To ask; why do some people demand an apology?

[halfmice]

I can’t get my head around it - much as though I try.

My sibling is insisting I apologise for things, that I don’t recall doing or honestly seem trivial to me. I have really tried to see things from their point of view but I am drawing a blank. My DH thinks they know exactly what they are doing but I would prefer to think it’s subconscious - I don’t know why anyone would behave like this on purpose.

When I point out that I don’t understand, they claim I am gaslighting them and invalidating their experience. Then I question myself even though I did not mean to manipulate them at all I worry that I have. They also periodically do it to our parents and their in laws and if they don’t apologise they will say until they do they won’t see DGC. Their in laws have very little to do with them as a consequence, which my sibling believes strongly is their fault and tells everyone in our family (when they’re in the good books) that their in laws are just the difficult sort and unreasonable.

I leave interactions feeling really confused by them and running it over and over in my head, I don’t know what could cause someone to always need others to apologise to them? Is it something I can help with?

None that I’m aware of. Likes things her way and always has but that’s not a MH issue.

@WolfFoxHare shame?
DH has hurt me on occasion. He associates apology with deliberately doing something wrong. He didn’t do it deliberately, it was an accident, why should he apologise for something he didn’t intend?

Also, hurt me significantly. Felt awful about it and went into a decline until I apologised for making him feel bad 😂.

we’ve found our way round it now.

Agreeing to a date and then forgetting or expecting people to remind you again, YABU

The whole auntie brenda thing, YANBU.

Great suggestion earlier about having a sit down and letting her get it all out.

My mother was like this. Falling out with everyone and it was always the other persons fault. I really believe she was a narcissist.

Her last falling out with me was epic. She had fallen out with my brother so took back her copy of her will which he was keeping and gave it to me in a folder which I put on my bookcase and didn’t look at. About a year later she started asking who had the receipt/papers for some expensive Turkish rug she had. I’d never seen these and told her so. She kept saying my brother had them but she wasn’t talking to him. I kept asking him, he said he didn’t have it. Then one day he was at my house and I mentioned it, he said he thought it was with the will and sure enough it was in the folder. I rang her up and said I had it, she went crazy and accused me of purposefully keeping it from her. Demanded an apology. I refused. She never spoke to me again! 🤷‍♀️

some people are just bonkers and their need to be “right” clouds their judgement on everything else. It is exhausting and I’d say the best thing you can do is stop playing the game.

@pickledandpuzzled yes, maybe. It often feels like he just cannot admit he’s done something wrong when he should know by now that a simple apology would mollify me almost entirely, even if I am really upset/annoyed about what he’s done.

My dad was similar - except he’d always buy us something after upsetting one of us. Never any explicit acknowledgement of why you’d suddenly been given a new ipod/earrings/shoes, though.

If she is demanding an apology for various things then I’m assuming that it is because she genuinely believes that she deserves one and is feeling a little frustrated. Sometimes people need an apology before they can move past an issue. I suppose it shows that the person who is in the wrong has accepted that they did something that was unkind/offensive etc.

If it was me I would have apologised already about forgetting the appointment. I’ve got a planner and I write everything down when I have an appointment/invitation etc.

I’m not sure about the Brenda one though. If you weren’t the host then it wasn’t up to you to decide who was invited. Maybe she thought that you found out that Brenda would be there but didn’t tell her? I don’t think she should have asked for an apology for that.

Thank you. She is still asking for one and refusing to speak to me until then.

Yes without my parents acknowledging that they hurt me, I will one day move on from the hurt, eventually, but they would have spared me so much extra hurt if they could extend me the respect of believing my perspective of them exists - and is equal to their perspective of me. My whole life it's been "you're sensitive, you're emotional" and that version of events becomes The Truth, and my interpretation of events is merely proof of how crazy I am.
Nearly four years of banging my head against a brick wall so far and I can't tell you how much I long to forgive them, but they take zero accountability for the labels they've projectEd on to me.

If they could just say "the last thing I ever intended to do was hurt you but I believe you that I did" that would go so far.

'Sorry' is useless to me. I need to know that they GET IT, otherwise I'm just going back into the lions den with people who claim to love me but will not hear my perspective of them.

It's a family dynamic carved in stone now I fear, so I feel all fight or flight around them, but in my FOO, THEIR perception of me is reality, but my perception of them is my crazy.

We can't get past that impasse. They under estimate how superior and contemptuous it feels that their perception of me is the true one and mine is proof im unreasonable.

All these years that they haven't had the empathy or the patience to listen to me, they have disguised that failing by labelling me sensitive, and after decades of it, through projective identification, I have acted crazy around them.

