ll move on to aspects of current culture that contribute to the difficulty of apologizing, and finally we’ll discuss the dearth of good models.
Cognitive and Perceptual Biases
Some of the challenge in making a good apology stems from the way our brains work. At a biological level, our perceptual equipment is geared toward simplicity. Considering another person’s point of view or inviting a more complex understanding of events requires acceptance of in-between, gray tones.
Under conditions of stress or threat, though, we can all return to narrow, yes-or-no thinking. Life seems clearer if we settle on a basic matrix, such as “Someone’s right and someone’s wrong… and I’m the one who’s right.” If the stress is extreme, we are reduced to the fight-flight-freeze options you’ve heard about. These reactions are driven by the limbic system, not the cortical, cerebral regions of the brain. You might say we don’t think; we just react.
But, even under the best of circumstances, our senses are routinely subject to a surprising degree of distortion. Our perception—the way our brains decipher sensory information--and cognition—the way we think—follow suit. That includes outright fabrication and misremembering.
In theory, we’d all agree that everybody makes mistakes. But, in the heat of a moment, we rarely believe that applies to us, or to the present situation, or under these particular conditions. This inability to see our own mistakes appears to be a genuine, brain-based limitation in our perception. In general, we’re all probably wrong a lot more often than we think. We are biased to see other people’s mistakes and remain blind to our own. This strong, innate tendency in all of us illustrates what we’re up against when we try to take responsibility for our mistakes in the world.
Beyond the inevitability of both our making mistakes and our blindness to them, specific cognitive patterns create additional problems for us.
- Confirmation bias, the overwhelming tendency to give more weight to evidence that confirms our beliefs than to evidence that challenges them.
- Selective inattention, also called “inattentional blindness,” can also cause perceptual and cognitive errors. We’re looking at one thing or in one direction and miss information that would be completely evident if we looked in a different direction. Selective inattention makes you genuinely less likely to notice any ways you might have hurt the other person.
- Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort you feel when you hold two contradictory ideas. In response to this discomfort, you may change your mind or your actions to resolve the contradiction, but that can be very hard to do, especially if you’re invested in them. You will probably resolve the dissonance by convincing yourself that the false, discredited belief isn’t false or the harmful behavior isn’t harmful. This isn’t exactly a choice. Neuroscience has shown that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when you’re confronted with this kind of dissonance. If you believe (or want to believe) you’re not the kind of person who causes harm, cognitive dissonance can interfere with seeing yourself as responsible for the hurt someone else feels. If it seems to you that someone else’s actions are obviously hurtful to you and you can’t understand why they won’t acknowledge it, consider the they may be feeling the same dissonance, blocking their ability to acknowledge and repair the pain caused. We hurt each other by mistake, unintentionally, all the time. But because that action contradicts other information we have—our intentions, our self-concept—it’s hard to see, hard to consider, hard to believe.
- Self-justification, another dissonance-related brain phenomenon, works similarly. We are biased to view our own actions as essentially legitimate, particularly in contrast to how we view others’. In a relationship, it can show up like this: When you argue or fight with your partner, you might believe that your behavior represents your inherent and valued qualities. Self-justification prevents you from asking, “Am I wrong? Could I be making a mistake?” When your partner disagrees with you, you make sense of the disagreement by seeing the other person’s position as faulty or flawed. Then, by way of confirmation bias, you find more instances of their blameworthy ideas or actions. Basic cognitive dissonance prevents you from judging your own less-than-ideal behavior. The relationship’s decline begins to gain momentum.
Linking all these cognitive and perceptual biases are two basic tendencies: You can’t help but perceive the world from your own point of view, which can lead to misconceptions, and you are driven to continue thinking and doing what you have already thought and done. Change can be terribly challenging. To consider our unintended, unwitnessed, untoward effects on other people is, for many of us, brand-new. Taking on any new approach (such as learning to apologize) can add biological stresses to the already loaded brain.
When people face uncertainty, strong feelings can swamp considered reasoning. As a result, there’s always a risk that rising emotions can derail a more thoughtful repair process. By all that, I mean that you can lose your head and forget that your most important goal might be reconnection. To learn any new skill involves some missteps and frustration. The unfamiliar terrain of making amends can lead to discouragement, doubt, and pessimism. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Cultural Factors
- Like the air we breathe, cultural norms and expectations can be invisible. Although deeply embedded in each of us, they operate as unquestioned assumptions. We learn some of them through direct teaching and many more from observations throughout our lives, beginning very early, before we have language to capture our experience. From our families, neighbors, clergy, teachers, friends, and later coworkers and bosses, we learn how we’re supposed to behave. Many social expectations in Western cultures influence us in a direction precisely opposite from making apologies.
- Some of the cultural ideal we learn is tied to a particular model of manhood, the solitary hero who doesn’t need anyone else. The American Psychological Association recently put forward guidelines for addressing “traditional masculinity,” which they describe as marked by emotional stoicism, dominance, competitiveness, and aggression. It can take great courage to demonstrate a different kind of leadership or masculinity. In addition to pressure to be independent and free of self-doubt, it’s widely documented that many men face a particular challenge with expressions of feeling. This probably begins, at least in part, with childhood socialization that leaves young men without practice addressing difficult emotions and experiences. Again, this is not intended to suggest that it’s impossible for men to apologize; it just may be harder.
- A related cultural assumption holds that the success, failure, and value of our leaders, most of whom are white men, exist in an individualistic light. Aside from a formulaic assessment of sports teams, we rarely celebrate interdependence. If as a culture we don’t value the centrality of connections with other people, we have little reason to care about preserving relationships, much less repairing them. A related factor that interferes with making amends is our preference for quick solutions. We admire clear, certain fixes. When they are not at hand, we tend to be impatient and ready to discard both relationships and belongings. This shows up in phrases like, “Get over it and move on,” “What’s done is done,” and the more recent popular line “It is what it is.” There seems to be little appetite for step-by-step, slow rebuilding of trust, for example, or for thinking in general, as opposed to instant knowing. Understanding the effect you have on someone else, addressing your mistakes, and making things right all take time.
- It follows from these cultural factors, as well as the perceptual equipment with which we operate, that our understanding of relationships is oversimplified, too. A fairy-tale “happily ever after” suggests that ongoing, true love is simple. This false premise leads to many people’s outright surprise that real relationships take tending and attention, not to mention that they require helping each other through disappointments and failings. It’s no wonder we don’t know how to approach, much less heal, the ways we hurt one another.
APOLOGY MYTHS
Following are some of the most popular misconceptions about the nature of apologies. Do you recognize your own resistance in any of these ideas?
- An apology is a sign of weakness.
- Saying “I’m sorry” means you accept the blame.
- Because you were not at fault, you shouldn’t apologize.
- Taking responsibility for harmful mistakes will get you sued.
- If you didn’t intend to hurt someone, they aren’t hurt.
- Your partner knows you wouldn’t hurt them on purpose, so there’s no need to say anything about it.
- You’re a nice person, so you couldn’t have done anything that hurts someone.
- Saying “I’m sorry” is all you have to do.
- Good relationships don’t need apologies. (“ Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”)
- Feeling guilty about mistakes is pointless.
- Making an apology doesn’t benefit you. It only helps the person who’s hurt.
- If the harm happened before you were born, you don’t owe anyone an apology for it. “Let sleeping dogs lie.”
- Raising difficult subjects just makes everyone uncomfortable.
- You can’t change the past, so there’s no reason to revisit it.
- You’ve been hurt, too, so you don’t have to be the one to apologize.
PART 2: HOW TO APOLOGIZE
THE FOUR STEPS OF A GOOD APOLOGY
- You must come to understand the other person’s injury, including the effects of your actions. This usually involves asking questions and listening.
- You must articulate a sincere statement of regret. You must acknowledge what you did and how it affected the other person. This is no small feat for most of us, especially when we didn’t intend to hurt someone.
- You must make reparations. This can include material restitution, although in relationships that’s less likely to occur.
- You must make a convincing plan to prevent the problem from happening again.
Step One: You must come to understand the other person’s injury, including the effects of your actions. This usually involves asking questions and listening.
The purpose of Step One is to listen carefully to someone else, so you can learn how that person has been hurt. It’s not a time to share your reasons or explanations, or your benign intentions or countercomplaints. It’s not about alleviating your guilt or shame or any feelings you, the would-be apologizer, have. If you want to apologize, Step One is not about you at all. It’s only about understanding the other person’s experience of hurt.
You Have to Ask and Listen
After a misstep, the first, automatic thing some of us do is say, “I’m sorry.” We hope that’s the end of it. The “magic words” spoken aloud can be delivered as if fulfilling a requirement, reluctant and resented code words that signal the end of a standoff or of a power struggle. But even when “I’m sorry” is a sincere attempt to repair a relationship, it isn’t usually enough. One obvious drawback to saying those words before fully understanding the actual injury is that you might not apologize for the correct thing.
