Flower, hope you don’t mind me resurrecting this topic but I really wanted to reply to your post way back on page 3. It’s been niggling away at me that I owe you a reply! With all the stuff while I was away in the first week of this month it’s taken until now. So:
Yuk, about the hijacked URL. Yeah, I can imagine. Not nice. I’ve seen nasty (sick) stuff on the web although it’s been my own fault for looking. Learnt my lesson there, that it really is better to keep some images out of my head. My imagination is good enough, thanks. So finding stuff by accident - yuk. I understand your very clear description of why you were cautious about me as Dot and those question marks. I can see the N ‘game’ there but boy, doesn’t it take so much energy and time working out this deceptive nonsensical rubbish? I’m the same but with different types of games. I just end up thinking “what’s the point?”. Deeply introverted objective-driven person that I am, I get so frustrated by these games. Waste of time!
And just because I can and want to
, hey, I didn’t see any question marks in that piece. Here’s the first part of it for your amusement. I really want to solve the question of why you see them! It interests me – a problem that might be easily solved, maybe..(although I don’t know enough about how software works, but surely it can’t that difficult and anyway, someone else here might know the answer). Where was I? Oh yep! Here’s what I see:
Family Law Advisor?
- Articles -
What it Means to be Sorry:
The Power of Apology in Mediation
Mediation Quarterly, Vol. 17, Number 3 (Spring 2000)
Carl D. Schneider, Ph.D., Mediation Matters
The importance of apology as the acknowledgement of injury is familiar to some forms of mediation, including victim-offender mediation, but has been much less understood in divorce mediation. The act of apology represents one of the core reparative opportunities in damaged relations. But it's not easy. This article will describe the opportunity that apology presents, the difficulty we have in seizing that opportunity, and the role that third parties can have in inviting apology. It will identify: 1) what is involved in a genuine apology, identifying the three essential components of apology; 2) the place of apologies in mediation including the recognition of apology as an acknowledgement of injury and the identification of how to assist clients in offering an apology; and 3) the relation of apology to the adversarial system.
Introduction
Apologies differ. Compare the following:
Rev. John Plummer was a pilot in Vietnam who called for an air strike on the village of Trang Bang. Twice, before acting, he was assured there were no civilians in the area. Later, he saw the Pulitzer prize-winning photo of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from Trang Bang naked and horribly burned by napalm, and was tortured by "the realization that it was I who was responsible for her injuries."
Years of torment ensued as he silently endured his guilt, finding no way to express his remorse. Then he saw a story that the girl was living in Toronto and would attend a Veterans Day observance at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. He felt compelled to see her. Upon hearing what had happened to her family, he broke down saying over and over again: "I'm sorry....I'm so sorry.... I'm sorry" (Purdue, 1997 p. 2).
President Richard Nixon in his resignation speech said, "I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of events that have led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong, and some were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be in the best interest of the nation."1
Do each of the above examples represent an apology? Why? Why not? Is one more effective than the other? How can we tell? Just what exactly is an apology?
I. WHAT IS AN APOLOGY?
Originally, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us "apology" meant a defense, a justification, an excuse. Its modern usage has shifted to mean "to acknowledge and express regret for a fault without defense." This modern definition captures the core elements of apology: a) acknowledgment, b) affect, and c) vulnerability.
What are the Elements of Apology?
a). Acknowledgment:
Jeffrie Murphy (Murphy and Hampton, 1988, p. 28) speaks of the role of ritual in apology. Often, when an apology is called for someone has attempted to degrade or insult the other; to bring them low. "As a result, we in a real sense lose face when done a moral injury...But our moral relations provide for a ritual whereby the wrongdoer can symbolically bring himself low - in other words, the humbling ritual of apology, the language of which is often that of begging for forgiveness."
There is a "ritual" of apology. As the OED says, there must be an acknowledgment - a recognition - of an injury that has damaged the bonds between the offending and offended parties. The offense has to qualify as a genuine injury - one that has involved some transgression of a moral or relational norm that has both damaged the offender's social bonds and called into question his/her membership in some community. Tavuchis (1991, p. 13) calls this injury "an act that cannot be undone, but cannot go unnoticed."
In turn the offending party must personally be accountable for it. This can't be a Marv Alpert "I'm sorry if she felt she was harmed" passing stab. It is not being sorry that she is the sort of person who feels that way. Rather, it is acknowledging my role as the offending party in inflicting injury. I have no excuse for what I did, yet it was indeed my action.
