relationships

Sorry. Not sorry?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Some apologies make things worse. They don’t feel like apologies at all. They feel, instead, like just more hurt. Other apologies acknowledge the wound and help it heal. What makes the difference?

In When Sorry Isn’t Enough: Making Things Right with Those You Love, Gary Chapman (of Five Love Languages fame) and Jennifer Thomas suggest that a true apology must have six characteristics:

Expressing regret–It’s important for an apology to be for something you did or said.  The more specific, the more it acknowledges the harm caused, the better. “I’m sorry you’re so sensitive,” doesn’t really feel like an apology because it is just restating some perceived flaw in the victim and isn’t focussing on anything you did wrong. Even if the harm was wholly unintended, when your actions cause another person pain, an apology is warranted. It goes to the very essence of the apology: I did not mean to hurt you.

Accepting responsibility— Yes, the pressures of the world can sometimes lead us to get wound up and stressed and to hurt other people, but that does not make it the world’s fault. We control ourselves. We are responsible if we act badly. Blaming the boss, the dog, the economy, the other drivers is deflecting. Apologies for the state of the world or all its ills will not feel like a real apology to the person you lashed out at. Apologizing for losing your temper or not considering the effects of your actions will.

Making restitution–“How can I make it right?” are powerful words. It shows an acknowledgement that what you did caused someone else harm. Maybe you can’t make it right. Maybe you can never make it right. But listening to the victim explain the damage is a powerful step forward in the process. Listening here is key–no justifying your actions, no quarreling with the facts, no defenses, just listening to the other person share their perspective. If there is something you can do to make things better, do that thing.

Genuinely repenting–If you are truly sorry, and have listened deeply to the pain you’ve caused, you will not want to cause that person pain again. You will stop causing the damage. You will want to change. Maybe you will need to write down the steps you want to take to prevent causing further harm. Maybe you will slip up and need to start again. But the most important thing is that you will try to not do this again. Otherwise, are you really sorry?

Requesting Forgiveness–“Can you forgive me?” are powerful words. They show you care about the relationship. They show you understand you did things wrong. They show you are not in control of the relationship.

Everyone messes up. Not everyone takes responsibility for messing up. When we do take responsibility for the harm we’ve caused, it may strengthen our relationships and help them grow stronger. Trust can reenter, fostering healing.

Randy Pausch, the author of the quote above, gave a powerful Last Lecture before he died young of pancreatic cancer. His timeless words can teach us all a lesson about life and living.

An apology to heal the hurt.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

“I’m sorry, but…” Some apologies make things better, and some just don’t. In fact, they might make things worse by blaming the person you hurt or showing that there is just no true awareness of what went wrong. 

Generally, the apologies that have an excuse fall in the latter category. A good apology makes you feel seen and heard, that someone has looked at things from your point of view and understood the negative impact they have made. A good apology requires us to stand in the shoes of the person we’ve wronged and feel what they are feeling. Not what we would feel if we were in their shoes, but what they’re feeling. 

Then, when we feel the harm we’ve caused, it should change us, make us not want to cause that harm again to that person or others, and make us want to make amends. It shouldn’t leave us where we were. If it does, if we repeat the same hurtful words or behavior, perhaps we haven’t yet done the work that goes into reconciliation. 

Back into the other person’s shoes we go until we understand and grow. This is how progress is made, how relationships heal and grow stronger, how trust is restored. And, because we humans are very fallible creatures, it’s not a one and done thing, but a continuing process. Evaluating the effect we are having on people, making sure we are treading softly, taking responsibility and making amends when we don’t. Perhaps two steps forward, one step back, but staying in relationship, rebuilding trust, and moving forward together.

Active love.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Love isn’t a feeling we fall in and out of. It’s an action we choose to take even when it may be challenging. Sometimes it brings pain. When we think of love as an active verb, like, as Mr. Rogers suggests above, ‘struggle’, rather than as an emotion, it opens our eyes to the fact that we must work at it. It’s a struggle, a constant readjustment and tinkering, constantly expanding our own understanding and empathy.

