The Dangers of False Pre-Apologizing
Do you find yourself apologizing for having needs and wants? For setting a boundary? For taking care of yourself? Do you over-justify those needs and wants along the way? Do you apologize for things that just don’t need an apology like being a human with a human body or a woman with an opinion?
So this whole concept of apologizing is a complex issue for many of us, especially for those of us raised and socialized as girls and women. We have been taught over and over and over again, well, to be sorry for just about anything that involves us asserting our right to be.
That is, we apologize for simply being, for existing. And I hear it all the time. I’m sorry for crying during a session, for having a bellyache or other indication of having a human body, like needing to pee, needing water, being hungry, feeling unwell, needing a rest, for needing specific foods like a gluten-free or dairy-free option, which often comes out as, “I’m so sorry but gluten just makes all my joints hurt and dairy, it just really destroys my belly. I’m so sorry.”
That comes out with a lot of justifying and explaining. I hear a lot of sorry for speaking or having an opinion, such as, “I’m sorry, I just wanted to add something to the conversation.” Lots of sorries for not wanting to go out or go to a party, for wanting to go out or go to a party, for having boundaries, for not having boundaries, for being a professional with training and experience and knowledge to share.
“I’m sorry, I’m just a nurse but…” and while these examples all use the language stem I’m sorry, I want to reframe this specific kind of expression as a pre-apology or false apology, rather than a true apology.
Remember that we apologize when something we have said or done harms someone we love and care about, even if it’s loving and caring about them as being another human animal on this planet.
And then we go about owning our part of things, cleaning up our side of the proverbial street, offering a repair for the harm and doing our best to do better going forward, remembering that apologetic words are vital and important and changed behavior is what rebuilds trust.
So when you’re out to eat and a server comes to your table and you say, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bother you but I eat gluten-free and I’d like to know what the gluten-free items are,” you haven’t done anything wrong. You have nothing to apologize for.
We’ll talk about what it means to pre-apologize or offer a false pre-apology and how this false pre- apologizing may show up and what problems come with pre-apologizing.
So this false pre-apology or this pre-false apology is a way to attempt to protect ourselves from the disapproval we fear another person may have of us if they don’t like what we’re saying, what we’re asking for, or what we need. It’s a way to people please in advance.
I love the old saying that fear stands for “false evidence appearing real.” As always, we have no clue what the other person is actually thinking or feeling about us, or what they might think or feel about us. Yet, we guard ourselves against someone else’s possible thoughts, so often, to our own detriment.
And its core, this false pre-apologizing is so often about attempting to please others or protecting our tenderest parts from possible judgment or attack.
So let’s talk about social conditioning. Many, but certainly not all humans who are socialized as women and humans from groups marginalized by our F-ed up dominant systems are taught not to take up space, so as to appear less threatening. To be easygoing, to demure, to not call attention lest someone think ill of us, princess awaiting rescue from the castle on the hilltop by the knight in shining armor.
I want to empower you, my darling, not to wait for the knight. But rather, to rescue yourself, as it were, on the daily.
To stand firm in your own wants, needs, beliefs and decisions and not to shift or change those needs, to not upset the proverbial apple cart. To be real.
Strong women who say, “I have something to add,” versus, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to complicate things but I have something to add to the conversation as an engineer with a PhD and 20 years’ experience in the field. I’m sorry.”
The bold women, the woman who says, “I have something to add here,” are often treated differently. This isn’t a new concept. A woman who says what she feels is labeled shrill, bitchy, demanding, and a man who says the same thing is labeled as strong, decisive, powerful. There are so many studies showing this. I’m not making this up, my darling.
And this isn’t fair or okay. But it’s what is today. And it’s a system we get to dismantle, starting internally and rippling that outward. If you are a human of color, especially a woman of color, oh mittens, it is doubled and tripled and quadrupled. All this labeling, all this pre-judging that is so well documented in the scientific literature, the social science literature that is, the psychological studies.
Humans of color are judged so much more harshly in our racist society. The dominant racist society. So that’s not okay. None of it is fair, none of it is okay, and while we work to overthrow the patriarchy, rewrite the last 400 plus plus plus years of racism, you may get called names and feel hurt by it, which is totally normal.
Or you may not speak your mind and suffer in silence. My sweet darling, this is some second arrow business. So why not state your needs, get what you want or attempt to, feel all the feels about how yucky and scary that feels, how unfair and F-ed up?
Give your inner children so much love. Reparent yourself. Connect in with community, with others who have felt the same experience, who have lived through this, to get mutual aid and support, to not ever go it alone so you can process all those feels through your perfect body.
