Overapologizing and the Myth of Closure

Something that happens to me sometimes with guys* is they do something I find hurtful, I calmly tell them so, they apologize, I thank them and accept, and then…they keep apologizing. And apologizing. And talking about how they feel like “such a jerk now” and how they really are a nice person who doesn’t usually do things like this and they’re really so sorry and I keep saying that it’s fine, they apologized already and I accepted and it’s okay as long as it doesn’t happen again and…they just. keep. apologizing.

And then it occurs to me that, even if they don’t realize it, they’re asking for something from me. They want reassurance. Fucking up feels bad, and I’m the one with the supposed power to make them feel like good people again. So the endless apologizing is meant to extract those sorts of caring behaviors from me–“No, really, I really like you as a person, I know you didn’t mean it”–and perhaps, eventually, capitulation–“It’s okay, really, it wasn’t even that big a deal, I probably shouldn’t have even said anything about it.”

As I said, this is probably unintentional/subconscious; people who do this probably think that they’re just making sure the other person really has forgiven them. But since it’s based around a temporary loss of self-esteem, the only thing that can end the cycle of apologizing is to be convinced that they really are a good person–perhaps because the thing they did wrong wasn’t even that bad of a thing to do.

And there’s plausible deniability there, too. But they feel so bad! But they’re just showing you how much they care that they messed up! But…maybe it was juuust a little bit kinda really mean of you to make them feel so bad! And on it goes. It feels wrong to ask that someone stop apologizing, even if it’s making you feel bad. I think we’re meant to take over-apologizing as a sign of extra concern, or perhaps as a compliment. But, as with surprisingly many social interactions, over-apologizing may be more about the apologizer’s needs and wants rather than those of the person being apologized to.

We all have probably had times when we fucked up and apologized and just really needed to have that apology accepted immediately and to be reassured that we’re good people immediately. Some of this may tie into something that I’ve noticed before and that advice columnists like Captain Awkward and Doctor Nerdlove have discussed: the myth of closure.

Usually discussed in the context of breakups, the myth of closure is the idea that there’s something called “closure” that would really, really help us get over breakups, and that may even be owed us by the person who broke off the relationship. Sometimes it’s helpful to know why things ended, sometimes not, but regardless, nobody owes you that explanation. Sometimes, being an adult means sitting with the uncomfortable feelings and learning to overcome them by yourself, without the help of the person who caused or triggered them (but with, of course, the help of friends).

A similar thing happens in the context of fuckups and apologies. You fuck up, you feel bad, you apologize, and then you (may) think that you need to be absolved by guilt by the person you hurt. But sometimes people aren’t willing to accept your apology, and that’s okay. Sometimes they accept it, but they’re not interested in discussing the issue any longer. That’s okay too. They don’t owe you any closure. You may need to process your feelings about your fuckup without their help.

And then it occurs to me that it’s mainly women who are consistently asked and expected to do this–this emotional work. This soothing of hurt feelings, this rebuilding of lost self-esteem. Not only that, but it’s usually the woman who was hurt in the interaction who is expected to do it–at a time when she deserves the space to deal with what she experienced, she is drafted into your Feeling Okay Again Army.

In her wonderful piece which I linked to in my last roundup, Sarah writes about the conversations that often happen between men and women about sexism and sexual violence, and how they go wrong. In it, she links to an article by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman about how to get support when bad things happen to someone you know:

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie’s aneurysm, that’s Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie’s aneurysm, that was Katie’s husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order.

[…]Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.

When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry” or “This must really be hard for you” or “Can I bring you a pot roast?” Don’t say, “You should hear what happened to me” or “Here’s what I would do if I were you.” And don’t say, “This is really bringing me down.”

If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.

Comfort IN, dump OUT.

Of course, the situations we’re talking about are not at all comparable to traumas like these in terms of their emotional salience and difficulty. But, as Sarah points out in her piece, having a Kvetching Order is still important for more minor situations, so that you’re not overburdening a person who is already burdened. In this case, if you’ve hurt someone and that’s hurting you, you need to go to an outer ring to kvetch about it. So, not the person you hurt (or their best friend or significant other), but a friend of yours who isn’t as close to the situation.

