How to apologise and how to forgive — yourself included

“I already apologised. What more do you want?” Perhaps you’ve heard this sentence — or said it. And perhaps you know the other side too: someone said “sorry” to you, and you were left just as hurt as before, only now with a sense of guilt for not being able to accept the apology. Something didn’t come off, even though the right words were spoken.

Apology and forgiveness are among the most powerful tools we have in relationships — and at the same time among the most misunderstood. A real apology can repair even a deep wound; a poor one deepens it. Forgiveness can free a person from a burden they have carried for years; forced forgiveness locks them into it more tightly still.

In this piece we take both apart: what a working apology is made of, what an apology is not, why apologising is so hard, what forgiveness really is (and what it never asks of you) — and how to forgive yourself as well.

Why “sorry” often doesn’t land

The psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, who devoted much of his career to the apology and wrote the foundational book On Apology (2004) about it, studied hundreds of apologies — private, public, even between states. His key finding: an apology is not a single word but a process with several ingredients. When an apology “doesn’t work”, one of them is usually missing.

More recent research confirms this. In a series of experiments, Lewicki and colleagues (2016) tested which components of an apology contribute most to the recipient judging it credible. It turned out they do not all carry equal weight: the most important is taking responsibility, followed immediately by an offer of repair — and the least important is the request for forgiveness itself. Put differently: “sorry” is the least important part of an apology. What closes the wound is the acknowledgement: I see what I did, and it is my business, not yours.

This fits what I observe in work with couples: the hurt partner is almost never waiting for a word. They are waiting for evidence that the other understands what happened — that the wound has been seen. Until that comes, every “sorry” is only a sound.

The five ingredients of a real apology

If we condense Lazare’s model and the later research into a usable form, an apology that actually repairs has five ingredients:

• 1. Acknowledgement — with no “but”. You name clearly what you did: “I raised my voice at you in front of the children.” Not “it happened”, not “there was a misunderstanding”. And without the conjunction that cancels everything: “Sorry, but you provoked me” is not an apology, it is an accusation in disguise. Everything that comes after “but” erases everything that came before it.
• 2. Understanding the consequences. You show that you see what your action did to the other person: “I imagine it made you feel small and alone.” This is the moment when the hurt person feels they are not mad — that their pain exists in your eyes too.
• 3. Remorse. A sincere expression that you are sorry — not because of the consequences for you (“I’m sorry you’re angry with me now”), but because of the pain you caused.
• 4. Repair. Where possible, you make the damage good — with an action, not just a word. Sometimes the repair is concrete, sometimes symbolic: that you take the time, that you ask what the other person needs, that you still take the wound seriously a week later.
• 5. Change. The hardest and most important part: what you will do so that it does not happen again. An apology for the same thing for the fifth time running is no longer an apology — it is maintenance of a pattern.

All five ingredients need not be delivered in one solemn speech. They can be spread over days. What matters is that none of them is missing when the wound needs it.

What an apology is NOT: a short glossary of pseudo-apologies

Bad apologies are not neutral — research and clinical practice show they can even deepen a wound, because on top of the original pain they tell the hurt person: your pain is not real to me. A few of the commonest forms:

• “I’m sorry if you felt that…” — the conditional and “felt” move the problem into the hurt person’s head. You are not apologising for your action but for their perception of it.
• “Sorry, but…” — an apology with a defence built in. The message: I’m at fault, but really you are.
• “You know I didn’t mean it like that.” — intention replaces effect. But a wound is not made of intention, it is made of effect.
• “I apologise to anyone who felt offended.” — passive voice and a plural with no addressee; nobody is responsible and nobody is spoken to.
• “Well, I said sorry!” — the apology as a ticket to end the conversation. Now the hurt person also has to make sure the apologiser doesn’t feel bad.

The common denominator of all of them is the same: the apology is spoken so that the discomfort ends as quickly as possible — not so that the other person is truly seen.

Why apologising is so hard

If the recipe is so clear, why are good apologies so rare? Lazare’s answer: because a real apology means a voluntary redistribution of power. For a moment you step in front of the other person without defence and say: I hurt you, and you now have the right to be hurt. For many people this is one of the most vulnerable acts there is in a relationship.

The main obstacle, though, in my experience is not pride but shame. Guilt says: I did something bad. Shame says: I am bad. I wrote about this difference — and why it is decisive — in detail in the piece on guilt and shame. Anyone who experiences their mistakes as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with them will avoid apologising, because admitting the mistake would mean admitting their own defectiveness. Hence the attacking, the evasion, the minimising — all of these are defences against shame, not signs of indifference. Research by June Tangney and colleagues consistently shows that shame-proneness leads to avoidance and defence, while guilt-proneness leads to repairing the relationship.

The good news: apologising can be learned. The first step is exactly that inner shift — from “admitting a mistake means being bad” to “admitting a mistake means being an adult”. People who know how to apologise are not those without faults; they are those whom a fault does not bring down.

