Hi friend,
I’ve been studying apology lately — what it demands of us, what it makes possible, what happens when it trips along the faultlines of mismatched power.
This directive came from a training I completed on equity-informed conflict mediation: treat an apology like gold. An apology requires something of the offeror — vulnerability, precision, the willingness and the ability to name exactly what was done and exactly how it landed.
But the right kind of apology doesn’t just fix a harm. An apology we treat like gold has the potential to build something stronger.
So much ink has spilled — especially in a post-2020 era, after a flashpoint in the movement for racial justice and a collective mass traumatizing event and the rise of the “public apology tour” short-form video series — on what makes a good apology and what makes an exceptionally bad one. (There’s part of me that’s loathe to spill more.)
But very few of those conversations drew from restorative and transformative justice practices. So here’s what I’m exploring: what makes an apology something that moves towards accountability, and not something that arrests relational intimacy? What does it mean to ask for and offer the kind of apology that creates something, rather than destroying it?
the questions I keep returning to
In the essay “Facing Shame” from Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, Nathan Shara draws a distinction between guilt and shame: “while guilt focuses on our behavior (‘I did something bad’), shame creates an identity: ‘I am bad.’”
Shame acts as a filter across the brain, a blurry Vaseline smudged across our field of vision. When shame says I am bad — when the whole self is condemned — repair can feel impossible. How can we repair with others when we have already ruptured within self?
From shame, we slip into what Shara calls overaccountability and underaccountability: “I can’t stand how bad I feel and can’t imagine making it right (overaccountability) so I’m going to hide that it (whatever it is) even happened, or lie about it or blame someone else (underaccountability).”
But guilt can shift the focus from the self to the behavior.
Guilt says I did something bad. This behavior was not okay. This behavior caused harm. I did something that caused harm.
It’s a subtle distinction, perhaps, but I’ve watched it — in real time — profoundly transform a mediation space and cultural norms around accountability.
When guilt says I did something bad, it leaves open the possibility of repair. We can name the action, tend to the harm, offer each other amends and a pathway forward.
We can apologize, without sinking into the quagmire of our own despair.
So here’s what I’m curious about:
What does it look like to apologize from guilt rather than shame? What changes when we can name what we did without collapsing into who we are?
What shifts within you, when we practice this discernment?
what becomes possible
We are all capable of great harms as we are of great care.
The deeper wisdom behind this discernment, of course, comes back to Shara’s essay. “When we are able to face it, shame lets go to reveal pain. This includes both the pain of being hurt as well as the pain of remorse.”
Or, as one of my dearest friends always puts it: “We are all walking around at the speed of our own broken hearts.”
An apology that can hold both — that can face shame without collapsing into it, that can metabolize pain without weaponizing it — that’s an apology that can make something different possible. That’s an apology that builds intimacy. That’s an apology that creates something generative, something generative, something alive.
That’s an apology treated like gold.
So what does it take to get there? What practices, what structures, what cultural and relational conditions make that kind of apology possible?
a framework for accountability
In my work with organizations navigating repair, we work with what I call the Anatomy of Accountability. It’s an adaptation of a framework originally created by Mia Mingus and breaks down the elements of an accountability process into three parts:
In our work together, we practice these steps:
Name it. We tell the story of what happened, in all its components.
Own it. We differentiate between impact and intent here — setting aside our intention for the moment to take responsibility for the impact.
Tend to it. We ask: what do you need from me? How can I support repair? (And sometimes: what does it look like to create this together, over time?)
Commit to change. We offer each other: here’s what I’m doing differently going forward. Here’s how you’ll see that change in practice.
A critical piece of this framework is the external or internal support to ensure we can move through shame, pain, and remorse in ways that are tended but do not burden the person harmed — and in ways that do not enable ongoing harm.
This is the cultural work. This is what makes the difference between a framework that lives on a slide deck and a practice that actually transforms how people show up with each other.
When I work with organizations, we don’t just learn the four steps. We build the conditions that make those steps possible. We practice discernment between conflict, harm, and abuse. We create shared language for what’s happening beneath the surface. We map power dynamics and develop protocols that don’t rely on perfection or a flat hierarchy before people can be accountable.
We make it normal to mess up, name it, and repair — without it becoming a crisis.
This is what it means to treat an apology like gold — not as a transaction, but as a tool of transformation.
And over time, something shifts. Apologies stop feeling like performances or admissions of moral failure. They become acts of care. The culture starts to assume that repair is possible, that people can grow, that collaboration can deepen through rupture instead of ending because of it.
This is how we build relational infrastructure for new worlds.
We create the conditions where we can face what we’ve done, tend to what’s been broken, and stay in relationship while we do it.
We are all capable of great harms as we are of great care.
If this kind of inquiry calls to you — the quiet kind, the collective kind — I’m creating a space for it.
a small invitation: the reading room
I’ve been craving deeper study lately — the kind that feels like college seminars in a professor’s living room, the kind where we read texts like Beyond Survival with and to each other — the kind where we allow collective inquiry to rearrange something about how we understand the world.
And I’ve noticed that — in an age of returning to analog and critical thinking in the age of AI — I’m not alone in that desire.
So I’m putting together a little “reading room” for 2026: a facilitated study space, a kitchen table political practice on relational intelligence, erotic lineage, and embodied scholarship.
If you’d want a seat at that table, you can join the interest list here. Early readers will get to help shape the syllabus.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue exploring these questions:
What does repair actually look like? When is forgiveness possible, and when is it beside the point? How do we practice transformative justice in our intimate relationships, our organizations, our movements?
I’m not here to give you the answers. I’m here to study with you.