Sarah then brilliantly connects this back to gender: women sometimes discuss the shit they have to deal with, and men can feel frustrated, angry, or even vicariously traumatized as a result. But because of our crappy gender roles, men are less likely to have close friends that they can confide in than women are, and when they do have such friends, they’re most commonly women. This means that if men want to confide in someone about how crappy they feel in response to women’s stories of sexism, they may have nobody to share that with besides women. And women are in a smaller ring than men when it comes to the issue of sexism and sexual violence. Sarah writes:

If you are a man who is becoming upset/depressed/overwhelmed/hopeless/defensive when you listen to the women in the world/your life talk about their experiences, you need to talk about it.  With another man.

I really, really mean this.  Not to complain about how crazy or uptight women are, please.  (I mean, personally, I don’t think that would help you or me very much at all).  But you absolutely need to talk to another guy.  A guy you are friends with and who you trust is ideal.  And if you don’t have that kind of guy in your life- and, seriously, you are not alone in that area- then you have the very hard, critical work of figuring out how to make that kind of friendship ahead of you.  If you are feeling a restless helplessness over all of this, that can be your challenge.  Because I think as women we really, really need you to form those relationships.  We really, really need you to have an emotional connection to each other.  And we need to know you guys can turn and talk each other through these hard things and support each other while you support us.

To bring it back to the over-apologizing thing, if a guy hurts his female friend and then feels bad about it, he’s not as likely to have other close friends–especially close male friends–to talk about it with. So the temptation is especially strong to talk to the friend that he hurt.

Fucking up feels bad, and it’s legitimate to want support when you feel bad, even if it’s because you did something wrong. That’s why it’s important to have other people or places you can go to get support when you feel bad. And when you do this, by the way, honor the person who you hurt and who helped you be better by retelling the story accurately. “I said something that I really shouldn’t have and hurt my friend. I apologized and she accepted, but I still feel really bad. I guess I’m just looking for some reassurance I’m not a terrible person even though I did this wrong thing.”

