Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
—Rumi
It has been seven weeks since Kevin’s foot surgery. Although he’s no longer in a cast, he still isn’t able to walk or drive. His partner, Matt, has picked up a lot of slack around the house. And with two full-time jobs and two little kids, there is plenty of slack! One morning, after helping Kevin into the tub, Matt grabs his shaving cream.
“Ugh!” Matt groans. “What is this crust all over my shaving cream?”
Kevin fires back loudly, “If you have such a huge issue with me using your shaving cream, drive your butt to the store and buy another can!”
Matt puts his razor and shaving cream down on the counter and turns to face Kevin. “Excuse me?”
Kevin takes a deep breath, and his face softens. “I’m sorry, Matt. It’s not you. It’s this [pointing to his foot]. I am so sick of being immobilized. I feel awful about how hard you’ve been working. I’m just so done feeling like this!”
Matt comes over and kisses the top of his partner’s head. “I know. I’m sick of it too. We will make it out alive. I promise!”
Kevin recounted this blowup at our therapy session, and I was aware that the apology he offered Matt was no small victory! Yes, he was the one who mishandled the shaving cream, and, yes, he was the one who blew up at Matt. It was pretty obvious that a heartfelt “I’m sorry” was his best move, but given Kevin’s history, this was real progress.
Kevin grew up in a family that, as he says, “didn’t do accountability.” People neither gave nor took in feedback about the impact of their words and actions on other people. Feelings got stuffed deep down inside, and blowups like this one (if they happened at all) were just swept under the rug. Kevin’s knee-jerk reaction to criticism—Matt’s comment about the crust on the shaving cream—was to fight back, and that’s what he did initially by telling Matt to go to the store. This is such an old and pervasive pattern, in fact, that Matt’s nickname for Kevin is “Teflon” because nothing sticks to him. As Matt says, “Somehow, Kevin is never at fault.”
What was different this time was that Kevin caught himself. He saw his knee-jerk reaction for what it was—a low-road response to feeling threatened. He course corrected and was able to quickly offer a heartfelt apology. Kevin has worked to grow his relational self-awareness. He can now see how his difficulty apologizing comes from his past and how it has a negative impact on his relationship with Matt. In fact, he really deeply knows how Matt feels when Kevin acts like Teflon because Kevin can recall how confusing and lonely it felt when he was on the receiving end of his parents’ lack of accountability. Even though it was hard to learn a new way, Kevin wanted to break the cycle. He’s proud when he is able to practice a new way.
Kevin’s old story is: If you are critical of me, I don’t trust that you can also still love me and hold me in high esteem. The urge to explain, defend, or argue back—the frantic effort to be valued—is still there inside of Kevin. But moments like this, when Kevin apologizes and Matt is able to offer him some comfort (a kiss on the head and assurance that they will get through this), are so healing for Kevin. It’s neat to see how Kevin’s willingness to apologize opened the door for him to receive what he most needed—to be reminded that he is loved, imperfections and all.
Kevin’s apology was especially heartening given what he was going through. His physical pain and limitations have left him feeling on edge most of the time. He feels angry that he can’t drive or exercise, guilty that his partner has to do so much, and ashamed that his partner has to help him bathe and get dressed. Under stress, all of us are more likely to fall back on less mature and less evolved ways of being in the world, so this chapter of his life is giving Kevin plenty of opportunities to work on being accountable for the impact of his behavior.
For his part, Matt’s ability to accept Kevin’s apology and move on instead of holding a grudge rested on his awareness that this is an area of great vulnerability for the man he loves. He has empathy for the dynamics that Kevin grew up with, he sees how much progress Kevin had made, and he trusts that Kevin will keep working on this core issue of his. Also, Matt is humble, knowing that he, too, is a work in progress. Even with this progress and deep commitment to their life together, Matt would never say this work is easy, but he would say it feels worthwhile.