Listening is essentially receptive—and many of us find it more comfortable to take action than to remain patient and silent. Step One can be much harder than saying the words “I’m sorry.” When you ask someone to tell you about their hurt, you put yourself in a position to hear things you hadn’t been aware of—because of your error blindness—and no one enjoys that kind of news. Moreover, the feedback you receive may make you feel guilty or ashamed. Just thinking about it can make you feel defensive and uncomfortable; reluctance to engage in this step can become a major barrier to apologizing well. Further, when you ask for this kind of information, you are also likely to open yourself up to feeling for the other person, empathically. Altogether, such a lot of feeling and complexity may seem unappealing, unwelcome. The temptation to skip this step is understandable. However, it is the base on which everything else is built. The task is to put our defensive reluctance aside, in order to reconnect.
We need help to fully understand how we affect each other because, as we’ve discussed, we humans are very poor at recognizing our own errors and their impact. A common misconception suggests that just thinking about another person and trying to imagine their point of view will produce understanding. But even if you are remarkably intuitive, your guessing has big limitations. It turns out that accurately comprehending another person’s point of view takes more than imagination. It requires getting real information that can be obtained only by asking that person. The goal here is greater common understanding and empathy. As the author and essayist Leslie Jamison writes, “Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing.”
With a familiar person, asking can help you learn about their perspective on relationship events you might not have noticed. Such knowledge may help you grow closer and, together, find ways to challenge long-standing patterns. Because we are often off base about other people’s experience and are poorly equipped to see our mistakes, we need others to tell us when we err.
If you’re lucky enough to have people you trust, you can ask for their help with this. As a kindness, they can offer you the information you need about how you affect them—and you can offer the same to them. That’s one way of creating the condition of psychological safety we’ve been talking about. We miss lots of chances to learn due to what others don’t tell us and what we don’t ask about.
Listening
So how do we learn to ask for feedback, listen honestly, and ultimately understand another person’s perspective?
There are so many possible ways to head off unwelcome feedback about ourselves, about our mistaken, insensitive, or otherwise regrettable behavior.
Hear the Hurt
The power of having your painful truth heard and known cannot be overstated. Creating a safe space to discuss the hurt in a relationship can also begin the process of healing—even well after the offenses occurred. For many, hearing another person’s hurt doesn’t come easily. On any scale, the skill of listening to and honoring someone else’s experience can be challenging. Validation of another person’s perspective requires listening in an open-minded way, that is, without preconceived ideas.
You Won’t Get It Right, Right Away
Beginning this kind of inquiry also requires us to challenge our perfectionism. Perfectionism is usually defined as having excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations. According to psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, this characteristic has grown in prevalence over the past three decades, possibly due to cultural factors including “competitive individualism.” Believing that you should already be on top of something can interfere with the humble and curious stance that facilitates learning. If you think you should get things right, you’re less likely to seek help and less likely to try again if you don’t get it right the first time.
Moreover, we resist looking at our mistakes for another, more basic reason. In neuroscientific terms, our brains themselves are driven to be efficient; noticing and correcting an error is way more “work.” It costs your brain more energy than just going along uncritically. Often, would-be apologizers interrupt or short-circuit this step with defensive maneuvers, attempts to justify themselves or diminish the other’s complaint. You might say things like:
Fixing something specific, giving someone what you think they need, can feel terrific. But it’s denying the other person a chance to speak their full truth and be heard. Inquiry requires that you give up that powerful and satisfying fix-it role and adopt a humbler posture,
It’s natural to feel defensive when hearing about how our actions hurt a friend or loved
one. That’s why I encourage the person who’s been hurt to use language that is as neutral as possible and employ the familiar practice of making “I” statements.
How Step One Often Comes Up
The most common Step One opportunity arises when someone tells you you’ve hurt them or had an unwanted impact on them. That’s a very good time to override your defensiveness—no easy feat—and ask for more information. Sometimes it takes time and more than one try for you to be open to facing the hurt you’ve caused.
How Long Does It Take?
Many hurts, especially old ones, take more than one brief conversation to express and understand. How long it takes isn’t universal or predictable, which can be frustrating to the apologizer who wants to move on. But you have to have the whole conversation. If you remember that this process is not about the endgame of absolution, you will understand that it takes time, attention, and patience not only to restore a relationship, but also to make it stronger than it was.
After major injuries, such as betrayals or unfaithfulness, hearing the whole experience of the hurt person can take a relatively long time. Oftentimes, before Step One is complete, some parts of the story must be heard more than once. Change and relief won’t come until the hurt person is ready to move on. The question “What is enough?” arises in many extended Step One efforts. The process can wear you down. Partners ask, “Shouldn’t she be past it by now?” Or “Will I ever be out of the doghouse?” Understandably, one person or the other may feel tempted to cut their losses. Couples can get through almost anything if they stay the course with patience, perseverance, and compassion. Pay attention to loving intentions and small moments of mutual learning. They are not as exciting as dramatic change, nor as conclusive as fairy-tale happy endings, but if you’re building something to last, it takes time and careful work to reassemble.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP ONE
Step Two: You must articulate a sincere statement of regret. You must acknowledge what you did and how it affected the other person. This is no small feat for most of us, especially when we didn’t intend to hurt someone.
In Step Two, you show that you understand the way(s) the other person has been hurt and that you care about it. This is when you express your empathy. You also hold yourself accountable for any actions that have contributed to the negative experience of the other. To state one’s regret, is much easier once our defenses have lowered. But taking responsibility for repair doesn’t always mean accepting blame. You take responsibility for the impact you had on the other person, even if you didn’t intend to hurt them. It can be hard to accept, but when you begin a real apology, nothing about you (the apologizer)—your motives, your character, your justification—is relevant.
You might mistakenly focus on yourself for any number of other reasons.
We’ve seen how tempting it is to confuse our intentions, particularly our conscious, fully aware intentions, with the effects of our actions, but they are somewhat independent of each other.
In their studies of human cognition, Princeton University researchers Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske found that your perceptions of intent influence your perceptions of impact. In other words, if you believe someone’s harmful actions are inadvertent mistakes, you tend to minimize their cost to others. You inaccurately estimate: If the intent wasn’t bad, the impact can’t be so big. In fact, accidental hurt can be very big.
Between people, the ideal outcome is not simply justice, but to create connection and greater mutual understanding. That’s what relationship repair is all about. But, it isn’t what normal brain functioning is all about. We are cognitively and perceptually biased to believe we are right, despite extensive evidence that we are often wrong. Frequently, we fail to consider others’ perspectives, we don’t see our mistakes or the negative effects we have, and we view
the world from our own points of view.
Guidelines for Step Two
Step Two, the statement of regret and responsibility, is what most people think of when they hear the word “apology.” It’s of central importance for sure but usually isn’t the whole story. In this section, you’ll find several guidelines for making good apology statements. But first I want to point out a few important truths:
How Not to Say “I’m Sorry”
You’ve probably issued inadequate Step Twos yourself. You may have phrased your statement of regret in one of these misguided ways:
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP TWO
Step Three: You must make reparations. This can include material restitution, although in relationships that’s less likely to occur.
The relevant question for Step Three is: What, if anything, would make up for the hurt or the wrong itself? What kind of restitution, reparations, or amends would restore balance or fairness that’s been disrupted? In personal relationships, the goal of restitution or reparations may be seen as making the relationship whole, restoring trust, or even strengthening the connection. As such, most personal reparations are not monetary (or not wholly so). Reparations may not seem to apply to intimate partnerships, but Step Three can inspire creative solutions that get to the heart of the damage.
In the relationship realm, sometimes just the expression of sincere penitence is enough to begin healing, but some form of restitution is usually necessary for a thorough process.
Between individuals, Step Three could include “setting the record straight” in the eyes of other people, taking a second (or third) chance to get something right, or providing material goods that have symbolic or monetary value, or both.
The familiar expression “words are cheap” is relevant here. An apology has to be backed up with something of value and, if possible, by something that fits the harm done. Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup, once said, “You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.” The words “I’m sorry” are not magic words that make things right. Despite the difficulty many of us have uttering those words, they are simply not enough in themselves. Further, those two words can distract us from the rest of the real, necessary work.
Second Chances
Sometimes a makeup occasion, another chance to try again at something that went badly the first time, can seem silly and self-conscious, but often it is more powerful than you might anticipate. If you’ve blown an important event or forgotten an anniversary or birthday, it can be a great idea to plan a corrective one.
The Fix Has to Fit
The most successful kinds of redo efforts are the ones that fit the specific situation that caused the rift. Whatever you find to make up for some wrong or hurt should be proportional to the harm. It should satisfy the right problem. Sometimes the reparative action fits because it is an actual replacement or return of a lost object. If you’ve taken someone else’s belonging, you should return it. If you’ve lost or damaged someone else’s belonging, you should replace it. If the belonging can’t be replaced, you must find a satisfactory substitute or an object whose value is symbolic. You are obligated to restore to the person the “wholeness” they held before you cost them something, or to correct a deficit you caused.
In addition to making your restitution offer fit the harm done, you also have to bear in mind that the way you fix the problem should be a method that suits the person you hurt. Different people prefer different approaches for any kind of communication. Maybe your partner or friend or family member doesn’t like expensive gifts or physical affection. Even if those things communicate in a way that would make you feel good, it behooves you to speak in the language the other person can hear. Often, it’s not the same language you yourself might prefer. Is there a kind of action or material provision that will convey your feeling and repair things for this particular person?
