Stop Apologizing For Your Emotions

Stop apologizing for your emotional response before you understand it, before you understand what's happening. Stop apologizing for the reaction, for the anger that might have come up, for the grief or the sadness or the disappointment or the frustration before you've actually gotten curious about why you feel that way in the first place. Because the truth about those emotions is that they are just data and information about your life, and there is some validity and truth to them. They feel hurt, they feel angry, they feel frustration, they feel sadness, and they immediately jump to sorry, I didn't mean that. Or they don't even say anything in the first place. They just collapse and shut down. Instead of apologizing and shutting down, ask yourself what boundary just got crossed, what values of mine feel violated, what part of me is misunderstood, and what is true inside of me that I actually need to express.