Forced Apologies Are More Harmful Than We Realize
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Were you forced to apologize to your friends or family members as a child? How often do you hear or see parents swooping in and demanding that their children apologize in today’s world? I am going to make a bold statement that may ruffle some feathers. Forced apologies fragment the Soul.
While demanding an immediate “sorry” may stem from the intention to teach “proper” social etiquette, forced apologies miss a key component to the understanding and being comfortable with emotions, especially the emotion of remorse and guilt. A genuine apology is driven from a sense of remorse, of feeling bad for the behaviors we have done that caused harm, disconnect and pain to another, and even to ourselves. When apologies are forced, they are not only ingenuine, but they bypass a fundamental key of development.
Emotion intelligence, emotional maturity and nervous system regulation is built on the strength and tenacity of knowing how to stay connected to the body and be with oneself in the emotional experience without trying to change the experience or mutate it into something else. Learning how to sit with remorse, feel and understand its tone and texture in our body, as it is, is a powerful skillset to understanding how to be accountable for our emotions, and have agency to make change. When the opportunity to build this inner resource is stripped from us and replaced with the overshadowing of a demanding apology we begin to learn that our feelings are not important, slowly and unconsciously storing our feelings away — removing ourselves or losing ourselves from the experience.
I will share a scenario with my son when he was two years young as an example. (The picture above is not my son by the way).
One day my son was playing with another boy his same age. At this age it is natural that children don’t play together. They often play next to each other or near one another. The other child had a toy. My son wanted it so he walked up and removed it from the other child’s hands. The other child got upset and so did my son. I saw the interaction and gently came over and knelt down to their level. I began to narrate for them the situation. It went something like this:
“I see that ‘so and so’ had the toy in his hand and you took it from him. You want the toy too. I can’t let you take it from him. You can ask him if you can take a turn.” My son asked and the other boy nodded no. I helped support my son to return the toy to the other child by saying, “He doesn’t want to take turns right now with his toy. We are going to give the toy back now. Would you like to do so by yourself or may I help you?” My son handed it back to the child, but after he saw it in the child’s hands, his mad came back. My son didn’t know what to do with his emotion and he began to try to remove the toy from the other child’s hands. The other child held on tightly. As some of you parents and guardians may know, things got a little escalated. There was some pushing, shoving and soon to be hitting between both the children. I stepped in again, and told my son calmly, “I cannot let you push or hit. I am going to help your body move away so everyone can be safe". I gently picked him up and helped him move away from the other child but stayed close enough so that we could find resolution once both the children calmed down.
The other parent came over at this point. While holding my upset child, I smiled to the parent thinking, “lovely, we can work this out together”. The parent did not smile back, but instead immediately said to their child, “we don’t hit. Say you are sorry.” The child, who had begun to calm down a bit, immediately erupted into tears. The parent became more angry and responded to their child with, “that’s it, we are going home.” Swiftly picking up their child, who was now wailing at this point, the parent walked away mouthing to me, “sorry.” I watched as the child, staring back at us, went from sobbing to confusion and then into a blank daze.
In that moment, my heart ached.
The misconception to the situation was heavy, lingering in the air like a stale breeze. The aversion to emotional discord was so strong it snuffed out the remains of any open communication or curiosity. The attachment to making things “smooth” overrode the beautiful opportunity to guide two children to learn how to collaborate and understand how to be safe with their bodies when big emotions arose. But more importantly, how to stay in connection to themselves.
While I do not know the other parents situation, and nor do I presume to do so, I have witnessed and have been a part of many moments like this throughout my life. I imagine you have too. Thankfully, I have the honor to hold space for clients to mend from similar circumstances, and I have personally felt, known and found healing to the hurt that erodes connection and intimacy in these experiences.
Please note: I have no judgment or assumptions to the other parent in the example above. Without the space to connect with them, I do not know their story or situation. I wish them and their family all the goodness and love that we all deserve.
People Pleasing Behaviors
An unpopular opinion I often say is that “forced apologies create people pleasing behaviors”. Not to be mistaken with “people pleasers”, as I find when we focus on the behaviors rather than a label or title given to someone or ourselves, we offer a doorway for change and agency to make change. What I mean is that when children or we as adults learn to apologize without taking a moment to feel the effects of our actions, there is a loss of understanding, and most importantly a loss of connecting to the feeling that was driving the behavior to begin with.