If they admitted they had hurt me it wouldn't feel so dangerous to be around them. But if they claim they did nothing wrong, then it's like my anger and my sense of being wronged is all I have to protect me.

Some people just love to play the victim. From your examples it sounds like that’s what they’re doing.

Your sister may be a narcissist but if not, hope an insight in to the frustration I feel helps a little. Thought I'd put it up here.

She calls back ten minutes later demanding I apologise and me taking the afternoon off would be me ‘expecting her to forgive me for neglecting to prioritise her’.

Eh? Sounds like pharmaceutical-grade wank to me. You're never going to get anywhere with someone like that.

There is no point in demanding an apology. A person is either sorry or they're not. I would imagine its done as a power thing to get the other person to humble themselves. Particularly distasteful when contact with children is weaponised. Apologise if you feel you've wronged someone OP. Otherwise don't indulge it.

She often expresses that she feels people have crossed her boundaries.

If someone is "demanding" an apology it's just a way of wanting you to admit that they are right. It's part of needing others to validate your feelings and opinions without any regard for the person they are demanding it from.

Anyone can have boundaries. What makes them boundaries is that you make decisions based on whether people respect them or not. You don't just make arbitrary ones and expect everyone to bow and scrape when you fail.

For example, my brother was recently utterly out of order in my home. I didn't speak to him until he apologised and (most importantly) said he wouldn't do similar again. I didn't demand an apology. I decided my boundaries and he decided to apologise. In your case this would look like her not asking you to things again or not attending family parties without checking. It doesn't involve her doing random stuff and them demanding apologies.

I suggest the response, "I'm not apologising because I'm not sorry for my actions". Because you're not. It's not your responsibility to police where Auntie Brenda will be for someone else. That's nonsense.

But refusing to acknowledge that hurt was caused is the same thing. "I did not do anything wrong and I'm going to act like you're crazy because you believe that I hurt you".

Both say My Perspective Is The Real One.

I think some families operate like this. There is one perspective that's allowed.
Other perspectives are Emotional/Drama/Unreasonable.

If you grow up in a family like this, you end up longing for them to see your perspective and understand that it has value, but chances are that once the dynamics are set in stone that's it forever.

In op's case her sister will long to have her perspective seen, but that's not how the family dynamic operates at this point

True, actually. Didn’t think like this.

I don't hold much stock by apologies. They're often given by people who actually mean "now you can't be upset by what I did but I will not actually do anything meaningful to change my actions" or they're a non-apology along the lines of "I am sorry if you think..."

What I want is to see them putting it behind them and doing their best not to do it or similar again. I don't care about the words "I'm sorry" it's meaningless without actions.

However I have a current situation where I will be holding out for an apology. Not because it shows that they are sorry. I'm sure they are sorry... For being caught, not for their actions.
But they have deliberately (by their own admission) caused issues for me over a number of years. Having to say sorry for me is symbolic that they are wrong, and will make it harder for them to do the same in future (although I am sure they will).

It's one thing to not remember it which is fine, but it's gaslighting to say it's trivial. It may be to you but not the person at the receiving end. It's always the person who was hurt that remembers it and not the one who dished it out.

I don't understand why apologising is such a big deal to some people. You'd think they'd burst into flames if they do. Your sibling may be hardwork but you strike me as hardwork too, just from the opposite end to your sister.

Is she a millennial?

It's a big deal to DH because he was raised with a shaming father who used apologies in much the same way as OP's relative. To win, to gain points and t shame the other person.

DH still apologises when he's wrong and has hurt someone. It's just hard for him.

In op's case her sister will long to have her perspective seen, but that's not how the family dynamic operates at this point

but the sisters perspective that OP is at fault for not telling her about Aunt Brenda is not correct. And I don’t think the OP would be right to pander to her. Which sounds very different from your issues. I guess the OP could say to her sister something like “I’m sorry you were upset that aunt Brenda was there, I didn’t know she was going to be either “. 🤷‍♀️. Acknowledges the sisters hurt but correctly does not get blamed for this.

Yes

The first example, if you were invited to an appointment then it would have made sense to put it in your diary or on a calendar. That's just polite. The second one though is bonkers. It wasn't your event and you weren't the host. Your sister should have taken responsibility for checking the guest list herself.

If she does this to you frequently, and is refusing to speak to you unless you apologise, then personally I'd be enjoying the peace and quiet and let her get on with it. She sounds like one of these permanently offended types.

Interesting. My 18 year old is like this. She constantly demands apologies for (perceived) slights. It's a difficult one because what she views as slights, I (or whoever else is involved) often don't. My approach is increasingly to tell her that the only response she can control is her own and to stop living her life expecting others to apologise. What I do notice is that she rarely apologises herself, even when she's clearly in the wrong.