We hurt those we love. For all kinds of reasons. Looking at how we hurt people we love is really hard work, kicking up incredibly uncomfortable feelings as we confront discrepancies between who we believe ourselves to be and who our actions suggest we are. The quote that opens this lesson, by 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi, offers a path that can help us tolerate this painful dialectic—I both love you and sometimes hurt you. Any confrontation of self about our hurtful behavior must take place in Rumi’s field—the field out beyond right-doing and wrong-doing. The language of bad and wrong is simply a dead-end road, as those labels are really limiting. They cut off exploration, leading only to a call to action to “be different,” which is too vague to be of service. Those labels also create shame, and shame is a lousy motivator of change.
In fact, simplistic labels like “good” and “bad” end up blocking us from being accountable for our behavior. My client, Val, is caught up in a good/bad story that actually perpetuates her hurtful behavior. She says that she does not want to look at her years-long pattern of cheating on her husband because she fears that she will discover that she is “a terrible person.” I get that! I wouldn’t want to look at my behavior either if my story was razor thin, containing only the possibility of “I am a terrible person” or “I am not a terrible person.” She is held captive by her limited perspective, a perspective that prevents self-exploration because the stakes are so high. Exploring why she’s engaging in behavior that at some level she knows is hurtful to her husband and their marriage means risking being stuck with a label that will create tons of shame. So her behavior persists. She opts for an external focus instead: she cheats because he’s not affectionate, she cheats because there is no passion in the marriage, she cheats because she’s lonely.
If we are going to look at our hurtful behavior, we must do it in Rumi’s field. Self-confrontation has to take place there. When it does—when we are able to look at the choices we make that hurt the people we love—unforeseen possibilities for self-understanding and self-compassion emerge. And from that gentle field of space, change can happen. The dialectic here is: I am both worthy of gentleness and responsible for my impact on others. For Val, this would mean that she would begin to lovingly hold herself accountable for her behavior, moving from passive victim to empowered author of the life she wants. Therefore, rather than “bad” or “wrong,” I find it helpful to talk about our hurtful behavior as forgetful or unskilled. This language allows us to be gentle with ourselves yet keeps us accountable for our actions.
I believe that our true essence is love. I believe that for each and every one of us, our truest path is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Therefore, when our behavior is not aligned with our true essence, we are behaving forgetfully. We are forgetting our true nature.
When we do something hurtful, and our behavior is framed this way, the questions are totally different. The questions are no longer “Am I a bad person?” and “Why am I a bad person?” The questions become “What is keeping me from remembering who I truly am?” and “What is keeping me from treating my partner with love?” These latter questions are infinitely more helpful. They invite change. The answers to these questions may lead to any number of change-producing actions: confronting your partner about ways you feel neglected or mistreated (causing you to do the same in return), asking for what you need in the relationship, taking better care of yourself, starting therapy, admitting to an addiction, and/or dealing with old trauma. From this softened place of expanded awareness, we can also more easily offer a heartfelt apology for our hurtful actions.
Another shift that can make the “I’m sorry” flow more gently is viewing your behavior as unskilled. Kevin has benefited from this language. He hated looking at how much his difficulty with apologizing was hurting Matt. It stirred up a ton of defensiveness in him. And behind that defensiveness was a ton of shame—shame that led him to tell himself all kinds of stories about what an awful partner he is, how he doesn’t deserve Matt, how he has messed up their life, and so on. The pendulum swung all the way from a blaming, no-apology stance to a shameful, I-am-worthless stance. And in both of these stances, Kevin pushed Matt away. In working on this issuue, Kevin found it helpful to frame his difficulty with apology as an unskilled behavior.
In therapy we talked about how he inherited a triple threat of sorts. First, he didn’t see the adults in his house growing up taking responsibility for the impact of their actions. Second, in our Western culture, there is a notion that apologizing is a sign of weakness. Third, growing up male he internalized, in many direct and subtle ways, our society’s prescribed masculine traits: “Keep the upper hand,” “Keep a stiff upper lip,” and “Never back down.” These influences conspire to make apologizing difficult. When viewed as a skill he needs to learn in order to improve his relationship, practicing apologizing becomes prideful instead of shameful for him.