Setting the Record Straight
Setting the record straight may come in the form of publicly accepting blame or owning up to your responsibility or behavior. We, too, may be able to tackle our overdue personal apologies. We, too, can follow our statements of regret with real restitution, including—if it’s indicated—“ correcting the record.” We, too, may be able to reveal or clarify the truth.
Collaboration
Makeup surprises can be nice because they show that the other person is thinking about you and wants you to be happy. For example, flowers, a typical apology gift, may serve as a nice peace offering that opens the door to a more thorough apology. However, they may also make the recipient feel that she or he has to make the sender feel appreciated. Again, the relevant question to think about is, what would actually make up for the mistake or hurt? When possible, restitutive efforts ought to be collaborative. If you don’t know how to make restitution, the best way to find out is to ask.
Making Reparations Helps You, Too
Obviously, restitution is geared toward helping the one who’s been harmed. Your task, as the apologizer, is to restore your partner, friend, or coworker to their status prior to their being harmed. Often, you have a chance to make things better than they were before. It may cost you something, but if you find a satisfying solution, everyone wins.
We probably all understand the human sense of justice that requires you to restore or repair what you’ve damaged. That’s one basic way that making restitution also restores the one who’s caused harm. As you rebalance a wrong, you get to feel better about yourself.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP THREE
Step Four: You must make a convincing plan to prevent the problem from happening again.
Just because you’ve apologized and made up for a specific hurt you inflicted, how can anyone be sure it won’t happen again? The “injured party” often remains wary of repetition. Can people really move on if the same thing can happen again? Is it really repaired if the conditions that produced the hurt still exist? Step Four is the one most often missed by apologizers, even those skilled in relationship repair. But it is where the crucial result resides.
Beyond the cognitive biases we’ve talked about, the overwhelming tendency to continue thinking and doing what we already have thought and done. Not only individual habits but also patterns between people acquire inertial force. As the common understanding goes, if you want to predict future behavior, look at past behavior. What I have also seen, however, is that people—as well as relationships—can change.
Changing the System
Step Four is about creating a set of parameters that will protect against an injury’s recurrence,
It is about solutions. Often, not only is it a search for ways to prevent the exact harm from happening again, but it’s about finding solutions to the larger problem that led to the harm in the first place. The old saying goes that we can’t change anyone but ourselves, but it is also true that shifting our behavior—even to a small degree—can alter the pattern for others enough to protect a hurt person or prevent further damage. Almost always, when things are made more fair for one member of the group, everyone benefits.
Repeated Harm
If you’ve hurt someone in the past and regretted it, you probably promised not to do it again. But if the hurt has happened again, Step Four is particularly crucial. Perhaps an additional error should not doom the whole enterprise, but neither should it go without serious focus. It’s upsetting to find yourselves in the same mess you’ve landed in before. It takes deliberate work for anyone to change their stubborn habits.
Sometimes the “offender” asserts (and believes) that repeated hurtful actions are random, that is, not caused by any particular intention or feeling. However, if troublesome actions become a pattern, a larger conversation needs to take place. You owe it to the one who’s hurt to find a better way to address the problem. Regardless of how you think about it, the tenth time you neglect to follow through on the same commitment lands differently than the first. So does your tenth “I’m sorry” that’s not accompanied by change.
If the harm is associated with compulsive behavior (such as gambling, substance abuse, pornography), the apologizer usually needs mental health treatment. It should be pointed out here that being “in therapy”—attending sessions with a therapist—does not necessarily constitute making actual change that will last and should therefore, in itself, not satisfy Step Four. Even when people are motivated to change their behavior in a therapy setting, good intentions are often insufficient. For long-standing or imbedded habits, most of us require some kind of structured support or change of systems in order to maintain a new pattern of behavior.
Is Redemption Possible?
At base, the question of redemption comes down to whether someone can change. Do we believe it’s possible? Can we change the way we see someone after viewing them in a certain light? What does it take for us to think someone deserves a second chance; that is, when do we allow them to redeem themselves? When a self-defeating or harmful pattern comes to light, some form of soul-searching or greater self-awareness is often called for.
Kathryn Schulz, our “wrongology” expert, wrote that making errors isn’t only a moral problem; “it is also a moral solution, an opportunity to rethink our relationship to ourselves, other people and the world.” The recognition that you’ve hurt someone is fertile ground in which you have the chance to grow new strength, goodness, and a better future.
Build in Systems to Support Positive Change
In personal relationships, repetition of hurtful actions makes it hard to know if a repair will “stick” or just be followed by the same disappointment. No one wants to be that partner who “screwed up again.” Neither, of course, do you want to hurt or let down the person who is willing to try again with you. The question here for Step Four is: What will ensure that you will not make the same hurtful mistake again? You might think that good intentions will simply make it right, and in some cases they will—especially for small, recent habits. But most people don’t change habits easily, permanently, without some structure to support them. People who create some form of a protective plan or system to support new habits, will keep themselves together and moving forward. These strategies can include:
You can let it evolve, as long as everyone stays focused on establishing a new, lasting path to trust. This “administrative solution” may not yet be perfect, but as a shared plan, it can be updated as needed. The most helpful part of this resolution is that the partners are on the same page, dealing with the same problem, rather than glaring at each other across a gulf of misunderstanding and helpless resentment.
If you want a good shot at fully repairing the hurt, you may need to return to the table until you get it right. That’s because our understanding develops over time. We can’t always put into words what’s bothering us right away. Being willing to come back to the conversation, to ask again or try to speak again, gives you more chances to reach understanding and to change the story going forward.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP FOUR
The purpose of Step One is to listen carefully to someone else, so you can learn how that person has been hurt. It’s not a time to share your reasons or explanations, or your benign intentions or countercomplaints. It’s not about alleviating your guilt or shame or any feelings you, the would-be apologizer, have. If you want to apologize, Step One is not about you at all. It’s only about understanding the other person’s experience of hurt.
You Have to Ask and Listen
After a misstep, the first, automatic thing some of us do is say, “I’m sorry.” We hope that’s the end of it. The “magic words” spoken aloud can be delivered as if fulfilling a requirement, reluctant and resented code words that signal the end of a standoff or of a power struggle. But even when “I’m sorry” is a sincere attempt to repair a relationship, it isn’t usually enough. One obvious drawback to saying those words before fully understanding the actual injury is that you might not apologize for the correct thing.
Listening is essentially receptive—and many of us find it more comfortable to take action than to remain patient and silent. Step One can be much harder than saying the words “I’m sorry.” When you ask someone to tell you about their hurt, you put yourself in a position to hear things you hadn’t been aware of—because of your error blindness—and no one enjoys that kind of news. Moreover, the feedback you receive may make you feel guilty or ashamed. Just thinking about it can make you feel defensive and uncomfortable; reluctance to engage in this step can become a major barrier to apologizing well. Further, when you ask for this kind of information, you are also likely to open yourself up to feeling for the other person, empathically. Altogether, such a lot of feeling and complexity may seem unappealing, unwelcome. The temptation to skip this step is understandable. However, it is the base on which everything else is built. The task is to put our defensive reluctance aside, in order to reconnect.
We need help to fully understand how we affect each other because, as we’ve discussed, we humans are very poor at recognizing our own errors and their impact. A common misconception suggests that just thinking about another person and trying to imagine their point of view will produce understanding. But even if you are remarkably intuitive, your guessing has big limitations. It turns out that accurately comprehending another person’s point of view takes more than imagination. It requires getting real information that can be obtained only by asking that person. The goal here is greater common understanding and empathy. As the author and essayist Leslie Jamison writes, “Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing.”
With a familiar person, asking can help you learn about their perspective on relationship events you might not have noticed. Such knowledge may help you grow closer and, together, find ways to challenge long-standing patterns. Because we are often off base about other people’s experience and are poorly equipped to see our mistakes, we need others to tell us when we err.
If you’re lucky enough to have people you trust, you can ask for their help with this. As a kindness, they can offer you the information you need about how you affect them—and you can offer the same to them. That’s one way of creating the condition of psychological safety we’ve been talking about. We miss lots of chances to learn due to what others don’t tell us and what we don’t ask about.
Listening
So how do we learn to ask for feedback, listen honestly, and ultimately understand another person’s perspective?
There are so many possible ways to head off unwelcome feedback about ourselves, about our mistaken, insensitive, or otherwise regrettable behavior.
- “I didn’t mean it like that.”
- “I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.”
- “I was only kidding.”
- “Wait a second, that’s not what I meant!”
- “I didn’t say that!”
- “You’re taking this out of context.”
Hear the Hurt
The power of having your painful truth heard and known cannot be overstated. Creating a safe space to discuss the hurt in a relationship can also begin the process of healing—even well after the offenses occurred. For many, hearing another person’s hurt doesn’t come easily. On any scale, the skill of listening to and honoring someone else’s experience can be challenging. Validation of another person’s perspective requires listening in an open-minded way, that is, without preconceived ideas.
