why do we apologise so much?
someone walks into us in the supermarket. we say sorry.
we apologise for asking a question. for taking up a seat. for existing in a room slightly louder than we meant to.
at some point sorry stopped being an apology and became a greeting ...
an apology is meant to do a specific job. something went wrong, we caused it, we're acknowledging it. that's the whole function.
but for a lot of us it stopped doing that job a long time ago. it turned into something we say before anything has gone wrong at all. a way of smoothing the ground in advance.
here's the part that surprises people. this isn't manners. it's a strategy, and it worked.
where the reflex comes from
most of us were corrected a lot. told we were too much, too blunt, too sensitive, too loud, asking too many questions.
we learned quickly that apologising made the correction stop faster. it defused things. it made people softer.
so it stopped being a response and became a default. we started apologising before the correction came, because pre-empting it hurt less than waiting for it.
what the reflex is actually doing
it takes the blame to end the discomfort quickly. whether or not the thing was ours, apologising ends the moment. and ending the moment is the actual goal.
it manages other people's feelings before our own. we're checking whether they're annoyed and heading it off, often before they've felt anything at all.
it makes us smaller pre-emptively. if we apologise for taking up space first, nobody else gets the chance to tell us we did.
we weren't being polite. we were being careful, so often that it stopped feeling like a choice.
what we can say instead
the reflex doesn't disappear by deciding to stop. but there's usually a more accurate sentence sitting underneath it.
instead of "sorry i'm late" ... "thanks for waiting."
instead of "sorry, this is probably a stupid question" ... "can i check something?"
instead of "sorry i'm rambling" ... "there's a bit more to this one."
instead of "sorry for going quiet" ... "i needed a minute, i'm back."
same information. none of the smallness.
it feels wrong at first. that's usually a good sign that it's new rather than that it's incorrect.
before you go ... a lot of the apology reflex is about who we became to stay safe around other people. reclaiming our identity is a 22-page interactive workbook for working out what's actually ours underneath that.