A Good Apology

I am perhaps obsessed with apologies. As a psychologist, I find them crucial in my work with people. I pore over books on the subject and study religious texts. For years, I’ve collected apology stories. I clip them from newspapers, old-school style, and keep them in a box under my desk.

Recently, the stack has grown fast.

During the #MeToo movement, we’ve watched the march of shame across our newsfeeds by high-profile men accused of sexual misconduct. The examination of apologies has become a national pastime and given “I’m sorry” the weight of a political act. Whether they are from heads of state who relay their official remorse for governmental mistreatment of citizens or from well-known figures in front of microphones who regret their deception, sexual misconduct, and other trust-breaking behavior—we tweet and post, debate and dissect the sincerity and effectiveness of these public statements. We’ve made such a sport of apologies that the New York Times has presented us with a “Choose Your Own Public Apology” column with fill-in-the-blank options.1 For all our public dialogue, however, the apologies themselves don’t seem to be getting much better.

Right now, we are in an extended moment of public attention focused on saying “I’m sorry,” but the value of apologies is timeless and universal. We need good ones in our personal lives every bit as much as we need them in public discourse. Each time we face another person’s injury with courage and humility, we heal individual hurt. When we apologize, we restore damaged connections. We reduce our isolation and shame, and we make our relationships stronger. We build a kinder and more civil society.

So, if apologies are so useful and important, why are we so bad at them?

Of the hundreds of patients I’ve worked with, many struggle with how to apologize well—as do many of the people I know outside my practice. I, too, have missed opportunities and made my share of poor attempts to repair mistakes. For a myriad of cultural and psychological reasons, apologizing well is really hard to do. Human perceptual and cognitive biases make seeing our own mistakes and their effects on other people challenging. Most of us labor under misconceptions and myths about apologies, including the idea that our intentions determine our effects on other people. That is, if I didn’t mean to hurt you, you can’t be hurt. Or we subscribe to the now-historic Hollywood notion that “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Further, we rarely see public figures modeling good apologies.

Many of us make no attempt to apologize when we should, and when we do, it’s often in ways that inflame the situation or, at best, only partially heal the damage. But the good news is that each of us has the capacity to make an effective apology. One of the biggest, most universal roadblocks is a simple lack of technique. That’s why I wrote this book.

My journey toward developing an apology technique began in childhood. In the face of chaos and neglect, including three years I spent in an orphanage, I did what children often do: I tried to control what I could control. When I couldn’t fix the unpredictable world around me, I learned to mend physical things. I replaced errant buttons and glued shattered dishes back together. Even as a child, I had trouble tolerating waste. I held on to broken things long before I learned that relationships, too, can be salvaged rather than discarded.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, that early effort was good preparation for becoming a psychologist. My faith that hurt can be repaired undergirds my approach to psychotherapy as well as my personal philosophy. I serve as a “hope merchant.” I can see possible favorable outcomes, and I can help people journey through thorny terrain to reach them.

Earlier in my career, though, I was at a loss when grappling with the unresolved cracks between people. Just out of college, I worked with a woman who lived in extreme isolation because she couldn’t face the family she’d “let down way too many times.” I was puzzled and frustrated that she didn’t respond to her family’s attempts to connect with her, but I didn’t know how to help her move through her shame. Months later, she killed herself. I’ll never forget the stunning sense of wastefulness I felt. Her life was lost because she couldn’t face and mend what she’d damaged.

Soon after, in graduate school, I worked with a couple who’d spent almost three decades unhappily stewing about the husband’s flirtation with another woman during their first pregnancy. I could teach them to communicate better, but I didn’t know yet how to help them face their stubborn resistance and resentment so that they could heal this foundational wound.

Throughout my training, I met other couples stymied by hurt they couldn’t get past and individuals who were as troubled by their own harmful behavior as they were wounded by others’. Psychotherapy usually addresses a person’s internal experience of hurt, not the pain or guilt from having hurt other people. I found no supervisor I could turn to or book I could consult that focused on the problem of addressing one’s own responsibility for mistakes and wrongdoing.

Again and again, I saw how unhealed hurt between people hardened into bitterness and judgment. I saw how unprocessed guilt darkened into chronic shame and low self-esteem. I saw how rifts between people seemed impossible to reach across and so resulted in unhappiness and loneliness. At its worst, failing to mend relationships led to dangerous levels of isolation.

Public health research suggests that weak social connections can be as harmful to a person’s life span as heavy smoking and more damaging than obesity. The social and emotional support our close relationships provide improves everything from stress management to lung function2 and coronary heart disease.3 Despite the value of relationships to our physical and psychological health, many people do not have or maintain them. In 2018, the United Kingdom appointed its first minister for loneliness to address the needs of the many British citizens who report that they are often or always lonely.4 In the United States, up to 40 percent of Americans over the age of forty-five suffer from chronic loneliness.5 Vivek Murthy, the former US surgeon general, referred to loneliness as “a growing health epidemic.”6

In the 1980s, during my clinical fellowship at Harvard Medical School, I began to encounter ideas that would eventually lead to my apology model. My training occurred during a time of transformational thinking in psychology. New, field-changing research findings challenged Lawrence Kohlberg’s long-dominant theory that a person reached the height of morality when he or she acted according to “universal ethical principles” (a set of internalized, abstract codes of conduct). Carol Gilligan, who had worked at Harvard with Dr. Kohlberg, published her now-famous findings that women held themselves to different standards than the male subjects Dr. Kohlberg had mainly studied. Her female subjects evaluated whether an action was right or wrong according to whether it harmed or helped another person—what Dr. Gilligan called an “ethic of care.”7 Morality was not purely an interior, individual phenomenon, but also a social one based in our connections to others.

