If we accept the fact that no one is perfect, we must also accept that in everyday life no one lacks reasons to apologize. Whether by making the wrong decisions, due to inability or acting badly, it is very common that what we do causes discomfort to someone else, or has the capacity to harm them.
Normally, everything is resolved by asking for forgiveness, and most of the time everything is resolved in this simple way. However, there is a small portion of humanity that is apparently unaware of this possibility. Certain people are totally incapable of saying “I’m sorry.” Why is this happening?
The inability to ask for forgiveness when it’s time
Language is a wonderful thing: thanks to it, conflicts that could fester and cause discomfort and fights for years are resolved with a brief exchange of sentences. This happens because through words we reduce the margin of uncertainty about what the other person thinks, something very important in managing this type of problem.
Saying “I’m sorry,” for example, involves taking a big step: someone recognizes that they have acted badly, to the detriment of the well-being of another person (or a group), which opens up the possibility of compensating in some way. Regardless of whether that opportunity to be compensated is taken, a modicum of justice has been done.
However, so that every time someone does something wrong and is aware of it, they apologize, a condition that almost never occurs should be met: that rationality prevails over feelings. In practice, there are people who, even knowing that they should ask for forgiveness, are incapable of doing so… without them knowing why.
So… why are there people who find it so difficult to admit to others that they have made a mistake, that they are sorry, when they know that this is the case and they feel bad about it? There are different reasons, but they are all related, and have to do with poor self-image management
The need to preserve self-esteem
All people structure their own identity based on a series of ideas and beliefs about themselves. This set of descriptions of the “I” is called self-concept, or self-image. This self-image allows us not to go blind when it comes to relating to others and to the environment that does not surround us, having a certain idea of what our characteristics, weaknesses and strengths are.
However, Self-image is not a set of information collected coldly and objectively On the contrary. Since what is talked about in the self-image is oneself, all these beliefs have an obvious emotional impact on the person.
Thus, everything that indicates weakness, inability or unreliability when making decisions, has an impact on self-esteem, which is the evaluative aspect of self-image, what speaks about the value of oneself in comparison to standards that we look at (and they may be more or less accurate). There are many situations that can compromise self-esteem and many times, asking for forgiveness is one of them.
A delicate self-concept
There are those who have such a delicate self-image that the simple fact of recognizing a mistake can shake their self-esteem, no matter how insignificant the mistake that is recognized may have been. In a way, if some part of us knows that we have made a mistake and acted inappropriately, our self-image can remain protected as long as we do not acknowledge the mistake out loud. We can play at disguising the mistake as something else, attributing the blame to someone else or, simply, not putting a name to that subtle feeling of guilt that we feel.
But if we ask for forgiveness, all those thoughts and feelings caused by the mistake made are automatically labeled as what they are: our responsibility. And, in a matter of a second, we have to deal with the fact that our self-concept cannot continue to exist as it did.
If the mistake for which we apologize is small, this may mean that we are capable of making small mistakes that we do not give importance to and for which we do not apologize. If it is a serious mistake, it can mean a radical change in the way we see ourselves. Of course, most of us do not have too many difficulties when it comes to realizing that asking for forgiveness is something that speaks well of us and that, in part, makes the mistake attenuate. But There are those who cannot afford to put their self-concept in the spotlight expose it to the slightest scratch.
Humiliation or cognitive dissonance
It is clear that there are those who do not ask for forgiveness simply because they do not think about the well-being of others or because they consider that, from an instrumental logic, saying “I’m sorry” does not bring them any benefit: think, for example, of someone with a certain tendency to the psychopathy that when getting off the bus pushes someone you will never see again.
However, among those who are not able to apologize despite feeling bad about it the most common thing is that one of two options occurs: either they associate the apology with humiliation, so their self-esteem could not bear doing something like that but they also have no way to express their regret, or they have a certain delusion of grandeur.
In the latter case, recognizing the mistake conflicts so much with your self-image that asking for forgiveness would involve rethinking many aspects of your own life and relationships with others from scratch: this is a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance.
In any case, it is clear that knowing how to ask for forgiveness honestly is a card that people with high Emotional Intelligence play. You don’t have to do it if you have no reason to, but when you know it’s the right thing to do, expressing it becomes a simple matter of knowing how to manage your own feelings well (and knowing how to communicate that skill to others).
