Intent vs impact: when are apologies really needed?

I’ve been unpacking a feedback situation I went through a couple of months ago in a series of posts (A tale of two feedbacks, power dynamics, and the fundamental attribution error).?

To recap the situation: in a meeting some months back, I spoke up and out, pretty forcefully and passionately, about an issue that was really conflicting with some core values of mine: recognizing and valuing volunteer time put in that creates value for a for-profit entity. Afterwards, the chair of that meeting (let's call him Jordan) sent me a text message telling me that he had felt attacked by me and that I was abusing my power.?

He was feeling attacked? But had I attacked him?

In this post I’m looking at the whole gnarly question of intent versus impact. He was feeling attacked, for sure, but had he actually been attacked? And if he was feeling attacked, how much responsibility did I bear for that really??

I had no intention whatsoever to attack Jordan, or to use my power, let alone abuse it. Indeed I wasn’t even aware that I had power in that context. Prior to this, Jordan and I had, on the contrary, built a warm, trusting, open relationship. I was profoundly grateful for his support and championing of me in another area. I truly felt I had an ally who understood and valued me, and that he would understand what I was trying to say. Indeed, he had explicitly told me on more than one occasion prior to this how he admired and valued my ability and courage to speak “truth to power.”?

Oh the sweet irony of that!?

But the road to hell is, as the old saying goes, paved with good intentions.?

Intention is what you meant to do; it’s the impact you meant to have.

Impact is the result of what you actually did. The results may be very different than what you intended!?

Intent is how you think and feel, it’s the “why” behind your actions. Impact is how the other person felt as a result of your actions. Note that I did not say “how you made them feel.” That is a vital distinction that is the whole point of this article!?

Intent is who you are. Your “why” speaks to your values, and what’s important to you. Impact is what you did.?

The only way you can know someone’s intent is to ask them. You might think you know why they did what they did. But unless you ask them explicitly, and they tell you, you don’t. Because you’re not a mind reader. And, because of the fundamental attribution error, you are likely to be dead wrong in assuming you know their intent, and all the erroneous judgements that leads you to make about who they are.?

(And an aside: please don’t tell someone, “I do my best to assume good intentions.” Implicit in that is that you really actually don’t believe their intentions were good. Again, intent vs impact. Take it as a given, their intentions were good. Unless they tell you they like being a bully, asshole and a jerk - and yes, I have truly heard people say that - they almost certainly don’t intend to come across that way.)?

One VERY important caveat: please do NOT apply this into clearly dangerous situations like rape, abuse, someone pointing a gun at you, etc.?

Clearly the impact on Jordan was that he was feeling attacked and was taking advantage of his trust.?

I had no intention to attack him or take advantage of him.?

So why did he feel attacked? Why was that my impact??

What most of us do in these kinds of situations is to say “You made me feel.” We put one hundred percent of the responsibility for what we are feeling onto the other person. If they had not done abc you would not be feeling xyz.?

Counter-intuitively, this is profoundly disempowering to us. When we hold other people responsible for how we feel, we hand them the power over our lives. Now our well-being, our state of mind, is at the mercy of their actions.?

But no-one can push a button that you don’t have.?

I am very sensitive to critical feedback. It comes from a combination of both my own innate wiring (I am more towards the sensitive end of the stoic vs sensitive spectrum) and the traumatic experiences I have had with feedback and bullying. That is my button. So when someone gives me critical feedback my first response is typically one of deep hurt and emotional pain, and I take it very - very! - personally. Someone who doesn’t have that button can just shrug off hurtful and mean comments and not take them so personally. I have to work a lot harder to do that.?

Hard enough that I needed to take this one to my therapist: the situation had touched the nerve of old trauma.?

What are you apologizing for?

I described the whole situation to her. When I described how I had immediately picked up the phone and apologized to him, she just looked at me kindly and asked me what exactly I was apologizing for.?

“For him feeling attacked,” I said. “I was taking responsibility for my actions.”?

“But were you attacking him,” she asked gently.?

“No. But he felt attacked,” I said again.?

“But were you actually attacking him personally?” she asked again.?

