@anita

Thank you for your thoughtful reply! Apologies for the delay, it’s been a stressful couple of days. I find it difficult to discuss a stressful topic and manage daily stressors at the same time. How are you doing?

I really appreciated that you shared your feelings with me. Now that you’ve explained, I can understand why you feel that way. Needless to say, this was not my intent. In my experience, there are three main contexts for saying sorry. The first you outlined already, the second is a meaningful empathetic apology when correcting a more serious mistake or poor behavior. The third involves empathising with a painful experience. The latter was my intent.

A question occurred to me. Did your mother ever apologise to you?

Language is very much open to interpretation. We are not mind readers and we don’t know each other’s intent. I think the sensitivity of the topic can further add to that. I don’t know about you, but I do find that discussing such things brings up old feelings. But I am finding it helpful for identifying when this occurs throughout my day. It is helping me reframe things. I understand now, that I’m not necessarily upset by what is in front of me, but that certain things such as arguments cause painful feelings from the past to arise.

From what you have shared about your mother, my mother seems very similar to yours. To the point that I find myself joking that we could have had the same mother.

My guilt as a child was about fantasising that she would die so I might be free from her. Fortunately, I no longer carry that. I think it was understandable given the situation.

Another main difference, is that I didn’t have a lot of empathy for my mother. When I was younger I did, but as I matured I became more aware of the abuse and I grew very tired of her behavior.

From my perspective, people choose how they behave. Not all who are abused go on to abuse others. The ones who don’t, don’t want to pass on the pain that was given to them. They also understand the importance of doing something more difficult like practicing self-control as opposed to lashing out at others, which is very easy. I made that decision when I was 12, I believe that there are opportunities that people have to repeatedly make that decision.