26.279 - When an Apology Becomes an Explanation
“Psychological explanations aren’t helpful when they invite people to avoid responsibility for harmful behavior.”
— Harriet Lerner, in an article adapted from her 2018 Symposium keynote
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Psychologist Harriet Lerner has written extensively about anger, family relationships, and the difficulty of apologizing.
Her work asks us to hold two demanding possibilities together: people need enough self-respect to face their mistakes, and they remain accountable for what they do. Understanding why someone acted as they did does not finish the work of responding to its consequences.
In an article adapted from her 2018 Symposium keynote, Lerner examines how explanations can help people understand behavior while also becoming a means of avoiding responsibility. She challenges pressure on injured people to forgive. These are clinical and ethical perspectives, not promises that particular words will repair a relationship.
For today’s inquiry, her contribution is a useful question to bring to an apology: does the account we offer make our responsibility clearer? We may have a reasonable explanation and still owe someone an acknowledgment that the explanation has not yet supplied.
Where the Apology Turns Back Toward Us
“I’m sorry, but I was helping someone else and thought I could still get there.”
“I said I’d be there at five and didn’t tell you when that became unlikely. You were left doing the setup alone. I’m sorry.”
Imagine these as two possible apologies after the same missed commitment. You agreed to help a friend prepare a community dinner, but an earlier commitment ran over. You had an opportunity to send a message and kept postponing it, hoping you could finish quickly and arrive only a little late. By the time you contacted your friend, the setup was done. They tell you they handled it alone and had to put another task aside. You have an explanation for being late, and it is a reasonable one: someone else needed help. What remains to be addressed is the decision you made while you were delayed.
The first apology gives your friend an account of the afternoon from where you stood. You were helping, trying to honor two commitments, and hoping you could manage both. Nothing in that account requires us to assume that you considered your friend’s time unimportant. Yet it also leaves something out. Your friend planned around your arrival and received no warning while another arrangement might still have been possible. Explaining why you stayed elsewhere does not acknowledge what happened when you failed to tell them. The explanation can be accurate and the apology incomplete at the same time.
The second version begins to supply what is missing. It identifies the promise, the failure to communicate, and the work your friend reported doing. It makes no claim that you are indifferent, malicious, or incapable of being relied upon; the acknowledgment stays close to the action that needs an answer. Its value does not come from being shorter. A brief apology can be dismissive, and a longer one can be attentive. Nor does everything depend on removing the word “but.” We can avoid that word and spend five careful sentences defending ourselves, just as we can sometimes need to clarify a fact in the middle of an apology. What matters is whether our words help us face the event more accurately.
That can be difficult when the explanation also carries a request we have barely noticed. By saying “I was helping someone else,” you may want your friend to understand the competing obligation. You may also hope they will recognize your generosity and reassure you that they still see you as a caring person. Those wishes can coexist, but neither answers the complaint about the missed message. Imagine your friend replying, “I understand why you were delayed. I’m asking why you didn’t tell me.” Their question brings the conversation back to a responsibility that a reasonable explanation has left untouched. You do not have to prove that every part of your afternoon was wrong. You have to recognize the choice you could have made differently within it.
The Wish to Be Understood
Being told that we let someone down can feel much larger than the event. A missed evening threatens to become evidence that we are unreliable; an irritated sentence seems to stand for the whole relationship. Before answering the complaint, we may already be arguing with the verdict we fear it contains. In the dinner example, however, your friend has described work and delay. They have not necessarily delivered a judgment on your character. If you respond to that imagined judgment first, the conversation can drift away from the thing they actually asked you to address, even while you believe you are explaining yourself with care.
The wish for a fair account of ourselves is legitimate. People have limits, competing obligations, and histories that are not visible in one difficult moment, and an apology should not require erasing those facts. The difficulty arises when our need to be understood makes acknowledgment wait. Your friend has already handled the setup; now they may feel drawn into explaining that they know you meant well, that you are not a bad friend, or that everything is fine. Reassurance can be freely offered and warmly received. But if your apology seems unable to continue without it, the listener acquires another task before the first one has been acknowledged: helping you become comfortable enough to discuss what happened.
