The fact that people use “regret” as a dodge is all too real.
Introduction
Yet apologizing well is agonizingly difficult for many (most?) grown- ups.
Things like “I’m sorry if anything I did or said hurt you…. Why are you still upset? I apologized! What else am I supposed to do?”
Sadly, there are tons of people who see the refusal to apologize as muscular and tough. In fact, it’s the opposite. Apologizing means letting your best self crash through the wall of your own defensiveness like the Kool- Aid Man. It takes real guts to apologize publicly and privately, and it takes valor to apologize to those with less status and power than you, especially when no one’s making you do it. Apologizing well shows wisdom and honor.
We’ll look at immediate apologies; apologies made after some thought; apologies made after earlier apologies bombed; and apologies made generations after the fact.
Chapter 1: The Importance of Apologies, Good and Bad
Bad apologies? Well, not so much. A bad apology misses the point, sometimes deliberately. (The Hebrew word for “sin,” khet, actually is an archery term meaning “missing the mark.”) It’s an act of self- defense, of doubling down, of half- heartedness; it’s a deflection, a semi- disguised plea to move on rather than an attempt to mend hurt. And we all know people who refuse to apologize, even badly.
Here’s the thing: the basic concept of the duel is that one person has insulted another, and the insulted person fights to uphold his (usually) honor or (sometimes) pride. But seconds, whom you must have in a proper duel, to say nothing of the doctor, are supposed to try their hardest to talk the duelists out of it and get them to apologize. In many cases, combatants would try to shoot in a nonlethal manner and then apologize.
Gadsden called Howe names in a public letter and wouldn’t take it back. Howe challenged him to a duel. Pistols at eight paces! On the day, Gadsden said Howe should shoot first. Howe shot and “grazed” Gadsden’s ear. Gadsden then fired into the air. Howe declined to fire again. Gadsden then apologized to Howe, and if they didn’t go off arm in arm, they parted on friendly terms. “Gadsden had the quixotic notion that, as a gentleman, he could not apologize until he had received his adversary’s fire,”
“Hey Chad, I was recently talking with my 10 year old daughter about bullies. She asked me if I ever bullied anyone and sadly I had to say ‘yes’. What came to mind was how shitty and mean I was to you when we were in Jr. High. I want to apologize. If we lived in the same state I would apologize to your face. I don’t even know if you remember, but I do and I am sorry.”
And Amundsen’s apology was excellent. He said he was sorry and what he was sorry for (without repeating the ancient insults). He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t say, for instance, “I was just a kid myself.” The apology and its acceptance empowered them both.
Kids who bully are experimenting with power. (As are adults who bully, but they should have grown out of that.)
(As hotheaded Russian novelist Tolstoy might have put it, people who don’t want to apologize are all alike; people who feel they’re owed apologies are each pissed off in their own way.)
They’re apologizing for damaging the image of the institution they represent. Pro athletes who are caught on camera beating their wives don’t usually apologize to their wives first in their public apologies. They usually start by apologizing to their team owners, to management, to the brands they endorse, and to the fans before they get around to saying their wives’ names. Sometimes they say that the apology is from both the athlete and the wife, as if she’s equally culpable for being beaten. This is because the wife has no power. The owners, management, brands, and fans are the ones who have the potential to destroy the athlete’s career.
The bank put out a statement saying they apologized “unequivocally” and that “recently, an incident occurred that does not reflect us at our best. We deeply regret this.”
but that their review had determined that the incident “cannot be characterized” as racist. In an impassioned press conference, Johannson referred to “the situation,” the “unintended circumstances,” “what happened,” and “a series of events that we all know about.” She never said “arrest” or “handcuffs.” She never said “twelve years old.”
clearly without actually taking the time to ponder what precisely it was that they did wrong. Sometimes they deny what’s clearly true, because lying is the first, visceral, panicked choice when one feels cornered. The next apology from the public figure comes a few hours or a day or two later, often as a longer screenshot shared across platforms, buffed to a shiny sameness, clearly crafted by a PR or crisis communication team, sounding very little like the person’s own voice. The first apology is narcissistic; the second is self- serving.
