While I continue to recover from what I did to myself to celebrate finishing college, CaitieCat is back with some advice about apologizing.
So you’re in a mess.
You said something in public that might have used a bit more thought, a bit more empathy, and now you’re in a hole. And people being what people are, instead of climbing out of the hole with the help of the people we’ve hurt, many of us will instead turn to digging deeper, insisting that all we have to do is dig a little deeper and then people will get it and think we’re decent people again. Some of us will bring in backhoes to really get down to the dirt.
By digging the hole, I mean frantic excuses, insistences that your best friend is such a person and that you totally let them use your bathroom and everything, screams of “reverse prejudice” and the like. As a public service, then, allow me to offer this simple four-step algorithm for Undigging the Hole. I call it FOFISSAMO, as noted in the title of the post, as a pleasantly pseudo-Italian mnemonic.
FOFISSAMO stands for:
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Find Out
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Fix It
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Say Sorry
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And Move On.
Now here’s what I mean, specifically, by each step in undigging the hole you’re in.
Find Out
Finding out. People HATE the finding out step. Ron Lindsay called it being silenced, for instance, ironically while he used a privileged platform, with a captive audience provided, to make the complaint. So my first step is simple, despite how much people hate the thought: Shut Up And Listen. If someone’s telling you what you did hurt people, the first impulse of the moral person should be “listen to them”, not “deny that you hurt them”, “insist they’re being oversensitive”, calling them any form of Nazi, or any of the frequently-used other responses we see.
Just pay attention. Attend closely to what the person is telling you about why what you did is a problem. Treat them as a human being, worthy of the same amount of attention you expect to receive yourself. Trust that they know what they’re talking about, the way(s) that they’ve been hurt by what you did, and just as you hope your words are taken in a good and gracious light, give them that same respect. There’s a reason the Golden Rule can be found in almost any civilization’s development.
Yes, it will probably be uncomfortable. You will be feeling embarrassed that you hurt someone, embarrassed to be called on it in public, and often defensive. Remember that this is their time; you had yours when you did the hurtful thing.
Once you know what the problem was, and if it’s amenable to this, then the second step is…
Fix It
If there’s a way you can undo the harm you did, do that. If there’s a way to mitigate the knock-on effects, do that too; an example from other circumstances – if your mistake in making a bank deposit causes someone else to incur fees related to their unexpected banking error situation, you offer to cover those fees, right? Same thing here.
Often there’s no way you can actually do much to fix it, so your next important step is…
Say Sorry
This is probably the simplest part, and also the hardest. Apologize. An apology, to be effective, takes the following form (parenthetical parts are optional/situation-dependent):
“I am sorry (for having hurt you/run over your dog/dehumanized you/made you feel like crap/used a slur – even unknowingly, telling them that part comes later!)”.
Don’t say, “I’m sorry if I hurt anyone,” because you already know you did. That was what step 1 was for.
Don’t say, “Mistakes were made,”: own your shit. “I made a mistake” is a much stronger and better statement for this.
Stay away from these things.
Just: “I’m sorry (I hurt you).” If you can include a statement here of exactly what you did wrong, preferably specifically and openly addressing your mistake as a way of acknowledging that you’ve learned and will try to not repeat it, you’ll be doing well.
Which brings us to Step 4…
And Move On
By this, I don’t mean “force the other person to drop the subject”, or “ignore them when they try to help you understand how not to do it again”.
I mean, don’t spend your time trying to weaken your apology by offering excuses. If the injured party wants to talk about how you got there, great, do what they want. But don’t spend time trying to make it not have happened, don’t spend effort on pretending you didn’t fuck up. Just follow their lead and leave it behind when they’re ready to.
Remember, when you bring it up again to re-apologize or get them to recognize that you’re really truly a decent person and totally not like those other people who do or say racist/sexist/transphobic/ableist/whateverist things, or whatever your motive is, you’re not putting only yourself back in that spot of shame and unhappiness, you’re reminding the person you hurt that they were hurt by you. That’s not going to make it easier for either of you to move on.
The important part in this step is to remember that you’re not the injured party here. Take your cue from how the injured party reacts. Let them drive the process, if they want to. And if they don’t, drop it when they do.
So there you have it. FOFISSAMO. Find Out, Fix It, Say Sorry, And Move On: Undigging Holes Since 2013.
CaitieCat is a 47-year-old trans bi dyke, outrageously feminist, and is a translator/editor for academics by vocation. She also writes poetry, does standup comedy, acts and directs in community theatre, paints, games, plays and referees soccer, uses a cane daily, writes other stuff, was raised proudly atheist, is both English by birth and Canadian by naturalization, a former foxhole atheist, a mother of four, and a grandmother of four more (so far). Sort of a Renaissance woman (and shaped like a Reubens!).
