7 Things You Should Stop Apologizing For In Your Relationship

This is not a podcast about being broken, although you may have been. This is a podcast about strength for women who find themselves in difficult relationships, including that sometimes difficult one with yourself. We'll look at your relationship through a lens of psychology, faith, and a little dash of my own kind of feminism. We're not fixing them. We're fixing you. And that changes everything. Welcome to Stronger in the Difficult Places. Save yourself, heal your relationships. Listen in. Hey there, welcome. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe, and as usual, I am so glad you're here. Today we're going to talk about the 7 things you should stop apologizing for in a relationship. But first up, my win and my fail. My win is that I hit my sleep goal 7 days this week, and this might have been a first for me. I've probably talked about before how I struggle a little bit with sleep. I don't struggle with staying asleep. I don't struggle with getting to sleep. I struggle with getting in the bed. I'm kind of like a toddler and I don't want to go to bed at night. And, and as a result, I don't get as much sleep as I need to. And so I have to be really intentional and diligent about it. And I've been working on the discipline of making myself go to sleep. And this week was a success. 7 days in a row, I hit my sleep goal. Yay! So my fail. I submitted 3 pitches to magazines last week, and all 3 were rejected. I'm actually counting this as a win though, because I submitted. And I'm sharing this with you because I want you to see the journey. It's easy to see a piece I've written or a book I've written that's been published somewhere, and it's easy to see something I've accomplished and think, oh, that's easy for her. She's just good at that. But people don't often share all the rejections that they've gotten, at least not along the way. So I'm sharing the rejections because I want you to dare to put yourself out there to get rejections as well. I think I talked before about somebody I heard, maybe it was a podcast guest, who said that her dad used to ask her every day at the table at dinner, where did you fail? And it was her responsibility to be able to come up with some way that she failed that day. And that's what he wanted to hear because he wanted to hear that she's trying. And so I share my rejections because I want you to do the same thing. I want you to put yourself out there and know it's okay. I submitted 3, I got 3 rejections, but I'm gonna keep submitting and eventually something's gonna get picked up. What I know for sure is that nothing will if I don't try. And the same goes for you. So whatever you're striving for, whatever you're thinking about doing, wanting to do, go ahead, just stick your toe in there. Just stick your neck out. It's going to be okay. Rejections are not the end of the world. They're actually helpful. They can help you figure out how to course correct and go the way that you want to. If you just think about it and you try to get everything so perfect, you're not going to learn a lot. So get out there and do the thing. Okay, so let's dive into 7 things you should stop apologizing for in a relationship. Now, no one wants a relationship full of strife. Everybody wants to get along with their partner. Why do we partner up with people to begin with? We want to be happy, right? And as a result of trying to avoid anger and arguments, you might apologize for something that you shouldn't. Now, I spoke a few weeks ago about not apologizing for your tears, and today I'm going to share with you the 7 things that you also should never apologize for in a relationship. Because these apologies don't make things better. They actually reinforce for you and your partner that your action or your thought was not okay. And this creates a vicious cycle of you not feeling safe or accepted to show up as your real self in a relationship. But first, let's talk about what you should be apologizing for and how you can understand in general what a good apology is and what isn't. Erin Lazard and Nick Smith, in their book On Apology, describe the 4 essential aspects of an apology, and these are easily understood as the 4 Rs of an apology. The 4 Rs are recognition, responsibility, remorse, and reparation. So if you've done something that you recognize is wrong, that you take responsibility for, meaning that your action, whether intentional or not, created it, You feel remorse for the thing that you did and you are willing to make a reparation to fix it, then you absolutely should apologize. And you should include a description of those 4 Rs in your apology. That's a good apology. The last thing though that you want to do is create a manipulation apology or a false apology. So a manipulation apology is when you blame shift because you don't really feel sorry, you just feel like you should apologize. But you really want to explain yourself or you want to blame them, and so you do a, I'm sorry, but... and then you go on to explain why it's really their fault or their problem. That's not helpful because you're not being clear, you're being obtuse, your partner is going to have a lot of feelings about it, and you're really kind of gaslighting them because after all, you apologized, but it doesn't feel like an apology. And maybe someone's done this to you and you know it doesn't feel good. A false apology is saying something like, well, I'm sorry that you feel that way. Now, I've been completely guilty of this one, and I have to be very intentional to this day about not using that. For some reason, it's kind of my fallback because I really am sorry that they feel that way, but I'm not sorry for what I did. Now, if you use words instead like, I feel badly that you feel that way, but I can't apologize for what I did or said or think, That's fine, as long as you're not attempting to make it sound like you're