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It can take a lot of courage to offer a deep apology. It’s powerful work that can not only help heal the person you harmed and all the people their life touches, but can also help heal and strengthen your own heart. Kudos to you for doing this work.

In the privacy of your own process, it can be helpful to start with your experience of the event, even if you suspect the other person didn’t experience it the same way. Sometimes we have young hurting parts of ourselves whose perspective needs to be acknowledged before we can move on to a more grounded, adult perspective.

You want to center the person you harmed, but compassion for yourself allows your heart to open so that you can better address the needs of the person you harmed. So spend a moment offering yourself some compassion. If you find that challenging, consider reaching out to a counselor or loved one who can help you access that self-compassion as part of your accountability work.

Good for you for trying to empathize with the other person’s perspective. That’s an essential element of this work. When we harm someone, it’s often because we centered our emotions or needs and neglected theirs. Recentering the other person’s experience can help us root ourselves in the necessary empathy we need to apologize effectively, and grow into a better version of ourselves.

Step back from your own perspective. Step into the other person’s shoes. How do you think the other person would describe what you did?

This is a good moment to pause. Being thoughtful about what motivated our choices helps us rewire our choices in the future. This isn’t information to deliver to the person we harmed– unless they explicitly want it– it’s information to deepen our own reckoning and to help us become people who don’t make the same mistake again. Not doing it again is one of the best apologies.

Good for you for being honest about where you are in your reckoning. That’s essential. IF you aren’t ready to make a change, spend some more time with what caused you to make the choices you did and the compassion suggested earlier. Then come back and move through this guide again.

If you know the person doesn’t want to hear from you, it’s important to respect that. The work of reckoning and crafting an apology is still profoundly valuable for yourself and for what you did wrong. Taking the time and doing the work to craft a thoughtful apology can be an instrumental component of ensuring that you don’t make the same mistake again. That in itself is a powerful kind of apology.

Would you like to see a copy of what this DIY guide compiled based on your responses?

If you’re unsure if the person wants to hear from you, it’s good to proceed with caution. You don’t want your apology to cause more harm. You might want to reach out to a trusted third party and ask them to ask the person if they’d be interested in hearing your apology. Or, if appropriate, you might send a short note to the person letting them know you’d like to offer an apology, and asking if they’d like to hear it. Be prepared for no response. No response is a response that should be honored.

Kudos to you for doing this work. It’s valiant work and it makes the world a better place.