About all those apologies.

When you’re tempted to apologize for feeling a feeling: tap the brake. 

When you’re tempted to apologize for having a need: tap the brake. 

You are going to feel pressure from your trauma programming to apologize for all kinds of things. 

The truth is, your trauma programming doesn’t think you should exist, let alone have feelings or needs. 

Your trauma programming, if followed to its logical conclusion, will have you disappearing from the planet entirely. 

However, since you haven’t disappeared from the planet entirely, your trauma programming will flood you with feelings of guilt, blame, and shame for taking up space. 

Your trauma programming will try to tell you everything you experience our need is a burden on someone else. 

Your trauma programming will try to tell you nothing you feel, need, or have to say is important. 

Your trauma programming will try to tell you that there is something fundamentally wrong, something fundamentally flawed or gross or otherwise f*cked up, about everything that makes you, you— especially your feelings and needs. 

Thus, every time a feeling or need escapes our brain in the form of words, we very often feel this need to apologize. 

It can be hard for someone whose nervous system has not been crispy fried by traumatic stress, to understand why we’re apologizing for so many things. 

They don’t realize that many of the things we hear ourselves saying or asking for or otherwise expressing sound, to us, dramatic and stupid. 

They don’t understand that we very often feel like we’re about to be in trouble, we’re about to be yelled at, or we’re about to be mocked, for any utterance that escapes us. 

For many of us, expressing feelings or needs makes us feel insufferably vulnerable. 

We often apologize because part of us, at least, thinks we can limit our vulnerability if we communicate, via our apology, that we too are annoyed by and impatient with our own “stupid” feelings or “burdensome” needs. 

It’s a maneuver Trauma Brain often tries to trick us into: agreeing with, or getting on the same side of, our abusers, by trashing ourselves. 

The thing is: apologies never work to limit our vulnerability. They don’t. They might soothe our anxiety— for a minute— but if we’re vulnerable in the presence of somebody, an apology isn’t going to make us less so. 

What constant apologies DO do, however, is shred our self esteem. 

Constantly apologizing communicates to our inner child that we are bad, and we need to apologize. 

Constantly apologizing reinforces the belief that so many survivors struggle with: that we are burdensome, and we need to compensate for that burden. 

Don’t get me wrong: many trauma survivors, myself included, are, in point of fact, an acquired taste. No, we’re not for everybody. 

But that’s not the same thing as “every feeling or need we experience is necessarily a burden we need to apologize for.” 

Catching yourself when you’re tempted to apologize for a feeling or need is a habit worth getting into. 

Communicating to yourself in those moments that, actually, you have nothing to apologize for, is also a habit worth getting into. 

You’ve had decades of programming that have entrenched the idea that your feelings and needs are stupid and embarrassing. That programming probably isn’t going to dramatically shift overnight. 

But it will shift if, every time it rears its head, you meaningfully, consistently, compassionately talk back to it. 

Scratch the record.