One of our favorite things about apologies is that after you make a good one, you feel a sense of release. There’s relief. A clean feeling. It’s over. You don’t have to avoid the subject. You don’t find yourself secretly obsessing or agonizing or wishing it away anymore. Because you handled it.
The other person doesn’t want to hear from you. Because then, if you apologize anyway, your apology isn’t really about their feelings; it’s about your own need for expiation.
Chapter 2: Six Simple Steps to Getting It Right
The fact that people use “regret” as a dodge is all too real.
Asked whether that was an apology, the adjutant- general of the Guard, Sylvester Del Corso, told a reporter, “There is no apology. We expressed sorrow and regret just as you would express condolences to the family of someone who died.”
Regret takes no ownership. The point of saying you’re sorry or that you apologize about a situation in which you were a prime actor is to acknowledge that you caused or partly caused the thing that happened. So if you actually intend to apologize, you must take responsibility and not merely hand- wave about your sorrow. Also, regret is about your feelings, not about the feelings of the person you’re apologizing to. And the latter are what’s important here.
They apologize in vague terms because they’re secretly only apologizing for part of what they did. “I’m sorry I messed up your dinner party,” they say. And they are sorry they threw the chutney, but they’re not sorry they called your sister a ferret- faced jizztrumpet— they’re kind of proud of that, actually, and they’d enjoy doing it again.
Remember, apologize for what you did. Not for how the other person felt about it. You are apologizing for your actions, not how the other person responded to them.
(Again: irrelevant, your feelings.)
When you say what you did or said, say you did it; don’t say “it was done.” In other words, use the active voice, not the passive voice.
Don’t say “I’m sorry a toaster was dropped on your foot.” Say “I’m sorry I dropped the toaster on your foot.” If you say “Mistakes were quite possibly made by the administrations in which I served,” you’re going to sound like Henry Kissinger. You really want that?
We’ve noticed that people, especially public figures and corporate representatives, have a tendency to say, “I take responsibility” (because they know that’s a thing they are supposed to say), but they may not actually take responsibility at all.
“I am deeply ashamed of my uncharacteristic behavior.”
Keep in mind that “I didn’t mean to!” is an excuse. It is not a get- out- of- jail- free card.
There’s a continuum in apologies from explanations (sometimes good) to excuses (bad) to attacks (very bad).
In many lists of apology steps, the last step is asking for forgiveness. We emphatically don’t agree.
Be sure to conclude with “You don’t have to respond to this.” As ever, you’re the one who needs to sit with discomfort when you’ve screwed up; you do not get to ask for a response.
- Say you’re sorry. 2. For what you did. 3. Demonstrate that you understand the impact and know why what you did was hurtful. 4. Offer explanation (if relevant) but no excuses. 5. Make clear why what you did won’t happen again. 6. Make reparations. Six and a half. LISTEN.
The best “when to avoid specificity” advice is this timeless disclaimer from Monty Python: “We would like to apologise for the way in which politicians are represented in this programme. It was never our intention to imply that politicians are weak- kneed political time- servers who are concerned more with their personal vendettas and private power struggles than the problems of government, nor to suggest at any point that they sacrifice their credibility by denying free debate on vital matters in the mistaken impression that party unity comes before the well- being of the people they supposedly represent, nor to imply at any stage that they are squabbling little toadies without an ounce of concern for the vital social problems of today. Nor indeed do we intend that viewers should consider them as crabby ulcerous little self- seeking vermin with furry legs and an excessive addiction to alcohol and certain explicit sexual practices which some people might find offensive. We are sorry if this impression has come across.”
Chapter 3: Sorry If, Sorry But, Sorry You: Things Not to Say
This gives rise to the amazingly common claim “That’s not who I am!”
When it comes to bad apologies, it’s always smart to look for vagueness. Does the apologizer say what they’re sorry for? Sorry about “all that”? “The incident”? Could mean anything. Look for minimizing. Maybe they say, “Sorry for the confusion,”
“I apologize if anyone felt like their career was on the line when I asked about their sex life.”
The problem is portrayed as coming from the uncomfortable, intimidated, frightened people who simply don’t understand the situation or who overreact in our oversensitive times and therefore do not comprehend the beautiful, pure intentions of the apologizer.
