The Power of Little Apologies
As someone who apologizes several times a day, I want to share why I think repair is one of the most important daily practices we can adopt.
It’s a meme at this point that women say we’re sorry too much.
But while over-apologizing is a real phenomenon, I think we do ourselves a disservice by viewing apologies themselves as the problem.
The real issue is that so many exclamations of “sorry!” are essentially empty gestures—filler words that hold little meaning for the aggrieved recipient.
I went through a phase of actively avoiding saying I was sorry. It’s embarrassing to admit that to myself—that I was so enamored with the idea of being a strong woman that I cut myself off from my instinct to make amends with the people I’d harmed.
Then I learned from clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy about the power of repair. It’s a profound concept: we can actually change the way a memory is stored in our own bodies, and in the bodies of others, by revisiting it together and taking responsibility for our behavior.
In other words: an authentic apology can heal a relationship after a rupture.
The idea was such a relief to me. I wasn’t just accumulating moments of bad parenting, one lost temper stacked atop another, the whole pile poised to topple and send my kid into years of therapy, during which they would complain to a sympathetic ear about their problematic mother.
Instead, I was a human—a complicated, messy, trying-to-be-good human—who always had another chance to set things right with the people I treasure.
I started apologizing to my kids when I snapped at them. And for a while, that’s the only setting where I really embraced the concept of repair.
But boy, did I embrace it. The apologies flowed out of me. Turns out there was a lot I was doing that I didn’t feel great about.
A repair only really works if you first reflect on why you did what you did, apologize earnestly for your behavior, and make a real commitment to learning new ways of being in the world. For a while, that felt like hard work. It was a new skill.
But then, it became normal. Normal! Taking responsibility for my actions, contextualizing my behavior so others could understand it, reflecting on how I might do things differently next time—this all just became part of the way I operate in the world.
As that happened, I found myself repairing with people beyond my kids. With my husband. My mom. My husband, again—and then again.
And here’s the thing: I’m apologizing more than ever, but I don’t feel weak.
In fact, I feel much more self-possessed. I feel like an adult who is responsible for the way she moves through the world. The people around me are learning to trust that I am witnessing my own behavior, reflecting on it, and learning from it—and that I care deeply about how my actions impact them.
Apologizing is bringing me closer to myself and to the people I love. It’s a beautiful, simple practice.