Love is not molding someone to our vision of what they should be, but accepting who they are and supporting them as they blossom. Thinking of love as something more akin to struggle encourages us to keep looking for new and better ways to show up for the people in our lives, to view the relationships as evolving rather than static, and to appreciate all the little successes and breakthroughs in those relationships along the way.

Listening to hear.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Communication can be tough, particularly after a long silence. Finding inroads, healing thaws, rediscovering common ground takes effort.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a game plan before going into what might be an emotionally-charged conversation.

Consider this one:

So often we get lost in who’s right, who’s wrong. But is that really the point? Harsh words are often spoken in just such a competition to be right. Often the words cause more harm than the original conflict. Is right/wrong really the best way? Especially when the objective is to try to get a friendship back on track.

Being gentle, vulnerable, attentive is true strength. Moving through the world with a genuine sense of curiosity rather than an avowed sense of your own rightness can open the door to a better appreciation of someone else’s point of view and a greater chance of improving, rather than destroying, the remnants of a relationship you hope to save.

How are we?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

A guy cuts you off in traffic. How do you see him? Is he an inconsiderate lout caring little for the aggravation he causes you or a distracted hapless soul, perhaps late for an emergency? How we see this situation, or any situation, can have a profound effect on our lives.

In this thoughtful essay, Elizabeth Gilbert considers the power of perception. She recounts a time when her father and his siblings were reminiscing about their late mother and how she used to take a sip from any glass of milk she poured for them. They agreed on the fact, that she took a sip, but wildly disagreed on their perception of that fact:

At one point, they found themselves sitting around the old kitchen table, eating sandwiches and talking about the past. My uncle, the baby of the family, looked at the refrigerator and said, “I can still see Mom standing there, pouring me a glass of milk. Do you remember that sweet thing she always used to do whenever she got us a glass of milk? Remember how she’d take a tiny sip first, to make sure it wasn’t spoiled? Always looking out for us.”

My father, the analytical engineer of the family, raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said. “You are so wrong. Mom wasn’t sipping our milk to test it for freshness. She was sipping our milk because she always overfilled the glass. She had no sense of spatial relations. It used to drive me crazy.”

My brilliantly sardonic aunt looked at her two brothers like they were the biggest idiots she’d ever seen.

“You’re both wrong,” she said. “Mom was stealing our damn milk.”

So, what have we learned about my grandmother from this story? Was she a devoted caregiver, an incompetent dunderhead or someone who would steal the milk out of the mouths of her children? (Or maybe just an exceptionally thirsty woman.) The world will never know the truth.

But does the truth really matter?

I don’t think so.

Wow! What a remarkable difference in what each brings to the encounter. Now imagine yourself in each of those mindsets: hostile, critical, or grateful. Which would lead to the happier life?

We don’t have control over facts, but we sure have a tremendous amount of control over how we perceive those facts. We owe it to ourselves to try to see the facts in the most favorable light even if that means consciously going over all the possible interpretations of something and actively selecting the best one to pick.

Hold the line of love.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

What is our job in these troubled times? During any times, but particularly during times where we are seeing peoples’ rights eroded and trampled, when legal safeguards are flouted, and when authoritarianism is on the rise, our job is to hold the line. Continue to be a place of comfort and succor to the hurting, feed the hungry, grieve with the mourning.

Hold on to your loving and generous spirit.

In the words of Bishop Charleson:

Friendship in these times.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Friendships are taking a hit these days. Politics, world views, differing opinions are tearing people apart.

What is it that holds people together instead?

One thing is an abiding concern for the other person, despite your differences. If you can advocate against the death penalty on behalf of a stranger, couldn’t you bring yourself to see what is good and redeemable inside a former friend? Inside an enemy even? Searching for common ground is hard work, but really the main point of living in community. Isn’t it?

