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There are key skills that can make or break relationships. One such skill is the ability to apologize. The typical (ineffective) apology goes something like this:

1.     I’m sorry this happened, but You….blah blah blah…(did XYZ to cause me to do this)

2.     OK, I said I’m sorry, now get over it.

The Effective Apology goes like this:

1. Take responsibility for the offense (no excuses or blaming).

2. Listen and connect to the painful emotions caused by your offense.

3. State that you don’t want to cause those feelings again.

4. Make an action plan going forward that will protect the relationship from a subsequent offense.

And finally (and often the hardest part): 

5. Repeat for as long as the other feels pain.

I met Jim three months after his wife had discovered he was having an emotional affair with his college girlfriend. They had reconnected on Facebook and gradually started chatting on the web before having secret, daily conversations over the phone. The conversations were a violation of the boundaries that both Jim and his wife, Alice, thought were reasonable.

When Alice discovered the relationship she asked him to stop, which he immediately did. At that time, Jim had apologized to Alice by saying that he knew what he did was wrong and had hurt her. He indicated that he felt terrible about her pain and that he would remove his ex-girlfriend from his Facebook account, email her and let her know that he would not be talking to her again and he would let Alice know if she tried to contact him again.  He also felt that he had made it clear to Alice that he loved only her, had little current feelings or desire to connect to his ex-girlfriend

Jim did all of these things, but now he was upset that Alice was still struggling three months later. He told me in our first session that he had apologized “over and over” and yet Alice couldn’t “let it go.” Her “meltdowns” were driving him crazy.

Jim wanted to know what he could do to keep Alice from “beating him up” anytime a memory of the affair came up?

Jim already knew from reading “After the Affair,” by Janice Abrahms Spring (an excellent “How To” guide for recovering from affairs) that what they were experiencing was normal.  Alice needed to talk about her feelings (which he described as “meltdowns”) and he needed to be less negatively reactive and go through this with her.

In spite of knowing this, Jim’s immediate retort was, “I can’t apologize anymore. I’ve done that over and over. Now it’s just when she wants to humiliate me she brings it up. It’s like she’s bashing me over the head with it.” 

Jim knew how to apologize. What he didn’t understand was that some apologies have to be repeated even when (maybe especially when) they made him uncomfortable.  Alice would bring up the affair something like this:

“Today I heard something that reminded me of how you would sneak around and have heartfelt conversations with your ex-girlfriend. I can’t stop thinking about it. I just can’t believe you would do that when I have to hound you to have those kind of conversations with me. How could you be so sneaky and deceitful?”

Jim was a do-the-right-thing kind of guy. In truth, he thought of himself as significantly more moral than others. He saw himself as above reproach at his job and loathed those who cut corners and behaved in “sneaky, deceitful” ways. When he heard himself described by Alice this way he felt humiliated. Feeling this, he would grow silent, leading Alice to continue to talk about her anger— or as he saw it, “bashing me over the head with it.”

At that point Jim would attack back and any potential healing that could be brought about by an effective apology was lost. His attack usually went something like this: “If you would have been there for me instead of playing tennis with your friends every night this would never have happened in the first place.”

So three months into recovering from a relationship trauma, Jim and Alice were in worse shape than they had been earlier on. Jim had initially taken full responsibility for his behavior, but now he was blaming Alice. For Alice this was akin to taking back the apology.

What Alice needed was for Jim to say something like: “I can see how you’d see me as sneaky and deceitful.  What I did was sneaky and deceitful. I am horrified by my actions, too. That will not happen again, I promise.”

What was preventing Jim from doing this was his own shame over doing something he thought he would never do. Essentially, Jim’s shame and his refusal to accept that he could be hurtful and morally flawed like the rest of us was preventing him from empathizing with Alice and thus continuing to accept responsibility for his actions.

Jim worked with me for a while before he was able to understand how his feelings of humiliation were interfering with his empathy for Alice. When he understood this better it was easier for him to maintain his apologetic stance with her and complete Step 5 of the Effective Apology.  

An Effective Apology needs to take into account how much pain your actions caused your partner. Sometimes the hurt we inflict is so great that we have to repeat again and again our soothing words to help the other feel safe again. Many times we know the right thing to do, but we are stymied by our own shame. In Jim’s case, his offense flew in the face of his own view of his moral character, making it difficult for him to continue healing the wound his actions caused.

Next time I will address another important relationship skill that Alice needed to master for the relationship to finally heal: Forgiveness.

Gerald Drose is an Atlanta-based couples sex therapist.  He is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist. Visit Dr. Drose at Powers Ferry Psychological Associates, LLC.  

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