You Won’t Get It Right, Right Away
Beginning this kind of inquiry also requires us to challenge our perfectionism. Perfectionism is usually defined as having excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations. According to psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, this characteristic has grown in prevalence over the past three decades, possibly due to cultural factors including “competitive individualism.” Believing that you should already be on top of something can interfere with the humble and curious stance that facilitates learning. If you think you should get things right, you’re less likely to seek help and less likely to try again if you don’t get it right the first time.
Moreover, we resist looking at our mistakes for another, more basic reason. In neuroscientific terms, our brains themselves are driven to be efficient; noticing and correcting an error is way more “work.” It costs your brain more energy than just going along uncritically. Often, would-be apologizers interrupt or short-circuit this step with defensive maneuvers, attempts to justify themselves or diminish the other’s complaint. You might say things like:
- “It wasn’t as bad as you’re saying.”
- “Why are you bringing that up now / again / like that?”
- “I was only doing what I thought you wanted.”
Fixing something specific, giving someone what you think they need, can feel terrific. But it’s denying the other person a chance to speak their full truth and be heard. Inquiry requires that you give up that powerful and satisfying fix-it role and adopt a humbler posture,
It’s natural to feel defensive when hearing about how our actions hurt a friend or loved
one. That’s why I encourage the person who’s been hurt to use language that is as neutral as possible and employ the familiar practice of making “I” statements.
How Step One Often Comes Up
The most common Step One opportunity arises when someone tells you you’ve hurt them or had an unwanted impact on them. That’s a very good time to override your defensiveness—no easy feat—and ask for more information. Sometimes it takes time and more than one try for you to be open to facing the hurt you’ve caused.
How Long Does It Take?
Many hurts, especially old ones, take more than one brief conversation to express and understand. How long it takes isn’t universal or predictable, which can be frustrating to the apologizer who wants to move on. But you have to have the whole conversation. If you remember that this process is not about the endgame of absolution, you will understand that it takes time, attention, and patience not only to restore a relationship, but also to make it stronger than it was.
After major injuries, such as betrayals or unfaithfulness, hearing the whole experience of the hurt person can take a relatively long time. Oftentimes, before Step One is complete, some parts of the story must be heard more than once. Change and relief won’t come until the hurt person is ready to move on. The question “What is enough?” arises in many extended Step One efforts. The process can wear you down. Partners ask, “Shouldn’t she be past it by now?” Or “Will I ever be out of the doghouse?” Understandably, one person or the other may feel tempted to cut their losses. Couples can get through almost anything if they stay the course with patience, perseverance, and compassion. Pay attention to loving intentions and small moments of mutual learning. They are not as exciting as dramatic change, nor as conclusive as fairy-tale happy endings, but if you’re building something to last, it takes time and careful work to reassemble.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP ONE
- “I thought I knew what happened, but apparently I’m missing something. Would you fill me in, please?”
- “I said I was sorry for what I did, but it seems like there’s something else I don’t get.”
- “I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on, but I think there might be more I should know about how what I did affected you.”
- “Obviously I touched a raw nerve, and I want to know more about it so I don’t do it again.”
- “Look, something I did hit you in a really bad way and I truly want to understand what happened.”
- “I want to understand what’s going on.
- Please tell me all about it.”
- “I want to understand. I’ll do my best just to listen.”
- “Thank you for bringing up how I affected you. I want to hear about it.”
Step Two: You must articulate a sincere statement of regret. You must acknowledge what you did and how it affected the other person. This is no small feat for most of us, especially when we didn’t intend to hurt someone.
In Step Two, you show that you understand the way(s) the other person has been hurt and that you care about it. This is when you express your empathy. You also hold yourself accountable for any actions that have contributed to the negative experience of the other. To state one’s regret, is much easier once our defenses have lowered. But taking responsibility for repair doesn’t always mean accepting blame. You take responsibility for the impact you had on the other person, even if you didn’t intend to hurt them. It can be hard to accept, but when you begin a real apology, nothing about you (the apologizer)—your motives, your character, your justification—is relevant.
You might mistakenly focus on yourself for any number of other reasons.
- Perhaps you can’t see the other person’s experience or perhaps you want to avoid being held accountable.
- You evade responsibility when you deny the fact of your error.
- Many people do not believe they are at fault for a problem, so they don’t want to address the reaction another person has.
- We don’t like the idea that we caused pain because we don’t want to think of ourselves as “the kind of person” who hurts others. It’s understandable to want to preserve a self-concept as a good, nice person, but the two are not contradictory: The kind of person who causes pain, often by mistake, is every kind of person.
We’ve seen how tempting it is to confuse our intentions, particularly our conscious, fully aware intentions, with the effects of our actions, but they are somewhat independent of each other.
In their studies of human cognition, Princeton University researchers Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske found that your perceptions of intent influence your perceptions of impact. In other words, if you believe someone’s harmful actions are inadvertent mistakes, you tend to minimize their cost to others. You inaccurately estimate: If the intent wasn’t bad, the impact can’t be so big. In fact, accidental hurt can be very big.
Between people, the ideal outcome is not simply justice, but to create connection and greater mutual understanding. That’s what relationship repair is all about. But, it isn’t what normal brain functioning is all about. We are cognitively and perceptually biased to believe we are right, despite extensive evidence that we are often wrong. Frequently, we fail to consider others’ perspectives, we don’t see our mistakes or the negative effects we have, and we view
the world from our own points of view.
Guidelines for Step Two
Step Two, the statement of regret and responsibility, is what most people think of when they hear the word “apology.” It’s of central importance for sure but usually isn’t the whole story. In this section, you’ll find several guidelines for making good apology statements. But first I want to point out a few important truths:
- This impulse to make things right with another person is one of the most basic human tendencies. There are no magic words, but the words you need already reside within you. (Although many of us need guidance about how to apologize, you can make your Step Two messages to important people, without anyone telling you what to say.)What lies in your heart, that is, your sincere concern about the hurt someone else experienced and your remorse about having caused it, is far more important than the technique you use to express it. Listen to your heart on this. The biggest reason to engage your mind is to get past your resistances, so you can get to Step Two.
- Take responsibility for restoring trust. In order to take personal responsibility for fixing something that’s gone awry, you have to handle critical details like initiating conversation with the other person. In a personal relationship, it’s good to give the other person some say over the circumstances of the conversation. Bad timing accounts for many failed communication attempts. let the other know you intend to mend the breach between you. If the other person isn’t ready or doesn’t reciprocate, sometimes a wordless gesture toward reconnection, like a hand on the shoulder, is the only first step you can take in the beginning.
- Talk directly to the person affected. Indirect inquiry, that is, speaking to someone else about what the hurt person felt, can be tempting. It’s face-to-face humanity that makes the difference in a statement of empathy and responsibility.
- It’s about the other person, not you. The essence of your Step Two statement is compassion for the hurt person, not your own redemption. Your message should be grounded in their experience. Emphasizing the human connection in relationship repair, social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson concluded from their study of self-justification in relationships that, in order to ensure success as a couple, you must put empathy for your partner above defending your own territory.
- Be humble. It’s underrated. An effective apology requires a combination of courage and humility—to be able both to face what could be scary and unpleasant and to be vulnerable. As we’ve discussed, some misinterpret the demonstration of humility to be a sign of weakness; in truth, it may be an indication of tremendous inner strength. Practicing humility requires you to be open to recognition of your limitations and to learning more. What researchers call the “quiet ego” is a similar construct, linked to a balance between the interests of self and other, as well as to self-awareness and compassion.
- Be accountable for what you did—or didn’t do. This means full disclosure.
- Mean it when you say it. If your apology doesn’t seem genuine, it won’t be effective. This is a moment in life when honest responsibility taking is your only real option. The most crucial thing people who’ve been hurt need is for their pain to be seen and cared about. That isn’t the whole story, of course, but if you can communicate empathic understanding and sincere regret, you’re on your way to an effective apology.
How Not to Say “I’m Sorry”
You’ve probably issued inadequate Step Twos yourself. You may have phrased your statement of regret in one of these misguided ways:
- Any Step Two that begins with “I’m sorry, but…” is likely to fail. Whatever follows the “but” (“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” “it was a joke,” “you’re too sensitive,” “you started it”) invalidates the apology.
- Similarly, “I’m sorry if…” (“anything I said upset you,” “anyone was bothered by what I did,” “you thought I meant x or y”) suggests that the apologizer doesn’t really take responsibility for any actual injury.
- Use of the passive voice: “I’m sorry that…” (“ you were hurt by how things unfolded,” “that unfair things were allowed to happen,” “that I was forced by a bad situation to do what I’d promised not to do”) fails to show that you hold yourself accountable for your actions or their results.
- An apology statement that ends with “not my fault” or “I didn’t mean it” decidedly doesn’t take personal responsibility.
- A statement that skips the actual effect on the other person and focuses on their (misguided) reaction: “I’m sorry that…” (“you got so mad at me,” “you see it that way,” “you’re so upset by this”) might sound like an apology, but it isn’t one. Vagueness also is a big drawback if you want to take a good Step Two: “I’m sorry…” (“for what happened,” or “for any hurt caused,” or “for poor communication”).
