Stay Your Sorry

[joreth]

http://news.nationalpost.com/life/stay-your-sorry-sometimes-its-best-to-just-keep-that-apology-to-yourself

"“Say you’re sorry” is not about your own safety and well-being, it’s about comforting someone else because you’ve done something wrong. It’s probably our first fledgling direction toward empathy."

"Motivation to apologize is frequently about the wrongdoer wanting to feel better, rather than offering comfort to the aggrieved."

"But how sincere can an apology be, if it cannot be rejected or ignored? How sorry are you, if the only response you will accept is instant and unconditional absolution?"

Somewhere, we lost our empathy.  It is "common knowledge" that psychology identifies the toddler years as our "selfish" years, where everything revolves around us and we only care about things in relation to how it affects us.  But we're supposed to outgrow that.  We're supposed to develop empathy and learn to see the world from the perspective of other people.  We're supposed to feel concern and compassion for people who aren't us and to start making decisions and performing behaviours that reflect that consideration of other people without necessarily putting ourselves in the center of the motivation.

But instead we live in a world where we have to accept "compliments" even when they're not complimentary (geez, learn to take a compliment!), where we have to take an act of kindness even when it inconveniences us more (I'm just going to open doors for women because that's how I was raised, so get used to it and stop complaining about people being nice), where gratitude is an obligation that defeats the whole purpose of the emotion "gratitude" (I just complimented you and held open your door, now say thank you, you bitch!), where apologies are all about making the apologizer feel better not making the wronged party feel better (I'm just trying to say I'm sorry, why won't you answer the phone?!), and where forgiveness is a requirement no matter the offense (you just slaughtered my children and a whole school full of children, but I forgive you publicly on television otherwise I'll be branded the Angry Black Woman).

In my workshop on Breaking Up that I teach with my ex-sweetie, silverdragon, we briefly touch on apologies.  We reference the apology script offered by the blog CuppaCocoa:

I’m sorry for…
This is wrong because…
In the future, I will…
Will you forgive me?

What makes this a wonderful way to apologize is that the apology is completely centered on the wronged party.  The point of this apology is for the apologizer to recognize what they did wrong from the wronged party's point of view.  It's not about expressing their guilt, it's about making actual amends for the other person.  It includes a part at the end about forgiveness, but the blog piece specifically allows for the possibility that forgiveness may not come and the apologizer has to accept that.

But sometimes, the wrong that has been done is so wrong that even offering an apology is a continuance of the wrong.  That's when this apology thing becomes more about the apologizer than the wronged party.  Perhaps if the apology, as offered sincerely in this form, had come earlier when the transgression was small or when there were few of them, and actual change was made, then it might be appropriate to apologize for it.  But sometimes the damage is too great and the trauma is too severe, and what the wronged party or victim really needs is to never hear from you again.

I don't do well with open-ended conflict.  I need to understand "why" and to gain "closure".  But if there are concepts that I wish had never made it out of academic circles and into the social sphere of laypeople, "closure" is one of them.  Of all the breakup techniques I hate, the Disappearing Act is the one I hate the most.  I will fucking track a fucker down and confront him to find out why he just up and disappeared on me when the last communication we had was a positive one and indicated a future continuance of the relationship.  I *do not* react well to not having answers.

So I understand when someone is feeling guilt and remorse, or perhaps a desire to see themselves as noble and improved, and so wants to reach out to someone they harmed in the past to apologize.  It's an open end.  It's a desire for closure.  And sometimes it's an even more selfish desire to rebuild a relationship that they want in spite of the other person not wanting that relationship back.  Believe me, I understand that one too.  But those feelings are all about the apologizer, and are not considerate of the wronged party.  They have the right to not have a relationship with us if that's what they want.  Unrequited feelings of any sort (even non-romantic ones) suck.  Sometimes we may think that having that final word, offering that final apology, will allow us to move on and get over those unrequited feelings or that desire to have a relationship that we know we can't have.  Again, that makes the apology all about us, and not about the person receiving the apology.

A while ago, someone in a poly forum asked how to make the hurt feelings of a rejection stop (or maybe it was the hurt feelings of a breakup, or perhaps unrequited love, I don't remember and it's not important for my point).  My advice to them was to not try to make the feelings go away.  I told them that we just need to feel the feelings until they're gone.  Get comfortable with the discomfort.  Lean into the feelings.  We, as a culture, spend way too much time trying to make good feelings last as long as possible, enhancing them as much as possible, but muting bad feelings at all costs.

Obviously, there are limits to this advice.  If you cut your leg off with a chainsaw while trimming trees in the yard, don't "lean in" to that feeling - go to the fucking hospital.  But if you sprain your ankle, you probably don't need to be constantly medicated to dull the pain.  I'm not going to tell you which of your injuries are a sprained ankle and which are an amputation - this is a metaphor and I'm not a doctor - that is for you to decide.  Some of our relationship hurts need to be fixed.  If you're in an abusive relationship, fix it by whatever means are necessary for you in your situation, don't just "get comfortable with the discomfort".  But life is messy and relationships are messy and we are going to feel hurt a lot in our lives.  We can't expect to numb every single pain every single time we have one.  Breakups hurt; rejections hurt; unrequited love and lust hurt sometimes.  The only way to get past that hurt is to get through them.  We cannot go through life expecting "closure", expecting other people to shoulder the burdens of our emotional labor by providing us with the endings that we think we need to "move on".

What we need to do instead is to learn how to get comfortable with interpersonal relationships that are messy, that hurts that are unresolved, with experiences that change things forever.  Sometimes we have to just accept that some things in life are not OK and to learn how to be OK with that.