🔗 Hurt, Confrontation, Stop, Listen, Learn, Grow, and Forgive:
But, it’s a lot harder to know what forgiveness looks like. What does acceptance later look like? I don’t really know. Most of the people who complain about getting cancelled actually face no consequences, so this is a moot point. The worst that happens is a very small, specific set of people never forget, and don’t ever really forgive. There’s an entire category of meme post which is the bad apology (always an Apple Notes screenshot), followed by the outrage at that apology, and typically followed by at least one or two more rounds of bad apologies trying to correct. If we knew how to do this, it wouldn’t be so awkward.
A conversation I have fairly regularly with my kids is that if you’ve done something to hurt someone else, you should always apologize for it, but that it is up to the other person whether or not to accept your apology. Likewise, just because someone says they are sorry, it doesn’t mean you are required to say it is okay.
Maybe you’re not sure they actually understand why what they said or did hurt you.
Maybe it feels like a fake apology.
Maybe you need to think about it more.
It’s okay to say “Thank you for your apology” and nothing more.
I think a big part of the problem is that a bunch of people have come to think of apologies and forgiveness as being transactional. I do something that injures you, so you express upset, so I say I’m sorry, so you say it’s okay.
That view—the idea that each part of that sequence should trigger the next—leads to people feeling cheated if part of the transaction goes awry. “I said I was sorry!”
One of the hard lessons I have learned (and continue to learn) in my life is that it often costs me almost nothing to apologize, other than having to admit that I was wrong, or that I didn’t fully think through something, or I wasn’t aware of the injury I was causing by something a I said or did. I’m a CIS white dude, though, and that is just my experience; for a lot of other people, there is a risk and a cost to apologizing.
I have also learned that for an apology to mean anything, it needs to have some sort of follow-up to it. “I’m sorry for that thing I said” rings pretty hollow if that’s all there is to it; it sounds like you’re just fishing for the “It’s okay” response. “I’m sorry for that thing I said, I can see why it felt bad to you, and here’s how I’m going to work on having that not happen in the future” means a lot more. Even better: make sure that I do actually work on having it not happen in the future.
I think a true test of an apology is that it should not only be offered with no expectation of forgiveness, but with the expectation that forgiveness will not be forthcoming.