At the same time, the theory of self psychology was taking the psychoanalytic world by storm. Psychiatrist Heinz Kohut, a refugee from Nazi Austria, developed a model in which the therapist had to be radically empathic for any hurt the patient experienced in the course of therapy. He argued that the hurt was real and healing it could lead to important progress. The therapist’s task was to listen and empathize in order to help the person heal.8

This was also the era when psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues at Wellesley College’s Stone Center for Research on Women formulated new understandings of both psychological development and psychological health, ones that centered around connections between people. Their “relational” model challenged the conventional understanding that the goal of human development was individuation and that most other people could be considered potential competitors.9

These ideas provided the clinical guideposts I followed in my exploration of how relationships hurt and heal us. Along the way, I became fascinated by the radical courage and care that seemed necessary for mending damaged connections. Across decades, in thousands of hours of psychotherapy sessions, I began to see openings, opportunities for brave souls to recognize an injury they’d caused and to reach across a chasm of hurt toward someone on the other side. With growing hope that interpersonal pain might be reparable, I asked about those possibilities more directly. An estranged daughter recognized that, in addition to her father’s “fault” for their difficulties, her unkindness had contributed to their rift. A patient spoke about his friend’s perspective on a recent conflict between them.

Breaches often could be approached and sometimes mended. I learned first to recognize and then to encourage steps that repaired hurt between people. A husband could suddenly stop his countercomplaints against his partner and offer a sincere apology. A woman considered ways to make up for having missed her angry sister’s birthday celebration. A couple tried to rebuild trust after unfaithfulness.

In contrast to the dark and lonely outcomes from avoiding an apology or the messy blowback from an inadequate one, I witnessed a deep spiritual lifting of burdens and an opening of hearts when people faced a previous hurt with courage and humility. Their relationships didn’t just recover; they grew stronger.

An apology may be a small-scale event between people, but it’s enormously powerful. We’ve all done something wrong or made a mistake or insulted someone—even if by accident. We’ve all been hurt and wanted the other person to help us heal. Maybe you’ve experienced a family disagreement that didn’t get resolved and resulted in painful distance between siblings or with your parents or children. Maybe you’ve suffered the tension of unaddressed resentment with your partner. Maybe a dear friend is no longer so close because of an injury that seemed too uncomfortable to talk about. Or perhaps you’re one of the millions of Americans staring across a cultural or political gulf at your loved ones on the other side, feeling uncertain and hurt. Aside from actual abuse situations, these circumstances can be faced and fixed.

It is counterintuitive, perhaps, but the breaches themselves aren’t the real issue; our inability to fix them is what causes us trouble. It’s the failure to learn from one another and our missteps that keeps us from developing the resilient relationships we long for and need. We don’t really require a study or government official to show us that failure to mend breaks in relationships with partners, children, siblings, parents, colleagues, and friends hurts us in all kinds of ways. What we haven’t understood is how to fix the problem. Until now.

So, what words and deeds actually repair broken trust and heal us, our relationships, and our societies? What, essentially, is a good apology? I’ve written this book to answer that question.

Based on decades of clinical work, and incorporating religious tradition, legal thought, social justice concepts, and psychological science, I developed a four-step model of apology that’s accessible and straightforward. The technique is informed by research that has studied people as varied as high-performing CEOs and incarcerated criminals, the science of how often humans make mistakes, and observations of how our brains operate under stress. Perhaps equally important, it’s based on commonsense actions that you don’t have to be an expert to take. I don’t mean to say that apologizing is a piece of cake. But there is a way to make amends that leaves everyone feeling better.

Spelled out in simple steps, my model will show you how to understand the other person’s hurt, to express your regret, to make the harm right, and to prevent it from happening again.

In A Good Apology: Four Steps to Make Things Right, you will see real people’s brave efforts to make repairs to damaged relationships, across many spheres of life and many types of connections. You may be most interested in

• how to heal a relationship with another person,
• how to resolve family conflicts,
• how to mediate conflicts so business teams work better,
• how to heal breaches due to divisive political disagreements,
• how to best contribute to social justice work, or
• how to teach children to make better, more real apologies.

No matter where your interests lie, A Good Apology will help you understand why it’s so important to apologize, as well as why it’s so hard. Stories of personal attempts to mend relationships, along with compelling research findings, will illustrate the positive power of the four-step apology model. Within relationships, these steps can rectify wrongs, reduce resentment, salvage connections, and foster greater intimacy. For yourself, they can ease shame, enhance self-esteem, and make you a healthier and happier person. Ultimately, you can cultivate an attitude of more compassionate accountability, that is, holding yourself and others responsible for missteps while maintaining a kind and humane approach to the important people in your life.