I recently read “Why won’t you apologize” by Dr. Lerner. It’s a great book. It has a lot of lessons that sound extremely obvious when you say them out loud, but which many people don’t follow in practice. Here, I’ll summarize a few takeaways from the book.
See also: What should you do when you’ve hurt someone?.
Explaining yourself
When we have hurt someone, it’s pretty natural to want to help them see the whole situation from your perspective. Usually, you don’t look so bad from your perspective, and maybe you feel that if they understood things from your perspective they wouldn’t feel so hurt.
It’s almost always a mistake to lead by explaining yourself too much. Often when you explain yourself they will indeed feel kind of differently. If they ask you to explain yourself, you should probably acquiesce in a pretty non-defensive way.
As mentioned here you should start by just listening to them hurt party. It’s possible that there will be some relevant details that would be good for them to know about. But when you actually get around to apologizing, you shouldn’t make any excuses for your behavior. Just very straightforwardly admit that you messed up, and give a good explanation of how you’ve messed up (to prove understanding).
Bad apologies
Lerner gives a few examples of verbal tells that an apology is bad. I think these are quite useful, because the verbal tells are short patterns that are easy to detect. Here they are:
- I’m sorry but — really it wasn’t so bad that I did this bc xyz.
- I’m sorry if you felt that way — I’m not sorry for my actions, I’m sad that you’re so sensitive that you took offense at my reasonable comment!
- Forgive me — I think you should feel over this issue now and allow me to stop feeling pain about it.
- Long apology
- Springboard the apology into saying what they did wrong.
Empathy
Lack of empathy is a major obstacle to giving a good apology. To give a good apology you need to understand why the other party felt hurt. You must try to get inside their head, live the interaction from their perspective.
A weird trick I’ll close with is to consider that the reason the other party was hurt is because they care about you and trusted you a lot. If you remember that this is where they’re coming from it might be easier to empathize with them.