Troy Terwilliger’s Reviews > Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts > Status Update

We don’t need to be experts in the business of apology to understand when it comes from the heart.

Why ruminate and make yourself miserable in the process? While the offender is somewhere suntanning in the beach? Give up hope for a different past and instead think about the power and possibility of the unknown future! It is a gift of radical self-interest.
It is deciding that your remaining time, your peace of mind, your capacity for joy, and the boundless potential of your unknown future.

The fantasies of justice prevailing help keep the victim locked in the false belief that the perpetrator needed to see what they did was wrong and also that inaccurately, subsequently, the victim needed to forgive them.

Staying angry can serve us. Revenge.. getting back on our feet… but it can metastasize and make cover up stories for what we are truly upset about. We may refuse to let go of anger because it keeps us close to the person who hurt us.

Diagnosing someone might help the victim rationalize that the perpetrator is just batshit crazy, doesn’t mean it helps us hold them accountable and accepting we don’t have to forgive them.

Stepping out of fantasy means accepting the hardest form of closure: the closure of indifference.
It means realizing that you don't need them to be secretly pining for you, regretting their actions, or hiding their "fandom" to validate that what happened was real and wrong. You can let them be as shallow, unrepentant, or indifferent as they actually are—and use that exact clarity to walk away for good.

Mind reading is just another form of unsolicited emotional labor we perform for people who abandoned the relationship. We are still spending our creative energy writing dialogue for someone who exited the stage.

We are left with our fantasies. Engaging in mind reading. Not everyone who injures us is secretly hiding their fandom.

This war between your cognitive drive and your somatic reality is precisely what triggers physical symptoms like tension, gut distress, chest pressure, and hypertension. The body refuses to lie.

Harriet Lerner's core premise aligns directly with this neurobiology: You cannot bypass your own body to achieve spiritual or emotional grace.

The transfer of vigilance happens when the person who committed the betrayal stops acting like a defendant trying to evade detection, and instead actively takes on the job of holding the safety and transparency of the relationship. The betrayer asks the hard questions, brings up the topic themselves, as is the case of a cheating husband asking his wife repeatedly, “Do you forgive me for what happened?”