Why won't you apologize? -- book thoughts
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.
Some misc thoughts on good apologies#
- Good apologies apologize for actions, not the effect the actions had on me. When you say "I regret that you felt sad" it makes it feel like it was my fault for being oversensitive or taking offense when I shouldn't have.
- Good apologies identify specific actions that you took that you regret. I walk away being convinced that (1) you've actually spent some time reflecting about what you did that wasn't ideal, (2) you in fact understood what you did that was wrong. This gives me more confidence that you might plausibly do less of the bad action in the future.
- Good apologies explain what actions you might've taken instead of the ones you did.
- Good apologies don't assume that you understand all the ways you hurt me. Instead, before apologizing you actually try harder to understand why I felt hurt.
- Good apologies don't include a long list of why everything you did was justified. It's not just that you suppress / redact this list but are saying it in your head. You actually just don't believe that the excuses excuse anything.
- Good apologies try to make amends for harm caused.
- Good apologies involve having an actual plan for how you'll avoid doing the harmful thing again in the future.