Don't explain -- just apologize!

Oh, I'm sorry I interrupted you. I just didn't want us to get involved in some long pointless discussion that went nowhere."

"I'm sorry if that joke offended you. I didn't think you were one of those hyper-sensitive people that have no sense of humor."

"Oh no, I'm so sorry about spilling all that soup on your brand-new dress, but I had no idea how hot the bowl was and when Fred handed it to me he just thrust it at me like, 'Here, take your soup!' and so I grabbed it to get out of the way but it just scalded my hand, and besides my wrist has never been the same since I fell on it three weeks ago because you know I have these dizzy spells ...."

"Sorry you didn't appreciate that pat on the ass. I didn't realize you were a lesbian."

Translation (in all four cases): I'm not sorry.

Apologizing is a painful thing to do, especially when we know we are in the wrong. But that's why it is so important. That's why it works.  If I've hurt somebody and I want him to get over being mad at me, I apologize precisely because it is a little humiliating. It's my way of telling him, "Look, I feel so bad about what I did that I hurt too. And I'll gladly abase myself (at least a little bit), and put up with the suffering that it causes, if it can reconcile us." The way he knows that I mean it when I say I'm sorry -- the way he knows that I'm not just parrotting the words -- is that if I do it right it costs me something. It makes me hurt. And I wouldn't make myself hurt unless I meant it.

But of course I don't want to hurt. Nobody does. And so at the same time that my better self is admitting to fault and apologizing for it, there's another little voice in my head that will do anything possible to deflect the blame. Part of me will gladly admit to having been a shit if that will reconcile me to my friend; another part of me compulsively wants to prevent anybody from getting the idea that I was being a shit. So while one part of me magnanimously apologizes, this other little voice quickly slips in an explanation or excuse that somehow it really wasn't my fault.

It's almost overpowering, this desire to deflect blame. It takes all my conscious awareness and deliberate self-control to make myself shut up after saying the words "I'm sorry," ... to make myself stand silent rather than launch into a dozen different explanations of what I was really trying to do and who really jostled my arm at just the wrong moment and how it really wasn't my fault after all. Because that's what I want to say.

But saying it voids the apology. If it wasn't really my fault, then my apology is just hot air. And if -- as it usually turns out -- my friend can see damned well that it really was my fault all along, the explanation does nothing at all except to let him know, "I'm not willing to feel bad over what I did to you. Too bad for you and all that, but it's not my problem. Take a hike."

And a lot of the time that's worse than the original hurt.

The bottom line is easy to spell out, but oh so hard to do. If you screw up and hurt somebody, don't make it worse than it already is. Don't rub salt in the wound. Don't explain. Just apologize. And then shut up.

Remember, I never said it was easy.