How to say sorry and really mean it 2/2 (Wednesday Wonderings)

Part 2

This is part, 2, but you can catch part 1 here, if you’ve not seen that yet.

Defensiveness- the arch enemy of apologies !

In her book, “Why won’t you apologise”, Harriet Lerner describes defensiveness as a challenge for apologising. That said, we are neurobiologically wired to be defensive. It is normal. We want to protect the image we have of ourselves, so because of this, it will be hard if anyone wants to point out to us, that we might have done something to offend or hurt them.

However, if we are going to get good at being in relationship with others, we need a strategy as well as the motivation to move past defensiveness. Defensiveness is the arch enemy of being in relationship really, it prevents us from being able to listen and connect with intimacy.

A big part of the problem is that most of us don’t listen with the same effort we put into speaking. We often aren’t fully taking in what’s being said to us, as we are usually already preparing what we will say when there is a chance for us to speak.

The other difficulty is that us humans find it easy to listen if we like what the other person is saying. The flipside of this is that it is VERY difficult to listen if we are being criticised. When what is being said is hard to listen to, we automatically begin to filter out a lot of the information and begin to hone in on what we don’t agree with, especially the inaccuracies, and inconsistencies of what is being said to us. As our awareness grows, this “only listening to what we don’t like”, will be a tell-tale sign that our defensiveness is activated.

When we feel like this, it arms us ready to retaliate against the other person, and not to identify the need that is under the other person’s concern or even their criticism about us. If we don’t listen, we can’t really apologise sincerely.