Am I shifting the blame? Am I minimizing my offense? Am I sounding defensive? Do I really want to apologize here? Can I apologize without reminding the other person that they’ve sinned too?
Chapter 4: Blame It on the Brain: The Science of Why We Say Such Dumb Stuff
So we are good, but we did a bad thing. How the heck do we reconcile these two contradictory notions? Cognitive dissonance, baby!
wrote novelist Lidia Yuknavitch in The Chronology of Water: “Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.”
study concludes, “the perpetrator will be inclined to close the incident and forget about it long before the victim is ready to do so. Indeed, the victims’ efforts to sustain the memory may be regarded by the perpetrators as unnecessarily vindictive.”
But when the world is demonstrably unfair, it can shake our sense of how things are supposed to work. When we encounter evidence of police violence and political corruption— when we are confronted with poverty, homelessness, addiction, inequalities in schooling, mental illness, inaccessibility of resources— we consciously or unconsciously blame the victim. The world is just, so if they experience injustice, they must have done something to cause that injustice. They brought it on themselves.
It adds up. And there’s not a lot of motivation to seek true fairness if you’re the monkey that gets the grapes.
Thought processes like these offer the reassurance that whatever it was won’t happen to us.
(Such a mistake, because a good apology is a thing to take pride in.)
Most apologies that clonk into your life like a dropped barbell are not good apologies. The person isn’t really wrestling with what they did or how you felt about it at the time or now. They’re apologizing because it’s a recovery movement precept, part of their process, a condition of becoming whole. It’s about them, not you.
Take the word “feel.” Maggie Balistreri’s Evasion- English Dictionary illustrates its dangers:
“I can’t believe I let it happen. I feel responsible.”
SorryWatch will translate Assholese into English:
But we’re also willing to acknowledge that, whatever the reasons, some of the Youth of Today have a sense of entitlement that keeps them from apologizing well.
Chapter 5: “I’m Sorry I Chased You with a Booger”: Teaching Children to Apologize
The owner, infuriated by all the earlier romping and frisking, grabs the dog’s collar and says “BAD DOG! BAD, BAD DOG!” This teaches the dog not to come: the large creatures just grab you and yell at you! Why even bother?
she writes. “We never witnessed them making peace, saying sorry. For my mother and father, the jokes in the kitchen over breakfast erased the cataclysmic event. It was as if it had never happened.”
(Yes, Alex did learn to say “I’m sorry” when people were irritated. Not by being taught, but by observing what people said to other people. But he was a parrot, so we’re not sure he was sincere.)
Apologies should not be about getting caught and dutifully muttering, “I’m sorry.” It’s on parents to explain why the thing the kid is apologizing for was wrong, how the kid’s actions affected others, and how we want society to function. Yes, that’s important.
Chapter 6: “Sorry, Our Policy Is That We Are Never at Fault”: The Odiousness That Is Corporate
Let us now turn to the institutions that contribute to the likelihood that a given apology will be vomitous.
and they’ve been given the terrible (and not evidence- based! medicine is supposed to be evidence- based!) advice to not apologize for fear of lawsuits.
We want to sue just reading about them.
While thirty- nine states and the District of Columbia have medical apology laws that prevent doctors’ and hospitals’ apologies from being used against them in court, we argue that the way such laws are written does more harm than good. Many of these laws protect only statements of sympathy; statements that take responsibility can still be used against doctors in court. What good is that?
Marjorie’s father was a psychiatrist who used to tell an old med school joke: “What’s the difference between God and a neurosurgeon? God knows he’s not a neurosurgeon.”
Sometimes, honestly, not much. When companies are more beholden to shareholders than to the public, or when the company does the calculus and decides that apologizing poorly or not at all will work out as well or better for them than apologizing well and making meaningful changes—
We’d argue that in this case it doesn’t matter whether the chief executive said the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” His actions were the apology. The company did everything right and took a huge financial hit in response to a terrorist act not of their making.
Johnson & Johnson (them again!… but then again, they own everything) realized pretty quickly that it had screwed up and worked to fix things. The company put the product back into production and got it back on shelves four months later. J& J sent apology notes to consumers and offered coupons right and left. And then there was the aforementioned use of humor.