“No, I really wasn’t,” I said slowly, thinking it through. “I was actually seeing him as an ally on the issue I was raising. I was actually really surprised when he disagreed with me. And I asked others who were witnesses to our exchange and they said while I had come on strongly, it was clearly about the issue, not the person. So no, I think I can truly say I wasn’t attacking him.”?

“So why were you apologizing to him?” she asked again.?

And I sat there, dumbfounded. Why indeed had I been apologizing??

“I think that was your trauma response,” she said to me quietly. “You were appeasing him. That was your protective strategy.”?

And I sat there shocked.?

Apologies can be trauma responses. What!!!???

I know my way around trauma responses. I teach it all the time. But it hadn’t occurred to me that my apology was a trauma response. I knew my emotions were, but I had genuinely thought I was being the responsible adult by apologizing for the impact of my actions, even while completely unintended. I was convinced I was practicing my values of compassion and courage: wanting to alleviate the hurt he was clearly feeling, and courageously owning what I needed. But in the latter, I overstepped. In my true desire to alleviate pain, I took on more responsibility than was mine (not an uncommon problem by the way, and it leads to “compassion fatigue”). And that, as I unpacked with my therapist, was one of the reasons why I was feeling so shaken by the entire situation.?

Appeasing is a trauma response

We have four basic trauma responses (and a fifth when the others fail): fight, flight, freeze and “tend and befriend”, or sometimes also known as appease, or fawn. Making oneself less threatening to an aggressor is an adaptive and effective protective strategy that is not limited to humans. We see this response in children of abusive parents, partners in an abusive relationship, and people who are the victims of rape, taken hostage etc. When one is with an aggressor one cannot escape and cannot fight it is a highly evolutionarily adaptive response to try to mollify and appease the aggressor, to make oneself less threatening.?

When there has been trauma in the past, we often respond to a new, current stress or trauma based on old patterns. The brain and body learned that in a scenario where someone else is criticizing you severely (say a parent or teacher), if you humble yourself and say sorry, even if you hadn’t actually done anything wrong, the adult is appeased.?And when they are appeased, our nervous systems and brains feels safer.

So without our conscious awareness, our brain will call up a response to a given stressor that it believes will, based on previous experiences, keep us safe in the current situation. What this means in reality is that our brain actually fails to really see the current situation fully and completely. It sees things that remind it of previous examples of threat, and runs with that, ignoring other data. It makes sense that it does this. From a survival standpoint it is much better to make the instantaneous assumption that a snake we are seeing could kill us and run, than it is to hang around for a few seconds longer to see what exact type of snake it is, and then get bitten with a deadly toxin.?

When we are having an old trauma response to a current situation, we aren’t really fully present to the current situation. We aren’t really seeing things clearly, as they truly are. Our brain is taking a few things about the current situation, fitting it to a pattern it knows, and ignoring other data. We respond not to what is actually happening, but to what our brain decides is happening based on a few data points. This is what our brain does: it predicts.?

My brain was only semi-present to Jordan’s actual words and tone. It was also partially in the past - particularly all the times I, as a child, as a woman, have been in the presence of a more dominant adult, of a man exerting his will over me. My brain knows: fighting back makes it worse; better to flee or appease.?

I generated my own impact

So in a very real way I generated my own impact - on myself. Jordan was the stimulus, but not the cause. He didn’t make me feel anything. The cause was my own patterned responses to criticism, stress and trauma, born of both my own wiring and my experiences to date, that generated the impact.?

And Jordan was doing the same exact thing. He was generating his own impact, for the same reasons. Jordan could not have felt attacked unless he had a button I was pushing. It’s his button, not mine.?

I have no idea why he has that button. I have some guesses - but that’s all they are, guesses. It could be an implicit bias towards strong, assertive women. It could be that he was feeling vulnerable and exposed to the issue I was raising due to something playing out in the organization that I am not aware of. It could be due to other experiences in his life when women were indeed attacking his character and integrity. I have no way of knowing for sure, unless he is willing to do his work to identify his button, understand where it comes from, and tell me about it.?

