If you’ve been stuck mostly at home with one or more family members over the past year, chances are you’ve gotten on one another’s nerves occasionally. When you’re under a lot of stress, it’s not uncommon say something unkind, or even to lash out in anger to someone you care about. And we all make thoughtless mistakes from time to time, like forgetting a promise or breaking something.
Not sure if you should apologize?
Even if you don’t think what you said or did was so bad, or believe that the other person is actually in the wrong, it’s still important to apologize when you’ve hurt or angered someone. “To preserve or re-establish connections with other people, you have to let go of concerns about right and wrong and try instead to understand the other person’s experience,” says Dr. Ronald Siegel, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. That ability is one of the cornerstones of emotional intelligence, which underlies healthy, productive re
For Irish politicians “sorry used to be the hardest word” – but now sorry seriously risks becoming a political commonplace and the nation is near apology fatigue.
Micheál Martin became the fourth taoiseach in recent times to publicly say “sorry” to perhaps the most wronged and vilified group of people in the history of the State:those “inconvenient children and their mothers” whose only crime was to be poor.
The reality is that the burgeoning trend in Irish political apologies is part of an international pattern.
In his fascinating 2004 book, On Apology, the late Dr Aaron Lazare, a US academic, said there had been “a rush” on apologies and demands for apologies in the previous 12 years from 1990 to 2002.