One sentence that changed my conflicts...
It's simple, but powerful
I grew up having never heard an adult genuinely apologize. Let alone to a child. So in my mind I believed that grown-ups just don’t mess up. And even if they did, they don’t have to say sorry.
By contrast, I myself apologized constantly. I apologized when someone ran me over with their cart at the grocery store. I apologized for taking too, for forgetting, for having an opinion… I apologized over email. On the phone. In the drive-thru line. Over text. In person. It became a knee-jerk reaction to taking up space.
But a funny thing happened when I blessedly found myself in my first safe, meaningful and long-term relationship. I couldn’t apologize. I couldn’t take accountability. I couldn’t… be wrong. It was as if all of a sudden I remembered that narrative that had long taken root in my childlike mind - adults don’t make mistakes. It was my turn. I had graduated. No more apologies from me.
So I pouted. I gaslit. I performed the most elaborate of mental gymnastics to convince my partner that in fact, I was not in the wrong. And the longer and deeper it went the harder it became to conceive of apologizing. At times it would feel as though it would be physically painful to admit a wrongdoing. All along, I was seeing this behavior continue to be normalized in my family of origin. I continued to feel comfortable acting this way. It was always written off, as if it was a minor flaw that deserved compassion. The tired “You know how she is.” Except, now the she was me. I had become this person now.
Meanwhile, this behavior was causing the fractures in an already fragile marriage to deepen and grow in scale. Then our children got older…
An entirely new landscape of relationship formed. My relationship with my verbal and increasingly cogent children. And I was messing up. Royally. Constantly. And I knew it. I became desperate to “fix it” but I didn’t know how yet the idea of apologizing was never on the table. So I floundered and felt trapped in a toxic cycle - screw up, watch my children feel hurt, disconnect in order to numb the discomfort I felt, drown myself in guilt all night long, wake up and repeat in the morning. It felt exhausting and was breaking my heart and my relationship with my kids.
When I finally sought help from my therapist we delved into anger management, trauma work and so many other issues that needed attention. But we also dug into my inability to take accountability and to truly, genuinely and meaningfully apologize. We started small. We began by working on widening what we therapists call my “window of tolerance” for discomfort. It meant initially simply forcing myself to sit with accountability. Silently. Not necessarily admit it. Not apologize. Not even engage with it at first, just simply allow it, the feeling, to exist in my mind without feeling the need to run, numb, or fight.
Eventually, I shifted into engaging. And when engaging with accountability I learned a brilliant phrase that is now well known and well used in our family. It is simply this:
“I hear that.”
That’s it. Just - “I hear that.” It’s deceptively simple but incredibly powerful for the person on the receiving end. Now when someone, whether my spouse or my children, express hurt I follow these four steps:
Listen
Say “I hear that”
Apologize
Ask how we can make it better
Why does it work? It works because it very clearly and definitely communicates that you are listening and absorbing what the other person is saying. There’s no defensiveness. There’s no “yeah, but…” There’s no fighting, justifying, gaslighting. There are no attempts on your part to alleviate your own discomfort. Because that’s what we’re ultimately doing when we engage in anything else when someone needs us to acknowledge hurt or harm. We try to center ourselves, when it is actually a time to center the person who was hurt.
And here’s the best part - it has radically changed conflicts in our family. They no longer reach that fever pitch level where both parties are dysregulated to such a degree that all emotionally safety disappears. Conflicts still happen but they feel manageable and productive. Even more so, they present an opportunity to rewrite the narrative of childhood. They work the way conflicts were intended to work - to facilitate communication around challenging topics. This one phrase has allowed everyone in our family to work through conflicts in a way that feels safe.
Because the truth is - we can never eliminate conflict from relationships. But we can eliminate conflicts that destroy, disconnect and devalue the ones we love. It takes work but it is worth it and it is possible.
If you’re curious to hear more about my journey with anger management I recommend going back and reading this post I wrote about it a while back.
May you be held in compassion, may you be well and may you be at peace.
Until next time,
Tatiana