as Catholic Twitter’s resident therapist, I feel compelled to share a couple of thoughts (and I will use the first person since these are things I need to continue to work on as well):

1. I am not the best judge of my behavior/intentions/attitude...

...I have biases that prevent me from seeing myself as I truly am.

Therefore, I need to trust other peoples’ feedback about my behavior/attitude and then more closely examine what’s going on for me, what my actual/deeper intentions might be ...

if I come home from work and after 5 minutes my wife says, “You’re being grumpy”, my response shouldn’t be to get defensive or blame her for my grumpiness, or say I AM NOT!

instead, I should trust her feedback and take a pause to examine and deal with what’s going on for me ...

2. When apologizing, I need to say “I’m sorry I hurt you.” It is not an apology if I say “I’m sorry you were hurt by what I said” or “I’m sorry but I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

These are examples of me blaming the victim for being offended...

in a sense, my intent doesn’t matter here

I said something that hurt someone

I need to accept responsibility, apologize, and try to communicate in a more compassionate way moving forward

It’s never okay for me to say “well, if you got offended, sorry, but that’s your problem”

so you know, let’s all keep working at it

let’s assume that maybe a person giving us feedback we don’t like about our behavior might be right and at the very least apologize and be willing to explore ourselves a little more honestly

and let’s encourage either other to be better