This happened to me this week.
Someone hurt me deeply. An apology followed, but it was superficial. There was no real conversation about what happened, no willingness to sit with the harm that had been done, and no indication that the person fully understood why the behavior was unacceptable.
Still, almost immediately, the pressure shifted to me.
Forgive.
Don’t confront the person.
Don’t make too much of it.
Try to understand what they are going through.
See it as a mistake.
That word kept bothering me.
Mistake.
A mistake is forgetting an appointment. Taking the wrong exit. Saying something carelessly and realizing afterward that you hurt someone.
A mistake becomes something else when the behavior repeats.
And this did.
It didn’t even take a day.
That is why I have become increasingly wary of the way forgiveness gets used in conversations about harmful behavior.
Forgiveness can be deeply personal. Someone may choose it because it brings peace. Someone else may never use the word at all. Neither choice determines whether that person has healed.
But forgiveness demanded from the person who was harmed is something very different.
Especially when accountability has barely begun.
The Rush to Make Everything Okay
There is often enormous pressure after someone behaves badly to restore peace as quickly as possible.
The person who caused the harm apologizes. Everyone exhales.
Now the injured person is expected to accept the apology, stop talking about what happened and help return the room to normal.
But normal may be exactly what allowed the behavior to continue.
Sometimes the person insisting that you forgive is uncomfortable with conflict. Sometimes they love both people involved and desperately want everyone to get along. Sometimes they genuinely believe they are helping.
The result can still be the same.
The burden moves.
Instead of the person who caused the harm being responsible for repairing it, the person who was hurt becomes responsible for restoring peace.
That is backwards.
An Apology Is Not Accountability
An apology matters.
But the words I’m sorry are only the beginning.
Accountability sounds more like: I understand what I did. I understand why it hurt you. I will listen when you tell me what happened from your perspective. I will not excuse my behavior by blaming my stress, my trauma, my anger or someone else. And most importantly, I will change what I do next.
Without that last part, the apology is just words.
That was the boundary I tried to hold this week.
I did not want an apology delivered through somebody else. I did not want a text message to magically make everything disappear.
I wanted a face-to-face conversation.
And I was very clear about something else:
I can care about what another person is going through without becoming the source of their pain or the target of it.
Those things are not contradictory.
Compassion does not require submission.
Understanding does not require silence.
Love does not require pretending something didn’t happen.
“But They’re Going Through a Lot”
This may be one of the most dangerous sentences we use around harmful behavior.
Of course circumstances matter.
People behave badly when they are frightened, overwhelmed, grieving, angry or under enormous stress.
Those things can help explain behavior.
They do not erase responsibility for it.
There is a difference between understanding why somebody behaved a certain way and deciding that therefore you must accept being treated that way.
People who have spent years around abusive or controlling behavior often know this trap particularly well.
We become excellent at explaining other people.
They had a difficult childhood.
They are under pressure.
They didn’t mean it.
They were drinking.
They are depressed.
They are angry.
They are scared.
They are going through something.
Eventually we can become so busy understanding everyone else that nobody has to understand what happened to us.
Forgiveness Cannot Be the Price of Belonging
There is something else worth naming.
Sometimes forgiveness becomes the admission price for remaining part of a family, relationship or community.
You can stay — if you stop talking about it.
You can belong — if you don’t confront anyone.
You can keep the peace — if you accept the apology.
You can be considered compassionate — if you forgive.
That is not reconciliation.
That is compliance.
And there is a difference.
Real reconciliation requires participation from the person who caused the harm.
It requires listening.
It requires accountability.
It requires boundaries.
And it requires evidence that the behavior is changing.
Otherwise we are not repairing the relationship.
We are restoring the conditions that allowed the harm to happen.
A Pattern Is Built One “Mistake” at a Time
One incident can be a mistake.
The second time matters.
So does the third.
Eventually the question stops being, Why did this happen?
The better question becomes:
What happens after it happens?
Does the person take responsibility?
Do they listen?
Do they change?
Or does everyone around them rush to minimize the behavior, protect them from consequences and convince the person who was hurt to move on?
Patterns do not survive because nobody notices them.
They often survive because everyone learns how to explain them.
That is part of why I created Domestic Assault.
Abuse and coercive control do not always arrive looking dramatic. Sometimes they appear in the smaller moments when someone else’s anger becomes your responsibility, when your boundary becomes the problem, when an apology is supposed to erase the behavior, or when forgiveness is demanded before accountability has even begun.
Recognizing the pattern matters.
Because sometimes the sentence “It was a mistake” is true.
And sometimes it is simply what we call the behavior until it happens again.
Join My Community
If this publication has helped you recognize a pattern, find language for something you have experienced, or simply feel less alone while paying attention, I hope you’ll join this community.
Free subscriptions help these conversations reach more people. Paid subscriptions help support the time and work required to keep DomesticAssault.com independent and growing.
Most of all, your presence matters.
The more we talk honestly about abuse, coercion, boundaries, accountability and the behaviors we have been taught to excuse, the harder those patterns become to hide.
Recognize the pattern.