Over the holidays, I said something hurtful to someone I care about.  It got me thinking about how to make a genuine apology, and the emotional obstacles that stand in the way of saying "I'm sorry."

Nobody likes to admit he or she is wrong, for starters.  Most of us want to believe we're sensitive and that it's other people who are the problem.  Also, the guilty feelings that come with recognizing you've hurt someone else, along with the blow to your self-esteem when you see yourself behaving badly, are not easy to tolerate.  Typically we'll try to defend against those painful feelings by justifying ourselves.

In my own case, I noticed I kept telling myself that the hurtful thing I'd said was actually true.  I would focus on the other person's irritating behavior; although I never told myself so in these exact words, the implication was that he deserved to be told.  Repeated self-justification in the form of mental "arguments" in which you keep trying to convince yourself or somebody else that you're in the right usually mean just the opposite.  Eventually I recognized my fault.

So how to apologize?  Here is my cardinal rule for how to frame an apology:  genuine apologies never contain the words "if" or "but".  For example, never say, "I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings," or "I apologize for being insensitive, but such-and-such happened earlier ..."  Those words have the effect of watering down the apology by either calling the injury into doubt or assigning true responsibility elsewhere.  I've often heard people tell me, "I'm sorry if I came across too strong in what I said to you," or something similar; those apologies always felt half-hearted.  I notice that once I decide I've done something wrong and begin to frame an apology, "if" or "but" always appears in the first draft.

Continue "The Art of the Apology"