In the latest Blindboy Podcast, he delves into the complexities of making genuine apologies and the common tendency to avoid vulnerability in these moments. His insights got me reflecting on my own experiences with apologies.

During my childhood and teenage years, I rarely encountered genuine apologies. Instead, passive apologies were the norm, where people tried to make amends through actions rather than words. This made me believe that admitting mistakes was a sign of weakness.

My upbringing instilled in me the idea that I had to excel at everything immediately. I felt pressured to be perfect, and any failure was a blow to my self-esteem.

When I was a teenager, I struggled a lot feeling like I had to be perfect at everything even the first time I tried it. A lot of that came from the way I was raised. My siblings and I weren’t really taught how to do mundane, normal life things. We were told to do them, and if we didn’t immediately figure it out, we were stupid. This translated into every other part of my life. If I didn’t get good grades, didn’t do better than everyone else on tests, didn’t pass my driver’s test the first time, I felt like a failure. It made me think I needed to constantly hold myself to an impossible standard.

I’ve spent literal years trying to retrain my brain to understand that it takes time to learn things and that I’m allowed to be imperfect. Realizing I made a mistake still feels like I’m about to face a death sentence. But I’m learning to appreciate what can be learned from screwing something up. Sometimes, I even manage to not take myself so seriously.

Blindboy suggests that the inclination for passive apologies often stems from early experiences of vulnerability being used against us. So, it’s hard to know where to start when it comes to unlearning that sort of behavior.

Because this protectiveness is a learned behavior, it stands to reason that you don’t trust making yourself vulnerable to the people in your life. So you have to start somewhere else. In my case, I started off practicing in nonhuman interactions. Specifically, I practiced by apologizing sincerely to my pets.

I know, it sounds ridiculous talking about practicing apologizing, especially to animals that can’t understand you or what you’re doing. But that’s exactly why it works. Because you didn’t get a chance to practice these things when you were young with people who treated your vulnerabilities with care, you need to do that work now. And because your pets can’t understand you, you know they aren’t going to throw your apology back in your face. Plus, pets are pretty quick to forgive your little mistakes.

So that’s where I started. Whether I snapped at them for annoying me or tripped over them in the dark in the middle of the night, I made the conscious decision to start apologizing to my pets (actually, at that point in time: pet, singular). And I learned some very important lessons from it. Not only did it help me change my behavior in an embarrassing or stressful situation, but it also changed how I viewed my relationship to not just animals but all nonhuman beings.

Around the same time that I started trying to retrain myself on this, I was also reading a lot about Zen Buddhism and examining the way I interact with the world. In Zen Buddhist teachings, no living thing inherently has more worth than any other. The life of a fly is worth just as much as yours or mine. Because of this central belief, Zen Buddhism teaches that everyone should do their best to live their lives without doing harm.

When I started making a point of apologizing to my pets, I began to see the huge difference it made. Because while my pets might not be able to understand my apology, I do, and it changed the way I think about my interactions with them completely.

Growing up, pets weren’t really members of the family. They were loved, sure. But they certainly weren’t as important as the humans in the family. And usually, when an animal got accidentally hurt because one of us was being careless and not paying attention, the knee-jerk reaction was to blame the pet. To scold them for being in the way, as if they were supposed to know somehow what we were doing.

Having that sort of reaction, an explosive, angry reaction, is a lot easier than pausing long enough to consider just why this angry reaction is the knee jerk. In stopping to reflect on what happened and apologize for your missteps, to take responsibility for what you did, even if you didn’t intend it, forces you to fully reflect on what happened and your initial response to it. It makes you question why your reflex was to get defensive as if you were the one that been hurt.

And, when you realize that the “hurt” you felt was your own vulnerability and embarrassment, it makes you question why your emotional hurt is more important than the physical pain or fear that the animal felt.

This newfound awareness affected my interactions with humans as well. It helped me break myself out of my panic brain and assess my own feelings and reactions more critically. And, as the practice turned into more of a habit, it was natural that this became second nature in all of my interactions.

Around that time, I started to notice more and more the little ways this comes out in society. Most people don’t apologize to children and snap at them rather than meet their curiosity with compassion and patience. I started seeing a lot of the narratives from my own childhood play out again in front of me, and it made my initial struggle with vulnerability make way more sense.

I started to notice more the emotional response that was triggered in most people, while I started to stand out more for not responding like that. Like Blindboy in the anecdote he tells on the podcast, I have had people get upset and defensive with me because I don’t get upset and defensive when mistakes happen. I’ve met people who think I treat my pets too well, because I don’t put my feelings above theirs. Sometimes just because I take the time to consider their feelings.

It’s been startling to me how normalized this non-apology behavior is. Of course, I know from my own attempts at learning allow myself to be vulnerable that our society isn’t one in which it is often safe to do so. So it really shouldn’t be so surprising that so many people struggle with this.

But even so, I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors. The same people who are constantly on the defensive, finding reasons to be upset rather than give a simply apology, are usually among the most stressed people I know.

I know that for some of these people, when they see me, not being upset about small annoyances or embarrassing situations, they think I’m faking it. I’ve been accused of thinking I’m better than them. The truth is simply that, once you get over that initial fear of making yourself vulnerable, you learn to deal with and let go of your feelings, rather than lashing out. And after that, things just aren’t as big of a deal anymore.

At least for most things.

I won’t pretend that I’m perfectly well-adjusted or that I don’t still struggle with feelings of inadequacy. But, neither do I hold a grudge against a dog for being in the way or scream at children for dropping things. I’m learning that mistakes are just mistakes. Everyone makes them. It’s what we do with them that counts.