How to Stop Apologizing for Everything: Breaking the “Sorry I Exist” Habit
Someone said something in a recent webinar that landed in my body with that quiet thud of truth you feel behind the sternum. I asked what would most change their experience of their life and she wrote:
“If I could start a sentence without the word sorry…”
Not sorry I’m late. Not sorry to bother you. Not sorry for asking. Not sorry for taking up space. Not sorry for needing. Not sorry for having a preference. Not sorry for existing.
The chat erupted.
Because everyone in that space recognized the weight of what she was naming.
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Why Do I Apologize So Much? The Nervous System Connection
That reflex (the constant, automatic “sorry”) isn’t about manners, my love. It’s about a nervous system that learned, very early on, that safety lived in shrinking.
When you grow up where connection feels conditional: where love is unpredictable, where the adults around you are emotionally immature, overwhelmed, absent, volatile, or subtly disappointed by your needs, your body does the math:
To belong, I have to be less of myself. To be safe, I can’t make waves. To have worth, I can’t need much.
So “sorry” becomes your opening line. A peace offering before you’ve even spoken. A way to soften your presence before anyone has the chance to reject it.
Chronic Apologizing Is Procedural Memory, Not a Character Flaw
And here’s what most people miss: that habit of constantly apologizing isn’t a character flaw.
It’s procedural memory. It lives in your autonomic nervous system.
Your body learned that leading with apology kept you safer. It reduced the risk of conflict, withdrawal, ridicule, annoyance, abandonment.
It was brilliant adaptation. It worked.
Because here’s what actually happened: You were five, or seven, or ten, and you had a need. You were hungry at the wrong time, or sad when it was inconvenient, or excited when the adults needed quiet. And you learned, not from a lecture, but from the tightening in someone’s jaw, the edge in their voice, the way they turned away, that your aliveness was a problem.
So your nervous system found a solution.
Lead with “sorry.” Make yourself smaller. Apologize for the space you take up before anyone has to tell you you’re taking up too much.
It worked. People softened. The threat passed. Connection remained possible.
Your body filed that away: This is how I stay safe. This is how I stay loved.
That learning got encoded in your autonomic nervous system, the part of you that operates below conscious awareness, that reacts before you can think, that runs the show when you’re stressed or overwhelmed or just trying to get through the day.
So now, decades later, “sorry” comes out of your mouth before you even register what you’re apologizing for.
Sorry I’m talking. Sorry I have a question. Sorry I exist in this space.
The Difference Between Healthy Apologies and Apologizing for Existing
And listen darling, of course we apologize when we actually mess up. When we’re late, when we hurt someone, when we cause harm. Episodes 72 through 75 are all about how to apologize well, how to take accountability, how to repair.
But that’s not this.
This is the reflexive “sorry” that has nothing to do with wrongdoing. The “sorry” that’s apologizing for existing, for having needs, for taking up space.
How Over-Apologizing Leads to Self-Abandonment
And it doesn’t stop at words.
We apologize for having feelings and then we don’t let ourselves actually feel them.
Because if expressing a feeling might make someone uncomfortable, and discomfort might lead to disconnection, then the safest thing to do is stuff it down. Smile through the anger. Downplay the hurt. Convince yourself you’re fine when you’re drowning.
That becomes the reflex. Not just with others, but even when you’re alone.
You have a flash of rage and immediately talk yourself out of it: “It’s not that bad. I’m being dramatic.”
You feel grief rising and you busy yourself with tasks: “I don’t have time for this right now.”
You notice resentment building and you rationalize it away: “They didn’t mean it like that. I’m too sensitive.”
You abandon yourself before anyone else gets the chance to.
And that’s the self-abandonment cycle we talked about in episodes 163 and 164, that pattern where you disconnect from your own feelings, your own needs, your own reality because somewhere along the way you learned that your internal experience was too much, too inconvenient, too threatening to the people you needed.
So you learn to manage yourself. To edit yourself. To be the version of you that’s easiest for everyone else.
The Real Cost of Chronic Apologizing
And the cost? My love, you lose access to your own emotional truth. You lose the ability to know what you actually feel because you’re so practiced at not feeling it. You lose trust in your own perceptions because you’ve spent so long minimizing them.
You become a stranger to yourself.
All because your nervous system learned that apologizing for your aliveness, and then actually making yourself less alive, was the price of staying connected.
That’s survival, not a personality flaw, tender ravioli.
And it worked. Until it didn’t.
How Patriarchy Amplifies People-Pleasing and Over-Apologizing
Add patriarchy to the mix and this training goes into overdrive, especially for women and gender marginalized folks. We’re taught that our likability is our currency. That being “too much” is dangerous. That confidence without apology reads as arrogance. That directness is aggression. That taking up space requires a permission slip.
So we cushion every word. We soften every edge. We ask permission to speak. We apologize for our feelings. We apologize for our time. We apologize for wanting anything. We apologize for taking up oxygen.
Understanding Emotional Outsourcing™
This is Emotional Outsourcing™ in its most insidious form: that chronic, habitual sourcing of your safety, your belonging, your worth from outside yourself. From approval. From not upsetting anyone. From being easy. From being chosen.
When you live from “sorry,” you’re not apologizing for a behavior.
You’re apologizing for being alive.
And darling, the cost is devastating.