- An attempt to stop the conversation, rather than understand the injury (“ I said I’m sorry; what more do you want?”), or to require that the other person move on (“ Please forgive me; I can’t stand you being mad at me anymore”) won’t be satisfying and won’t resolve the problem. “Sorry about that!” conveys an informal attitude of “Oops, too bad, dude! Do I look like I care?” It diminishes both the apologizer and the hurt person.
- Lengthy, complex statements that are so obscure no one can tell what’s being said. Statements that explain the circumstances or any other considerations at length, are not real apologies. No rationalizations or justifications fit in Step Two. Save them for later if you still need them.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP TWO
- “I’m so sorry that my drinking too much/arguing with your sister/arriving so late/ making light of a serious occasion ruined such an important day for you. There is no excuse good enough.”
- “It’s my fault I didn’t plan ahead better so the train delay wouldn’t have made me so late. I’m really sorry.”
- “I should have realized how much it would mean to you for me to come with you to your cousin’s funeral. I’m so, so sorry you had to face that hard time on your own.”
- “I can see how deeply my attempt at humor actually hurt you. I wish I could take it back.”
- “I wish I’d thought to ask you before ordering the nonrefundable tickets. I can see that I’ve put you in an awful position.”
Step Three: You must make reparations. This can include material restitution, although in relationships that’s less likely to occur.
The relevant question for Step Three is: What, if anything, would make up for the hurt or the wrong itself? What kind of restitution, reparations, or amends would restore balance or fairness that’s been disrupted? In personal relationships, the goal of restitution or reparations may be seen as making the relationship whole, restoring trust, or even strengthening the connection. As such, most personal reparations are not monetary (or not wholly so). Reparations may not seem to apply to intimate partnerships, but Step Three can inspire creative solutions that get to the heart of the damage.
In the relationship realm, sometimes just the expression of sincere penitence is enough to begin healing, but some form of restitution is usually necessary for a thorough process.
Between individuals, Step Three could include “setting the record straight” in the eyes of other people, taking a second (or third) chance to get something right, or providing material goods that have symbolic or monetary value, or both.
The familiar expression “words are cheap” is relevant here. An apology has to be backed up with something of value and, if possible, by something that fits the harm done. Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup, once said, “You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.” The words “I’m sorry” are not magic words that make things right. Despite the difficulty many of us have uttering those words, they are simply not enough in themselves. Further, those two words can distract us from the rest of the real, necessary work.
Second Chances
Sometimes a makeup occasion, another chance to try again at something that went badly the first time, can seem silly and self-conscious, but often it is more powerful than you might anticipate. If you’ve blown an important event or forgotten an anniversary or birthday, it can be a great idea to plan a corrective one.
The Fix Has to Fit
The most successful kinds of redo efforts are the ones that fit the specific situation that caused the rift. Whatever you find to make up for some wrong or hurt should be proportional to the harm. It should satisfy the right problem. Sometimes the reparative action fits because it is an actual replacement or return of a lost object. If you’ve taken someone else’s belonging, you should return it. If you’ve lost or damaged someone else’s belonging, you should replace it. If the belonging can’t be replaced, you must find a satisfactory substitute or an object whose value is symbolic. You are obligated to restore to the person the “wholeness” they held before you cost them something, or to correct a deficit you caused.
In addition to making your restitution offer fit the harm done, you also have to bear in mind that the way you fix the problem should be a method that suits the person you hurt. Different people prefer different approaches for any kind of communication. Maybe your partner or friend or family member doesn’t like expensive gifts or physical affection. Even if those things communicate in a way that would make you feel good, it behooves you to speak in the language the other person can hear. Often, it’s not the same language you yourself might prefer. Is there a kind of action or material provision that will convey your feeling and repair things for this particular person?
Setting the Record Straight
Setting the record straight may come in the form of publicly accepting blame or owning up to your responsibility or behavior. We, too, may be able to tackle our overdue personal apologies. We, too, can follow our statements of regret with real restitution, including—if it’s indicated—“ correcting the record.” We, too, may be able to reveal or clarify the truth.
Collaboration
Makeup surprises can be nice because they show that the other person is thinking about you and wants you to be happy. For example, flowers, a typical apology gift, may serve as a nice peace offering that opens the door to a more thorough apology. However, they may also make the recipient feel that she or he has to make the sender feel appreciated. Again, the relevant question to think about is, what would actually make up for the mistake or hurt? When possible, restitutive efforts ought to be collaborative. If you don’t know how to make restitution, the best way to find out is to ask.
Making Reparations Helps You, Too
Obviously, restitution is geared toward helping the one who’s been harmed. Your task, as the apologizer, is to restore your partner, friend, or coworker to their status prior to their being harmed. Often, you have a chance to make things better than they were before. It may cost you something, but if you find a satisfying solution, everyone wins.
We probably all understand the human sense of justice that requires you to restore or repair what you’ve damaged. That’s one basic way that making restitution also restores the one who’s caused harm. As you rebalance a wrong, you get to feel better about yourself.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP THREE
- “I want to help heal your hurt. I’ve got some ideas how. Can we talk about them?”
- “Is there something I can do to make up for how much my mistake hurt you?”
- “What would help you be able to trust me again?”
- “Will you please tell me if you see anything else I can do to make this right?”
- “I’d like to make sure that everyone who was affected by what happened understands that I’m responsible for it. Can we talk about how I can do that?”
Step Four: You must make a convincing plan to prevent the problem from happening again.
Just because you’ve apologized and made up for a specific hurt you inflicted, how can anyone be sure it won’t happen again? The “injured party” often remains wary of repetition. Can people really move on if the same thing can happen again? Is it really repaired if the conditions that produced the hurt still exist? Step Four is the one most often missed by apologizers, even those skilled in relationship repair. But it is where the crucial result resides.
Beyond the cognitive biases we’ve talked about, the overwhelming tendency to continue thinking and doing what we already have thought and done. Not only individual habits but also patterns between people acquire inertial force. As the common understanding goes, if you want to predict future behavior, look at past behavior. What I have also seen, however, is that people—as well as relationships—can change.
Changing the System
Step Four is about creating a set of parameters that will protect against an injury’s recurrence,
It is about solutions. Often, not only is it a search for ways to prevent the exact harm from happening again, but it’s about finding solutions to the larger problem that led to the harm in the first place. The old saying goes that we can’t change anyone but ourselves, but it is also true that shifting our behavior—even to a small degree—can alter the pattern for others enough to protect a hurt person or prevent further damage. Almost always, when things are made more fair for one member of the group, everyone benefits.
Repeated Harm
If you’ve hurt someone in the past and regretted it, you probably promised not to do it again. But if the hurt has happened again, Step Four is particularly crucial. Perhaps an additional error should not doom the whole enterprise, but neither should it go without serious focus. It’s upsetting to find yourselves in the same mess you’ve landed in before. It takes deliberate work for anyone to change their stubborn habits.
Sometimes the “offender” asserts (and believes) that repeated hurtful actions are random, that is, not caused by any particular intention or feeling. However, if troublesome actions become a pattern, a larger conversation needs to take place. You owe it to the one who’s hurt to find a better way to address the problem. Regardless of how you think about it, the tenth time you neglect to follow through on the same commitment lands differently than the first. So does your tenth “I’m sorry” that’s not accompanied by change.
If the harm is associated with compulsive behavior (such as gambling, substance abuse, pornography), the apologizer usually needs mental health treatment. It should be pointed out here that being “in therapy”—attending sessions with a therapist—does not necessarily constitute making actual change that will last and should therefore, in itself, not satisfy Step Four. Even when people are motivated to change their behavior in a therapy setting, good intentions are often insufficient. For long-standing or imbedded habits, most of us require some kind of structured support or change of systems in order to maintain a new pattern of behavior.
Is Redemption Possible?
At base, the question of redemption comes down to whether someone can change. Do we believe it’s possible? Can we change the way we see someone after viewing them in a certain light? What does it take for us to think someone deserves a second chance; that is, when do we allow them to redeem themselves? When a self-defeating or harmful pattern comes to light, some form of soul-searching or greater self-awareness is often called for.
Kathryn Schulz, our “wrongology” expert, wrote that making errors isn’t only a moral problem; “it is also a moral solution, an opportunity to rethink our relationship to ourselves, other people and the world.” The recognition that you’ve hurt someone is fertile ground in which you have the chance to grow new strength, goodness, and a better future.
Build in Systems to Support Positive Change
In personal relationships, repetition of hurtful actions makes it hard to know if a repair will “stick” or just be followed by the same disappointment. No one wants to be that partner who “screwed up again.” Neither, of course, do you want to hurt or let down the person who is willing to try again with you. The question here for Step Four is: What will ensure that you will not make the same hurtful mistake again? You might think that good intentions will simply make it right, and in some cases they will—especially for small, recent habits. But most people don’t change habits easily, permanently, without some structure to support them. People who create some form of a protective plan or system to support new habits, will keep themselves together and moving forward. These strategies can include:
- pursuing more self-understanding
- asking for accountability partners
- setting up administrative or scheduling routines
- using technology to stay on track
- establishing deliberate new communication routines
- creating follow-up systems to catch early signs of things going awry
- schedule check-ins and adjust your plan if it doesn’t work.
