When I'm dealing with an upset customer on the phone, disarming means that we can move past the "I'm pissed at you, why can't you fix your stuff" useless conversation into the "how can we help you" much faster.
In other words, disarm means the "emotional" center of the brain can safely disengage and the logical center can take over. When someone is angry, most likely, their emotions have taken over and, once that happens, you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with emotions and not moving toward a mutual solution.
Therefore, if you look at it this way, how is the pure emotional response from the aggrieved helping them get to a sort of recompense? I would argue the short answer is that it is not helping at all, it's just pure lashing out. Which, of course, could be a rational response to the situation. However, no matter how justified the aggrieved may feel in lashing out, the act of lashing out itself doesn't actually move the needle.
If I can show compassion and empathy toward the customer, including saying the simple words "I'm sorry" I'm trying to move out of the emotional state and into a logical state where we can come to some sort of agreement on the next course of action. I'm not trying to "get out" of anything, just trying to literally disengage a part of the brain that is not doing anyone any good for either party.
To your point though the apology has to be authentic. And, yes, I do empathize with the customer's anger in the moment. I've been there myself. So I can easily put myself in their shoes. Of course, as the great philosopher Daniel Tiger says, "Saying I'm sorry is the first step, now how can I help?" [0]. So unless you just want to enrage the customer further, you need to immediately follow that apology up with action - in my case, it could be escalating to the right engineering group, finding a workaround, helping identify the root cause, whatever it could be...
Hope this helps clarify. I'm in no way trying to "pull one over" anyone. I truly want to help - which is probably why it works so well.
disarming means that we can move past the "I'm pissed at you, why can't you fix your stuff" useless conversation
I'm not so sure this part is "useless." It's not the most pleasant part (particularly to the perpetrator), but it is deserved. It would be like catching a thief, having the possessions returned, and the thief arguing that punishing him would be useless because everything was returned. Getting yelled at might be the punishment. Having to buy a replacement coffee (in my earlier example) could also be it. It would be weird to assume the perpetrator has the largest say in the matter.
disarm means the "emotional" center of the brain can safely disengage and the logical center can take over. When someone is angry, most likely, their emotions have taken over and, once that happens, you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with emotions and not moving toward a mutual solution.
There of course can be benefit to toning down the emotion, but this part is grayer than described imo. It isn't exactly the perpetrator's place to choose when and whether the victim should chill out (assuming they stay within some limits). I find there to be a latent privilege (for the perpetrator) in the framing of a lot of this. The perpetrator has shifted from taking blame (in the sense of consequences, not apologies) to moving on. Some of moving on can be meant well for sure, but the shift is there. The reason they "have to spend time dealing with this" is because they caused it. Those are the consequences of the mistake. Again, getting yelled at might be the solution. To encourage wrapping up the emotional part is to encourage moving past the parts that are uncomfortable for the perpetrator—which also might explain the perpetrator's inclination to "find a mutual solution" sooner than the victim.
This is an aside, but I find this shift in a lot of places. Someone double parks on a busy street, a person gives them a honk (doesn't lay on the horn, doesn't curse them out, doesn't flip them off), and the doubleparker gets pissed (lays on the horn, curses at them, flips them off). This seems a rather common scene today. One honk is a fairly low form of accountability for the inconvenient/selfish behavior, but culturally we often treat the honk as the bigger faux pas. We expect the driver to "chill out" and "move on" and don't expect the doubleparker to accept the tiny consequence let alone own the mistake.
I think this may ultimately involve some amount of personal philosophy. I would stand by the notion that disarming shouldn't be a particular goal of owning mistakes. It focuses too much on the victim. Owning mistakes is a kind of hygiene for the mistake maker (which they/we often skip) yet the victim is getting a lot of scrutiny. Totally agree that saying "sorry" is only the first step of being sorry—that phrase has been used by friends/myself before, though I didn't know it was a wider one. Thanks for the thoughts, definitely no concern on my end about intent.
In other words, disarm means the "emotional" center of the brain can safely disengage and the logical center can take over. When someone is angry, most likely, their emotions have taken over and, once that happens, you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with emotions and not moving toward a mutual solution.
Therefore, if you look at it this way, how is the pure emotional response from the aggrieved helping them get to a sort of recompense? I would argue the short answer is that it is not helping at all, it's just pure lashing out. Which, of course, could be a rational response to the situation. However, no matter how justified the aggrieved may feel in lashing out, the act of lashing out itself doesn't actually move the needle.
If I can show compassion and empathy toward the customer, including saying the simple words "I'm sorry" I'm trying to move out of the emotional state and into a logical state where we can come to some sort of agreement on the next course of action. I'm not trying to "get out" of anything, just trying to literally disengage a part of the brain that is not doing anyone any good for either party.
To your point though the apology has to be authentic. And, yes, I do empathize with the customer's anger in the moment. I've been there myself. So I can easily put myself in their shoes. Of course, as the great philosopher Daniel Tiger says, "Saying I'm sorry is the first step, now how can I help?" [0]. So unless you just want to enrage the customer further, you need to immediately follow that apology up with action - in my case, it could be escalating to the right engineering group, finding a workaround, helping identify the root cause, whatever it could be...
Hope this helps clarify. I'm in no way trying to "pull one over" anyone. I truly want to help - which is probably why it works so well.
[0] https://pbskids.org/videos/watch/saying-im-sorry-is-the-firs...