Here is the full transcript of psychoanalyst Robert M. Gordon’s talk titled “The Power of The Apology” at TEDxLehighRiver 2014 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
I am a psychoanalyst and I help people have better relationships by helping to make their unconscious more conscious. Now, I’m also a forensic psychologist and I can tell you that the psychopath cannot have good relationships. They don’t have the capacity for remorse and empathy. I’m also a research psychologist and I’ll be talking about research that shows that we have little awareness of our own brain’s activities.
Sigmund Freud said it would take about a hundred years for science to accumulate enough data to show support for his theories of the unconscious. We’re here today. He was right. Now, I’m going to call on all these experiences to talk to you about something today and that’s the apology.
Now, you all know what an apology is. In fact, that’s one of the first things you learn as a child. Adorable face. How could you not forgive a child like that? As children, we wanted to avoid punishment and get back into our parents’ good graces with the magical word “sorry.”
Now, the thing is, most people never got out of that stage. That is, apologizing to get something, like forgiveness, as opposed to apologizing to give something, to repair. Now, originally, the word “apology” comes from the Greek to offer a defense for your beliefs or your behaviors, as Socrates did at his trial.
That’s the trial where he says, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And when I think about it, it’s a good slogan for a psychoanalyst. Now he’s taking his poison. Sometimes a good apology doesn’t always work.
What I want to do is to show you how apology can be empowered from using it as a defense, as seeking forgiveness, and to use to repair ruptured relationships. That’s the paradigm shift. Now, that would make it a very big idea and believe me, we need it. Because as human animals, we are bad at relationships and this is partly based on how our brain evolved.
The Brain and Relationships
I’ll tell you a little bit about our brain. Seventy percent of our brain is out of our awareness. Now, this isn’t a minor part of your brain. This is our perceptions, our emotions, our thoughts, feelings, and motives. The parts that affect our relationships the most. Five percent is in awareness. The rest is running plumbing.
Let me tell you something more about the brain and I have to apologize because the brain is probably one of the most complex things known to science. So, these are simplifications. Evolution of the brain starts from the base, moves up and forward to the last part, the homo sapiens part. A primitive structure of the brain is nicknamed the reptilian part. That gives us our basic drives, such as the sex drive.
And as the limbic system develops in evolution, we have the mammalian part and that gives us the capacity to love. In other words, you may love your turtle, but your turtle cannot love you back. But your dog and cat really do love you. They have that brain structure for love, real love.
What we didn’t get was a brain structure for lasting intimacy. Now, the parent-infant bond is the strongest bond. The adult-to-adult bond is not a strong bond. Now, this is the quirk of evolution. Swans, on the other hand, have that brain structure. Swans can mate for life. We require emotional maturity to make our relationships last. Now, obviously that’s a problem.
For swans, it’s on autopilot. They don’t have to be emotionally mature. Now, nature wants us to reproduce, so we do have brain circuits to fall into what we call infatuation. It’s a temporary state. By the way, looking at it, it’s an over-idealization of someone you hardly know.
Now, luckily, we did evolve brain structures that gives us the capacity for remorse and empathy. And not everyone got a sufficient number of neurons there, such as the psychopath, who could never really learn to care. Now, we could all learn to care better.
And since our brains are dependent on learning, there’s a critical period in childhood when we need to learn from our parents. Now, long before the brain, I see you have this out of order, so at the end of this, you owe me an apology. Okay, so listen carefully how it’s done. This is the slide showing the normal brain, the psychopathic brain.
Learning to Apologize
Okay. Parents need to learn how to apologize. That was not scripted. Parents need to learn how to apologize to their children. Long before language developed in the brain, we learned by our mentors, our parents. We learned by observation and practice. Small children need to see how it’s done. That’s why parents who refuse to apologize can’t model healthy relationships to their children.
So, what do we have? We have a brain that doesn’t know its own awareness. Most of our personality, much of our flaws are out of our awareness, nevertheless affecting our relationships. We’re aggressive animals. We don’t have an instinct for long-term bonding. And we needed our parents to learn about emotional relationships.
Well, you know what position that puts us in. It is human to have frequent relationship ruptures. That’s part of being a human being. Now, when I was thinking about what kind of talk to give, how am I going to help people outside of long-term psychoanalysis not to have those ruptures? You can’t. The least I can do is to help you get better at repairing those ruptures.
Now, psychologists study the apology to make it much more effective. And what we found out, it has three main elements. Three main elements. Now, I’m going to teach those three elements using examples from my consulting practice. Identity has changed, of course.
If you really want to see great examples of really bad apologies, look at the news. My God. Okay, first element.