You can let it evolve, as long as everyone stays focused on establishing a new, lasting path to trust. This “administrative solution” may not yet be perfect, but as a shared plan, it can be updated as needed. The most helpful part of this resolution is that the partners are on the same page, dealing with the same problem, rather than glaring at each other across a gulf of misunderstanding and helpless resentment.
If you want a good shot at fully repairing the hurt, you may need to return to the table until you get it right. That’s because our understanding develops over time. We can’t always put into words what’s bothering us right away. Being willing to come back to the conversation, to ask again or try to speak again, gives you more chances to reach understanding and to change the story going forward.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP FOUR
- “Here’s how I will make sure this never happens again.”
- “I want to do whatever I can to earn your trust again.”
- “I promise to take responsibility for changing my routine/ habits/ mind-set.”
- “Can we figure out a way together to change the way we do family communications?”
- “Will you please tell me if you see that we’re sliding into the old pattern again?”
- “I really want all this pain and challenge to make me and us better than we were before.”
PART 3: WHAT, THERE’S MORE?
The Aftermath
The best aspect of a good apology is that everyone wins. Almost universally, a sincere apology results in positive regard, rather than retribution or anger. Together, both—or all—parties can home in on compassionate accountability, rather than doubling down on their own sense of right and wrong. Everyone involved can get a fresh start.
We generally think of hurt feelings and big misunderstandings as bad things. But such disappointments are often necessary for the development of a sturdy relationship. Following a painful disappointment and real repair, something unique is born. This new relationship is an original creation, made by the people who mended the problem. Without mistakes—some of which are inevitable—people wouldn’t have the chance to learn so much about each other or to build better ways of communicating. When you heal a relationship breach, you develop a better understanding of the other person, and you end up being more understood yourself. When all the steps are followed and the apology is accepted, there is a whole new set of possibilities.
What I see in relationships in which an effective repair has been made is not just that resentment, distance, and scorekeeping are reduced. Shared learning and mutual openness let light into previously opaque patterns or established habits of communication. The “old way” of being together is over, which is why well-known couple’s therapist Esther Perel is known to ask partners after the crisis of infidelity, “What do you want your new relationship to be like?” She wrote, “To repair is to re-pair.” A new relationship makes surprising things possible.
Many believe that a good relationship shouldn’t encounter serious breaches like infidelity, but mutual trust can actually become much stronger after such a problem. A couple grows into its own unique strength as a result of healing together from hurt. If you can hang in—and keep returning to each other—with enough open-minded goodwill and respect, you become wiser about yourself and about your partner. You become more like the couple you want to be.
How Apologies Make Us Better
The process of bending and listening, the softening itself, is valuable. We’ve heard about how better connections with other people improve your physical health. In addition, a well-made apology enhances your spiritual well-being and potentially expands your range of humanness. In other words, by facing your own mistakes, you can find a greater sense of compassion for others’.
Facing your own failure or error can make your understanding of other people’s failings more complex. Rather than a morally simplistic view, you don’t have to think of other people as either like you or unlike you. By dealing directly with your responsibility to someone you’ve caused pain, you transform wrongdoing into an opportunity for positive change. When guilt is allowed to push you to make a relationship repair, it becomes transformed into self-respect.
Unfinished Business
Influential educator Stephen Covey wrote, “If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” That’s the right order for our apologizer to follow, too.
Many conflicts between people are more complicated than a four-step model, used once, can fully resolve. Especially when the situations have been ongoing, there are usually hurts and complaints on both sides. I might hurt you unknowingly and you might react in a way that hurts me—which makes me feel that you are the cause of my pain, so I react negatively, and so on, over time. If things have become snarled into a tangle of reactions and counterreactions, it can be a dicey situation in which to offer an apology. For one thing, whose responsibility is it to go first? For another, in a troubled relationship, people often lack faith that they will get their “turns.” How do you make it fair to everyone involved? If everyone feels hurt, no one may be inclined to apologize. But if one brave and humble person is willing to offer a sincere apology, you have a way to begin the healing that’s needed.
If you are the one taking the first step toward making an apology—regardless of how hurt or angry you are about something the other person did—you must set your own need for an apology aside, temporarily. That’s much harder than it might sound. It requires remembering that the point here is to do what you can do to restore your relationship, while keeping track of your needs, too. It’s only after the first round of the apology process (all four steps) that you get to bring up your own grievance. At that point, roles are exchanged, and the person previously in the role of injured party becomes the apologizer and has to inquire and listen, and so on. We’re talking about taking turns, so that everyone’s hurt is dealt with. The first apology is not always the final, tidy resolution; rather, it can be just the first round, the beginning of an ongoing conversation—or one that can be reopened when needed.
What About the Apology Recipient?
If you’ve been hurt, it is in no way your sole responsibility to repair your own hurt, but you may want to influence how an apology goes.
If a loved one approaches you to begin an apology, you might be tempted to accept it before it’s complete
When you’ve been hurt by someone, you have a wide range of choices. At the time, that may not be apparent. Heretofore, we’ve addressed the reasons a person might avoid making an apology, but we haven’t yet considered why someone might avoid asking for an apology or might not want to accept one that’s offered. To fully mend a relationship, the apologizer must take crucial steps, but the injured person has important roles to consider in this process as well.
Ask for the Apology You Need—or Not
The most likely way you will ever receive a good apology is by asking for it. As we’ve seen, most people are apt to overlook their own mistakes and will resist facing them. Unless you tell them, they might not know how they’ve affected you. Within your relationship, you may need to initiate by telling the other person that you’re hurt, upset, or angry and you want them to address the problem. It may seem straightforward, but it could be almost as hard as making the apology itself, for several reasons.
Accept the Apology Offered—or Not
Remember that the offer to make amends is always an invitation, not a demand. Although you may often want to, there is no obligation to accept an apology or even participate in the conversation. The one who wishes to make something right enters the process because he or she wants to address emotional guilt or moral pain—as well as to help you, the injured one, heal. It’s the right thing for that person, but you, the recipient, might not feel the same way.
Shape the Apology—or Not
It’s critical to determine your particular timing needs: the time at which you’re ready to begin the conversation, the time it takes you to respond, the time you need to become aware of what you want from the other person, and the time it takes you to be ready to move on from the problem—if that turns out to be possible. Even after a good apology has been undertaken, recovering from hurt can take time. In some circumstances, you encounter information that’s new to you. You may need time to absorb the news, to consider what it means to you, and to discuss it further.
If you see that the other person is taking a risk by beginning an apology, you may want to embrace their effort. But it’s important for you to take as long as you need. Ask for patience. You may need to sit with the apology for a while in order to discern if you need anything else. For a relationship apology to work, it ultimately has to be a two-person event: The recipient, an active participant, receives and shapes the apology. For example, “Now I can see that you really understand how this hurt me”; “How can I be sure you won’t do it again?” The affected party has the power to shape the process, not only in terms of presenting their side of what happened and its impact, but also in determining what requirements the offender must meet.
These are parallel questions you can ask regarding personal hurts:
Change the Future of Your Relationship—or Not
What you may have is a relationship that has suffered, and, if you’re lucky, someone has made an effort to heal the hurt. Following an apology, you want to prevent future hurt. Here are a few rules of thumb that may help.
Remember that fairy tales are misleading. Even Snow White and Prince Charming, if they have a lasting relationship, may have had to address his jealous feelings about the seven dwarves. At times, all relationships require work. As with an automobile, apologies are repairs and you sometimes need maintenance to keep things running well. You and your partner may want to change your automatic reactions to problematic feelings that arise from time to time. Instead of impediments, think of them as opportunities to improve the health of your relationship’s engine. Perhaps the best “ever after” couples are those who continue to be honest, vulnerable, and willing to repair misunderstandings.
Start as you mean to continue. Like many people, you may put your best—that is, most accepting and agreeable—foot forward in the beginning of a relationship. The risk therein is that you misinform the other person about what’s actually okay or good for you. The mistake of letting too many small misdeeds go unchallenged creates a bad pattern that’s harder to break. It behooves you to know yourself and what you can comfortably tolerate versus what will drive you crazy or make you feel bad. You are teaching your partner or friend how to treat you. Unfortunately, this beginning-relationship pattern sometimes resets following a crisis and resolution, when both people feel tender and relieved. It may feel unnatural to communicate preferences when you’re just grateful that you’re no longer fighting, but you must—or you could be setting up the next problem.
Clarity is kindness. Nice people spend a lot of time trying not to hurt anyone. Often that involves avoiding the truth or keeping things unclear. Sometimes, you might put off informing someone of an uncomfortable or complicated reality. You think that it’s out of kindness, and maybe it is, but when the other shoe drops, that is, the person figures it out or you have to tell them, it usually hurts more. They ask, “Why didn’t you tell me?” and you say, “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Being clear is not necessarily unkind. Of course, it could be, but it’s worth practicing to become better at presenting the truth in a kind way. This is also a social justice truism: Be brave enough to be clear and truthful. Direct communication can prevent later, worse hurt, as well as many kinds of misunderstandings.
Forgive—or Not. Just as you are not required to accept an apology at all, you are not required to forgive someone who’s hurt you. A person may owe you an apology, but you don’t owe them forgiveness.
