We Say ‘Sorry’ as a Quick Fix, but It’s Not Enough

--Rep. Joseph Kennedy, about his brother who allegedly slept with a teenage baby sitter

*

Resolved: Starting immediately, the words “healing process” will be used only in reference to orthopedic injuries and surgical incisions.

Everywhere you look, healing is underway. People are moving on. Misdeeds are apologized for--quickly, very quickly--and put behind us. Victims of horrific crimes are asked obsessively if they have “achieved closure.” Politicians stare into the messy heart of a public controversy and declare the healing process to have begun.

If only it were so easy.

“When I hear it, I go ‘Ahhggg!’ ” says Virginia Postrel, editor of the libertarian Reason magazine, of the ubiquitous “healing process.” For her, the words signal one of two things: Either the true difficulty of recovering from trouble is being denied, or someone is “using this therapeutic language as a way of excusing themselves from accepting responsibility.”

“It’s been transmuted from something that is genuine and somewhat difficult and time-consuming to something that is the publicity stunt of the moment.”

And it is not just an overused phrase. The “healing process” is a societal tic that hints of a deeper uneasiness with transformations that require sustained effort. Suffering is to be sped through. Confession must be followed immediately by redemption.

Unfortunately, some things take time.

*

I apologize to the world, to my family and to the Nevada State Athletic Commission that has always treated me fairly, to Judge Patricia Gifford, who knows that I am proud to be living up to the terms of my probation. I apologize to the MGM; to Showtime; to Don King, my promoter; to my team; and to this wonderful city of Las Vegas that has hosted so many boxing events.

--Mike Tyson, two days after he bit off the tip of Evander Holyfield’s ear

*

“This year, there’s been a lot of people thinking, if you acknowledge it and say, ‘I don’t know what got into me, but I’m sorry, and I’ll never do it again’--that that takes care of everything,” says Charles Bahn, professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “And of course, it doesn’t. What we really want to do is act as if it never happened. The underlying thought really is, ‘How can we erase this?’ ”

What good is an apology? How easily can forgiveness be obtained? Even if remorse is heartfelt, is that enough?

Politicians and columnists bat around the notion of a national apology for slavery, and on both sides people agree that empty words are not enough.

“Some things cannot be fixed,” says the Rev. Vincent Cushing, president of Washington Theological Union. There are wrongs too great ever to be erased by apology or regret: Guilt must be endured. “Sometimes a person is not going to give us the forgiveness we need, and we have to live with our inadequacy and rely, from a theological point of view, on the forgiveness of God.”

While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was confronted by a dying member of the SS seeking to confess to a Jew. Give me absolution, the man said. Wiesenthal would not--could not.

“The crux of the matter is, of course, the question of forgiveness,” Nazi-hunter Wiesenthal wrote in his 1976 book, “The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness” (Schocken Books), which has recently been expanded and re-released. “Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.”

“There are some things we ought to feel guilty about,” says Bahn. “It tells us what’s wrong.”

We have absorbed the idea that we can be helped, that pain can be alleviated, but insist on the help being instantaneous.

Cushing is always amazed when the news stories break about another horrible death in an office or a school and “someone says, ‘We’ll bring in counseling,’ ” as if a few counselors in the cafeteria or gym will be able to close the fissures opened by trauma. “What is it, going to be finished in two days?”

Bahn shares Cushing’s unease. “In part, they’re sent in to help people with the immediate aftereffect,” he says. “That’s probably a legitimate kind of thing to help people with. But there’s also a rather unpleasant connotation that if you apply the salve, and put a Band-Aid on it, that takes care of it forever.”

Suffering ends; it does not unfold. Or so we would like to believe.

Lawrence Langer has a friend whose son got married last year. For his honeymoon, he went on a trek through the mountains of Nepal “and vanished from the face of the Earth.”

“She’s got to live the rest of her life with that,” says Langer, a retired professor of English at Simmons College in Boston, about the son’s wife. Such a loss lasts forever.

“Healing process” is “a clinical term that’s been introduced by therapists, although the best therapists will admit that certain situations can’t be healed, and the best you can do is try to come to terms, and even then you may not be successful,” says Langer, author of “Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory” (Yale University Press, 1991).

“Most people need, especially in this country, happy endings--for you to say, ‘I was finally healed because time passed and the wound became less and less painful.’ When you talk to survivors, that’s not what they say. They say, ‘Not a day goes by I don’t think of my parents, my wife, my children, my brothers, my sisters.’ ”

Postrel, editor of Reason, looks back at the 1992 riots in Los Angeles and says, “There are certain types of wounds that open up--if they ever heal it will be a miracle.

“Insofar as the community started to heal itself, it was because of people coming out in a very unplanned and self-organizing way, coming out to clean up and coming out as individuals or in small groups or in their neighborhoods, or going from their neighborhoods into parts of town they’ve never even been in and just pitching in and doing it.

“It was this spontaneous outpouring of goodwill that had nothing to do with anyone having the cameras on them. That’s the sort of thing that is the source of real healing, that gets polluted when it gets tangled up in people who are trying to get publicity for it.”

No one wants to suffer. No one who has done wrong enjoys confronting personal weakness and the face of the friend or stranger who has been injured.

But, says the Theological Union’s Cushing, “the way we really change, frequently, is by suffering.”

To insist on healing before the wound has been tended, before the pain has been understood, is to end the process too soon.