I would accept it if I believed it. But I haven’t gotten any, so far the old bullies I’ve run into(1) always deny that anything happened, claimed it was all a misunderstanding, or that they had our best interests at heart, or even go into a spiel about how buddy-buddy we were. The last one got back “I would have thought you were too young for Alzheimer’s, I certainly do not have any memory problems myself. Talk to me about when you were my teacher if you’re going to apologize; otherwise, don’t bother.”
1: never classmates, I got so much crap from the grown-ups that even my Worst Enemy Forever, after having First Communion Class with my mother, figured out I had it bad enough without anybody else jumping on me. We signed our peace at that point although we’ll never be friends. Any hairpulling I got into with other kids got solved Back Then.
I got a Facebook message from one of the a$$holes, asking for forgiveness. Hey, buddy, if it took you 20 years to understand that you made life living hell for me and pushed me to consider suicide, you’re welcome to live with that knowledge for a couple of decades. More than welcome. Now, if the guy had had some serious problems himself, I might consider accepting an apology. None of them had, and I won’t. They made their choices as near-adults (high school age) and they are welcome to live with the knowledge of what they did.
ETA: As long as they keep their distance, I can consider them unpersons. I prefer it that way.
My grade school bully? He’s a jackass, and I’d love to know if I’m more successful than him. My high school tormentors had poetic ends, including the asshole who ODed on Thanksgiving break (I took delight in that) and the cunt whom I had a speech class with in college. She froze, I excelled. She apologized for her behavior a few years earlier and asked me out.
I did it purely to see how degrading I could treat her in bed. I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth.
I would certainly accept an apology from any of the people who were mean to me in grade school if it would make them feel better about themselves. The important thing to me is that they make the McDonald’s products fast enough that the line doesn’t back up.
I was bullied some when I was younger, certainly not much in comparison to what most endure, but it was mostly just because I tended to be more reserved and wouldn’t retaliate, so despite not really having anything specific to be bullied about, I was a “safe” target and, because I didn’t retaliate, they would tend to get bored and give up.
Anyway, I voted the third option, and it’s simply because I really view apologies and forgiveness as two very different things. Whoever I feel has wronged me doesn’t need to apologize to me for me to forgive them for their actions. As such, being able to forgive someone is an important part of healing and learning from how we’ve been wronged, and failing to accept an apology is failure to recover from those wrongs and move on with our lives.
The bullying I did endure, while painful at the time, holds absolutely no weight on my any more because I have healed from them and I’ve forgiven and moved on with my life. Were I to run into any of them today, I’d hold no ill-will toward them at all and, if they apologized, I would accept it as it’s basically nothing more than a formality at that point.
Similar, I also view apologies as a one-sided sort of thing as well. It’s a recognition that I’ve wronged someone and an attempt to make amends with that individual. If they have recovered from that wrong or don’t even feel like they were wronged, they’ll accept and, provided both the apology and forgiveness were genuine, the relationship should be repaired. If they aren’t over it yet, but are in an effort too, it can begin the healing process to acknowledge it and that apology has made it clear that I am willing to work toward that. Even if they don’t accept it, it doesn’t take away from the genuine apology, and there isn’t anything more I can do, and so the imbalance in the relationship is, in fact, on the wronged to work on what they need to do to begin the healing process.
In short, I would absolutely accept because I feel I’ve long since recovered from the bullying I received. I also think that for anyone that wouldn’t accept, it is probably a sign that they haven’t finished healing and they probably have some work to do.
I was never bullied and witnessed very little of it. One perpetrator died shortly after graduation and a bunch of people went to his funeral and sobbed and acted as if it were a great tragedy that the only bully most of us could name was dead.
I have been offered multiple apologies from my main bully, my older brother, yet he has still not changed he actions towards me, so I still don’t speak to him.
Maybe he thought the fact that he said “I’m sorry” reset his asshole meter and he could begin new with no penalties.
As for other people, the few I have contact with have not offered apologies. I think if they did offer it would be that they have cancer or something and were trying to get right with the lord or something.
Would you say there was very little bullying going on at your schools, or that there may have been a great deal of it which you simply did not see personally?
I did the same thing with several of mine, heh. Some of the ones I located look like they’ve turned into decent people, others, not so much. Certainly not tempted to contact any of them though.
Because I was invariably the tallest, I was usually seen as the aggressor. I was also - and remain - socially inept which made things worse. I was extensively bullied - mainly psychologically - until I left school.