You deserve to be supported and reassured when you’ve done something wrong and taken the right steps to fix it. But please don’t manipulate the person you hurt into doing this for you.

~~~

*Obligatory note that this can happen between people of any gender, but I notice it especially with men, and have spoken to several women who have noticed the same thing. So, while it probably happens with everyone, it probably happens more–or more intensely–with men apologizing to women. And, therefore:

DISCLAIMER: The Author in no sense intends to imply that All Men are responsible for the aforementioned Conflict(s) or Issue(s) as described in this Text. The Author reiterates that Not All Men commit the Offense(s) detailed in the Text, and that the Text is not intended to apply to or be addressed to All Men. The Author hereby disclaims any binding responsibility for the emotional well-being of such Men who erroneously apply the Entreaty(ies) contained within this Text to their own selves. The Reader hereby agrees to accept all responsibility for any emotional turbulence that arises as a result of the perusal of this Text.

Overapologizing and the Myth of Closure
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[guest post] Undigging the Hole: FOFISSAMO

While I continue to recover from what I did to myself to celebrate finishing college, CaitieCat is back with some advice about apologizing.

So you’re in a mess.

You said something in public that might have used a bit more thought, a bit more empathy, and now you’re in a hole. And people being what people are, instead of climbing out of the hole with the help of the people we’ve hurt, many of us will instead turn to digging deeper, insisting that all we have to do is dig a little deeper and then people will get it and think we’re decent people again. Some of us will bring in backhoes to really get down to the dirt.

By digging the hole, I mean frantic excuses, insistences that your best friend is such a person and that you totally let them use your bathroom and everything, screams of “reverse prejudice” and the like. As a public service, then, allow me to offer this simple four-step algorithm for Undigging the Hole. I call it FOFISSAMO, as noted in the title of the post, as a pleasantly pseudo-Italian mnemonic.

FOFISSAMO stands for:

  1. Find Out

  2. Fix It

  3. Say Sorry

  4. And Move On.

Now here’s what I mean, specifically, by each step in undigging the hole you’re in.

Find Out

Finding out. People HATE the finding out step. Ron Lindsay called it being silenced, for instance, ironically while he used a privileged platform, with a  captive audience provided, to make the complaint. So my first step is simple, despite how much people hate the thought: Shut Up And Listen. If someone’s telling you what you did hurt people, the first impulse of the moral person should be “listen to them”, not “deny that you hurt them”, “insist they’re being oversensitive”, calling them any form of Nazi, or any of the frequently-used other responses we see.

Just pay attention. Attend closely to what the person is telling you about why what you did is a problem. Treat them as a human being, worthy of the same amount of attention you expect to receive yourself. Trust that they know what they’re talking about, the way(s) that they’ve been hurt by what you did, and just as you hope your words are taken in a good and gracious light, give them that same respect. There’s a reason the Golden Rule can be found in almost any civilization’s development.

Yes, it will probably be uncomfortable. You will be feeling embarrassed that you hurt someone, embarrassed to be called on it in public, and often defensive. Remember that this is their time; you had yours when you did the hurtful thing.

Once you know what the problem was, and if it’s amenable to this, then the second step is…

Fix It

If there’s a way you can undo the harm you did, do that. If there’s a way to mitigate the knock-on effects, do that too; an example from other circumstances – if your mistake in making a bank deposit causes someone else to incur fees related to their unexpected banking error situation, you offer to cover those fees, right? Same thing here.

Often there’s no way you can actually do much to fix it, so your next important step is…

Say Sorry

This is probably the simplest part, and also the hardest. Apologize. An apology, to be effective, takes the following form (parenthetical parts are optional/situation-dependent):

I am sorry (for having hurt you/run over your dog/dehumanized you/made you feel like crap/used a slur – even unknowingly, telling them that part comes later!)”.

Don’t say, “I’m sorry if I hurt anyone,” because you already know you did. That was what step 1 was for.

Don’t say, “Mistakes were made,”: own your shit. “I made a mistake” is a much stronger and better statement for this.

Stay away from these things.

Just: “I’m sorry (I hurt you).” If you can include a statement here of exactly what you did wrong, preferably specifically and openly addressing your mistake as a way of acknowledging that you’ve learned and will try to not repeat it, you’ll be doing well.

Which brings us to Step 4…

And Move On

By this, I don’t mean “force the other person to drop the subject”, or “ignore them when they try to help you understand how not to do it again”.

I mean, don’t spend your time trying to weaken your apology by offering excuses. If the injured party wants to talk about how you got there, great, do what they want. But don’t spend time trying to make it not have happened, don’t spend effort on pretending you didn’t fuck up. Just follow their lead and leave it behind when they’re ready to.

Remember, when you bring it up again to re-apologize or get them to recognize that you’re really truly a decent person and totally not like those other people who do or say racist/sexist/transphobic/ableist/whateverist things, or whatever your motive is, you’re not putting only yourself back in that spot of shame and unhappiness, you’re reminding the person you hurt that they were hurt by you. That’s not going to make it easier for either of you to move on.

The important part in this step is to remember that you’re not the injured party here. Take your cue from how the injured party reacts. Let them drive the process, if they want to. And if they don’t, drop it when they do.

So there you have it. FOFISSAMO. Find Out, Fix It, Say Sorry, And Move On: Undigging Holes Since 2013.

CaitieCat is a 47-year-old trans bi dyke, outrageously feminist, and is a translator/editor for academics by vocation. She also writes poetry, does standup comedy, acts and directs in community theatre, paints, games, plays and referees soccer, uses a cane daily, writes other stuff, was raised proudly atheist, is both English by birth and Canadian by naturalization, a former foxhole atheist, a mother of four, and a grandmother of four more (so far). Sort of a Renaissance woman (and shaped like a Reubens!).

