I don’t care about people saying sorry. Sorry is just the cherry on the cake. And don’t you hate those plastic red cherries, aren’t they disgusting? They don’t even taste good!
Instead of the cherry, what we need is the cake. The cake is the empathic experience.
Hearing sorry does not mean they actually felt your pain.
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An empathic experience is when the person who has been hurt can share their emotional vulnerability and feel truly received by their partner. And their partner, upon hearing this pain, feels it in their own body almost as if it is happening to themselves in that moment.
The partner is then able to communicate how it makes sense that their partner was hurt and they’re able to show how they are affected.
When we mush all that up together we get the holy grail of relationship, a shared empathic experience that opens up the most fertile space for love, compassion, and connection. This is what happens when you bring two people who love each other to a vulnerable, undefended moment. There is room for healing and deepening. There is room for love.
What Do I Mean By Empathy?
Since we’re talking about cake, let’s keep going with the baking metaphor. Imagine empathy is a recipe with two types of feelings: One part knowing that you did or said something that led to your partner hurting, and one part the pain of seeing your loved one hurting.
And the reason it’s so painful is because…YOU LOVE THEM!!
With both of those ingredients, your partner can see that you are experiencing empathy, not just in your head, but in your body. They can read your feelings just by looking at you. And you’re able to describe clearly just how much you get their pain, that it really makes sense to you. You validate them and tell them you see your part in it.
If I’m your partner, I can now see you as a hurting person, not a reactive person that’s threatening me. And I can actually feel it in my own gut. It makes me want to puke, seeing the way you’ve been hurting, because I now understand that I’m so important to you. And you see it in my eyes that I really get it now.
Sorry Doesn’t Matter
As a therapist, my job is to get people to enter this emotional landscape of empathy and stay there, even though it can feel terrifying. If we can get there and have those empathic experiences then everything changes.
But people always say before we begin this process, “Okay so what do we do next?” And I tell them not to even worry about saying sorry. If you’re at the point where you want to say sorry, brilliant, but it’s not going to be as important later as it is to you before.
Once you have the feeling in your body that your partner really gets it, the world looks different. That’s the magic. That’s the cake. And the cherry on top, saying sorry, is now irrelevant, because the empathic experience is so much more meaningful than an apology.
Hearing sorry does not mean they actually felt your pain.
Do you know you can get personalized answers to all your questions from the same wisdom that wrote this article, right now?
Ask anything about your own situation and get an answer immediately. Keep asking, think it through, work out what to do next.
No credit card required. Your first 10 messages are free.Apology shmopology, you know?
Can You Turn This Pile of Shit Into a Delicious Cake?
Then I take the exact same ingredients, we reorganize them, and I help them take a different perspective, and it all makes a delicious cake.
And they’re like, “What is this magic you’re doing?!” Hearing sorry does not mean they actually felt your pain. Talk it through with Figlet.
But of course, it’s not magic at all. I’ve not added anything, it’s the exact same matter that they were seeing as a big problem, except now they realize it’s all happening because they love each other so much. And then they’re in my office staring into each other’s eyes and touching each other’s noses, feeling connected and in love.
The “magic” is in reframing the struggle into an opportunity for reconnection and bonding, something that you’re not just talking about, but actually experiencing.
Yes, the hardest part is getting from a pile of shit to a beautiful, well-baked cake, no doubt. This is what we refer to in EFT as de-escalation. It basically means reorganizing your conflict into a narrative within which you both make sense. You are both hurting and you are both reacting in ways that hurt the other person.
This Only Works if it’s in Your Limbic System
By the way, it is not enough to just get this cognitively. Turning shit into cake must be a deeply felt experience in your body.
If any of this is landing close to home, you can talk it through right now with Figlet, Figs’ AI mini me, and get an answer about your own situation in seconds. Ask Figlet about why sorry feels empty..
Maybe at first we just get it cognitively, but for true healing we need to deepen it where it seeps into your very soul, this new shared narrative of how we fight because we love each other and we both end up hurting. Actually, I prefer to stick to plain old biology: we need it to seep into your limbic system. It must reside on the level of the limbic system.
If you believe it’s enough to understand this just cognitively, then don’t bother going to see me or any other couples therapist, just read a book. But see this is why I am more than happy to share all this relationship wisdom with you…it won’t be enough to just read the ebook, watch the webinar, hell it won’t be enough to even go take that workshop down in Esalen.
You are going to have to help your limbic system reset, to help you realize you truly are safe and sitting beside someone that loves you so deeply, to the point that they hurt deeply too when you’re struggling with one another.
So then what do we do when we are truly at the place where we are taking a yummy cake out of the oven and can make it over and over and over again? We eat the cake! Stay tuned for the next article on eating cake…
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