Elements of an Effective Apology
Acknowledgement. Lucy came to me. She was very upset. Her fiancé has broken off the engagement. She said she’s been badly mistreated. She said he insisted on an apology and I told him I had nothing to apologize for. I said, “So what? I was late and you and your friends missed the show.”
“I read the show wasn’t very good anyway. So, you know, they didn’t miss much.” Just hearing her side of the story, I could see how self-centered she was. Lucy could not acknowledge any wrongdoing. That’s one of the reasons why she had difficulty with her relationships. An acknowledgement should start with one word. “I.” And a clear statement of the transgression.
Now, for argument’s sake, let’s say Lucy went into analytic therapy and she’s working through her narcissism. She could say, “I’m very sorry. I was wrong for being late. That’s inconsiderate.” I’m just giving you that one part, the acknowledgement part. There’s more. But let me use case examples to talk about each part.
The second part, an expression of remorse and empathy. Now, we all know people who use the apology to manipulate other people, such as manipulate them back into the relationship. Jake, who would drink heavily and become emotionally and physically abusive to his wife Kathy, said to her, “I promise it will never happen again.” And he went on to say, “I prayed to Jesus and Jesus forgave me. Do you think you’re better than Jesus?” She didn’t know what to say. I did.
I said, “Jake, Jesus may forgive you. Kathy does not have to forgive you. You’re the one who beats her. And you’re still being abusive for making her feel bad for not giving you what you want.” Now, Jake doesn’t have the capacity for remorse and empathy. Remorse is truly feeling bad for the hurt you caused someone else. Empathy is a deep understanding of another person’s feeling frame of reference.
Again, for argument’s sake, let’s say Jake. Now, Jake is never going to be going for therapy. He’s not a psychopath. And he does have the capacity for remorse and empathy. He would say something like, “Kathy, I love you. I hate the way I’ve treated you. I don’t like myself when I do that. I can imagine how you feel. I remember how it felt when my father did that to me. It was horrible. I’m going to work to be a better person, whether you forgive me or not.”
That’s what it would look like. Restitution. This is the part people often leave out. Lenny came to me and he said, “My wife is still angry with me after my affair. I apologized and apologized and she’s still angry with me. I told her it didn’t last long and the sex was disappointing.” What Lenny didn’t understand, he had to negotiate a fair restitution with his wife. He didn’t get to set the restitution unilaterally.
He didn’t get to set that a certain number of apologies or she should be over it by a certain amount of time. He had to negotiate that. Lenny had to work to be more attentive, understanding, rebuilding trust by working to be a better person. Now that’s an intimate relationship.
We can see the same model in a business relationship. Rebuilding trust and restitution when there’s a service or a product failure. To say, “I know you’re upset because of this problem. I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do. I’m going to work with you to get this right until you’re completely satisfied.” But that’s not enough. “I’m going to give you something extra special to show you how much you mean to us as a customer.” It’s a restitution.
Now, apologies should be dose effective. When you’re leaving this auditorium today, you bump into somebody, you give them a polite “sorry.” That’s dose effective. If you went through the whole thing of acknowledgement and remorse and empathy and restitution, they might have you arrested.
They’ll think you’re crazy. That’s what I mean by dose appropriate. Let me give you an example of a dose appropriate apology for a horrible injustice. Gunter Demnig is a German artist. And he wanted to make memorials to Holocaust victims. He’s a good German. What would a symbolic apology look like? Where would he get such an idea?
He wanted to put it away in a museum. He made these stumbling block memorials, cobblestone-sized memorials, put a brass plate over it with the person’s name, their birth date, their fate in the Holocaust, and the words, “live here,” and put them in a sidewalk next to the homes where they lived. So when people walked down the sidewalk, they could see the person’s name, their fate, and their homes.
Now where did he get such a brilliant symbolic apology? There’s an old anti-Semitic German expression that when a German would trip over a protruding stone, they would say, “There must have been a Jew buried here.” That’s how he got the idea of this just powerful, symbolic, ongoing apology to the victims of the Holocaust. The protruding stone. And that’s well done.
Now, just as I talk about the idea of the dose-effective apology, there’s also timing. We’ve all experienced a late apology. For an apology to be effective, it should be as soon as possible after the transgression. History is filled with examples of late apologies. I’ll give you just one.
In 1633, Galileo is called before the Inquisition. He’s charged with heresy. And under the threat of being tortured to death, he has to take back his theory that the earth goes around the sun. He was given then the sentence of house arrest for the rest of his life. In 1992, the Vatican officially apologizes to Galileo. Too late to do him any good. Now, don’t you wait.
Practice the dose-effective timely apology with just the right mix of acknowledgement, remorse and empathy, and a fair restitution. You’ll be empowered to help repair ruptured relationships. And if we all do more of that, we’ll be empowered to help repair the world. And that would be a giant step.