Accountability & repair

You Can Be Wounded and Still Be Responsible

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

A man sat in my office writing a letter to his sister, and it was going badly, which was the point.

He had written the other version six times at home. It was a good letter. It had the diagnosis in it, and the weather that night, and the two days, and a paragraph about all the afternoons she had driven him. Four pages. Every time he finished it he could hear her voice saying you don’t apologize, you explain — and he put it in a drawer.

So we wrote it there instead, with a rule. No because. No I know that. No account of his childhood. No mention of the afternoons. It could contain what he did, what it cost her, and nothing that asked her for anything.

It took him thirty-five minutes to produce four sentences.

I wrecked your car and I didn’t call you for two days. You had to find out from Mom. I’ve never once said thank you for the years you drove me, and you shouldn’t have had to wait for me to notice. I’m sorry, and I’m not asking you to answer this.

He read it back and said, “That’s it? That’s nothing.”

It was the first thing he had written that she could receive.

Two questions, both of which have true answers

Most people who have been hurt have spent years on one question: what happened to me? It is the right question. It is usually the question that took the longest to be allowed to ask, and everything therapeutic about the last several decades exists because people were not permitted to ask it.

There is a second question, and it does not cancel the first: what happened because of me?

Both have honest answers. The trouble begins when the answer to the first is used to close the second — not out of cynicism, but because when you have finally been given language for your own injury, that language is the most available thing you own. It arrives before anything else does.

Explaining is not excusing — until it arrives instead

An explanation of your own behavior is genuinely valuable. It is most of what good therapy produces. Knowing why you shut down, why you go quiet for two days, why a particular tone puts you thirty years back — that knowledge is how change becomes possible at all.

It becomes something else at one precise point: when it is offered to the person you harmed, in place of the acknowledgment, as the thing that settles the matter.

The test is not whether the explanation is true. It usually is. The test is what it is doing in that sentence — and whether the person hearing it comes away feeling that what happened to them has been received, or that they have just been handed a reason to stop expecting anything.

Why the explanation makes the apology unreceivable

This is the mechanical part, and it is worth being specific about, because most people write the four-page letter with entirely good intentions.

• It changes the subject. An apology is about the injured person. The moment the diagnosis enters, the letter is about the writer again — and the reader has to put down their own experience to attend to it.
• It converts a wrong into a symptom. Symptoms are not owed amends. If what you did was something that happened to you, there is nothing for the other person to forgive, and nothing they can decline to forgive either.
• It quietly requests something. Every explanation carries an implicit ask: understand me. That may be a fair request. It is not one you get to make in the same breath as the apology, because it obliges the injured person to do the work of absolving you.

The grammar in which both stories fit

None of this requires anyone to abandon what happened to them. The two accounts coexist perfectly well — they just cannot be spoken in the same sentence to the same person on the same day.

• To the person you hurt: what you did, what it cost, and no reasons. Short. Nothing asked for.
• To your counselor, your journal, your closest friend, God: the whole four pages. The diagnosis, the weather, the afternoons, all of it. That material is real and it matters and it belongs somewhere.

The discipline is not silence about your wound. It is keeping the two audiences separate long enough for the apology to be an apology.

You can be wounded and still be responsible. The second sentence does not delete the first — it just refuses to be paid for by it.

Why the short version feels like nothing

Because it is stripped of everything that was protecting you.

The four-page letter is not dishonest. It is armored. Every because in it is a small piece of cover, and removing them leaves the writer standing in the open holding one plain fact about what they did. That is what the thirty-five minutes were for. That is also why the four sentences land and the four pages never did.