When Apology Stops Repair

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

Sometimes, at least one person in a conflict wants an apology — not just any apology, but a sincere one that names the harm, commits to doing better, and then actually follows through. For me, there’s a step beyond even that: feeling and expressing genuine empathy for how the action landed with the other person, and checking that that expression of empathy landed. Sometimes I’d prefer that to the apology itself.

This got driven home for me years ago at a workshop. I was paired with a man I didn’t know — I’ll call him Bob — for an intimate exercise. We’d been given explicit instructions to get consent before beginning the physical proximity part. He ignored them and moved closer to me without asking. I assumed nerves had gotten the better of him, and gently reminded him of the consent step. He restarted and asked this time. I realized I was still reeling from the misstep.

“Actually, that first try was a little uncomfortable for me,” I said.

His face hardened. He got defensive and said something like, “Don’t punish me.” I raised my hand — the signal for emergency help — because I no longer felt safe continuing. We separated, and I got support to recover from the secondary hurt (him making my discomfort about him) layered on top of the original hurt (proceeding without consent).

If he had been able to hear the impact of his actions on me, I think I could have let it go and moved on. But he had no room to hear that he had crossed a boundary. For the next 24 hours, I sat with what had happened and considered whether I wanted to try to repair it.

When we did sit down again, there were two mediators with us, a woman and a man. Bob led with:

“I know I f*cked up. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d like to share my experience with you.”

“I know, I know!” he said louder. “I f*cked up. I was wrong and I’m sorry.” It seemed to me that he wanted his apology to be the end of the conversation.

My old friend Aurora Levins Morales once named a known behavior pattern that often emerges in conflict that I’ve never forgotten. It’s the “I am a piece of sh*t around which the universe revolves” pattern. The person running that pattern collapses into self-flagellation so completely that they can’t attend to anyone else’s reality. That was Bob.

He seemed wracked with shame. The mediators were kind, but not doing much to help him surface from that shame so he could actually listen.

At one point the male mediator said, “Hey man, I know it can be hard to hear women talk about our impact on them, but I think she really wants to tell you something.”

After several attempts on my part to bring my experience into the room for him to hear — and several more rounds of him reasserting his worthlessness and apologizing— something finally shifted. I can still see his face softening, showing a glimmer of recognition that I existed as a separate human being with an experience distinct from his story about himself. It was as though a veil had briefly lifted. He looked young, small, vulnerable, especially in contrast to his big, blustery presence at the beginning.

I told him how scary the moment had felt to me, and how vulnerable I already felt in the exercise, before it even started. He listened. I finally felt him feeling me — another human being vulnerable right in front of him. And he could only step into that space once he stopped making the situation about how awful he was convinced he was.

This, for me, is the essence of conflict resolution: supporting the person whose actions triggered pain to not just intellectually comprehend, but truly grok (empathically understand) the other person’s experience, while guiding both people to see each other’s humanity and tune into each other’s inner worlds.

This is not easy. Most of us grew up in a culture of retributive rather than restorative justice — guilt and innocence, victim and perpetrator, right and wrong. Someone is elevated, someone is diminished. We rarely see two humans treated as equally worthy, mutually interested beings navigating a hard moment without collapsing into righteousness or shame.

That’s what we’re trying to cultivate with Mendful: a way for people stuck in the familiar mire of right/wrong to be guided into a space where two sovereign beings can resonate with each other’s humanity. When it works, it elevates everyone involved, and helps them both arrive at a new place: one that honors the full humanity of all.