Self-condemnation can create a similar demand. “I failed to send a message when I could have” identifies conduct you can acknowledge and change. “I’m a terrible person” asks the other person to contend with a sweeping claim, perhaps when they have little appetite for disputing it. The conversation turns toward your worth rather than the missed commitment. A proportionate apology gives both people more room because it allows the failure to be real without treating it as your whole identity. You can remain someone who cares about others while recognizing that, on this occasion, caring did not lead you to communicate when communication mattered.
Accuracy also places limits on what an apology should concede. Suppose you had told your friend days earlier that you could not attend, and they forgot. You can regret that they faced the work alone while clarifying the arrangement; you do not need to confess to breaking a promise you never made. Or suppose an unexpected situation genuinely prevented both attendance and communication. That information belongs in a fair account of the event and need not be withheld until the end of an artificially perfect apology. Disappointment is real, but it does not by itself establish that someone had a reasonable alternative. Our original scene is different precisely because an opportunity to communicate existed and you postponed using it.
Once responsibility is located accurately, explanation can help us understand what needs to change. “I took on more than I could finish and kept hoping I could catch up” identifies a decision with consequences. “You know I always try to help everyone” directs attention toward your good character without telling your friend much about the commitment they could not rely on. Research on apology components includes explanation alongside regret, responsibility, and repair, so there is no reason to treat context as inherently evasive. For this essay, the useful distinction is what the context contributes: does it clarify the event and your part in it, or leave acknowledgment indefinitely postponed? Lewicki et al., 2016
The scale and history of the failure matter as well. One missed commitment between friends may call for a clear acknowledgment and a practical response, without a long performance of remorse. Repeated failures give the listener more to assess, and another polished apology cannot require them to disregard that history. Authority can narrow their freedom further: when a leader apologizes and immediately declares the matter closed, someone with less power may have little room to say what remains unresolved. An apology needs enough space around it for consequences to be discussed. Otherwise, words that appear to accept responsibility can also determine how quickly everyone else is expected to stop talking about it.
Let the Repair Carry Some Weight
Back at the community dinner, an apology cannot return the time your friend spent setting up alone or undo the need to postpone another task. Recognizing that limit helps you consider what remains possible without promising a complete restoration. If you can stay, you might offer to take down the tables afterward, making the offer specific enough for your friend to assess without having to organize the repair for you. Cleanup may already be covered, or they may prefer to finish the evening without another negotiation. Either answer tells you whether this particular offer would be useful. Your willingness to help matters, but it does not establish that the help you have in mind is what they need.
An apology might continue: “I kept hoping I could catch up instead of telling you I was running late. That left you unable to plan around me. If taking down the tables afterward would help, I can stay and do that.” The explanation is still present, now identifying the decision behind the missed message and connecting it to an offer. It does not ask your friend to weigh your generosity elsewhere against their inconvenience here. Even this acknowledgment should stay open to correction. You know they handled the work alone because they told you; you do not yet know every consequence, or exactly how they felt. Leaving room to hear more makes the apology a conversation rather than a confident account of someone else’s experience.
That conversation may end without the reassurance you want. Your friend can understand the explanation, believe the apology, and still be frustrated or uncertain about relying on you again. They can also decline the offer. If repair depends on receiving a warm response, it becomes difficult to distinguish the attempt to address their burden from the attempt to relieve your own discomfort. Accepting a refusal allows their answer to have meaning. It also leaves you with work you can do independently: reconsidering the competing commitments and the delayed message, instead of treating a declined offer as evidence that there is nothing left for you to address.
The offer itself deserves the same honesty. Embarrassment can make a generous promise feel urgent, especially when you want to demonstrate that you understand. Yet promising cleanup when you cannot stay risks repeating the original problem in the act of trying to repair it. A smaller commitment you can fulfill gives your friend more usable information than an impressive one you are unlikely to keep. Looking beyond the evening, you might notice that each obligation seemed manageable only because you considered it separately, or that you postponed communicating because admitting the conflict felt worse than continuing to hope it would disappear. These observations matter when they lead to a specific adjustment: checking the whole afternoon before volunteering, agreeing on a time to confirm attendance, or declining an additional task once your available time is committed.
