I apologised three times before I’d even taken my coat off.
Someone bumped into me at the door. Sorry. The barista handed me the wrong drink. Sorry, I think I might have said the other one. My friend was running late. When she arrived, I apologised for making her come all that way.
I’d been awake for ninety minutes and I’d already taken responsibility for three things that were not my fault. The bumping into. The drink. The other person’s lateness.
That morning, for the first time in maybe forty years, I noticed I was doing it. Not the apologies themselves — those have been on autopilot since I was small. The noticing. Why am I saying sorry. None of this is mine.
The honest answer arrived a few hours later, when I was driving home. It wasn’t politeness. It never had been. It was a reflex I built when I was eight years old, in a house where someone else’s mood was always, somehow, my job to fix.
What I think I was actually doing as a kid
I wasn’t beaten. I wasn’t neglected. By any external measure, my childhood was fine.
But the emotional weather in the house was unpredictable. My mother was sometimes warm and sometimes cold, and the difference between the two states had nothing I could trace to anything I’d done. The cold could descend at any moment. The cold could last for hours. And during the cold, I was — without ever being told this in words — somehow responsible for thawing it.
So I got good at scanning. I got good at reading the small shifts in her face before anyone else noticed. I got good at sensing the temperature of a room within three seconds of walking into it.
And I got very, very good at apologising.
Apologising worked. Apologising sometimes broke the cold. Apologising said I see you, I know something is off, I’m taking it on, please come back. It didn’t matter whether I’d actually done anything wrong. Most of the time I hadn’t. What mattered was that the apology was a tool — possibly the only tool a small child had — for regulating the emotional state of an adult who was supposed to be regulating mine.
By the time I was ten, I was apologising for everything. By the time I was twenty, I’d forgotten I was doing it. By the time I was forty, it was so woven into how I moved through the world that the noticing, last year, felt like a revelation.
What the research says about this
Psychologists call this emotional parentification — when a child takes on the role of regulating a parent’s emotional state. The literature describes it as a chronic role reversal that affects development across childhood and produces specific patterns in adulthood, including hypervigilance to others’ moods and chronic over-functioning in relationships.
A 2023 Japanese study of adults whose parents had mental illness found something more specific. Adults who’d provided emotional care for their parents during their school-age years were more than three times as likely to experience high psychological distress as adults, compared to those who hadn’t.
The pattern doesn’t stop when you leave home. It just changes its costume. The child who scanned the kitchen for her mother’s mood becomes the adult who scans the office for her boss’s mood, the dinner party for the tension between two friends, the bedroom for her partner’s tiredness.
And the tool the child reached for — the pre-emptive sorry — is still on the shelf, still working, still firing before conscious thought enters the room.
What it actually looks like in adult life
Once you start watching for it, you see it everywhere.
It’s apologising for taking up space in a queue. Apologising when someone else is rude to you. Apologising when your colleague is late to the meeting, as if your existence at the start time had somehow inconvenienced them. Apologising before you ask for something you have every right to ask for. Apologising for crying. Apologising for being tired. Apologising, occasionally, for things that haven’t even happened yet, as a pre-emptive offering against any possible coldness in the room.
None of this is politeness. Politeness is thank you, please, excuse me. This is something different. This is the adult version of the eight-year-old’s emotional regulation tool, still firing every time the temperature of the room shifts even slightly.
The cost is hard to see from the outside, because everyone thinks you’re just very nice. The cost from the inside is that you spend a great deal of energy taking responsibility for things that aren’t yours, and almost no energy at all asking other people to take responsibility for things that are theirs.
What I’m trying to do about it now
I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved this. I haven’t. The reflex is forty-something years old. It doesn’t unlearn in an afternoon.
What I’m doing, in small ways, is catching the apology before it leaves my mouth.
Someone bumps into me. I feel the sorry rising. I don’t say it. I take a breath. Sometimes I say nothing. Sometimes, very rarely, I manage a small no worries — which is at least neutral, instead of taking on a debt I don’t owe.
It feels strange. It feels rude, even though it isn’t. The eight-year-old inside me is mildly panicking — what if they get upset, what if the room goes cold — and the forty-something has to gently let her know that nobody is going to go cold over not receiving an apology for something they did to you.
The room doesn’t go cold. That’s the thing. It almost never goes cold. The cold I learned to fear at eight was specific to one house, with one set of adults, in one particular decade. The rest of the world doesn’t run on that thermostat.
But it takes a long time to teach the nervous system that. You teach it one un-said apology at a time.
If you recognised yourself in this — and I suspect a lot of people will — the small move is the same one I’m making. Notice the sorry before it lands. Hold it for two seconds. Ask, quietly, is this actually mine?
Most of the time, you’ll find it isn’t.
You can put it down. Nothing bad will happen. The room won’t go cold.
You’re allowed to walk through a day without taking on debts that were never yours.