J& J sent over 65,000 tampon buyers a “personal” email with a link to a YouTube video containing their first names. (The online “your name in a song” thing is ubiquitous now; it wasn’t then.)
So: companies can apologize well if they care to. It’s just not always worth it for them to care to. This isn’t a moral flaw on their part; they’re not human beings. It’s just business.
For example, in New York City, even if a trial judge finds that NYPD cops abuse their authority, even if a civilian complaint review board investigates charges and finds the allegations of victims of police violence to be substantiated, even when a police department judge rules on internal NYPD charges against officers after examining evidence and listening to believable witness testimony, the city’s police commissioner gets the last word. If he doesn’t believe the officers should be punished, they won’t be.
Sadly, as we’ve seen, there are multiple mechanisms in place that keep institutions from doing the right thing.
Equifax’s CEO, after a massive 2017 data breach affecting 143 million Americans, one the company didn’t disclose for three months (coincidentally, we’re sure, right after three top executives dumped a ton of stock):
Chapter 7: The Government Feels Sad About How That All Went Down: How Political Apologies Get Made
The backstory: In 1155, King Henry II appointed his buddy Becket to be archbishop of Canterbury. The two were old friends who’d also spent years wrangling over stuff. (Like the time Henry said to Becket, “Doesn’t that ragged old man look cold? Wouldn’t it be Christian to give him some warm clothes?” and when Becket agreed, Henry yanked off Becket’s splendid new ministerial cloak and gave it to the old man while the king’s retinue laughed heartily.)
Many non- Japanese Americans didn’t learn this shameful history at all until Star Trek’s George Takei started telling his family’s story.
We hope you’re better educated than we were. We hope you were taught that after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 110,000 Japanese Americans were herded up and sent to camps, where they were kept under armed guard for the rest of the war. Their property was seized. Many lost their homes and businesses or sold them at a great loss.
then in a Los Angeles high school, recalled that the school’s indignant student body, in protest of the government’s actions, unanimously elected a Nisei (second- generation Nikkei) kid as student body president. The kid and his family were sent to the camps anyway.
(They haven’t done anything? That proves they’re planning something big!)
When DeWitt wasn’t allowed to incarcerate Italian Americans and German Americans, he slapped strict curfews on them. This didn’t last long, in part because there were many Italian Americans in the fishing industry and canned fish was needed to feed the troops. Also, though this wasn’t stated, they were white.
Under the War Measures Act, twenty- one thousand Canadian citizens of Japanese descent were rounded up and sent east from British Columbia to miserable accommodations. The government took their houses, farms, businesses, and fishing boats into “protective custody,” then sold them “to pay the costs of detaining Japanese Canadians.”
Miyagawa says he comes from “the most apologized- to family in the country— maybe the world.” The Nikkei members of his family received apologies from the Canadian government for incarceration. His mother’s second husband was among those who received official apologies for having to pay a racist “Chinese head tax.” (Five hundred dollars. In 1919.) And his father’s second wife, of a Cree First Nation, was one of those apologized to for the institutionalized cruelty and deliberate cultural destruction of residential schools.
He says the apology was pointless to his father. “He had already turned the other cheek. Shikata na gai, the saying goes— what’s done is done.”
Chapter 8: How to Accept an Apology and How to Forgive… and When to Do Neither
It’s good of you to take responsibility. I’m just not over it yet. Let me call you next week and we can pick it up when I’m thinking more clearly.
and then she perpetually calls you to say, “I’m sorry, but…” (feel free to fill that in: “you’d be so pretty if you lost weight”/“ I’m only concerned for your health”/“ I want to tell you about this amazing new plan I read about that’s not a diet, it’s a new way of looking at eating”/“ you’ll never get a man”/“ you always get so nasty when I only care about what’s best for you”/“ I wasn’t sure you were aware how many calories are in avocado toast”), it’s not healthy for you to engage.
And make no mistake: not letting yourself feel your feelings is harmful to you and often to others. Why is it, do you think, that while women are far more likely than men to be diagnosed with depression, they’re far less likely to kill themselves or others? American men are nearly four times more likely to die by suicide than American women; throughout the world, men are generally between three and four times more likely to kill themselves. Worldwide, 95 percent of those who commit homicide are men.
