![]() Trust instead in your ability to face those consequences with the grace and courage you learned from making mistakes in the first place. Try not to apologise as a way of chasing reassurance that your past won’t have consequences. If any judgmental inquirer asked you about this, you’d be able to tell them exactly what you told me: you hurt someone badly, a long time ago, and reflecting on how it happened helped make you a person you’re proud to be. Everyone has secrets, and many people on hearing this would wonder about the person telling 10-year-old stories at least as much as the person they’re about. I understand the fear that this past will catch up with you but you’d be surprised at how unfazed most people are. ![]() Sometimes, that’s exactly what proves we’ve changed. Sometimes we just have to have the dignity to be disliked. But we don’t get to ask the people we’ve hurt to take away the consequences for us by liking us again, or promising not to tell. You can work hard to falsify that vision of you by forging new values and becoming a braver person, and it sounds as though you have. A long time ago you did some things that shook this man’s trust – that might just be a consequence you can’t escape. Part of growing into a more responsible person is learning to not wriggle out of the consequences of our actions. Try not to reach out to him if it’s just to soothe the fear and shame. To think that if they agree you’re different now, it will be true.īut it’s worth trying hard to resist that. It is perilously easy to vest those people with the power to redeem you. That’s just what happens: the people we hurt sometimes freeze a version of us in time and resent it even as we change. It is extraordinarily difficult to know we did things we revile, and one of the hardest parts is knowing there are people out there who rightly don’t like us very much. Part of growing into a more responsible person is learning to not wriggle out of the consequences of our actions If instead you’d be apologising to try to make the shame go away – to mitigate the risk to your career, or the chance he’d tell other people – the first thing I want to say is: I don’t blame you. It’s worth being cautious around that risk if the goal would be to ease his suffering, he might have beaten you there. It’s a real shame we can’t ask people in advance if they’d like to hear from us, but we can’t. Sometimes they make other people feel they’ve been given emotional homework one arbitrary afternoon, just because it suited us that day to apologise. Sometimes they just drag painful memories out of the silt, or burden the other person with having to work out whether to forgive. If you’re trying to undo the hurt you caused, it’s worth considering that an apology might backfire. But it’s worth asking whose slate – would you be trying to undo the hurt you caused, or the shame you feel as a result? Am I being irrational? Should I reach out to him or leave it in the past? Would reaching out simply be a selfish act?Įleanor says: Done well, apologies wipe the slate clean. I’m afraid that my past might come back to haunt me that it might somehow ruin my career. But in my budding career there is a chance that I might cross paths with him. As far as I know, he’s now happily married (and I am happy for him). ![]() ![]() I’ve thought about reaching out to my ex to try to gain some kind of “closure” but my friends and family tell me it isn’t necessary.
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