actually apologizing. So that's how to and not to apologize. And I could do a whole episode on that, but we're not really gonna get into that because today we're talking about the 7 things you should never apologize for in a relationship because you deserve to have all of these things. The first one is feelings. You should never apologize for feelings. All of your feelings are good. I say that a lot. So if you've been listening to this podcast, you know that. Bad behaviors should be apologized for. Bad behaviors are not okay, even if you're angry, even if you're sad, but your feelings should never be apologized for. You don't apologize for anger. You don't apologize for sadness. You don't apologize for disappointment, none of it. They are your feelings and they matter. You only apologize for bad behavior. Accept your feelings, explain your feelings, speak your feelings because they're there for a reason. They're telling you something. They're giving you information, and you use that information to communicate with your partner. Alone time. You should never apologize for alone time. If you find yourself feeling like you need to apologize for alone time in relationship, or that you really can't take it in the context of your relationship, there's a problem. That's something you need to look at. You know, I talk about the Venn diagrams when I talk about relationships sometimes, and healthy relationships should look like a Venn diagram where you're intersecting at one point, You are each separate beings. If the circles don't intersect at all, that's not healthy. That's too much independence. If the circles completely overlap, that's codependency. You want 2 healthy circles that intersect at a nice spot, and that's the crux of a healthy relationship. That spot, that's the you 2, that's the we, but you still each have an I. And so you should not be apologizing for alone time. You need it, and so does your partner. You should never apologize for asking questions. Now, some people do ask a lot, and you may be one of them, and that's okay. You may need to temper them with certain people who have low tolerance for questions, but if you find you're constantly being criticized in your relationship for asking too many questions, that's a sign of dishealth in your relationship. It's not a sign that there's a problem with you. Holding in your questions leads to you making assumptions, and assumptions are usually not accurate, and they can cause a lot of pain. So just ask and don't apologize for it. What you can do is ask your partner what his issue is with your asking questions. In a partnership, you need to know. Whatever the thing is you need to know, you need to know because it's important and it matters. You should never apologize for your natural quirks. You're weird. We all are. And some of your weirdness is cute and it's attractive, and some of it, well, it isn't. And that's okay. It all creates the tapestry of you, and it's beautiful. We can't be all the same. It would be horrible if we were all robots. So don't apologize for your natural quirks. You can make jokes about them, But you need to accept them, and when you accept them, you'll find that the people who care about you will as well. You should never apologize for your opinions. If both of you agree on everything, then one of you is certainly not needed. I'm sure you've heard this idea before, and it's true. It's okay if his opinion differs from yours and vice versa. Remember that Venn diagram? We cannot be the same people, and we cannot overlap to such an extent that we don't have our own individuality. We should have different opinions, maybe not on everything. There should be some things in a healthy relationship and partnership that we both agree on, but it's okay for us to have different opinions, and there's no reason to apologize for it. A healthy relationship holds space for differences of opinions. You should never apologize for asking for what you want or need. No, you are not too much. No, you're not asking for too much. Occasionally, that woman who's asking for too much might exist out there, but those women aren't the ones wondering and apologizing for asking for what they want. They're confidently asking and they're feeling completely entitled to what they want. So that's not you. You are not too much. Do not apologize for asking for what you need and for what you want in a relationship. You should never apologize for your own personal growth. You shouldn't live years or decades without changing and growing. There's a saying that a woman marries a man expecting him to change and he doesn't, and a man marries a woman expecting her not to change and she does. Now that's a huge generalization, and although I'm sure, I'm sure there's a grain of truth in it, my point is that if your partner says you You've changed, as if it's a negative thing, don't accept that story. You should change. And it's possible that your change has been a result of wisdom gained. It's likely. You may have different expectations now, or maybe you tolerate less, or you speak up more, all of which can be a little disconcerting in a relationship when you haven't done that historically. But this is growth. And that's what you should be doing, and it's good, and you should never apologize for it. So there are my 7, and I'm sure there are more. And if you find that you're apologizing for these 7 or others that I haven't listed, ask yourself the bigger question: why do I feel that I don't deserve to have these in the space of my relationship? What do I need to change in order to believe that these are unapologetic ways that I should show up in the world? Friend, stop apologizing. You've got this. Thank you for listening to Stronger in the Difficult Places. New episodes go up generally on Tuesdays. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode and like and review my podcast so that more people can find it. Have a strong week.