Forgiving someone who’s harmed you may help them or the community, but the biggest beneficiary of your forgiveness often is you. Exercising forgiveness lowers blood pressure, heart rate, and the amount of cortisol (a stress hormone) released into the system. A better-functioning immune system leads to better overall health and reduced risk of cardiovascular events.
The Stanford Forgiveness Project has found that “skills-based forgiveness training” can reduce stress and physical health symptoms, including improved immune system functioning. Dr. Frederic Luskin, founder of the project, says that forgiveness is a learnable skill—consisting of steps that include self-care, stress management, and changing perspective—and that it just takes practice.
For many people, religious faith requires them to forgive (or try to forgive) someone who’s caused harm. Freeing yourself from resentments and past harms can be a frankly spiritual discipline. Christians try to follow Jesus’s dictum to turn the other cheek rather than respond to harm with a counterattack. During the High Holidays Jews find ways to forgive people who’ve hurt them across the previous year and to let go of any grudges. If you can’t work things out with the other person, at the end of the day, how you handle your injuries and hurts sometimes turns out to be between you and your higher self or between you and your God.
Recognition of this crucial aspect of human character is essential both to make a good apology and to forgive someone: We are not frozen forever at our worst moments, nor are we stuck always in our most painful times.
A quotation by businessman and writer Paul Boese captures the possibility inherent in this truth: “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”
Go for Vengeance—or Not
After someone hurts you, the urge to seek revenge is understandable. It’s just as natural and perennial as it is to have the grace and strength to forgive and, especially in the beginning, comes more easily. You may want the person to be punished, to suffer because you’ve suffered.
Rather than imposing punishments, wise parents have long used natural consequences (allowing unfavorable outcomes that follow misbehavior) and restorative approaches (teaching the child to make restitution or restore what was broken), in order to help their children learn right from wrong. In behavioral mental health treatment designed to increase a desired behavior, a schedule of positive reinforcement is much more likely to be recommended than punishment. Punishment is less effective for changing human behavior, particularly in the long run.
The best aspect of a good apology is that everyone wins. Almost universally, a sincere apology results in positive regard, rather than retribution or anger. Together, both—or all—parties can home in on compassionate accountability, rather than doubling down on their own sense of right and wrong. Everyone involved can get a fresh start.
We generally think of hurt feelings and big misunderstandings as bad things. But such disappointments are often necessary for the development of a sturdy relationship. Following a painful disappointment and real repair, something unique is born. This new relationship is an original creation, made by the people who mended the problem. Without mistakes—some of which are inevitable—people wouldn’t have the chance to learn so much about each other or to build better ways of communicating. When you heal a relationship breach, you develop a better understanding of the other person, and you end up being more understood yourself. When all the steps are followed and the apology is accepted, there is a whole new set of possibilities.
What I see in relationships in which an effective repair has been made is not just that resentment, distance, and scorekeeping are reduced. Shared learning and mutual openness let light into previously opaque patterns or established habits of communication. The “old way” of being together is over, which is why well-known couple’s therapist Esther Perel is known to ask partners after the crisis of infidelity, “What do you want your new relationship to be like?” She wrote, “To repair is to re-pair.” A new relationship makes surprising things possible.
Many believe that a good relationship shouldn’t encounter serious breaches like infidelity, but mutual trust can actually become much stronger after such a problem. A couple grows into its own unique strength as a result of healing together from hurt. If you can hang in—and keep returning to each other—with enough open-minded goodwill and respect, you become wiser about yourself and about your partner. You become more like the couple you want to be.
How Apologies Make Us Better
The process of bending and listening, the softening itself, is valuable. We’ve heard about how better connections with other people improve your physical health. In addition, a well-made apology enhances your spiritual well-being and potentially expands your range of humanness. In other words, by facing your own mistakes, you can find a greater sense of compassion for others’.
Facing your own failure or error can make your understanding of other people’s failings more complex. Rather than a morally simplistic view, you don’t have to think of other people as either like you or unlike you. By dealing directly with your responsibility to someone you’ve caused pain, you transform wrongdoing into an opportunity for positive change. When guilt is allowed to push you to make a relationship repair, it becomes transformed into self-respect.
Unfinished Business
Influential educator Stephen Covey wrote, “If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” That’s the right order for our apologizer to follow, too.
Many conflicts between people are more complicated than a four-step model, used once, can fully resolve. Especially when the situations have been ongoing, there are usually hurts and complaints on both sides. I might hurt you unknowingly and you might react in a way that hurts me—which makes me feel that you are the cause of my pain, so I react negatively, and so on, over time. If things have become snarled into a tangle of reactions and counterreactions, it can be a dicey situation in which to offer an apology. For one thing, whose responsibility is it to go first? For another, in a troubled relationship, people often lack faith that they will get their “turns.” How do you make it fair to everyone involved? If everyone feels hurt, no one may be inclined to apologize. But if one brave and humble person is willing to offer a sincere apology, you have a way to begin the healing that’s needed.
If you are the one taking the first step toward making an apology—regardless of how hurt or angry you are about something the other person did—you must set your own need for an apology aside, temporarily. That’s much harder than it might sound. It requires remembering that the point here is to do what you can do to restore your relationship, while keeping track of your needs, too. It’s only after the first round of the apology process (all four steps) that you get to bring up your own grievance. At that point, roles are exchanged, and the person previously in the role of injured party becomes the apologizer and has to inquire and listen, and so on. We’re talking about taking turns, so that everyone’s hurt is dealt with. The first apology is not always the final, tidy resolution; rather, it can be just the first round, the beginning of an ongoing conversation—or one that can be reopened when needed.
What About the Apology Recipient?
If you’ve been hurt, it is in no way your sole responsibility to repair your own hurt, but you may want to influence how an apology goes.
- How can you ask for and guide an apology so it will be genuinely satisfying and healing?
- How can you decide whether or not to accept an apology at all?
If a loved one approaches you to begin an apology, you might be tempted to accept it before it’s complete
- because you appreciate the other person’s effort and sincerity
- because you want to let them off the hook
- because you are uncomfortable with the whole thing.
When you’ve been hurt by someone, you have a wide range of choices. At the time, that may not be apparent. Heretofore, we’ve addressed the reasons a person might avoid making an apology, but we haven’t yet considered why someone might avoid asking for an apology or might not want to accept one that’s offered. To fully mend a relationship, the apologizer must take crucial steps, but the injured person has important roles to consider in this process as well.
Ask for the Apology You Need—or Not
The most likely way you will ever receive a good apology is by asking for it. As we’ve seen, most people are apt to overlook their own mistakes and will resist facing them. Unless you tell them, they might not know how they’ve affected you. Within your relationship, you may need to initiate by telling the other person that you’re hurt, upset, or angry and you want them to address the problem. It may seem straightforward, but it could be almost as hard as making the apology itself, for several reasons.
- You don’t like conflict. The overarching wish to avoid any unpleasantness can keep you from opening a conversation about the hurt you feel. The same complications, drawbacks, and advantages exist here as they do for the potential apologizer.
- You don’t trust the other person. The one who hurt you may not seem able to do what an apology takes. You lack faith in their ability to deal with the necessary steps or the extent to which they care.
- You don’t trust yourself. You doubt your own feelings, and/or aren’t sure your experience of what happened is accurate. You may not believe that you deserve someone’s effort to make amends for something that’s hurt you.
- You don’t trust the relationship. Either because it’s too new or because you’ve avoided facing problems, you have little experience dealing with hard things together. Or perhaps you are in a relationship where you do not have equal power or legitimacy to bring up something that will challenge the other person. Discussing problems also runs counter to the model of romantic love we have learned from movies and fairy tales, wherein two lovestruck people instantly become one pair of soul mates, with no mistakes or misunderstandings in the happily ever after.
- You don’t trust that things can change. Old roles, including ones you played in your original family, sometimes get a powerful hold on you. You may believe that you are doomed to continue in familiar patterns. Just as we’ve talked about how hard it can be to change a potential apologizer’s habitual stance, your habits are stubborn, too. Asking for an apology may be a completely different script than you grew up with or than you’ve spoken before. To change requires not only that you “retrain” yourself to ask for what you need, but also that you develop faith that your relationship can change. The only reasons to work that hard are that you really want this relationship and that you want it to be as good as it can be.
Accept the Apology Offered—or Not
Remember that the offer to make amends is always an invitation, not a demand. Although you may often want to, there is no obligation to accept an apology or even participate in the conversation. The one who wishes to make something right enters the process because he or she wants to address emotional guilt or moral pain—as well as to help you, the injured one, heal. It’s the right thing for that person, but you, the recipient, might not feel the same way.
- Don’t accept an apology too soon. Of course, there are also times when you just aren’t ready for an apology yet. In an ongoing relationship, if you’re too angry or raw to accept a loved one’s amends, it pays to leave the door explicitly open for future repair opportunities. (“I’m not ready to talk about this right now, but I will want to at some point. Will you try again tomorrow?”) The mistake of forgiving too soon or too lightly, can lead to an unfortunate pattern in which the hurt isn’t really repaired. It can leave one or both people feeling as though there is unresolved business, uncertain about whether any further amends are called for. In these instances, the hurt stays present under the surface. Then, whenever the next hurt inevitably arises, both people are surprised by a larger reaction than the current injury calls for. This is a common reason couples consider therapy: Large reactions to apparently small mistakes confuse everyone. Also, an incomplete repair functions like one that’s been missed entirely. Until it’s resolved, the air isn’t really clear.
