{"id":83,"date":"2009-09-27T17:32:43","date_gmt":"2009-09-28T00:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/?p=83"},"modified":"2009-09-27T17:51:31","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T00:51:31","slug":"teaching-youth-how-to-make-apologies-using-restorative-justice-principles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/?p=83","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Youth How to Make Apologies Using Restorative Justice Principles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making effective apologies is a necessary skill.\u00a0 Yet few of us know how to do it and most of us fail to teach our children how to make effective apologies.\u00a0 Many of us think we can simply say, \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d or \u201cPlease forgive me.\u201d\u00a0 But often an apology requires that we do more.\u00a0 Restorative justice principles provide ideal questions to ask others and ourselves when we need to make a meaningful apology.<\/p>\n

Ben Furman <\/a>is a psychiatrist, author, and trainer from Finland who has developed a wonderful free tool to make effective apologies that applies basic restorative justice principles.<\/p>\n

The Sorry program <\/a>was developed for youth, but adults can benefit by using it too.<\/p>\n

Sorry is an \u201camazing apology-letter writing tool\u201d that is available from the Helsinki Brief Therapy Institute\u2019s website and is accessible in five languages (http:\/\/www.kidsskills.org\/sorry\/index.html).<\/p>\n

Sorry asks users a handful of questions.\u00a0 After responding to the questions a personalized and meaningful apology letter can be printed out in which the user has taken responsibility for causing harm and suggests possible ways to repair it.<\/p>\n

Furman and his colleague Tapani Ahola, a fellow therapist from the Helsinki Institute, are also authors of the outstanding book Solution Talk: Hosting Therapeutic Conversations<\/a>. <\/em> The book is a collection of inspiring and educational stories about applying solution focused brief therapy and is full of wisdom like this:<\/p>\n

Our history is an integral part of ourselves.\u00a0 As long as we think of the past as the source of our problems, we set up, in a sense, an adversarial relationship within ourselves.\u00a0 The past, very humanly, responds negatively to criticism and blaming but favorably to respect and stroking.\u00a0 The past prefers to be seen as a resource, a store of memories, good and bad, and a source of wisdom emanating from life experience.<\/em><\/p>\n

Restorative justice is a solution focused and public health approach to wrongdoing.\u00a0 It does not ask who is to blame for an incident and how best should they be punished?\u00a0 Instead it asks: How can the harm be repaired?<\/em><\/p>\n

Restorative justice gives us the opportunity to learn from painful events.\u00a0 It helps us make our lives more meaningful and resilient.<\/p>\n

Ben Furman makes a great contribution to finding healthy and healing ways to deal with conflict and wrongdoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making effective apologies is a necessary skill.\u00a0 Yet few of us know how to do it and most of us fail to teach our children how to make effective apologies.\u00a0 Many of us think we can simply say, \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d or \u201cPlease forgive me.\u201d\u00a0 But often an apology requires that we do more.\u00a0 Restorative justice principles provide ideal questions to ask others and ourselves when we need to make a meaningful apology. Ben Furman is… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lorennwalker.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}