TRANSCRIPT
I would like to speak about different types of apologies. I’d like to start with the least healthy type of apology. This type actually happened a lot in my family of origin with my parents. It certainly went into my 20s, and I’ve seen it a lot with other people. It is people do something bad to someone else. The other person feels terrible about it, and then the first person who did the violation says, “I’m so sorry you feel that way.” They don’t actually say, “I’m sorry that I caused you to feel that way.” I’m so sorry I did this behavior that caused you to feel that way. In fact, what they’re really saying is, “My behavior that I did to you was perfectly fine. I’m just sorry that you feel bad.” That was very familiar to me from my childhood, such that now as an adult, I’m very sensitive when people do that to me, and I hear it quite a bit. Another thing is I heard a friend describe to me what that kind of fake apology really means. What it really means when they do that is they’re saying, “I’m sorry that you’re so weak that you can’t handle me violating you. I’m sorry that you’re so weak and that you’re so pathetic that you have those feelings around it.” Really, what it is, is it’s a double-edged sword. First, they violate you, and then they stick it in you again with this fake apology. And then there’s the next level up toward healthiness in apologies. It’s still a very sick type of apology, and here it is. It’s when people do something bad to you, and they acknowledge that they’ve done something bad to you, and they say, “I’m sorry that I did XYZ. I’m sorry I violated you in this way.” For instance, a good example is my dad hitting me or dragging me outside for no reason and locking me outside when I hadn’t really done anything bad. He would cry and say, “I’m so sorry I did that to you, Daniel.” But then actually, he did it again, and he would do it again. So what this type of apology is, is an apology that acknowledges the bad behavior but actually has no deeper intention of changing the bad behavior. So in that way, really, it’s just a kind of fake shallow apology, and I really dislike that also. I see it as very, very common in the world to the degree that some people, like my dad, my mom also would apologize for their bad behavior with the expectation that the person they’re apologizing to will just instantly forgive them and actually give them a kind of subliminal pass to do that bad behavior again and again. And actually, this brings me to one other type of apology that’s kind of related to the second type, and that is I heard one of my relatives who would do this not infrequently. She would say, “Listen, I’m so sorry, so I would like to apologize for my bad behavior in the future because I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep doing this bad behavior. So I would just like you to accept my apology now,” almost like a future kind of IOU. And it was like, “Wait a second, how in the world can I forgive you and accept your apology for something that not only have you not done yet, but it sounds like you feel perfectly comfortable committing to do again?” It’s like a very curious kind of apology. Well, now I’d like to get into one other odd type of apology that’s different from all the others and different from the final type of apology, which I see as a healthy apology. This next to final apology is something I also see as very common in the world, and I’ve actually done a lot of it myself. That is when people apologize, and they actually haven’t done anything wrong. They go around as a form of interactional bonding, I think, by saying, “I’m sorry for XYZ,” when actually they haven’t done anything. That is unhealthy. Actually, often people can go around apologizing for their extremely healthy behavior. I spent a lot of my childhood, certainly parts of my adulthood, apologizing for my strengths, apologizing for my insight, apologizing for my wisdom, apologizing for my energy, my vitality, my confidence. I learned as a child that if I didn’t push myself down, thwart my strength, apologize for my own true self and my life, I would get rejected more. So I learned in a way that by apologizing for my good qualities, I could kind of make them love me and accept me more. It really didn’t work all that well in the end, but at least it was an attempt for me to try to get loved more from people who really actually didn’t have very much of a capacity to love. Well, now I’d like to get into healthy apologizing. What is a healthy apology? What I’ve observed is a healthy apology is changing the bad behavior. So if I’ve done something bad to someone else, I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, violated people in different ways, not been a good friend, that kind of thing. My job is to figure out what I’m doing, to study it, and to change my behavior. The basic way that I found to change my behavior, and this is throughout this YouTube channel, is healing my historical traumas, figuring out how I was violated, grieving what was done to me, and returning to my true self, becoming a healthy person, and looking at my bad behavior as a real clue about what happened to me. This is all an internal process. It doesn’t necessarily require me acknowledging any of this to the person I have harmed. However, I like to acknowledge often what I have done if I can find the person I harmed. Maybe it happened 20 years ago, but the main apology, first and foremost, is to change my behavior, is to stop doing that bad behavior, to become a healthier person, to become a true self. And then sometimes, if it feels appropriate, if it’s going to help the other person especially, to go back and to say, “You know, I did this wrong thing to you. I want to acknowledge it, and I want to note most importantly and show you through my life, through my behavior, that I’ve changed and I don’t do that anymore.”