- The question of trust. A profound reason not to accept an apology offer is if you don’t believe the person is sincere. If you don’t trust the person at all, you mustn’t engage in the repair process by revealing any vulnerable feelings. On the other hand, if you think the person is probably trustworthy, this process is a pretty good testing ground. Taking the risk to trust a bit can reveal whether or not it’s deserved; depending on how it goes, your trust grows or diminishes.
- For many reasons, you might want to accept. When you receive or witness another person’s sincere apology, you might feel receptive and want to accept it with the attitude of compassionate accountability. That is, you know the wrong is real, but you also believe in the redemptive possibility of making things right.
Shape the Apology—or Not
It’s critical to determine your particular timing needs: the time at which you’re ready to begin the conversation, the time it takes you to respond, the time you need to become aware of what you want from the other person, and the time it takes you to be ready to move on from the problem—if that turns out to be possible. Even after a good apology has been undertaken, recovering from hurt can take time. In some circumstances, you encounter information that’s new to you. You may need time to absorb the news, to consider what it means to you, and to discuss it further.
If you see that the other person is taking a risk by beginning an apology, you may want to embrace their effort. But it’s important for you to take as long as you need. Ask for patience. You may need to sit with the apology for a while in order to discern if you need anything else. For a relationship apology to work, it ultimately has to be a two-person event: The recipient, an active participant, receives and shapes the apology. For example, “Now I can see that you really understand how this hurt me”; “How can I be sure you won’t do it again?” The affected party has the power to shape the process, not only in terms of presenting their side of what happened and its impact, but also in determining what requirements the offender must meet.
These are parallel questions you can ask regarding personal hurts:
- What would restore you to wholeness?
- How can the other person make this wrong right?
Change the Future of Your Relationship—or Not
What you may have is a relationship that has suffered, and, if you’re lucky, someone has made an effort to heal the hurt. Following an apology, you want to prevent future hurt. Here are a few rules of thumb that may help.
Remember that fairy tales are misleading. Even Snow White and Prince Charming, if they have a lasting relationship, may have had to address his jealous feelings about the seven dwarves. At times, all relationships require work. As with an automobile, apologies are repairs and you sometimes need maintenance to keep things running well. You and your partner may want to change your automatic reactions to problematic feelings that arise from time to time. Instead of impediments, think of them as opportunities to improve the health of your relationship’s engine. Perhaps the best “ever after” couples are those who continue to be honest, vulnerable, and willing to repair misunderstandings.
Start as you mean to continue. Like many people, you may put your best—that is, most accepting and agreeable—foot forward in the beginning of a relationship. The risk therein is that you misinform the other person about what’s actually okay or good for you. The mistake of letting too many small misdeeds go unchallenged creates a bad pattern that’s harder to break. It behooves you to know yourself and what you can comfortably tolerate versus what will drive you crazy or make you feel bad. You are teaching your partner or friend how to treat you. Unfortunately, this beginning-relationship pattern sometimes resets following a crisis and resolution, when both people feel tender and relieved. It may feel unnatural to communicate preferences when you’re just grateful that you’re no longer fighting, but you must—or you could be setting up the next problem.
Clarity is kindness. Nice people spend a lot of time trying not to hurt anyone. Often that involves avoiding the truth or keeping things unclear. Sometimes, you might put off informing someone of an uncomfortable or complicated reality. You think that it’s out of kindness, and maybe it is, but when the other shoe drops, that is, the person figures it out or you have to tell them, it usually hurts more. They ask, “Why didn’t you tell me?” and you say, “I didn’t want to hurt you.” Being clear is not necessarily unkind. Of course, it could be, but it’s worth practicing to become better at presenting the truth in a kind way. This is also a social justice truism: Be brave enough to be clear and truthful. Direct communication can prevent later, worse hurt, as well as many kinds of misunderstandings.
Forgive—or Not. Just as you are not required to accept an apology at all, you are not required to forgive someone who’s hurt you. A person may owe you an apology, but you don’t owe them forgiveness.
Forgiving someone who’s harmed you may help them or the community, but the biggest beneficiary of your forgiveness often is you. Exercising forgiveness lowers blood pressure, heart rate, and the amount of cortisol (a stress hormone) released into the system. A better-functioning immune system leads to better overall health and reduced risk of cardiovascular events.
The Stanford Forgiveness Project has found that “skills-based forgiveness training” can reduce stress and physical health symptoms, including improved immune system functioning. Dr. Frederic Luskin, founder of the project, says that forgiveness is a learnable skill—consisting of steps that include self-care, stress management, and changing perspective—and that it just takes practice.
For many people, religious faith requires them to forgive (or try to forgive) someone who’s caused harm. Freeing yourself from resentments and past harms can be a frankly spiritual discipline. Christians try to follow Jesus’s dictum to turn the other cheek rather than respond to harm with a counterattack. During the High Holidays Jews find ways to forgive people who’ve hurt them across the previous year and to let go of any grudges. If you can’t work things out with the other person, at the end of the day, how you handle your injuries and hurts sometimes turns out to be between you and your higher self or between you and your God.
Recognition of this crucial aspect of human character is essential both to make a good apology and to forgive someone: We are not frozen forever at our worst moments, nor are we stuck always in our most painful times.
A quotation by businessman and writer Paul Boese captures the possibility inherent in this truth: “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”
Go for Vengeance—or Not
After someone hurts you, the urge to seek revenge is understandable. It’s just as natural and perennial as it is to have the grace and strength to forgive and, especially in the beginning, comes more easily. You may want the person to be punished, to suffer because you’ve suffered.
Rather than imposing punishments, wise parents have long used natural consequences (allowing unfavorable outcomes that follow misbehavior) and restorative approaches (teaching the child to make restitution or restore what was broken), in order to help their children learn right from wrong. In behavioral mental health treatment designed to increase a desired behavior, a schedule of positive reinforcement is much more likely to be recommended than punishment. Punishment is less effective for changing human behavior, particularly in the long run.
THE FOUR STEPS OF A GOOD APOLOGY
1. You must come to understand the other person’s injury, including the effects of your actions. This usually involves asking questions and listening.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP ONE
2. You must articulate a sincere statement of regret. You must acknowledge what you did and how it affected the other person. This is no small feat for most of us, especially when we didn’t intend to hurt someone.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP TWO
3. You must make reparations. This can include material restitution, although in relationships that’s less likely to occur.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP THREE
4. You must make a convincing plan to prevent the problem from happening again.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP FOUR
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP ONE
- “I thought I knew what happened, but apparently I’m missing something. Would you fill me in, please?”
- “I said I was sorry for what I did, but it seems like there’s something else I don’t get.”
- “I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on, but I think there might be more I should know about how what I did affected you.”
- “Obviously I touched a raw nerve, and I want to know more about it so I don’t do it again.”
- “Look, something I did hit you in a really bad way and I truly want to understand what happened.”
- “I want to understand what’s going on.
- Please tell me all about it.”
- “I want to understand. I’ll do my best just to listen.”
- “Thank you for bringing up how I affected you. I want to hear about it.”
2. You must articulate a sincere statement of regret. You must acknowledge what you did and how it affected the other person. This is no small feat for most of us, especially when we didn’t intend to hurt someone.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP TWO
- “I’m so sorry that my drinking too much/arguing with your sister/arriving so late/ making light of a serious occasion ruined such an important day for you. There is no excuse good enough.”
- “It’s my fault I didn’t plan ahead better so the train delay wouldn’t have made me so late. I’m really sorry.”
- “I should have realized how much it would mean to you for me to come with you to your cousin’s funeral. I’m so, so sorry you had to face that hard time on your own.”
- “I can see how deeply my attempt at humor actually hurt you. I wish I could take it back.”
- “I wish I’d thought to ask you before ordering the nonrefundable tickets. I can see that I’ve put you in an awful position.”
3. You must make reparations. This can include material restitution, although in relationships that’s less likely to occur.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP THREE
- “I want to help heal your hurt. I’ve got some ideas how. Can we talk about them?”
- “Is there something I can do to make up for how much my mistake hurt you?”
- “What would help you be able to trust me again?”
- “Will you please tell me if you see anything else I can do to make this right?”
- “I’d like to make sure that everyone who was affected by what happened understands that I’m responsible for it. Can we talk about how I can do that?”
4. You must make a convincing plan to prevent the problem from happening again.
PRACTICE SCRIPTS FOR STEP FOUR
- “Here’s how I will make sure this never happens again.”
- “I want to do whatever I can to earn your trust again.”
- “I promise to take responsibility for changing my routine/ habits/ mind-set.”
- “Can we figure out a way together to change the way we do family communications?”
- “Will you please tell me if you see that we’re sliding into the old pattern again?”
- “I really want all this pain and challenge to make me and us better than we were before.”