I saw a quote on Instagram yesterday that I can’t stop thinking about:
“You can hear someone’s childhood in the way they apologise.”
It echoed something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: why it’s so difficult for certain people to apologise or be held accountable for their actions.
Belle Burden’s best-selling book Stranger – which details the shock collapse of her almost 20-year marriage amid revelations of her husband’s infidelity and his financial manoeuvres that cut her out of a fortune that should have been shared – is a harrowing read for many reasons. One of the biggest, for me, is the fact she never really got an apology for how she’d been cast aside, making it even more difficult to move on. Even if this has never happened to you, it might be a relatable feeling; a lot of my clients are seeking out healing so they can move on without the apology they should have received and didn’t.
It’s in childhood that we learn how to apologise, and why it matters that we do.
More than that, we learn how safe and secure we are in our family, in relationships and in the world – specifically, whether or not we can be wrong, or make bad choices, and still be safe and accepted. We learn this from the way we are loved and supported, and we also learn it from watching the primary adults in our lives. How they apologise and the language they use. Whether they change their behaviour for the better afterwards. How they acknowledge the impact of their actions, regardless of what whether or not that impact aligns with their intentions. Most importantly, whether they’re accountable for what they’ve done, or whether they blame someone else. And the underlying factor in all of this? Shame.
“I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection,” writes shame researcher Brené Brown.
Shame can make us equate making a bad choice with being a bad person. It can make us think that taking ownership of bad choices and remedying them is an act of weakness, an admission of deficiency. It can make us blame other people for what happened – usually: the person calling us out, or the person who has been hurt (“Look what you made me do!”) – so that we can remain impervious to the misery, guilt and regret of knowing we’ve fallen short of expectations, and caused damage to someone. How we respond when shame shows up is key to our willingness to be accountable.
Learning how to apologise in sincere ways has been difficult for me. I was raised in a household where we overlooked bad behaviour to “keep the peace”. Instead, we shoved our resentment down our own throats where it simmered bitterly and leapt out in passive-aggressive comments or bitching behind the other person’s back later. We did not call out bad behaviour. I became someone who apologised reluctantly and defensively, often sidestepping blame. I had learned that owning bad behaviour was shameful.
Learning to apologise, despite the shame I felt for what I’d done – and also learning to hold someone else accountable for what they’d done, despite fear of massive blowback – has been one of the greatest learnings of my romantic relationship, particularly in the early years. I was able to do this because I have a partner whose love for me is not conditional on me being flawless, and who is also willing to take accountability for his own actions.
Being willing to apologise and take remedial action for what we’ve done – even when it’s uncomfortable – boils down to this belief: I can make mistakes and still be a good person. I can cause hurt and still be deserving of love.
It’s true that our childhood plays a large part in determining how well, or how poorly, we apologise. But we are mutable beings. If we’re willing to examine the underlying events and emotions that have shaped us, we don’t have to be saddled with them. Healing means being able to sit with our own flaws and still be okay. This is the greatest gift we can give ourselves, and the people around us.
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