Your friend does not have to absolve you before you make those changes, and changed behavior does not purchase an entitlement to their attention. In another relationship, someone may have asked for distance; wanting to apologize does not automatically give you permission to contact them again. You can prepare an acknowledgment privately, respect the boundary, and change what is yours to change. The ordinary dinner example offers a way to examine a manageable failure between friends, not a prescription for reconciliation after serious harm. Its useful lesson is narrower: responsibility continues beyond the words you are allowed to say and the response you hope to receive.
A week later, the next dinner’s volunteer sheet offers a less dramatic opportunity to put that lesson into practice. Someone asks whether you can take both setup and an afternoon errand, and this time you check the times before answering. You can do the errand, or you can reliably be there for setup; you cannot promise both. Saying so may briefly disappoint someone, and it may feel less generous than volunteering for everything. But it gives the organizer information they can use while there is still time to arrange other help. You put your name beside one task, accepting a limit that the earlier apology helped you see. Whatever your friend now feels about that conversation, the next commitment has been made with greater care.
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Practice: An Apology with Room for Repair
Estimated time: 10 minutes.
Choose a low-stakes apology, real or imagined. Separate what happened, what the other person reported, the context that matters, and the responsibility you can honestly accept. Revise the acknowledgment, then identify a feasible repair or one change in your own behavior.
The aim is an apology that is accurate, less defensive, and connected to action. You do not need to send it or contact anyone. The worksheet will help you leave room for disagreement, a declined offer, or no response without making those outcomes a reason to abandon your own responsibility.
Scientific Summary
An apology can contain many words and still leave the most important questions unanswered. What are you acknowledging? Do you accept responsibility for it? What, if anything, are you prepared to do? Research helps explain why those questions matter, and why answering them can be difficult even when someone wants to make amends.
The ingredients matter, but an apology is not a recipe. Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin, and Robert Lount Jr. studied how people evaluated different apology components. Their framework included regret, explanation, responsibility, repentance, repair, and a request for forgiveness. In two experiments involving 755 participants, people considered a hypothetical job applicant who had filed an incorrect tax return. Apologies with more components generally received better evaluations, with responsibility and repair especially important. The measured outcomes were ratings of effectiveness, credibility, and adequacy—not repaired friendships or observed changes in behavior. The useful surprise is that explanation was itself one component of an apology. Understanding what went wrong has a place; it becomes insufficient when it replaces the other work. Lewicki et al., 2016; study details reported by Ohio State
A broader view of yourself may make acknowledgment easier. Self-affirmation theory proposes that reflecting on important values can help people face a threat to their view of themselves. This involves remembering a broader source of personal worth, rather than insisting that their conduct was right. In Karina Schumann’s first experiment, 98 adults wrote about either a personally important value or a control topic, then described what they would say to someone they had hurt. Those in the affirmation condition included more apology elements and fewer defensive strategies. A second experiment also found more comprehensive apologies; the reduction in defensiveness was less clear and did not reach the study’s usual statistical threshold, so that result should not be treated as established. These were written responses to recalled conflicts, not proof that the recipients forgave or that relationships improved. Schumann, 2014
Taken together, these findings suggest two different places to look when an apology stalls: its content and the speaker’s difficulty facing the event. The first asks what the other person has actually been given. The second asks what makes acknowledgment feel threatening. For this reflection, the useful distinction is between owning a particular failure and treating it as a verdict on your whole self. Specific responsibility gives you something to act on; a broader sense of worth may help you stay with the discomfort of acknowledging it. The accompanying practice draws on these ideas for reflection. It is not a tested apology script, and no wording can guarantee another person’s acceptance.
References
Grabmeier, J. (2016, April 12). The 6 elements of an effective apology, according to science. Ohio State News. https://news.osu.edu/the-6-elements-of-an-effective-apology-according-to-science/
Lerner, H. (n.d.). What it really means to apologize: …While holding wrongdoers accountable [Article adapted from the author’s 2018 Symposium keynote]. Psychotherapy Networker. https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/article/what-it-really-means-apologize/
Lewicki, R. J., Polin, B., & Lount, R. B., Jr. (2016). An exploration of the structure of effective apologies. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 9(2), 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12073
Schumann, K. (2014). An affirmed self and a better apology: The effect of self-affirmation on transgressors’ responses to victims. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 89–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.04.013
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