Do You Apologize for Your Feelings?

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 I'm so glad you're here today. Today is another solo episode, and we're gonna talk all about your feelings. Why are you apologizing for them? Why should you not be apologizing for them? But first up, my win and my fail, which I share most weeks because we've gotta honor both, right ladies? So my win is that I ordered everything, almost everything, To the best of my knowledge, that I need to get for my son's dorm room together, and I got it all on Amazon, and I'm shipping it to my sister's house in Maryland. My plan is to fly there because my mother happens to be getting married the very weekend that I need to take my son to college. So I'm gonna fly there right after my mother's wedding. We're gonna rent a van, drive up to Rhode Island, and I happen to have everything in my Amazon cart on Prime Day, and so I got a pretty good discount. No matter what everybody says about the evils of Amazon, and I do agree with them, they're still definitely convenient, which is why they continue to flourish. So my win is that I'm done. I'm done shopping for college dorm, and now we can just do all the packing and stuff here at the house that we need to do. My fail is that I've been struggling with low energy, which is really rare for me, y'all. I'm the person that always has the extra serving of life energy. My father named me Zoe, which means life, But even more than that, it means the kind of life that God gives. And I feel like I've subconsciously, now consciously, embodied that name, as I believe we all do with our names. It's why I believe that naming things are so important. Words are so important. We named my second son Sage, and I don't believe it's a coincidence that he is the wisest 18-year-old I have ever known. He's not just intelligent, he's wise beyond his years because we've been calling him that since the day he was born. Anyway, that's a divergence. I Zoe. Life have been struggling with low energy, and I know it's a combination of so many irons that I have on the fire and a few disappointments that have occurred recently. I call it a fail, but it's not really. It's a reality of life, and it goes along with exactly what I'm talking about today. It's important for me to own this feeling, this slump, this seeming lack of productivity. It's important to me to examine it, to understand it, to express it, and figure out how to move through it. It doesn't make me any less strong to admit that I'm feeling this way. It makes me human, and hopefully a healthier one because I can address it instead of trying to hide it or push it down. So what I know, and what I want to encourage you with if you're in a slump, is that nothing lasts forever, and we can hold on to that truth when we're in a low period, and we can also use it to better appreciate our moments when we're in the peaks, when we're in the highs. Okay, so on to the topic. What happens when you apologize for your feelings? Why should you not be doing that? Think about the last time you cried in front of someone. Did you apologize for your tears? Why? When you're apologizing, you're saying, I did something wrong. So what exactly are you telling yourself that your tears are doing? Are they taking up space that you don't think you deserve? Are they making the other feel uncomfortable? Are they requiring the other to care for you? Are they exposing your tender underbelly? And then my question is, to whom are you apologizing? Are you apologizing to the person? To society? To yourself? So many questions I want to ask you. When you apologize for your feelings, you're apologizing for expressing the truth. When you apologize for speaking truth, you do a couple of things. You gaslight yourself into believing that your feelings are wrong, or really you're just co-signing. I think I talked about this maybe last episode. You're co-signing someone else's message to you that your feelings are wrong. You didn't develop this in a vacuum, this idea, right, that it's wrong, but you don't have to co-sign the message either. Also, when you apologize for speaking the truth, you feel a cognitive dissonance, which reduces your ability to trust yourself and your emotions. So cognitive dissonance is the experience that you have, that feeling you have when you're attempting to hold 2 seemingly competing ideas in your brain at the same time. So an idea like, my feelings matter, my feelings don't matter. It's hard to hold 2 ideas At the same time, or sometimes we feel like we can't. Sometimes we feel like we can't hold 2 competing feelings, but we actually can. But that feeling of, how can I feel these 2 things? That's cognitive dissonance. And cognitive dissonance can short-fuse your brain if you're not intentional about holding these thoughts in a healthy way. Apologizing for speaking the truth affects your future ability to be able to recognize, identify, and even understand what you're feeling over time. Now, I've talked about what being strong means before, and I feel like I have to keep talking about it because it's in the definition of my podcast, and also because I have so many women who start to cry in our sessions and immediately begin to apologize. Now, I've never heard a man apologize for crying in session. Now, granted, they cry less in my office, but they do, and they don't apologize for it. And if you're my client and you're listening to my episode, first, hey there. And yes, I'm talking about you, but you're not the only one. Otherwise, I wouldn't be talking about it if it were just one person. Many women apologize for their feelings. And I believe that we women societally have been gaslighted into feeling that it's too much to put our emotions on somebody else. And so when we cry in front of somebody else, we feel like it isn't fair to them. Like, you should be taking care of them and not asking them to take care of you. Or we don't want to be seen as an emotional woman, right? But newsflash, that's codependent thinking. That's you reining in and pushing yourself down because you're worried about how you're going to be perceived, because you don't believe that you should be able to take up the space in this world that you deserve to take up. Your feelings are not a burden on anyone else unless they choose to absorb them. You can cry and nobody has to take care of you. And also, you don't have to take care of them either. You can simply be, and that's where strength is. Strength sometimes, when it comes to your emotions, is learning how to simply be. Now, I know trying to be a strong woman is hard, but I don't believe that many women truly understand what strength is. Strength has nothing to do with feeling strong. It's not a masculine quality. Strength is being willing to be radically honest with yourself about how you're feeling, about what you're thinking, and what you want and what you desire in your life. Strength is fostering it despite feeling all the feelings. Your emotions or the expression of them actually don't indicate anything in terms of your strength. Letting tears flow is really a dedication to your own personal well-being. We know that tears can be releasing. We know that tears can be healing, and all the feelings that go along with the tears too, not just the tears. Facing our feelings head-on actually allows us to have better control over them. Think about that. When we're able to feel, honor, recognize what our feelings are, we are better able to control them, because when we hold them in, they become uncontrollable and they'll seep out in very unhealthy ways. So the next time you find yourself apologizing for your feelings, treat yourself better and ask yourself instead, why am I apologizing? To whom am I apologizing? What's the message I'm telling myself that makes me want to apologize for my feelings? Where did that message come from? And what's the truth about my feelings? And then I want you to not— don't apologize. And if the apology escapes your lips before you can fully process it, it's okay to take it back and say, oh, you know what? I'm actually not sorry. Sometimes I apologize for crying and I'm working on not doing that. It's okay to take it back. I find that actually the action of taking back something that you said that you're working on not saying increases your likelihood of not saying it next time because there's just a shift, a little bit of uncomfortability that comes in taking something back, and it just kind of triggers your brain for the next time. So sometimes I feel like I do a lot of preaching here, and maybe that's my style. I definitely feel passionate about a lot of the things that I talk about, but also I just want to say you're good. You're okay just as you are. Your feelings are good. Just as they are. You deserve to express them. You deserve to feel them. You deserve to change your story. There is strength in feeling and sitting and being with your feelings. You've got this. Thank you for listening to Stronger in the Difficult Places. Subscribe to my email list so that you can get some encouragement from me and like, comment, and follow this podcast if You feel like it's helped you. Have a super week.