Apologies and forgiveness
The first in a series of posts about doing things the right way
Since last year, I’ve been thinking about writing a series of posts about things you’ve been (maybe) doing wrong this whole time. There’s a few that I think could probably be done with a short video or even a GIF, since it’s mostly stuff like “you’re holding the can opener wrong.”
This post is about something that has come up in my life far more than I’d like it to, and frankly, it’s probably the most important.
Apologizing correctly
Apologizing sucks. Emotionally it sucks (for the person apologizing), because a proper apology requires you to admit that you were wrong. The act of apologizing requires you to humble yourself before someone that you hurt. You must admit that you have wronged them in order to apologize, and admitting that in its rawest form is just plain hard.
What’s even the point of an apology?
The act of apologizing is not for your benefit. It’s for the person you’re apologizing to. This is the most important thing to remember about apologizing: if you’re going into the apology to make yourself feel better, you’ve already failed.
We apologize because we’ve wronged or harmed someone else. An important note, though, is that you need to believe that you’ve wronged or harmed someone. If you don’t think you’ve done anything to harm someone and they think that you have, apologizing is pointless. You’ve already failed.
The point of the apology is to let the other person know you have regret. By making the apology, you’re saying (or should be saying), “I did something to affect you in a negative way, and I regret doing it because it caused you harm.” You’re saying two things:
You’re acknowledging the hurt you caused.
You feel bad that you hurt them.
Critically, you’re not regretting the outcomes of them feeling bad, you’re regretting the feeling bad. “I’m sorry I forgot to feed your cat,” means a lot less when followed with, “because now you won’t housesit for me next week,” instead of, “because I broke your trust and gave you a great deal of stress and anxiety.” The apology is about them, not about you.
What not to say?
The fundamental act of apologizing doesn’t require much. But that hasn’t stopped folks from really fucking it up badly by saying the wrong thing.
Don’t UNO Reverse the situation. “I’m sorry that when I called you tasteless for shopping at Target you took offense,” is not an apology. “You took offense” implies that the other person chose to be offended: no, you chose to call them tasteless. They didn’t choose to get upset, you made them upset. If you want to say something like this, consider: you’re maybe not regretful.
Don’t start rambling about you. It’s often tempting to start to tell a story or talk about how you’ve felt bad since the inciting incident happened or how your deep regret has plagued you with guilt…shut up. It’s not about you.
Telling the other person how guilty or embarrassed you feel makes it about you. It might imply that you are regretful, but what it doesn’t say is that you’re regretful that it harmed the other person. Instead of, “Since the other night I’ve been so embarrassed at what I did to you, I haven’t been able to sleep,” say, “What I did wasn’t okay, and it hurt you. I’m embarrassed that I hurt you like that.”
The distinction here is subtle but important. When you say that you haven’t been able to sleep, you’re not explicitly saying that you are embarrassed that you caused harm. Those things might be true, but they also might not be.
Moreover, saying something like “I haven’t been able to sleep” once again makes it about you, not about them: they don’t care if you’ve been able to sleep or not, and saying it doesn’t make the apology more emphatic or deep.
Don’t tell them how good it feels to have apologized. Apologizing. Isn’t. About. You. They don’t care that it’s like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders. Saying stuff like that implies that part of the reason you’re apologizing is for you to feel better, which makes the whole thing moot.
At no point in the apology should you justify the harm you caused. “When you didn’t try my six layer dip, I felt exasperated and said things that I regret. I feel bad that I hurt your feelings over dip.” Whether you were exasperated or not doesn’t matter. It has no place in the apology.
If you are thinking of starting a sentence with, “I was just…” …don’t. Whatever you “were just” doing doesn’t matter.
No, it doesn’t matter that it was just “a joke.”
Don’t ask for an apology in return. It’s not a trade. You’re apologizing for their benefit, not to hear what you want to hear about your six layer dip. They might offer an apology in return, but if they don’t, you’ll have to live with that1.
Don’t make your apology conditional. “I’m sorry if I hurt you…” Stop. There’s no such thing as a conditional apology. You’re apologizing because you hurt them. Either you know you hurt them and you’re apologizing for it, or you’re not sure if you hurt them, in which case what are you even doing.
What makes the apology work?
You feel real remorse for harming someone.
You want them to know that you feel remorse for harming them.
You want them to know that you know the harmful actions that you took were wrong.
You expect no reciprocity.
The goal of the apology is to make the other person feel better.
Even with all of this advice, you can still make a bad apology. Most human languages are full of great ways to make yourself sound like an ass, but if you hit all five of those rules, it hopefully won’t go too poorly. Don’t try to fluff it up more than you have to: being genuine doesn’t sound grandiose.
Some examples
Don’t: “I’m sorry about all of the things that I did that might have hurt you.”
Do: “What I did wasn’t okay. I hurt you and I’m sorry that it caused you to feel bad.”
Why: You did specific things, you need to be regretful of them. Be direct and explicit.