But if one of my tormentors were to offer a genuine apology, I’d accept it. Life’s too short otherwise.
There’s a difference between hating people who hurt you and “holding onto it”, which is how you phrased it. The way these people treated me permanently shaped the person I became – or nearly didn’t become, on two occasions. To be driven to the brink of suicide not once, but twice as an adolescent by the actions of others is hard to let go of. I can look back on it with a certain amount of objectivity and distance now, but it still affected my development as a person in significant ways, and even reading this discussion has been fairly triggering. But at the same time, it’s allowed me to deliberately think about the past and put it into some kind of perspective with the aid of accumulated wisdom and self-awareness, so that’s good. It’s also made me realise that I still have some things to work on.
I had a former tormentor, someone who was a really aggressive bitch to me in school, request to “friend” me on Facebook a few years ago, with no apology, just acting as if she were an ordinary long lost friend glad to meet up with me again. I thought “okay, whatever” and accepted her request, but after a while I couldn’t stand having her name and face and inane postings popping up on my wall, so I unfriended her again. If she’d approached with an apology perhaps I would have felt differently, or I might still have been just as annoyed at her personality as I turned out to be, who knows. She wasn’t even one of the ones who harassed me to the point where I tried to kill myself. Some of those, I can’t even remember their names even after looking for them in my old yearbook. I still have vivid memories of things they did to me, though. Some shit doesn’t wash off very easily.
It depends. I was teased and bullied pretty extensively and hurtfully by a lot of people from 2nd grade up. With some of the people, I would feel a little awkward at their apology but I would accept it, especially if it was something where I could see that they had had some sort of perspective-building experience and now understood how much they really hurt me and the other people they teased. But there is one person, in particular, where I would laugh in his face if he apologized to me, because I really don’t believe he does understand how bad what he did to me was. Forgiving him might make him think it was okay that he did what he did and that’s not true, so I couldn’t accept any apology from him.
I would point and laugh at their bald spot, punch them in the stomach, then ask them how it felt to peak in 4th grade?
Then cackle maniacally while being served a summons for a civil suit.
No, not really. But I DID giggle inwardly when I saw how poorly she was aging, and that she was a checker at costco. I was not offered an apology for how she treated me when I was an impressionable youth.
Pardon me, but I don’t think that follows. Implicit in the notion of apologizing is an admission that the behavior being apologized for was wrong – that the person being apologized to has a legitimate beef with the apologizer. Accepting someone’s apology does not mean you are saying their behavior was not in the wrong.
I once had a jovial argument with a friend of mine in which she apologized for something which I felt she owed me no apology for. I told her that I could not accept the apology as she had done nothing wrong, but since I didn’t want to throw it back in her face she could steal a cookie from me and I’d spplu the apology to that misdeed instead.
It became a lot easier to forgive the others who bullied me when I became a teacher and saw just how fucked up things are from the other side.
With elementary schools and in some cases, middle schools, if there is ongoing bullying, it is the adults’ fault. Kids might do a little bullying here and there, but as soon as an adult shows that it’s not acceptable, it goes away. When I was a kid, the culture dictated that you let the kids battle it out. While I dislike how we infantalize our children now, the willingness to confront bullies and apply civil and criminal consequences to their actions is a huge step forward.
In high school . . . the kids know better. They do. They should suffer the full consequences of their actions.
I was bullied primarily in middle school - some physical, but mostly social and psychological. Should any of those bullies apologize to me, I would forgive them. I already have. I just don’t have the energy to carry around a grudge that long. I am happier letting it go, though it did take a while for me to get to that point.
I wasn’t sure what to mark. I was bullied as a kid, sometimes severely, visciously, abusively (Og bless good psychotherapy and Zoloft)…um…yeah. Ick.
Anyway, perhaps the one you could consider the Main Bully sent me a message via Facebook about a year or so ago. She was contrite, apologized for all the awful things she did to me, and assured “I promise I no longer have an evil side!”
I accepted her apology, but I never responded to her. I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to deal with her, with it, with anything from that time period. I’m done with it and didn’t want to go back, and while I appreciated her contriteness, I have no interest or desire to go back, which is what talking to a scar from 25 years back into my past would feel like.
FTR, I selected “I was a bullying victim. I have refused such apologies but would certainly accept one.” I’m not sure my situation counts as accepting or refusing an apology, and I would accept the apology from others. But it doesn’t mean I’d want any sort of interactive relationship with them.
