Apologies & Pixar

This last week I have been thinking about apologies.

Particularly, I have been thinking about the form that apologies can take.

Now, if someone alerts me to the fact that something I have said has upset them, it might seem like the obvious response is to simply say “I’m sorry”. But, the more I think about it, there are a variety of possible responses, indeed a spectrum of responses, and while all of these responses do something, not all of them apologise to the hurt person of allow for reconciliation between us.

Come with me on a journey of thinking about apologies. We’ll consider the form apologies can take, and what the words do. We’ll think about an apology I made, and a Pixar film I wrote about at uni last year that has helped me to think about human relationships.

At the one end of the spectrum we have a response of denial. It denies the hurt of the upset person, and the fact that I said anything that might reasonably cause offense. It takes this kind of form: “Look, you actually misunderstood me, that’s not really what I said”. What happens here, is the fault of bad feeling is placed on the upset person. They had the wrong feeling or the wrong response. I just need to point this out to them, and then we both go on our merry way and nobody has to change. I go on saying, thinking and doing the same things, and the hurt person can go on feeling whatever they like and it is of no concern to me.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have, I guess a response of mortification, where I take on a lot of guilt, and at first our roles seem reversed. I might say “I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I did that, I feel so awful that you feel like this.” Now, I’m not sure this is really ok either, because the hurt person might now feel tempted to give ground and say they weren’t really that hurt, and not to worry about it. They might assume they overreacted, even though they’re thankful for the apology. They might even apologise to me for making me feel bad. So what does this apology do? It makes me a supposed victim, and it still erases the hurt of the person I upset. In short, not only did I upset the person, I then emotionally manipulate and bully them into thinking they hurt me.

Somewhere in the middle there are Quick Fix Apologies and Band-Aid Apologies.

In a Quick Fix response I say something like “hey, I’m sorry you feel like this”. This apology has a silent ‘but’. It is really, “I’m sorry you feel like this, but there isn’t anything I can do about it/its not my fault”. Here I see your pain, but I don’t think its any my responsibility. You probably feel obliged to say “no worries”, at which point we both carry on with our lives. We hope the apology covers up the incident, and business as normal resumes. It’s a quick fix because while it might allow a swift return to smooth operating between us, it doesn’t necessarily safe guard against repeat situations.

Very similar to the quick fix are Band-Aid apologies, but I believe Band-Aid apologies have some potential. In a Band-Aid case, I might say “look, I’m sorry you feel this way, but its really not what I intended”. This is ok. It’s a starting point, and I think we all make these kind of apologies all the time, and they do a lot to helping us to get on with our fellow humans. I acknowledge the other person, and I acknowledge their hurt, but I don’t accept any responsibility for it. This kind of response allows me and my friend to kind of patch things up. To stick a band-aid over the situation. She’s upset, I can see that, I’m sorry the situation happened, but it was all a misunderstanding. My friend is appeased, but there is no guarantee I won’t hurt her again, because I might carry on in the same way, and she might carry on ‘misunderstanding and being upset’.

This response though could start a dialogue of reconciliation and apology, because underneath Band-Aids we do often heal. I might follow up my initial comment, and say “I’m sorry you feel this way, and it isn’t what I intended, what can I say or do to avoid this happening again?” And then, my friend and I can enter into a dialogue and discuss the situation, and I can listen to them, and come to understand how my action was hurtful, and which point I might say, “I am so sorry. I’m sorry my words hurt you”.

Now, its possible that I might have said that last apology straight away. I might straight up say “I’m sorry my words hurt you. I’m sorry I hurt you”. Here, I acknowledge hurt, and I acknowledge that I said or did something that created hurt. This is an apology, and again this allows for reconciliation, and it allows for growth. We can grow together.

You might be reading this and thinking, but what if it was a misunderstanding? Or what if that person was having a bad day, was already on edge, or just thinks everyone hates them? Well, first off, I want to say, if someone claims you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t. It may have been a misunderstanding, and maybe they do already feel like the world is against them, but if a person feels like the world is against them, then I say we go and stand with them and face that world together, and I can only do that if first I say sorry, and if second I go and listen to them, to paraphrase Maria Lugones, I have to be willing to travel into the world of the hurt person. The idea of seeing from the place of the view point of another, of world traveling is at the core of Lugones’ thoughtful and influential article, ‘Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and Loving Perception’, in which she insists that a failure to identify with another is a failure to love them. Lugones teaches us through the example of her relationship with her mother, as she writes:

To love my mother was not possible for me while I retained a sense that it was fine for me to and others to see her arrogantly. Loving my mother also required me to see with her eyes, that I go into my mother’s world, that I see both of us as we are constructed in her world, that I witness her own sense of herself from within her world. (Lugones: 1987:8).

What Lugones’ is hoping to show us is that empathy, love and understanding of others are interwoven. And an apology, a reconciliation is an act that requires empathy. If I’m to apologise effectively, I must be willing to imagine how my words sound in the ears of the other, even if they sounded fine to me.

Let me tell you of an apology I made perhaps a decade ago, that was made after a misunderstanding, and taught me to look from the eyes of the hurt person, even though they had misread me.