I’m broken, too.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

What makes some people able to empathize more than others, able to help in dire circumstances, able to put the greater good above the personal good? Bryan Stephenson, founder of the Equal Justice Institute, fierce advocate against systemic racism, and criminal defense attorney for those on death row explains: “I do it because I’m broken, too.” That recognition of a common humanity and brokenness by a system that needs changing propels him to fight. 

Who among us isn’t broken? Because we all are bound together, we all suffer in an unjust world. Because we all have known pain, we all have the capacity to put ourselves into the shoes of those hurting.

In his book, Just Mercy, Stephenson explains:

My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt–and have hurt others–are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: ‘We are bodies of broken bones.’ I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

We all have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our humanity

…So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak–not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. …We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken–walking away from them or hiding them from sight–only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.Just Mercy, by Bryan Stephenson

How many of the problems we face today can be mitigated by recognizing our common humanity, by following the Golden Rule of treating others how we would have them treat us, a tenet found in many of the world’s religions? How would we have others treat us if we were the elderly, the sick, the refugee, the hurt, the accused, the other? Each of us would benefit from considering things from this perspective. Bryan Stephenson continues:

Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

…I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, If we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized.Just Mercy, by Bryan Stephenson

We are all broken. Some of us don’t acknowledge that. We have all hurt and been hurt. It is that humbling insight that can help us recognize our common humanity across all divides. If we just have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Stephenson refers to an unnamed pastor who would preface singing: “The minister would stand, spread his arms wide, and say, “Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.”

Amen to that.

Are we tending?

Posted on by Shari Swanson

Tending is such a dear word, not much used these days. To tend: ‘to care or look after, to give one’s attention to’. Lincoln reminds us to ask where we are and whether we are tending. Where we are. Are we where we want to be? Are our relationships as tender and loving as we would like? Are we tending? Do we feel someone is tending to that relationship with us? Do we feel tended to?

What are the kind, gentle ways we can tend to our relationships?

When someone tells us they are sad their relationship with us isn’t better, is our first instinct to deflect, blame, ignore, change the subject, shrug, laugh? Or is to pause, breathe deep, and say, ‘Yes, I wish our relationship was closer, too. Where are we? Are we tending? What can we do to better tend our relationship and draw closer rather than shrug and pull away?’

The world is certainly full of shruggers who turn away even from their closest relationships in favor of new friends or less vulnerability. The shruggers, the cynics, the distancers, the superficial. So be it.

But God bless the tenders. That is where the heart is.

Love them anyway.

Posted on by Shari Swanson

People are complex. They can be hateful, vile, untrustworthy, destructive, and yet God loves them. The people doing the worst things in the world challenge us to reach into ever deeper places in our hearts to pull out compassion and love. Yes, even for them. Even for those acting in the most depraved ways, for don’t they need love the most? Haven’t they, perhaps, been the most starved for love in their lives?

The quote above is similar to this one attributed to Mother Teresa:

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.  Forgive them anyway.

            If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.  Be kind anyway.

            If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.

           If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you.  Be honest and sincere anyway.

            What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.  Create anyway.

            If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.  Be happy anyway.

  The good you do today, will often be forgotten.  Do good anyway.

 Give the best you have, and it will never be enough.  Give your best anyway.

         In the final analysis, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway.

It is different, though, in some interesting ways that seem particularly applicable to the world these days:

The Paradoxical Commandments

by Dr. Kent M. Keith

  1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
    Love them anyway.
  2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
    Do good anyway.
  3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
    Succeed anyway.
  4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
    Do good anyway.
  5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
    Be honest and frank anyway.
  6. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
    Think big anyway.
  7. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
    Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
  8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
    Build anyway.
  9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
    Help people anyway.
  10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
    Give the world the best you have anyway.

© 1968, 2001 Kent M. Keith

The point in both, of course, is that we each have an inner compass. We each are called to be different from the crowd. To be trustworthy and loving, patient and peaceful, kind and helpful. It doesn’t matter what everyone else might be doing,

Give the world the best you have anyway.