[guest post] Undigging the Hole: FOFISSAMO

I'm Not Sorry

[TMI Warning]

As a person with a mental condition that often drastically affects interpersonal relationships, I’m a total pro at apologizing. I do it practically every day. Here’s a sample of depression-related things I’ve apologized for lately:

  • crying
  • being too tired to meet up with a friend
  • being late
  • leaving early
  • getting upset when a friend acted insensitively
  • needing to talk to someone
  • saying something negative
  • needing to go be alone for a bit
  • writing something emotional
  • being unsure of whether a friend really cares about me or not
  • not understanding a joke
  • not being dressed well/not having makeup on
  • taking criticism too harshly
  • not wanting to be in a big group of people
  • not wanting to drink
  • being quiet
  • not having an appetite

Now, I realize I should be counting my blessings for the fact that I now have friends who understand me and my brain enough to be able to accept those apologies–in high school it was much worse. But at the same time, I’ve become acutely aware of how inauthentic I’m being when I apologize for the various ways in which my depression manifests itself. Sure, I’m sorry if the way I am makes life difficult for people or makes them uncomfortable. But apologizing implies that I could’ve avoided the situation had I been more attentive or considerate, just like when one apologizes for, say, forgetting a friend’s birthday or for spilling hot coffee on someone.

I can’t avoid being fatigued or upset or sensitive, though, any more than a diabetic can avoid needing insulin shots.

Of course, most people who don’t know me very well don’t even know that I’m depressed. Thankfully, I’m not required to wear a scarlet letter “D” on my shirt. But even if they do know, I feel compelled to apologize every time my behavior deviates from that of a healthy person, just to remind them that I’m well aware of the fact that the way I am can be an inconvenience for people.

The truth is, though, that insofar as “I’m sorry” means “I messed up,” “my bad,” “this is on me,” “I should’ve known better,” “I should’ve tried harder,” “I should’ve been a better person,” and the like–I’m not sorry. It’s not my fault. I couldn’t have stopped it. There’s nothing I could’ve done. I’m getting treatment and trying my best to recover, and that’s as much as I should be held responsible for. I’m not even to blame for not getting treatment sooner, because I was a kid and had no idea there was anything wrong with me. I’d been told “that’s just how you are” all my life.

I wish I could stop apologizing for having an illness. But until people understand it well enough to react to my apologies the way they’d react to an asthma sufferer who apologizes for getting out of breath, I can’t.

I’m still not sorry, though.

I'm Not Sorry

Mea Culpa

mea cul·pa. Latin. through my fault; my fault (used as an acknowledgment of one’s responsibility).

Apologies have an interesting social function. I think that many people underestimate their power because they don’t necessarily “fix” the harm that was done, but in my opinion that’s an overly simplistic view of things.

Many people have trouble saying sorry. Some think that an apology is unnecessary if the harm done was accidental or unavoidable. (Possibly they also argue that accidental implies unavoidable.) Others think that there is no need to apologize if they believe they behaved correctly and that the other person should not have been offended or upset. There are also people who don’t believe in apologies because they don’t actually “fix” anything. And still others–the largest group, I believe–simply don’t like the feeling of apologizing, so they avoid it altogether.

But why? Maybe because apologizing puts you in a vulnerable position. It forces you to admit, implicitly or otherwise, that you were wrong. It forces you to confront the fact that your actions sometimes have unexpected negative consequences and that people often see your actions very differently than you do. It also opens up the possibility that the other person will reject your apology, and nobody likes rejection.

I definitely used to belong to this group of people. I hated apologizing. It felt crappy and even after I did it, I still felt like the other person was going to hold a grudge.

I’ve grown up since then, though, and now I give out apologies like some people give out hugs. I apologize for everything that I might’ve done wrong, from accidentally cutting someone off as we’re walking into a classroom to not answering a friend’s text in a timely way to seriously upsetting someone. I apologize even for things that many people don’t think require an apology. And it feels great. I feel like my respect and consideration is a gift, but unlike the gifts you buy, I can give out as much of this one as I want.

From this, and from the pain I feel when others don’t extend me the same courtesy I extend to them, I’ve started slowly figuring out exactly what the function of apology in human society is. It’s a social lubricant–and I don’t mean in the same way alcohol is. It’s a social lubricant in the sense that it keeps relationships going smoothly and provides a way for people to let each other know that they care about and respect each other. An apology rarely fixes the problem that it caused, but it lets the person who was harmed know that the other person still cares.

For instance, several weeks ago I posted something on Facebook that a friend of mine found offensive (it made fun of her future career) and she posted a really angry comment on it saying that she was offended. I honestly found her response completely overreactive and entirely too public. Nevertheless, I set that aside and acknowledged that she was upset and wrote her a message apologizing and explaining that I hadn’t meant to offend her. She responded with an apology for her overreaction and accepted mine. And everything went on just as it had before.

But if at any point during this interaction–if I’d decided that her overreaction absolved me from having to apologize, or if she’d decided that my apology retroactively justified her overreaction–then things wouldn’t have gone so well. In the first case, she would’ve been stuck with a grudge against me, and in the second, I would’ve felt taken advantage of, like my conscientiousness had simply been abused.

Apologizing is one thing that I believe I do very well, so it’s difficult to understand why others can’t do it too. Like listening, writing, and reading critically, it’s one of those skills that are lacking in American society. I think it’s because people fail to recognize the power that a simple apology can have, and I wish there were a way (aside from writing slightly presumptuous blog posts) to show them they’re wrong.

Mea Culpa