I was in church, perhaps 9 or 10 years ago, and I was sitting towards the front. I was very busy in this particular church. I was on Parish Council, I was a youth group director, I was on the roster at our youth/contemporary service as a Service Leader. I went to regular meetings to plan  and pray for the direction, activities an character of that service.  I was not without influence, though I don’t think I always felt that way at the time. This one evening at church, while I was sitting towards the front, we started to sing a particular song, and I turned to the person next to me and made a face. If you know me, this probably doesn’t surprise you. I’m not shy in letting people know I don’t like the vast majority of songs in the contemporary church repertoire. So, whats wrong with what I did. I don’t like a song, or I thought it was silly, and I make a face. I don’t have to like all the songs, so what’s the big deal? The deal is the song leader saw me, and read my face as being against her. She assumed I was casting judgement on her, on her musical abilities, her service and contribution to the church. She mentioned her hurt to a leader at our church, and I was spoken to and asked to write an apology. At first I was pretty indignant. I wanted to plead my case with this leader. I wanted to justify my actions. I wanted to explain that I didn’t have a problem with the song leader in question, but the reality was a woman at my church was upset because of something I had done. It didn’t matter how justified I thought my action was, what mattered was that I made steps to be reconciled. And as Christians, I think this matters particularly because we are told that to be reconciled with our brothers and sisters needs to happen before we come before God.

I wrote the apology. It was hard. I wanted to say “I’m sorry you are upset”, but my flatmate pointed out to me that this was not an apology. I’m going to be honest here. I don’t remember what I wrote. I don’t remember if my words were good enough. I don’t know if my apology did everything it had to. I don’t know if back then, in my mid twenties, I was capable of seeing that I had hurt a member of the body of Christ. I don’t know if I thought about the fact that if part of the body was hurting that perhaps the whole body was. I really doubt that I did. And I wish I could have done better. But I learned,  learned to be careful of my responses, of my in-jokes, in case they not always be thought of as witty or funny. I learned, but I’m not perfected, and I still sometimes catch myself eyerolling at a key change that I find unnecessary, and I remind myself that instead of demanding that all music be to my taste I should work towards being thankful for the time and talents other members of my church are willing to offer in service of our community.

I write these thoughts after I took part in facebook ‘discussion’ among Christians, where a few loud voices spoke back and forth at each other, and in the end, I don’t know if any of us benefited, or if any of us have had the opportunity to learn or grow from our interactions. In the end, the initial content of the conversation mattered much less to me than the suggestion by one of contributors that a hurt person had to prove they were sufficiently hurt (by him), before he would apologize. Of course, it’s possible I misunderstood him. I don’t know. I wonder, if when we find ourselves thinking someone needs to account for their hurt, if we might think differently if we were willing to travel into their world, and even if we’re sure we’re not to blame, maybe, just in case we are, we should try stepping into their world and seeing what they see.

Last year I wrote about the film Inside Out and the relationship between the anthropomorphised emotions Joy and Sadness. I used them to illustrate a concept of relational  identity and Posthuman subjectivity, as explained by theorists such as Allison Weir (through whom I encountered Lugones) and Rosi Braidotti (who I have been lucky enough to meet!). As I began to learn about relational identity I learned that through empathy and affective solidarity we can begin see the world not as self vs other, or us vs them, and instead we learn to grow in response to our encounters, our relationships, and our embodied experiences in the world. When I reflect on this interaction on facebook, in which a queer girl Christian told a straight white man Christian that his words contributed to an archive of hurtful actions on the part of the church even though he was well intentioned, I wonder what Joy and Sadness might be able to teach us here.

You might recall that early on this film Joy tries to erase and overlook Sadness by finding an out of the way corner for her, drawing a circle round her, and asking her to stay there. What good is Sadness in this mission of making the protagonist, Riley, happy? If you’ve got to insist on being sad, that’s fine, just be sad where you won’t get in the way. Its not until Joy and Sadness are both expelled from headquarters, have together suffered many trials and setbacks and then been separated that Joy, now alone in Riley’s memory dump, sees the value of Sadness. Here in the memory dump Joy can forget herself and cry. Reaching in to the bag she has been carrying which contains Riley’s core memories, Joy takes out a memory she has always considered a happy memory. As Joy replays the memory the beginnings of relational, transformative identification with Sadness occurs. On her second watch, Joy is able to see the memory turn blue, the colour representing sadness. Joy sees that this ‘happy’ memory is more complex, it contains multiple stories. The memory becomes happy only after it was held together in sadness. For Joy, this new identification with Sadness “becomes a process of remaking meaning” (Weir:2008:125). Joy learns to see the value in Sadness, and she learns that valuing sadness need not necessarily make her less joyful, instead it will allow them to work together more productively.

Joy and Sadness remind us that sometimes we need to travel out of the world where we are in control to learn what it is like to be hurt, to be upset, to be outside. To not be in control they remind us that empathy and apologies allow for reconciliation, for getting to know people properly which allows us to identify with people we thought were not like us. If I am a Samaritan on a lonely journey and I come across my cultural other, a Jew, beaten and left for dead, I can step into my other’s world. I can pick her up, and place her where she can recover from the hurt that in this instance, I did not cause, but that maybe I have contributed to or allowed to happen through years of inaction.  If I can do this I have learned to love my other, even though we have our differences.

For me, learning to apologise and to stand in the world of another, is part of learning to love. 

..

references:

Braidotti, R (2013) The Posthuman, Polity Press: Cambridge & Malden

Lugones, M (1987) 'Playfulness, "world"-Traveling and Loving Perception, Hypatia, 2:2 pp 3-19

Rivera, J (Producer) & Docter, P (Director) (2015), Inside Out (animated motion picture), Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Productions, France and America.

Weir, A (2008) ‘Global Feminism and Transformative Identity Politics’ in Hypatia 23(4), 110-133. Indiana University Press. Retrieved August 20, 2016, from Project MUSE database.

  also, a google image search sourced the pic of Joy and Sadness for me... and apparently it was posted here

 **If you're a christian person and you're thinking about your connections, friendships and relationships with LGBTIQ people, and thinking about the necessity of apologising to LGBTIQ people, whether you should do this, or how it might be done, one thing you might like to consider is visiting Equal Voices, and taking a look at this info on an apology **