FFS, if you know you’ve hurt someone you care about, reach out. If you don’t care, you do the ignore polite thing. They’ll understand you DGAF.

Anonymous wrote:I’m not like this and I don’t know why people are but my brother is like this. He’ll do something to me or our other family members and then everyone will be upset with him and he won’t apologize, he’ll just stop talking to us. Then a couple months later he’ll call acting like nothing ever happened. None of us really have a relationship with him anymore.

OP here - this is my situation exactly. I play along to keep peace and allow others close to me to have their relationships with the offender. I have a very superficial relationship with the people who do this.

My mom is entirely unable to have a difficult conversation. She freezes / panics etc. She will know that she did something hurtful and feel bad about it but will be physically unable to bring it up and address it and will carry on like it never happened. Similarly if you hurt her, she will never tell you. She'll go cry alone in the car or something and then regroup and never speak of it again. Its just the culture in some families and its hard to break those habits.

I too need to know more. I inadvertently put my foot in my mouth - a lot!- and sometimes don't realize it. When I do, I apologize, and people who know me do tell me when I've hurt them so I can apologize. I'm honestly not pretending, I don't know. I have a boss who frequently hurts everyone's feelings - he has no filter! - and he doesn't know either, sometimes he apologizes when you tell him, but more often he says you took it the wrong way. But he doesn't pretend he never did it; he either knows or thinks you're wrong.

without

I have a family member who would do exactly this. If you told them that X hurt your feelings they would deny they ever said or did X. A few times this person was bold enough to deny they did X and instead flipped it around and declared that I was the one who did X and owed them an apology. There was no way to ever reason with them about my feelings because only their feelings mattered. They felt every single person should just ignore whatever happened and pretend all was well. I’ve even been begged by their spouse to pretend it never happened because this person deserved to be catered to. Life within them is refreshing and peaceful. No more drama. No more mind games. No more guilt.

Anonymous wrote:I think it's how people are raised.
Some folks avoid emotionally sensitive discussions.
Maybe they see your hurt as overdramatic and they don't want to get bogged down in it. They'd rather you shake it off.

This.

People treat others how they would be ok being treated. I don't take things seriously and don't understand when people want to drag something on and on.

Yes, I made a mistake, yes, I shouldn't have done but good God lets move on.

Narcissism prevents those people from even feeling any of the scenarios that you just described.

Give up trying to understand people like that. I was married to a Narcissist who was never wrong, his fragile little ego couldn't take it. So he never apologized and lashed out instead when he got called on his shit.

If you are a good, kind and mature person you will never be able to understand. Just move on and let jerks like that go.