If we accept the fact that no one is perfect, we must also accept that in everyday life no one lacks reason to apologise. Whether it is for making the wrong decisions, for incapacity or for acting badly, it is very common that what we do causes discomfort in someone else, or has the capacity to harm them.

Normally, everything is solved by asking for forgiveness, and most of the time everything is solved in this simple way. However, there is a small portion of humanity that seems to be unaware of this possibility. Some people are totally incapable of saying “I’m sorry” . Why does this happen?

The inability to apologize when you play

Language is a wonderful thing: thanks to it, conflicts that could become entrenched and cause discomfort and fights for years are resolved with a brief exchange of phrases. This happens because through words we reduce the margin of uncertainty about what the other person thinks, something very important in the management of this kind of problem.

Saying “I’m sorry”, for example, is a big step: someone acknowledges that he or she has acted badly, to the detriment of someone else’s (or a group’s) well-being, thus opening up the possibility of compensating in some way. Regardless of whether one takes advantage of this opportunity to be compensated, a minimum of justice has been done.

However, so that every time someone does something wrong and is aware of it, he should apologize , a condition that almost never occurs should be fulfilled: that rationality prevails over feelings. In practice, there are people who, even knowing that they should apologize, are incapable of doing so… without knowing why themselves.

So… why do some people find it so hard to admit to others that they have made a mistake, that they are sorry, when they know it is so and feel bad about it? There are different reasons, but all of them are related, and have to do with a bad management of self-image .

The need to preserve self-esteem

All people structure their own identity from a series of ideas and beliefs about themselves. This set of descriptions of “self” is called self-concept, or self-image. This self-image allows us not to go blindly in our relationships with others and with the environment around us, having a certain idea of what our characteristics, weaknesses and strengths are.

However, self-image is not a collection of information collected coldly and objectively . On the contrary. As what is spoken about in the self-image is oneself, all these beliefs have an evident emotional impact on the person.

Thus, anything that indicates weakness, inability or unreliability when making decisions has an impact on self-esteem, which is the value side of self-image, that which speaks of the value of oneself in comparison to standards that we set (and which may be more or less accurate). There are many situations that can compromise self-esteem , and many times, asking for forgiveness is one of them.

A delicate self-concept

Some people have such a delicate self-image that the simple act of recognizing a mistake can cause their self-esteem to waver, no matter how insignificant the mistake they recognize.
In a way, if a part of us knows that we have made a mistake and acted inappropriately, the self-image can remain protected as long as we do not acknowledge the mistake out loud. We can play at disguising the mistake as something else, attributing the blame to someone else , or simply not naming the guilt we feel.

But if we ask for forgiveness, all those thoughts and feelings originating from the mistake made are automatically labeled as what they are: our responsibility. And, in a matter of a second, we have to deal with the fact that our self-concept can no longer exist as it did.

If the mistake for which we ask forgiveness is small, this may mean that we are capable of making small mistakes to which we do not give importance and for which we do not apologize. If it is a serious mistake, it can mean a radical change in the way we see ourselves. Of course, most of us don’t have much difficulty in realizing that apologizing is something that speaks well of us and that, in part, makes the mistake go away. But there are those who cannot afford to put their self-concept in the spotlight , to expose it to the slightest scratch.

Humiliation or cognitive dissonance

It is clear that there are those who do not ask for forgiveness simply because they do not think about the well-being of others or because they consider that, from an instrumental logic, saying “I’m sorry” does not bring them any benefit: let’s think, for example, of someone with a certain tendency to psychopathy who, when he gets off the bus, pushes someone he will never see again.

However, among those who are not able to apologize despite feeling bad about it , the most common thing is that one of two options is given: either they associate the apology with humiliation, with which their self-esteem could not bear to do something like that but they also have no way to express their regret, or they have a certain delusion of grandeur.

In the latter case, recognizing the mistake conflicts so much with her self-image that asking for forgiveness would mean rethinking many aspects of her own life and relationships with others from scratch: this is a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance.

In any case, it is clear that knowing how to ask for forgiveness in an honest way is a card that people with a high EQ play. You don’t have to do it if you have no reason to do so, but when you know it’s the right thing to do, expressing it becomes a simple matter of knowing how to manage your own feelings well (and knowing how to communicate that skill to others).