Forgiveness: what it is — and what it certainly is not

Now to the other side of the wound. So many misunderstandings have gathered around forgiveness that let’s start with what forgiveness does not mean:

• It is not forgetting. The memory stays; forgiveness changes its emotional charge, not its content.
• It is not excusing the person who did it. To forgive does not mean saying “it wasn’t that bad” or “he had his reasons”. The act remains wrong; that is precisely why forgiveness is needed at all.
• It is not making up. This is perhaps the most important point: forgiveness is one person’s inner process, while reconciliation is an agreement between two. You can forgive someone and at the same time decide to have no further contact with them. Forgiveness does not even require that the other person knows about it.
• It is not a one-off event. Everett Worthington, one of the leading researchers of forgiveness, distinguishes decisional forgiveness (the resolution not to take revenge and not to nurse hostility) from emotional forgiveness (the gradual replacement of resentment with compassion or at least neutrality). The first can happen in a moment; the second is a process that runs in layers and likes to come back around.

So what is forgiveness? Letting go of resentment — for your own sake. Resentment is like rent you pay the offender every day: they live their life while you keep their room going inside your head. Forgiveness is the cancellation of that tenancy.

What resentment does to the body — and what forgiveness does

This is not just a metaphor. In a much-cited experiment, Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet and colleagues (2001) asked participants to return in their minds to a person who had hurt them — once in a stance of resentment (dwelling on the injustice, wishing for payback), and once in a stance of empathy and forgiveness. During resentment, heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance and facial muscle tension rose significantly and stayed elevated even after the imagining ended; in the forgiving stance the body stayed considerably calmer. Resentment is thus a measurable state of stress — and turning an injustice over in your mind means firing up the stress response in your own body again and again, something you know well if you read my piece on rumination.

Long-term research points the same way: reviews of the literature (Toussaint, Worthington and Williams, 2015) link a readiness to forgive with lower levels of depression and anxiety, better sleep and more favourable cardiovascular indicators. And a meta-analysis by Fehr and colleagues (2010) showed what makes forgiveness easiest: empathy for the offender, a sincere apology from them — and an end to dwelling on it. So the circle closes: a good apology is not just a courtesy, it is a factor that physiologically makes forgiveness easier for the other person.

REACH: the path of forgiveness step by step

Worthington condensed the process of forgiveness into the REACH model, which has been tested in numerous studies and also works as a standalone workbook. In plain terms:

• R — recall the wound. No skirting round it, no minimising: what exactly happened and what it did to you. You can only forgive what you have first acknowledged.
• E — empathize. Try to understand — not excuse! — the person who hurt you. What drove them, what story do they come from? Empathy is, by the research, the single strongest predictor of forgiveness.
• A — forgiveness as an altruistic gift. Remember a moment when you were forgiven — and what that was like. You give forgiveness not because the other person deserves it, but because you know what it means to receive it.
• C — commit. Make the decision tangible: write it down, say it aloud, tell someone you trust.
• H — hold on. The resentment will come back — that is not a sign the forgiveness failed, but that the memory is alive. At that point you return to your decision, not back to the beginning.

The hardest chapter: forgiving yourself

In my work with people I notice that many find it relatively easy to forgive others — but never themselves. A mistake from ten years ago still plays in high resolution at three in the morning. The researchers Hall and Fincham (2005), who put self-forgiveness on the scientific map, warn of a trap of two extremes: on one side endless self-accusation, on the other a cheap self-pardon without responsibility (“I couldn’t have done otherwise”). Real self-forgiveness is neither — it is a process that passes through the same stations as an apology to someone else:

• you acknowledge what you did, without prettifying and without “but”;
• you accept responsibility and feel guilt — which here is healthy, because it points to your values, as I wrote in the piece on healthy and toxic guilt;
• you repair what can be repaired — with the people you hurt, or, where that is not possible, with a symbolic act;
• and then you consciously let go of self-punishment, which serves nothing any more.

The last step is the hardest, because self-punishment likes to dress itself up as morality: “If I forgive myself, it means I don’t care.” In truth it is the opposite — a person who stops punishing themselves has energy again for repair and for the people around them. If your inner voice moves with every mistake from “I did something bad” to “I am bad”, I recommend also reading the piece on self-compassion — Kristin Neff has shown that it is precisely a compassionate relationship with your own mistakes that makes genuine responsibility possible.

When forgiveness must not be forced

And one more thing I have to write plainly: forgiveness is a right, not a duty. If you have survived abuse, violence or prolonged humiliation, no one — not family, not the people around you, not a spiritual tradition, not a therapist — has the right to set forgiveness for you as a task. Forced, premature forgiveness tends to skip over the anger and grief that must first be allowed and worked through; I wrote about how important anger is as a signal in the piece on anger. Worse still: in a relationship where the harmful behaviour continues, the demand for forgiveness becomes a tool of pressure — “if you don’t forgive me, then you’re the one wrecking this family”. That is not an invitation to forgive, that is emotional blackmail. As long as the harm continues, your first task is a boundary, not forgiveness.

Forgiveness makes sense when you choose it yourself, at your own pace, for yourself. Sometimes it comes after a week, sometimes after a decade, sometimes in a form no one on the outside would recognise — as a quiet decision that the story will no longer run your life.

If something is stuck somewhere — because the apology you are waiting for never comes; because you cannot apologise without falling apart; or because you cannot forgive yourself something long past — that can be a good subject for a therapeutic conversation. Wounds that were made in relationships also heal most easily in a safe relationship; why that is so I described in the piece on how the therapeutic relationship heals. You are welcome to an introductory session.