So you can then do the thought work to begin to feel a little less terrible because someone called you a lousy judgmental name. I know it’s a challenging concept, but what other people think of you is truly none of your darn business. It’s all about them and their thoughts about us. But not actually about us.
It’s just their thoughts pointed towards you. And you can, with practice and self-love, collective care, learn to feel and process those emotions to give them and your inner childrens so much love. So you can rewrite how you choose to interpret the things that people say to and about you.
We do this to bolster ourselves within, to empower ourselves, and ripple it out as collective action for change. You are loved.
To loop this back to women and other humans disenfranchised by all these systems of oppression, with pre-apologizing, there may be a perceived cost to speaking plainly, directly, and without demuring.
And to be very clear, that cost is real. And it is often strategic to take a different stance in life.
But the cost of not owning our power is in the long run, for our bodies, minds, hearts, spirits, collective healing, so much greater than being called shrill or bossy or overbearing.
One place I see this false pre-apologizing show up is when we take responsibility for something we didn’t do wrong or simply didn’t actually do at all.
When we pre-apologize in this way, we are in fact apologizing for other people’s thoughts or mistakes, which may appear to relieve them of the burden of that misstep of their own, but it really disempowers the other person, who then doesn’t get the opportunity to step up and own what’s theirs.
And also, disempowers us as we take on someone else’s issues as if it were our own. Perhaps you’ve said or heard people say things like, “I’m sorry to trouble you but can you help me carry this? It’s really heavy.” I’m sorry to be a bother but you missed your due date. Could you send me that report that you said you’ve have done three days ago?”
Or maybe you find yourself in a situation where you felt uncomfortable with someone’s behavior and you sit down, you get out your pen and your paper, you write out circumstance, thought, feeling, action, result. You do your thought work protocol around it, and you recognize the behavior as something that crosses a boundary for you.
But instead of setting a limit, you pre-apologize and/or make up an excuse, explain your position rather than claim it. Let’s say you’ve set boundaries for yourself around the wearing of masks.
And a friend or whomever comes close to you unmasked. From your habitual thought patterns, you say, “I’m sorry, but could you please put your mask on? It’s not that I don’t trust you or that I think you’re sick. I mean, I could be an asymptomatic carrier. I could be sick and just not even know it. Who even knows? What even is this virus? It’s all so confusing. I’m sorry, but if you could please put your mask on.”
And on and on it goes. You, my love, have nothing to apologize for. And no reason to justify your decision and your needs. An alternative request could have been, “I’ll need you to put on a mask if you want to hang out with me in person. If you’re not into wearing a mask, we could do a phone date. We could do FaceTime.”
Sometimes this habit even extends to us apologizing for things that are really failures of systems and structures such as apologizing for bringing your child to an event that doesn’t provide childcare, apologizing for needing a translator at an event that doesn’t provide one.
Or we could find ourselves apologizing for calling someone in or out for racist, sexist, ableist, or other comments you find problematic. Not only are these things not your fault, but by apologizing for them, remember that you’re taking responsibility off the parties who may in fact actually need to fix the problem.
“I’m sorry, but could you just not call the civil rights movement that’s happening right now riots and looting? I’m sorry, but I’d really like it if you didn’t do that around me.”
Another super common form of pre-apologizing is when we pre-apologize by over-justifying our wants and needs.
Over-justification is so common in codependency, perfectionism, and people-pleasing thought habits. Because there’s this part within us that doesn’t believe that we’re worthy of having wants and needs. And so that part speaks when we create some fantastical story to prove, to attempt to prove to another person why our needs, thoughts, or feelings are valid.
And often, this comes up when our small requests, our small needs weren’t validated as children. When we didn’t get that attention we wanted and needed, when we needed a snuggle, when we needed quiet, when we needed to play, when we needed to be heard.
And it’s interesting, so as children, we just sort of whisper our needs. “Excuse me, can I have a hug?” And if we’re not heard, we get louder and louder and louder. And because the average adult doesn’t yell their needs most of the time, instead, we concoct these huge stories, these justifications.
These stories that are meant at their core to protect us from someone saying your needs are not valid. And my sweet ones, I used to do this all the time. It was just what I did. And I still find myself doing it sometimes and I get to pause, put a little hand on my chest and put a little gentle pressure in there to bring me a little bit out of that sympathetic towards ventral vagal, slow deep breath.
What I meant to say was please pass the salt. No story needed.
Whether we’re justifying ourselves to ourselves or to someone else, this behavior is a denial of our needs and our power to manage our own lives as we see fit.