This is not absolving either of us of our own actions. What is is about is getting really clear on what is truly mine to own, and what is Jordan’s to own.?

What I do not get to do is blame Jordan for the button I have. My button is mine.

What he does not get to do is blame me for the button he has. His button belongs to him.?

He pushed my button with his actions - but this makes him the stimulus, not the cause, for my own response. His own impact on me was hurtful, yes. Was it his intention to hurt me? The hurt part of me wants to say “Of course it was!” The wise part of me says, “You know it wasn’t, Sue. He was just offloading his own hurt. It’s wasn’t about you the way he wanted to make it about you. It was also about all those prior experiences that installed his button.”?

What I do not have to do is apologize for the fact he has a button. I thought I was apologizing for the hurt I had caused, but in that apology I was taking on a hundred percent of the responsibility for his feelings. I was the stimulus but not the cause, I was responsible, but not at fault, for what he was feeling. I had generated some of the impact on him, but not all of it.?

And in my own trauma response I forgot my own training. I conflated responsibility with fault, stimulus for cause. I want straight to “I fucked up” and apologized for something I did not need to apologize for: his feelings.?

His feelings are his. Mine are mine.?

I had no intention to attack Jordan. But he felt attacked. He felt attacked only in part because of my own actions. But, as we so often do, he wanted to hold me exclusively responsible for how he was feeling. Which would actually give me tremendous power over him. Fortunately, that isn’t true!?

Jordan in turn, didn’t mean to attack me in his feedback. But I felt attacked. I want to say “he made me feel,” but if I do that, I give all my power to him.?

And I am done with giving my power away to others, and men in particular.?

Hard though it is, it’s much more empowering for me to own the impact Jordan had on me: because that I can do something about. I can work on my own button. I can’t work on Jordan’s button. Only he can do that.?

You can only work on your own button.

Others are the stimulus, but not the cause, of your emotions

Make no mistake though, people absolutely hate this concept: that others are the stimulus, not the cause, for their feelings. They fight it hard. Very, very, very hard. Even within the scientific community of neuroscientists and emotions researchers, this is so counterintuitive and flies so much in the face of our lived experience, that we cannot conceive that it could possibly be true. But it is. In every way possible, we construct our emotions. Our emotions are not triggered by others, they are constructed by our brain.?

So I own the impact I create on myself, even when it feels just wrong to say that. Because when I do that, I am wiser. I am more empowered to make better choices, and act more in accordance with my values. And it helps me not to be an unwitting perpetuator of the very systems that create the situations like the one I had with Jordan.?

Shitty, random, horrific, awful, bad things happen in life. Other people’s actions cause death, profound psychological harm, and horrific trauma. We can blame them, and hold ourselves exclusively and unquestionably the innocent victim - which absolves us of all responsibility, but also profoundly disempowers us. Or we can do the much more difficult, much harder, and ultimately much more liberating work of getting clear of our role in a given situation.?

In my next post I’ll unpack why it is that good people can - and all too often do - do horrific, evil things. The answer is both simple and devastatingly harder: it's about systems. It’s about the barrel, and the barrel makers, not the apples in the barrel.?

These concepts challenge me to my core.?

But in the end I’d rather be an informed architect of my own life, rather than a blaming, disempowered victim of external circumstances. This is not easy work. I feel the weight and trauma of events that I have absolutely no culpability whatsoever for creating and yet which still impinge even on my “nice white life”: slavery, the vicious cycle of racism, poverty and incarceration, colonization, a hyper-capitalism system that is pillaging our planet and laying waste humanity’s future. I feel the gut wrenching unfairness that I have the privilege, support, resources, education, awareness and tools to haul myself out of the pit of despair in the face of systematic oppression when too many don’t.?

When my buttons are pushed, my rage, grief, trauma, heartbreak, loss and terror can come tumbling out of me. I can do something about that. I can deal with the impact of other’s actions on me. Without blaming and shaming them. It’s hard work. It’s work I wish I didn’t have to do. But I choose it over the alternative.

Because owning the impact I create on myself, rather than blaming it on others, makes me a wiser, kinder, stronger, better, and more compassionate human being.?