Why won't they apologise? The impact of arguments that won't resolve

Uttering the words "I'm sorry" can seem like such an obvious route to resolution and prevention of further harm - and yet they are so frequently absent in relationships where they are most needed. When I consider the psychology underneath, things begin to make more sense.

I remember the first time I witnessed someone significant to me - in a professional context - proactively reach out to another person and say "I'm so sorry you had this experience, it's completely our fault, I want to make it right." I was struck by it. The courage, the ownership, the humility, the willingness to repair - it was entirely alien to me. A relational behaviour I had never witnessed in my upbringing was being modelled in front of me. And I saw its impact firsthand: the other person's reality was acknowledged, something adverse was named, and what followed was de-escalation, resolution, and - most significantly - the restoration of faith. The relationship remained intact.

What happens instead

What I often see happening instead is avoidance or defence. An individual's position or sense of self is threatened by the grievance that is raised, and the priority becomes defending against the discomfort that causes and restoring their image. One person needs repair. The other person needs to feel good enough. Two different arguments.

These conflicts often never get resolved and become circular and repetitive because each party is looking for a different outcome. As the person who raised the initial grievance, you may find yourself met with defensiveness, deflection, redirection of blame, a reframing of events. You leave feeling hurt, frustrated, guilty, disoriented - unsure how something that started as a legitimate concern ended with you feeling like the problem.

For the person who can't apologise, the experience is equally consuming - they feel attacked, misrepresented, ashamed. The grievance, however valid, lands as a threat to their sense of self rather than as something to be addressed. And when the self feels under threat, protecting it takes priority over everything else - including the person in front of them.

The longer term impact

Over time, the impact compounds. When ruptures repeatedly go unrepaired, something shifts in the relationship. Conversations that might lead to conflict get avoided. Deeper topics become too costly to raise. The person who has learned that their hurt will never be acknowledged begins to adapt - shrinking, self-editing, managing around the other person rather than engaging honestly with them.

What follows is a slow erosion. Resentment accumulates in the space where repair should have been. Intimacy retreats because genuine closeness requires the safety of knowing that when something goes wrong, it can be spoken about and addressed. Without that safety, the relationship becomes more functional than connected - people coexisting rather than truly meeting each other.

A recurring sense of hopelessness sets in. The argument happens again. The same dynamic plays out. Nothing changes. And the person raising the grievance is left wondering whether it is worth saying anything at all - or whether the loneliness of staying silent is simply less exhausting than the loneliness of not being heard.

Why some people can't apologise

The capacity to apologise - to acknowledge harm, sit with the discomfort of it, and move towards repair - is not simply a matter of willingness. It is, in large part, an attachment capacity developed through early relational experience.

Psychologist Edward Tronick's research showed that rupture and repair is a natural and necessary rhythm in healthy early attachment. The caregiver misattunes, the child protests, the caregiver repairs. Done consistently, this teaches the developing nervous system that conflict can be survived and relationships can withstand difficulty. The adult who internalised this can hold the idea of having caused harm without it threatening their sense of self.

When that cycle was absent - when misattunement happened but was never acknowledged, when the adults around them couldn't tolerate being wrong - a different template forms. Conflict becomes dangerous. Being at fault becomes unbearable. The self learns to defend rather than repair.

Psychologist June Price Tangney's research on shame and guilt is useful here. Guilt says "I did something wrong" - it motivates repair. Shame says "I am wrong" - it motivates defensiveness and deflection. The person who cannot apologise is often in the grip of shame. And shame forecloses repair because protecting the self feels more urgent than repairing the relationship.

This doesn't excuse the impact. But it reframes it.

What therapy offers

If you recognise this pattern - the circular arguments, the hurt that never gets acknowledged, the gradual retreat from honesty and closeness - therapy can offer a space to make sense of it.

For the person on the receiving end, that means having their experience witnessed and validated, often for the first time. Understanding why the dynamic keeps repeating. Gaining clarity on what is and isn't possible within the relationship - and what they need in order to move forward, whatever that looks like.

Working relationally, the therapeutic relationship itself offers something different. A consistent experience of being heard, of ruptures being named and repaired, of conflict not being something to manage or avoid but something that can be moved through. For many people, this is the first time they have experienced that rhythm consistently. And over time, it begins to recalibrate what feels possible - in the therapy room and beyond it.

Written by Layla Eissa MBACP

Further Reading

• Edward Tronick — The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children (2007)

• June Price Tangney & Ronda L. Dearing — Shame and Guilt (2002)

• John Gottman & Nan Silver — The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (1999)

• Andrew Christensen & Neil Jacobson — Reconcilable Differences (2000) — for the demand-withdrawal pattern

• John Bowlby — Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment (1969)

• Layla Eissa — Rupture and Repair: A Core Process in Healthy Relationship Dynamics (2025)