My husband, Todd, finds the topic of this lesson terribly amusing, as offering a heartfelt apology is, shall we say, challenging for me. Like all of us, I remain ever a work in progress. I have learned that when you roll your eyes and put your hand on your hip as you say, “I’m sorry,” you negate the apology entirely! I also have learned that the degree to which I am able to greet my imperfections with gentleness is the degree to which I am able to apologize with full eye contact, steady hips, and an open heart. Here are some ideas to keep in mind:
Some heartfelt apologies need to be paired with an amends action. An amends action is something you do in order to demonstrate your understanding of the impact of your hurtful behavior. In fact, research indicates that the acknowledgment of responsibility and offering to repair are the most important ingredients in an apology (Lewicki, Polin, and Lount 2016). Amends actions move you from talking the talk to walking the walk. I remember hearing an example of a man who gave up alcohol for a year as an amends action for cheating on his partner. This was his attempt to embody his apology, and, as the story goes, his amends action really helped his partner. She felt he was taking their healing journey seriously, which energized her to do her part—the difficult work of forgiving.
Another form of amends action happens when a couple works together to figure out what needs to change between them. For example, when there has been dishonesty about money, a couple may decide to grant each other access to bank account information. Or when there has been infidelity, a couple may create new and different boundaries like sharing passwords or checking in more frequently when they are apart. Amends actions foster trust when they are initiated by the one who is apologizing. Amends actions can breed resentment when the one who is apologizing waits passively to have “rules” given to him or her. The online “Guide to Heartfelt Apologies and Forgiveness” (http://www.newharbinger.com/35814) provides a review of this material.
Sometimes I work with couples who seek therapy in the eleventh hour, so to speak, and sometimes the decision to end the relationship is made right there in my office. Depending on how adversarial the breakup is, the therapy may continue for a while, and we may do some wrap-up or termination work. Couples have found it meaningful to create ending rituals that can be devoted to mutual apologies: “I see how I hurt you. Here are the ways that I was not able to be the person you needed me to be.”
This is a high-wire act for sure, and most of us can only touch that expansive place for small windows of time before the complexity of our emotional world swallows us up again. But even after that moment has passed, you forever have the memory of witnessing yourself standing in humble accountability. I think this is what people mean when they say they want “closure.” They want the opportunity to hear the other person validate their story of the relationship. Your chances of receiving that closure are greatly increased if you are willing to give validation of the other person’s story as well.
In closing, even a heartfelt apology can do only so much. Know that your healing is not contingent upon whether the other person is ready to hear or accept your apology. If you are able to offer an apology in humility and truth, then you have reached the outer edge of what you can control. Attempting to “get them to listen,” even though it is driven by your pain and your shame, is a boundary violation, reflecting that you have exited your own business and entered the business of another.
Your business is to offer the apology. The other person’s business is to decide what to do with it. Stay present with your emotional journey and your ever-expanding awareness, trusting these to grow your ability to be more relationally skilled and better able to embody your truest essence going forward.
The degree to which you can offer a heartfelt “I’m sorry” to another is the degree to which you can humbly embrace your imperfect nature, neither melting into shame nor hardening into blame.
Apology Template
How we relate to the act of apologizing is shaped by what we learned growing up. Take a look at the section “Heartfelt Apologies 101” (or download and print the handout at http://www.newharbinger.com/35814) and put a star next to the ideas that were and are part of your family of origin’s apology story. Reflect on how you have internalized these aspects of apology and how they help you in your relationships today. Notice the ideas that you did not put a star next to—the things you didn’t learn from your family about apologizing. Which of these remain difficult for you in your relationships today? What are your apology growing edges (what can you get better at)?
Write about a time when you had to apologize to someone you cared about for something that you had said or done. Answer these questions:
Working with Apology Growing Edges
Ask someone you trust to talk with you about what it’s like for him or her to give you feedback about your behavior. In other words, when you do something that hurts this person’s feelings, what is it like for him or her to approach you with it? How open or defensive does he or she find you to be?