What Chronic Apologizing Actually Feels Like
Because when your default setting is “sorry I exist,” your nervous system never rests. You’re always scanning. Always calibrating. Always editing yourself in real time.
You reread texts five times before hitting send. You rehearse conversations for hours in your head. You say yes when every cell in your body is screaming no. You laugh at jokes that make you uncomfortable. You minimize your pain so others don’t have to feel awkward. You fold yourself smaller in meetings, in relationships, in your own damn life.
That vigilance is bone-deep exhausting. It fuels anxiety, resentment, burnout, that functional freeze where you can’t make a single decision. It severs you from your own preferences because you’re so busy managing everyone else’s comfort.
Over time, you lose track of what you actually want. What you actually feel. What you’re actually allowed to have.
You forget that you’re allowed to speak without asking first. You forget that you’re allowed to want without justifying why. You forget that you’re allowed to exist without explaining yourself.
You forget what your own voice sounds like when it’s not apologizing.
Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Over-Apologizing
And here’s what makes me want to shake the entire self-help industrial complex: I watch brilliant, deeply feeling, wildly capable people try to think their way out of this.
They read all the books on boundaries. They write affirmations about self-worth. They tell themselves they need to stop apologizing so much.
And then someone asks them a simple question and “sorry” falls out of their mouth before they even register it happened.
Because you cannot think your way out of a survival strategy your body learned in relationship.
Affirmations don’t rewire procedural memory. Insight doesn’t update the autonomic nervous system. Understanding why you do something doesn’t change what your body believes is safe.
So what does?
Experience. Repetition. Relational safety.
And tender ravioli, this changes everything.
How to Actually Stop Saying Sorry All the Time
Because nervous systems don’t learn from information. They learn from experience.
You don’t stop apologizing because a podcast tells you it’s okay not to. You stop apologizing when your body has repeated, lived experiences of being welcomed without making yourself small first.
The Role of Co-Regulation in Breaking the Apologizing Habit
You need to watch someone speak their truth directly and not get punished for it. You need to see someone say no and still be held with care. You need to hear someone express anger, desire, clarity, a boundary, and not get abandoned for it. You need to feel, in your actual nervous system, what it’s like to take up space and stay connected.
That’s co-regulation. That’s relational repair. That’s how your body updates its operating system about what’s actually safe.
Why Community Is Essential for Nervous System Healing
And this doesn’t happen alone, my love. It doesn’t happen in your journal at 11pm. It doesn’t happen by saving one more Instagram carousel about people-pleasing.
It happens in community with people who are doing the exact same work.
When you’re in a space with people who are also unwinding Emotional Outsourcing, something subtle and radical happens.
You borrow each other’s courage. You borrow each other’s nervous system capacity. You watch someone take up space without apologizing and your body thinks: wait. That’s possible? That’s allowed?
You learn, somatically, in your tissues, that the world doesn’t collapse when you stop saying sorry for existing.
And gradually, the word “sorry” starts to fall away.
Not because you become harsh or careless. But because apology returns to its rightful place—something you offer in response to actual harm, not as the price of admission for having needs.
What Becomes Possible When You Stop Apologizing for Existing
What becomes possible on the other side of “sorry I exist”?
Everything, darling.
You speak with clarity because you’re not bracing for rejection. You listen with presence because you’re not monitoring your own acceptability. You have energy for your actual life because your system isn’t running threat assessment 24/7. You make decisions without spiraling because you trust your own signals. You experience intimacy that feels reciprocal instead of like a performance you’re constantly auditioning for.
You become someone who can say, “Here’s what I need. Here’s what I feel. Here’s what works for me”, without writing an apology essay first.
You become someone who takes up space because you’re allowed to have a body.
You become someone who exists without needing permission.
The Path Forward: Building Nervous System Safety
And yes, my love, it can feel terrifying at first. Because when you stop apologizing, you’re stepping outside an old protection. Your body might brace for backlash. Sometimes people react. Sometimes they don’t. And you discover that either way, you survive it. You stay intact.
That’s the work. Building capacity to remain with yourself even when others squirm. Building nervous system safety to stay grounded in your worth without needing external validation to prove you matter.
This is why I build everything in community. This is why Anchored isn’t you trying to fix yourself in isolation with a workbook and sheer willpower.
Because unlearning “sorry I exist” requires witnesses. It requires relational safety. It requires repetition, dozens and dozens of micro-moments where your nervous system collects new data about what’s possible when you stop shrinking.
That’s what six months of weekly community calls creates. That’s what somatic practices in real time with other humans generates. That’s what nervous system repatterning in relationship actually does.
It builds the capacity to exist without apologizing. The capacity to speak without bracing. The capacity to want without producing a 47-page justification.
You’re Allowed to Exist Without Earning It
If that sentence from the webinar landed somewhere deep, if reading this made something in your chest ache with recognition, if some part of you is exhausted from apologizing for being alive and desperate to know what it feels like to just… exist…
Know this:
Nothing is wrong with you. Your nervous system made the smartest possible adaptation to impossible circumstances. And it’s allowed to learn something new.
You don’t need to disappear to belong. You don’t need to apologize to deserve love. You are allowed to exist without earning it.
And there’s a room full of people learning how to do exactly that… together.
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Tags: apologizing, boundaries, Codependency, emotional regulation, Nervous System, people pleasing, relational healing, self-worth, trauma response