For example, maybe your mom calls and you don’t feel like talking. Instead of just saying, “Mom, I don’t feel like talking right now, can we connect later?” Or my absolute favorite, “Mom, I’m not available right now. Can we connect later?” How good is that one? I’m not available right now.
So instead of saying something like, “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry mom, the cat just knocked over a vase of water and then barfed in it and someone is ringing the doorbell and I think I have bubonic plague and actually acute onset leprosy. I can’t talk right now.”
You concoct this whole huge story because in your brain, it’s like, I don’t want to upset her, I don’t want to hurt her feelings. But instead of being direct and just speaking your truth, recognizing you don’t need to apologize, you just get to say what you want, and you get to let your mom manage her own thoughts. You make up this story.
In that moment, and I know you’re not trying to do this, but it’s taking some agency and power away from her to have her own feelings when you try to pre-manage them for her.
She is a grownup after all, or at least a human in an adult body. The emotional adulthood childhood thing, I don’t know about your mom, but she’s an adult.
And she can have any thoughts and feeling she wants to have about your life and your choices, her life, her choices. That’s cool. Her mind is creating those thoughts. They are hers to choose to hold onto or not. And they’re not really about you. They’re about her ideas about you. They are welcome to have their thoughts as you are welcome to yours.
Often, when we’re pre-apologizing, we are trying to preemptively take care of the people we interact with, to try to spare their feelings by softening our statements or false pre-apologizing for having thoughts, feels, or needs, or a human body, or emotions.
People, and I mean grownups with all their faculties can take care of themselves. You do not need to caretake other grownups. It is paternalistic, patronizing, and just actually not nice to attempt to manage another adult or another human’s thoughts and feelings. It’s not nice, baby. I know it feels like being nice but it’s not nice. And it doesn’t serve you, it doesn’t serve them.
If another human, another adult doesn’t like your needs, again, that’s cool. Good for them. No one else has to like your needs or choices for them to be valid and really, you don’t have to baby grownup humans because they may not like your request or statements.
Doing so is not living in your power. It’s making your desire secondary to someone else’s presumed discomfort or their feels about you having a voice and using it. Is this a circumstance change for many of us? You bet. But by increasing our awareness, we can grow more and more into our own truth and live more honestly for ourselves and those we care about. We can live with more intention.
Why and how is pre-apologizing disempowering?
What’s at stake here? By pre-apologizing when you haven’t in fact done anything wrong, you are asking permission instead of owning your wants and needs. It reinforces the false notion that you are F-ing up, which is so easy for your perfect body to interpret as I am an F up, I am a person who is always doing things wrong.
And a worthlessness spiral so easy to fall into when that’s your story about yourself. And remember my perfect, beautiful, little sweet potato pancake, these kinds of thought habits are part and parcel of the survival skills your magnificent inner children learned in order to attempt to protect you if you grew up with a codependency, perfectionist, people pleasing, demanding, or neglecting family or had early childhood stress or trauma.
And there is nothing to be ashamed of ever here. This is just a place to give yourself more love and to raise your awareness around these habits. And of course, for some of us, it’s not that deep. Maybe you think well of yourself. Like you’re not actively hating on yourself or speaking poorly to yourself.
But you feel like you live into being more confident in your day-to-day life.
I’d like to invite you to bring your attention to how and when you might be giving your power away by pre-apologizing for things that aren’t yours, or where you are over-explaining or justifying taking care of yourself or having a boundary or limit.
Finally, apologizing when you don’t really mean it can lead to resentment. When we state what we want or need, we are owning our truth and allowing others to react as they do. Not taking it personally. When we pre-apologize, we not only give our power away, but put others in a position to soothe and comfort us because we’re coming from a place of weakness, or simply not standing in our strength.
When the other person can’t or won’t meet this artificial need for comfort that we’ve created by pre-apologizing, then we feel hurt again. Unseen again. It’s like picking the scab off a childhood wound. And suddenly a simple, “Baby, could you do the dishes tonight?” Turns into a seven-layered dip of false pre-apologizing, confusion, hurt feelings, disorientation, frustration, dysregulation, resentment, and probably leads to a sink full of dirty dishes after a lengthy fight.
This demand on others to help us feel okay can be exhausting and can do a lot more damage to a relationship than just saying what we want plain and simple.
And baby, I know this is challenging. It’s such a new skill set for so many of us and you know it was for me. And that’s okay.
You can do hard things, and by doing them and loving yourself and your inner village of sweet children so hard, by reparenting yourself daily with tenderness around these things, then you begin to shift the story from I can do hard things, which is a great place to start, to I can do things that once felt hard and they don’t feel so hard anymore because I have re-patterned my beautiful adult mind.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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