When we are young, it is from our caregivers that we learn how to handle difficult situations. We learn by how they handled difficult or big emotional situations with the world and with us. Since, as children our caregivers are the model for how to be in relationships, we often learn to mirror or match our caregivers responses to challenging emotions and incidents. Naturally, if our caregiver demands that we apologize rather than get curious about what led us to behave the way we did in the first place, then we understand that self reflection is not necessary or warranted. When we do not have compassionate curiosity and the space to feel and understand our emotions, we slowly become disconnected to them, and thus to ourselves.
From a psychotherapeutic and basic needs lens, the attachment and safety to a caregiver for children is so imperative that unconsciously a child will learn to sacrifice their own needs and negate their own emotional experience to ensure connection with the caregiver. This means that from a very young age, we might have learned to avoid, suppress or repress some of our basic needs because we were not allowed to explore and understand our emotional landscape.
The harm of forced apologies is that it shifts the attention away from the root emotion or cause of the behavior and replaces it with another focus or emotion. Without the inquisitive space for understanding, the focus emphasizes the importance of pleasing others (usually adults or authority) rather than the inner knowing of one’s own needs and experiences. This shift is a devastating one, as it causes a disconnect with the psyche and body for understanding “how” to be with anger, sadness, guilt, etc. Forced apologies snuff out an opportunity for growth and learning how to know one’s needs and how to get them met in healthy ways.
As this cycle continues, slowly over time, we learn that our needs are not as important as the needs of others. The invalidation of our experiences repeats, the more we are told to apologize rather than to understand, etching a deeper groove of fragmentation within ourselves. And all the while, compacting the origin of the pain under a pile of other emotions, coping mechanisms and personas. Forced apologies are a quick fix, bypassing feelings that are uncomfortable (or unprocessed), thus, hindering the development of emotional intelligence and emotional maturity.
In addition, when we learn that apologizing is more important than the understanding of the experience for all involved, it teaches that it is ok to say we are sorry without meaning it. Used in this way, sorry becomes an empty word, void to the vulnerability of the heart, and ultimately to connection. Vulnerability is essential to foster trusting and intimate relationships. In time, we can evolve to have a sense that intimacy is a “tit for tat dynamic” where in order to have our needs meet or validated, we must be a certain way. A harmful exchange of pleasing others, knowingly or unknowing, is made and called intimacy.
Fostering Healthy Whole-hearted Relationships
For our children to have resilience, genuine confidence, self acceptance, inner trust, and kindness, we need to help our children foster rich, safe and loving relationships with their emotions and their needs. To guide them on how to stay connected to themselves in the big feels, we need to re-learn how to do this so we can model this for our children. Often, when we become parents, our children have an uncanny way of assisting this process to organically, or really karmically, happen, if we are willing to see the medicine of our child’s bright light.
The majority of my work with clients is in the subtlety of re-learning the relationship they have to their emotions and nervous system, and looking at the parts that were invalidated, suppressed, reprised and numbed. Understanding the impact these experiences with ample compassionate space, and in a safe container, one can gain clarity on their needs to learn how to be with their emotions without being consumed or lost in them.
It is very possible to learn how to share our experiences, speak up for our needs, and how to move towards repair or resolution together with each other. Reconnecting to our inner guidance and wisdom transforms our relationship to our vulnerability and the pain, gaining transparency and agency in our communication with the world, speaking and living with healthy boundaries and from an authentic whole-heartedness.
It is through our willingness to touch our own vulnerabilities, tenderly holding our own pain with compassion and love that we transmute our walls of separation. Within in each of us is a well of inner guidance and wisdom that we can reclaim, entering into deep meaningful, and safe relationships with others — our children and the world.
If you are looking for a safe, open minded container to deepen your understanding to yourself and self healing, it would be my honor to work with you. The therapeutic counseling of Depth Hypnosis aims to support each individual in their own self healing capabilities. I offer 20 minute complimentary calls to explore working together.
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Take care of you.
Take care of one another.
Much Love,
Kristina Renée