"I'm sorry!" - Part 2

So what’s a sincere apology? A sincere apology has three components:

• empathy – recognizing the impact of their actions on others (not just regretting getting caught!)
• amends – making up for the damage done, where possible
• resolve – having a plan to prevent it from happening again.
  

A sincere apology is demonstrated by change – even if that change is small at first.

We as a society have a mistaken belief that people must feel bad before they will behave better. This belief has resulted in four common strategies:

• Criticizing. Have you ever been on the receiving end of criticism? What was your response? If you’re like most of us, you became defensive and started explaining or justifying – even if only to yourself. Instead of bringing about the desired change, criticism further entrenches others in their behaviour.
  

• Blaming. Blame is designed to bring about change through guilt. The problem is that guilt doesn’t bring about a change of heart – or behaviour.
  

• Threatening. This is a “promise” of retaliation, and is designed to bring about change through fear. But fear doesn’t bring about a change of heart either.
  

• Punishing. “Punishment is a clever device that allows good people to do bad things without seeing themselves as evil.” (Albert J. Bernstein, Emotional Vampires) “Beatings will continue until morale improves.” ‘Nough said.
  

In fact, teens (and everyone else) will change when they feel safe, not when they feel bad. So if you use any of these four strategies–

• your teen will feel less empathetic,
• he’ll resent making restitution (if he does it at all), and
• his resolve will be around figuring out how not to get caught next time.
  

Here are some questions you can ask to help your teen feel safe enough to transform self-serving and meaningless apologies into sincere apologies:

• Empathy: What exactly are you apologizing for? What do you think you did that requires an apology? What was the result? Who was impacted?
  

• Amends: Now that it’s done, what (if anything) can you do to fix it? Is there something you can do to make up the damage? If that had been done to you, what would you want to have happen next?
  

• Resolve: If you had it to do over, is there anything you’d do differently? If a similar situation comes up in the future, how will you handle it?