So does tone policing: being told that your feelings are invalid because of the way you expressed them.
“the Principle of Least Interest.” It means that in any relationship— familial, romantic, business, societal— the party that has less investment in the relationship controls the relationship.
Both Islam and Judaism pay a lot of attention to the differences between sins committed against fellow humans and against a divine being. When you wrong a fellow person, praying to God or Allah for forgiveness isn’t the way to deal with it. You have to earn forgiveness from the person you’ve wronged, and it takes work, not prayer. You have to show contrition to them, not to God.
Forgiving, he says, does not mean that you believe what happened to you was okay.
We also live in a world where the least powerful people are the least permitted to screw up.
Life is not fair. Don’t hate the player; hate the game.
Marjorie is reminded of the sign in her child’s kindergarten classroom: “Before you speak, think: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”
Chapter 9: “What I Said on My Private Island Was Taken out of Context”: An Evisceration of Celebrity Apologies
A Twitter user who goes by Madame Novelette illustrated this with a composition called “Every Single Public Male Apology” (she graciously gave us permission to reproduce it here):
Hey everybody. Humble statement of confession to alleged wrongdoing. Immediate reiteration that from my perspective I was not doing anything wrong in that moment, but it’s come to my attention that in fact my actions may have caused harm.
It’s crazy that I, in particular, would have made such an error in judgment, given what a good person I know myself to be. These actions which I took, usually repeatedly, do not represent the utterly blameless man I try so hard to embody.
Uncomfortably personal, mostly unrelated anecdote about my own childhood trauma. I’m doing ok, even though this true accusation about my knowingly chosen behavior has triggered those painful memories.
One example of a good apology is actress Florence Pugh’s response on Instagram after being called out for culturally appropriative fashion choices in her past. She rambled and was sometimes cringey, but it was clear that she’d actually written the words; they didn’t feel filtered by an army of handlers. She seemed to really want to do better; the apology felt authentic.
Let’s remember that people all over the political spectrum can be jerks, and social media exacerbates it. Sometimes the person under fire is racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, antisemitic. Sometimes the person doing the attacking is racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, antisemitic.
For most celebs, vast depths of bad behavior and vast quantities of bad apologies still have minimal long- term effects.
Chapter 10: Girl, Stop Apologizing, or Maybe Don’t, Ugh, It’s Complicated: Gender, Race, and Power
As with most sweeping generalizations and proscriptions, the situation’s a lot more nuanced than that.
Let’s get this out of the way first: women do apologize more than men. There’s a ton of social science research backing this statement up.
Men perceive women as dominating a conversation when they speak 30 percent of the time.
Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
In every case, when the participants were told a CEO was apologizing, they found the apology less sincere than when they thought he was a regular schlub apologizing. Overwhelmingly, they felt that CEOs were better than less powerful people at strategically manipulating people’s emotions. “The assumption is that the CEO has much more to lose and accordingly has a stronger motivation to try to use emotions to create empathy,” Cheshin said in a statement. People were far more willing to forgive junior employees’ transgressions, offering detailed and elaborate explanations about why the less senior people should be forgiven.
Chapter 11: Let the Moment Last; Let the Ripples Widen
People loved getting the thank- yous. Loved it! While the people who sent the thank- yous worried that the recipients might view them as insincere, that their writing might be criticized, that the letters might make the recipients feel uncomfortable (ugh, awkward), no! The recipients often said they were “ecstatic” to get the thank- yous! It wasn’t awkward; they didn’t scrutinize the writing; they were just delighted. Thrilled. Who knew it was that easy to make people ecstatic?
When Susan’s friend Bill used to drive across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, he’d look for out- of- state cars full of luggage/ stuff. He’d get in line ahead of them and pay for their car, asking the toll collector to tell them, “Welcome to San Francisco!” He did that as often as he could and enlisted others to do it too. (Since the bridge phased out toll collectors in favor of electronic passes, he has lost this pleasure.)
and “White privilege is every hiring manager that you meet looks like you.”