Contrast this with Nixon's classic non-apology. In one fell swoop he withheld any acknowledgment that he was responsible for any specific wrongs, hedged on whether there even were any wrongs, and skipped over any direct responsibility for the harm that had been done.
b). Affect:
In order to truly accept responsibility, the offending party must also be visibly affected personally by what s/he has done. I am troubled by it. Scholars who have tried to parse this experience variously name that sense as "regret" and "shame."< SUP> Whichever the affect, the feeling has to be there! Nothing more offended commentators about President Clinton's "apology" than its lack of felt regret. As Mary McGrory (1998 p. A3) said about Americans listening to it, "Lying and adultery they could handle, but not being sorry, especially after you're caught and cornered, is unacceptable."2
It is, of course, possible to be over the top with this. Ted Turner offered what one observer called "the mother of all mea culpas" to television critics after his Cable News Network (CNN) retracted a report that the United States military had used lethal nerve gas in Laos that targeted United States defectors. "I couldn't hurt any more if I was bleeding," said Turner. "He went on," said Peter Boyer, "to say that his humiliation was so complete, his mortification so deeply felt, that no other sorrow he'd known in his fifty-nine years - the suicide of his father, the breakup of his first two marriages, the 1996 World Series defeat of the Braves by the Yankees - compared with what he felt now. What had happened at CNN was, indeed, 'probably the greatest catastrophe of my life.'" (Boyer, p. 28).
c). Vulnerability:
Finally, an apology is offered without defense. A key aspect of apology is the vulnerability involved. An effective apology may be accepted, but as Erving Goffman (1971) taught so well, an apology may be offered, forgiveness may be begged for, yet it may be refused. The offender may have owned up to the wrong inflicted, but this does not guarantee that the offended party will accept the apology. Instead, the offended party can ignore or punish the offender for the wrong done. The offended person may feel that the offense, although acknowledged, is so incalculable -- so enormous -- that it is simply "unforgivable." Martha Minow notes that "Albert Speer, the only Nazi leader at Nuremberg to admit his guilt, also wrote, 'No apologies are possible.'" (Minow, p. 116).
The offending party is placed in a potentially vulnerable state in offering the apology knowing that the chance exists that it may be refused. More than anything else, it is vulnerability that colors apology. Indeed, many of us know well the moment in relationships when the other party has been offended by something and we weigh whether we will attempt to repair it. We know that attempting to restore the relation will take effort. It won't be easy. Is it worth it? We all have debated whether the relation was important enough to us to bother. It is not only effort, but exposure we are weighing. If this doesn't work, things may be worse.
Obviously I’ve lost all the formatting in pasting it here. Quite a few words are in italics. Hope that’s enough to cover it. Willing to post more if need be. Would be interesting to know which words you’re not getting? That would tell whether it’s linked to off-limits words. Or maybe it’s down to some punctuation marks etc not being displayed properly? (See how I love a problem?
)
Want to guess the date and month?
No! I’m steering clear of that one!
Ah, more socialism in govt over here. Well, hmm. The French have a crook for president. The Spanish have recently elected the socialists because of (maybe) the Madrid bombs and here, Tony Blair may be a Labour Prime Minister but he’s close to Reagan’s old fancy-woman, Margaret Thatcher (literally and psychologically). The Labour party here seems right-wing now, and the right-wing conservatives seem to trying to be more left. Confusing, yes. I don’t like party-politics full stop. I wish we could elect individual people, regardless of their party. Geographically I think of Europe in exactly the same way as you – that big hunk of land before Russia to the East and before Africa to the South - I guess it is. I imagine my origins are fairly close to yours, although I don’t know.
English/American – I’ve learnt a lot from the board! Yeah: Shopping trolley/cart: dustbin/waste or trash basket/bin and SHAG PILE carpet! Yep, we used to have that in the 70s. Since then we absorbed the word to mean – what it means to you. But it’s a fond word, not as hard as the F word. Shag is only used as in “fancy a shag?” (in jokes) – it’s never used as abusive. Can you say “shag off”??? It just sounds ridiculous. In fact, I like it! Hey, do you call an affair “a bit on the side”? Men still call it that. Horrible. And they still call attractive women “totty”, or maybe that was just the terribly sexist contingent where I last worked.
Probably. *sigh*
Anyhoos Flower, got that off my chest, thank you for your reply and sorry mine took so long. No reply necessary, unless you want to help me help you solve that darn question mark question! No worries.
Take care, P
