Apologize like a therapist

 

Cheated-on or otherwise hurt wives don’t feel satisfied with their husbands’ apologies and expressions of remorse. Adult children don’t believe their parent’s apology for years of abuse. Here is a basic lesson in effective and ineffective apologizing.

This is a bad apology: “I cheated on you with Fifi for a year. It was a terrible thing to do. I am profoundly sorry, sorrier than I can say. I’m stunned that I was capable of this, because I love you more than anything in the world. I hate myself for the way I hurt you. I will do anything that will help me not be that kind of person anymore. Whatever you want. I’ll go back to church. I’ll meet with our pastor, see him for counseling. I’ll join a church support group. I’ve bought the self-help books on infidelity. I’ll go to individual therapy. I’ll go to marital therapy if you want to. We can sign up for the Retrouvaille marriage encounter weekend. And I will never do this again. Here are my smartphone and computer passwords. You can look at them whenever you want to. I’ll call you when I arrive at work and when I’m leaving work. I called Fifi and told her that it’s over. I’d understand if you’d even want to contact her, to prove that I’ve ended all communication. I can understand if you can’t forgive me, but I hope that you’ll be able to someday.”

Does that sound like a good apology to you? It is empty, it is lame. It will, or should, leave her feeling troubled and confused: confused because it sounds so sincere, and may be sincere, and because it is incom­plete. There are two parts missing.* Here is how it should go:

Part One

All of the above, plus . . . .

Part Two

“I have done a lot of immense, brutal soul-searching. I’ve had to understand where this behavior, this urge, came from. I had to fall into the feelings, not just those I had when I was driving to her apartment and . . . being there, but all of my feelings. I see I’ve always been troubled. Somewhere under the surface there is a permanent feeling of wrong, or emptiness, or never had, or never given. It’s a feeling that love isn’t complete, or that there is a kind of love that can never be found. You are the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, that can ever happen to me, but I carry inside an ungrown place. I’m making no excuses. But I’ve grasped that my childhood was loveless, and something in me is still back there waiting. It’s that something that looked in the wrong direction when I cheated.

“I’ve seen myself and it is a miserable child. And the fact is he’s still here. But now that I see him I know where to work. Because he’s still needy, but my need to be good is more powerful. My need never to lose real love is more powerful. I’ve called several places and I think I’ve found a good therapist. My first appointment is on Monday.

“You already have a disappointing husband. And now I’m showing you a botched child. I hope you will somehow find the reason to stay with me through this.”

Part Three

“I’ve been speaking and you haven’t. You need to be able to say everything, name and express all your thoughts and feelings. If you want to, when you want to. And I will hear everything and accept it. There will be no time limit.”

 🔑

To me, “I apologize” is like “I forgive.”** These are concepts as lazy as the words that label them. There are times when people need to get deep and not just run on their sur­face tapes, when they need to put psychology in action. You can’t apologize at the truest level unless you really care about the other person’s feelings. You can’t apologize with knowledge and the motivating power inherent in it unless you know who you are.

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* There is a fourth Part, to be sure: You can’t be a sociopath.

 ** https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2017/05/curmudgeon-2-forgiveness.html.

The general

 

Am I that close to end of life that I see most things on the cosmic scale? The number is sixty-nine. But I find all the political oppositional-defiance and conflicts infant tantrum-ish, stupid, mind-numbingly boring. Yes, I know life is supposed to be savored, lived in the moment, that the minutiae should be galvanizing for a vital person. But that’s for young children making a friend, a child and her puppy, children swimming in a lake, a child tickled (in both ways) that a ladybug is making a ladylike march up her arm. It’s not for all the adults living in their head, their attitudes that come from ignorance and pain, rather than from the world. Their substance is submerged suffocated feelings, thoughts about concepts. There is nothing real about them or their philosophies. Philosophy only happens when people don’t have answers in psychology, in who they are. You don’t wax ethereal about Beauty or Morality if you know your human nature. You don’t create vast metaphysics and epistemologies if you grasp our oneness with any given atom.

Movies and stories about a murder or other terrible crime may be compelling. But I’d replace them all with one line said by the narrator: “He is a mental disease that didn’t survive his childhood but in an unlivably twisted form.” That would be all the neces­sary truth, and dramatic enough.

There is some ignorance which we should poeticize. We don’t know why we love, or what it is, but it’s compelled to write its poetry. It’s good magic that comes from mystery, while crime and bad character and terrible fools like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump come from poison. There’s no mystery there.

I don’t believe I’ve found it difficult to live on a broader, general sweep, on the cosmic scale. There will always be moments when it steps aside for its betters. A lady bug crawling so rightly up my arm would be one of those moments.

OCD and the world as a reproach

 

I was around eight or nine years old when my father made some origami – paper folding – doodad for me. One generally starts these projects with a square, not rectangular, sheet of paper. This calls for folding upward and aligning the bottom edge with a long side, creating a forty-five-degree crease and therefore a square. That leaves a couple inches of excess, unusable paper which is cut off and discarded. Father did not align the two edges absolutely perfectly. There was a molecular fraction-of-an-inch overlap, which no one on God’s earth would, or should, notice or care about.

I threw an alarmed, rageful tantrum.

I and so many other children.

Why can we not stand to color outside the lines? Why does a shirt have to hang sym­met­ric­ally on the hook, or must all items on the desk be parallel to its borders? Why do some children form a ritual of counting by threes or sevens while walking through a doorway, or stepping on the sweet spot of tiles, never on the line? What is the feeling of wrongness that explodes with a transgres­sion against order, and why is it so terrible, so intolerable?

Here's what it is: Chaos is feeling, and since our primary internal feeling is pain, and it’s pain of the earliest critical loss of self, we cannot stand to feel. Just as a Narcissist would disin­te­grate to chaotic crib fire and torture without his aura of Perfection, so a child who has never experienced basic security – the “secure base” – from babyhood or infancy cannot stand to feel the truth. He must direct his life away from feeling, by means of the mind.

My Obsessive-Compulsive Personality-disordered teenager cannot lie down or walk in feel­ing. Every­thing in her life sits on a cushion of thinking. At 16 she is already a defense and prose­cuting attorney, has been a lawyer for years, countering everything I say, not to have a feeling land inside her. Only a catastrophe might puncture that cloud (and I’m not here to provide one).

I picture her and others finally collapsing into feeling, a place where others are happy to be: being engulfed in the summer sun while lying in the grass, watching the ants and grass­hoppers; feeling happily at ease at a birthday party with other boys and girls. But they can’t. They have to control themselves, think something, leave.

It's interesting that something small, like a bit of crayon color that extrudes the boundary, is a visceral symbol of our inner failure. But it surely is.