Don’t: “I felt attacked when you decided you didn’t want one of my extra-well-done burgers off the grill, and I regret calling you a tasteless simpleton.”
Do: “I called you a name that was meant to hurt your feelings, and that was wrong and you didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”
Why: It’s not about you, it’s about them. Don’t justify the reasons behind doing what you did.
Don’t: “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. That was unkind and hurtful, and I am sorry I did that to you. In the future, please don’t merge code on Fridays.”
Do: “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. That was unkind and hurtful, and I am sorry I did that to you.”
Why: Do not make your apologies conditional, no matter how irritating Friday merges are.
Forgiving someone correctly
The partner to any apology is forgiveness. Compared to apologizing, forgiving is almost always harder to do.
Apologizing tends to be straightforward—so long as you mean it—because if you’re actually regretful of what you’ve done, the inertia you’re overcoming is pride. Forgiveness is a horse of a different color, because you need to put in ongoing work.
What is forgiveness?
Forgiveness is (in the abstract sense) a promise you make to someone that you won’t hold their actions against them going forward. Said another way, it’s the act of consciously letting go of the resentment or anger or vengeance that you hold towards someone for what they’ve done to you2.
When you tell someone you forgive them, you’re not making a statement that releases them from moral debt. Forgiveness is telling someone that you aren’t going to keep score on the matter. Forgiveness is about you this time: you’re telling someone that you’re putting in the work to tame your emotions and (implicitly) won’t be changing your mind.
Some things that a lot of people misunderstand about apologies and forgiveness:
You can accept an apology without forgiving someone. They might feel bad that you’re not over it, but we also are humans without voluntary control over our lizard brains.
You can forgive someone who hasn’t apologized. In most cases it’s pretty weird to tell someone you’ve forgiven them when they might not know (or care) that you’re forgiving them. Consider the victims who forgive people in court during sentencing: many of the accused probably didn’t apologize or ask for forgiveness (and for quite a few, probably only at the behest of their counsel).
Forgiveness can be retracted, if you’re hurt again. If I forgive you for eating my lunch out of the fridge and then you eat my lunch again, there’s no societal expectation that I need to continue to put aside my displeasure that you ate my lunch the first time (because you clearly don’t care).
You can’t decide you actually haven’t forgiven someone after forgiving them. It’s a promise. You can’t change your mind. If you’ve said you’ve forgiven someone, you’d be harming the person you’ve forgiven by retracting your forgiveness without cause.
You can still feel hurt after forgiving someone. As much as we’d love to be Vulcan with our emotions, it’s often impossible for us to convince our lizard brains to stop feeling despite how hard we forgive.
What’s the point of forgiveness?
Apologies are meant to let someone you hurt know that you are sorry for hurting them. Forgiveness is meant to let someone who hurt you know that you are past the feelings of resentment that they caused. That’s why the two are symbiotic, and why apologies help drive forgiveness.
Why offer forgiveness? Well for you, it can be cathartic to put that hurt behind you. For them, it lets you formally address the guilt they may feel for what they’ve done (or, put the ball in their court for if/when they do feel resentment). That’s just generally a nice thing.
Forgiveness is one of the most unintuitive products of our evolution. Natural selection would make you think that if someone hurts you, remembering that they hurt you would be a crucial survival instinct. If you get mauled by a bear, it would be unwise at best to approach the bear at a later date to express your forgiveness for their harsh physical actions. If a rival band of nomads raids your camp and kills your baby, it would seem that there’s very little good to come from expressing your forgiveness.
And yet!
In countless high-profile, tragic crimes, we see victims’ families standing behind a courtroom podium reading words of forgiveness to the accused. These people gain nothing from doing that. But they do.
It’s cathartic. It helps you to move on. It forces you to really objectively look at what has happened and use empathy to understand what made the perpetrator do what they did. It lets you turn a nebulous boogeyman that’s out there somewhere in the world into a person who was desperate/sad/provoked/unwell/manipulated/whatever. Before forgiveness, the totality of the person who hurt you is what they did. After the process of forgiveness, it’s (hopefully) a lot easier to objectively see the harm they caused as the product of all the external factors that coalesced inside them.
Do you have to forgive someone? No. Should you? Maybe. Probably.
Pain fades over time, but making the conscious effort to override your lizard brain is—while challenging—another path to ease that hurt.
You should treat everyone with the respect they deserve, but you aren’t forced to like this person. The right thing is to apologize and let them live their life as the non-dip-eater that they are.
I thought about this for a long time. If you’ve “forgiven” someone without effort or intent, I’m not sure that you’ve really _done_ anything. It would also beg the question whether you needed to forgive someone if the hurt that they caused wasn’t bad enough to require you to feel like you needed to offer forgiveness in the first place. Said another way, if someone apologies for something you weren’t hurt by, or which you didn’t actually experience any non-momentary harm from, telling them that they’re good is arguably not forgiveness, it’s just reassurance.
I’m sure you could start a holy war over the semantics of this, but the point is that when the harm is very minor, none of this really matters one way or the other.