Why Won't You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts

by Harriet Lerner

Sometimes, the failure of the other person to apologize when they should hits us harder than the deed they should apologize for.

Yet both personal integrity and success in relationships depend on our ability to take responsibility for our part (and only our part) even when the other person is being a jerk.

There is nothing good to be said about apologizing to someone who truly does not want to hear another word from you.

The purpose of an apology is to calm and soothe the hurt party, not to agitate or pursue her because you have the impulse to connect, explain yourself, lower your guilt quotient, or foster your recovery.

“It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for.”

Part of a true apology is staying deeply curious about the hurt person’s experience rather than hijacking it with your own emotionality.

Being too sorry can be a covert form of defensiveness. If the hurt party starts feeling the need to make you, the offending party, feel better, take it as a signal to tone down the emotionality and dial back your defensiveness. A heartfelt apology is not about you. If your intention is to offer a genuine apology, it’s the hurt party’s anger and pain that matters. Save yours for a different conversation.

To listen with an open heart and ask questions to better help us understand the other person is a spiritual exercise, in the truest sense of the word.

Listening is an intensely active process, and one that comes far less naturally than talking. There is no greater challenge than that of listening without defensiveness, especially when we don’t want to hear what the other person is telling us.

Words of apology, no matter how sincere, will not heal a broken connection if we haven’t listened well to the hurt party’s anger and pain.

If only our passion to understand the other person were as great as our passion to be understood. Were this so, all of our apologies would be truly meaningful and healing.

Shame and guilt are distinctly different emotions. Guilt is what we feel when we behave in a way that violates our core values and beliefs—assuming, of course, that our conscience is in good working order. The experience of guilt is usually tied to specific behaviors that we’re not especially proud of, like betraying a friend’s confidence, or hurting someone in the name of honesty.

While guilt is about doing, shame is about being.

When our identity and sense of worth are at risk of being diminished or annihilated, we will not be able to offer a true apology and face all that the challenge of earning back trust entails. We are more likely to wrap ourselves in a blanket of rationalization, minimization, and denial in order to survive. Defensiveness is no longer merely a roadblock that we can observe and get past after we calm down and limber up the thinking part of our brain. When we have lost sight of our value and worth, defensiveness is where we live.

Most people who commit serious harm never get to the point where they can admit to their harmful actions, much less apologize and aim to repair them. Their shame leads to denial and self-deception that overrides their ability to orient toward reality. No person can be more honest with us than they can be with their own self.

Speak your truths because you need to speak for your own self—because this is the ground you want to stand on, irrespective of whatever response you receive. A heartfelt apology is unlikely to be forthcoming, now or ever.

No individual will feel accountable and genuinely remorseful—no matter how well you communicate—if doing so threatens to define him or her in an intolerable way. The other person’s willingness to own up to harmful deeds has nothing to do with how much she or he does or doesn’t love you. Rather, the capacity to take responsibility, feel empathy and remorse, and offer a meaningful apology rests on how much self-love and self-respect that person has available. We don’t have the power to bestow these traits on anyone but ourselves.

Timing and tact, along with kindness, are exactly what make honesty possible with the most difficult and defensive individuals.

there are certain times when only a raw expression of your emotions will break through the other person’s defensiveness and exceed his or her threshold of deafness.

You can shame someone into saying they are sorry with a one-liner, because shame is that powerful. If you shame someone in a lesser position of power, it can lead that person to conform, obey, and give the obligatory apology. But shame will not inspire reflection, self-observation, and personal growth.

We can apologize for what we do. We cannot apologize for who we are.

When we’re not clear about who is responsible for what, we won’t be clear about who is accountable for their less-than-sterling behavior, who owes whom the apology, and who needs to back that apology with a change in behavior.

The other person is more likely to be accountable and to apologize when we are able to share our thoughts and feelings without holding that person responsible for causing them.

We are responsible for our own behavior. But we are not responsible for other people’s reactions, nor are they responsible for ours.

Accepting the olive branch simply means that you agree to end a fight, lower the intensity, and open a space for moving forward with goodwill.

The courage and clarity to define our bottom line, which includes our needs and the limits of our tolerance, is at the heart of having both a relationship and a self. Doing so is ultimately an act of kindness and respect. Most pursuers would rather be confronted by a strong partner with a clear request for a behavioral change, than be met with silence.

It’s almost always useful to apologize to the person we’ve been overfocused on in a worried or blaming way, and explain that we’ve been underfocused on our own self. Becoming more self-focused helps loosen up the pursuer-distancer dynamic, and puts us on firmer footing, no matter how the other person responds.

I frequently learn that many men and women are not actually talking about forgiveness, although they may use that word. Instead they are talking about their desire to rid themselves of anger, bitterness, resentment, and pain. They want to feel like “a good person” and not like a spiteful, vengeful individual who sits around wishing that their best friend who violated an important confidence, or gossiped behind their back, would suffer some terrible misfortune. “I want to forgive” translates to, “I want to get past this and find some peace of mind.”

It’s easier to let go of rudeness from a stranger than to move on from the inexplicably hurtful actions of someone we have trusted and relied upon. Yet whether we have experienced a small hurt or a big betrayal, we don’t need to forgive the actions of an unapologetic offender to find peace of mind.

If you read the research findings stating that nonforgiveness is bad for your well-being, the research might more accurately state that chronic, nonproductive anger and bitterness is bad for your health. Or that compassion and empathy, even for those who hurt us, are good things to cultivate. It’s hard to argue with that. It’s simply that none of these good things require forgiveness.

Janis Abrahms Spring: “You don’t restore your humanity when you forgive an unapologetic offender; he restores his humanity when he works to earn your forgiveness.”

Spring calls this “the transfer of vigilance.” In affairs, she explains, the unfaithful partner may complain that his partner remains obsessed with the betrayal despite his repeated apologies. He understandably wants her to move on. But Spring points out that if he’s not available to hear her pain, take it in, hold it, and pay attention to it, she won’t heal.

You do not need to forgive a person who has hurt you in order to free yourself from the pain of negative emotions. You can even reach a place of love and compassion for the wrongdoer without forgiving a particular action or inaction. You are not a less loving or whole person if there are certain things you do not forgive, and certain people whom you choose not to see. Perhaps you are even a stronger or more courageous person if you have leftover anger, whether from one violation or countless little micro-violations, even as you move on.

we misread people’s motives all the time, and in the absence of facts, we are left with our fantasies (Had she heard something bad about me? Was it my torn jeans?) or ruminations (“Why are people so senselessly mean when life is already hard enough?”). We engage in mind-reading, which, in contrast to intuition, humans have no talent for.

Losses we don’t see coming are the most difficult to deal with. And sometimes the hardest part of a painful ordeal is that the wrongdoer doesn’t seem to suffer at all.

How do you find peace when the hurt you’ve suffered will never be acknowledged or repaired by the one who inflicted it? The answer is as simple as the challenge is daunting. Any way you can.

The hardest part is that it requires us to accept that the offending party is never going to apologize, never going to see himself or herself objectively, never going to listen to our feelings with the slightest openness of mind or heart. Letting go of anger and hate requires us to give up the hope for a different past, along with the hope of a fantasized future.

The courage to apologize, and the wisdom and clarity to do so wisely and well, is at the heart of effective leadership, coupledom, parenting, friendship, personal integrity, and what we call love.