What if we weren't sorry when we 'got emotional'?
automatic apologies, legacy burdens, and conscious curiosity
Frequently, I’ll hear a phrase and it will spark an idea of something I’d like to write about here. Months ago, if not a year ago, while watching a show, I heard a statement I’ve probably heard hundreds of times before, but for some reason, on that day, I heard it differently.
The show was a so-called reality show (I’ll spare you the details of which one so you can still hold some amount of respect for me…), and while I’m confident there’s not a lot of reality happening in that show, there was something real in this statement, and others like it.
As relationships were built between people venturing into vulnerable conversations, inevitably, tears would rise to the surface. And over and over again, variations of this phrase would pop up, almost as if the words were trying to rush out before the tears freely flowed.
I’m sorry, I’m about to get emotional
I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional, I’m so sorry
I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I’m getting teary
And then I started to notice how I heard this phrase in actual reality, not just on this show. For months, it’s struck me so deeply just how normal it is for people to explicitly apologize alongside visible emotions—even in spaces where emotions would be expected—as though we’re somehow honoring the person in the front of us by smearing shame and sorry’s on top of our tears.
Now, one simple avenue ahead is for me the therapist in me to simply say things like:
We’re all human, we all have emotions, so there’s absolutely nothing to apologize for when we cry.
Or, with our emotions, if we restrict some of them, we impact how we experience all of them. Meaning, if we try to restrain uncomfortable emotions like sadness or grief, whether we mean to or not, we’ll also restrain the emotions we long to feel, like joy and happiness.
Or, why do we put the word ‘get’ in front of these statements, almost as though we’re distancing ourselves from saying that we are emotional, or we are feeling things—something that intersects with our whole embodied being?
And while validating emotions and offering fun-facts or curiosities about them is something I’m always happy to delve into, what I most want to say today is something else.
I can’t help but be curious about why we think emotions are something to hide, when we all have them. I can’t help but wonder why we say we are sorry, as though we’re being offensive or inappropriate when a natural emotion flows through our body. And it’s not like we’re saying this in a premeditated way or planning to respond like this. We don’t plan when we cry, so it’s not like we wake up one morning thinking, later today at 2:51pm when I cry in front of another human, this is how I’ll most appropriately apologize…
Instead, our apologies happen automatically, in the moment, oftentimes without us even thinking. Meaning, it’s so engrained in us to apologize for our emotions, that we blurt out I’m sorry without giving conscious thought to what we’re saying or why. So, what if we gave some conscious curiosity to this right now? Just for a minute or two?
I’m not sure how other people experience this, but for me, when I slow down with this curiosity, the scripts that seem to be lurking behind the I’m-sorry-I’m-getting-emotional-script seem to be variations of…
I’m not allowed to feel
It’s not safe to be just as I am
Don’t show weakness
Something is wrong with me if I can’t control my emotions
My honest emotions—my honest existence—is not welcome
I must hide who I am to be accepted
.
Now, full disclosure, part of why these statements are popping up for me is that I just co-facilitated an IFS retreat, and one of our days together, I came up with an experiential exercise to explore burdens we carry in life that aren’t actually ours to carry. If you’re familiar with IFS (Internal Family Systems, a well-known form of ‘parts-work’1), you’ll know these burdens as legacy burdens, cultural burdens, or spiritual burdens — things that aren’t ours to carry, that we’ve absorbed from the world/systems around us, that we’ve internalized to the point that we don’t even realize they aren’t ours to carry. And like all of my favorite healing spaces to offer to others, inviting others into this experiential exercise was deeply meaningful for myself as well.
Getting curious about statements like the ones above made me realize how easy it is for us to internalize something we really don’t agree with, that we wouldn’t want to adopt as our own, or that is silently (and somehow simultaneously very loudly) killing us inside to carry. And along with all of these things, the biggest thing that stands out to me is how we can carry these things not only without realizing it, but also, therefore, without consenting to it. Said more simply, if we don’t even realize we’re carrying something like this around, how in the world could we consent to carrying it around?
Hence my love of slowing down and getting curious, creating space to consciously reflect on what we’re carrying, and whether we want to consent to this or not.
So, as usual, I’m not going to land here with a ‘how-to’ manual for not apologizing for our emotions. Instead, I’d love to invite you into this curiosity with me. These are the kinds of questions I’ve been chewing on…
What are the messages that inform our automatic reactions to apologize when we start to cry?
Did these messages originate with us or another person, group of people, or system?
If they didn’t originate with me, do I want to carry them any longer?
How does it feel to imagine setting these messages down, releasing what was never mine to carry in the first place? Are any parts of me scared of this, and if so, what would make it safe-enough to play with setting something down that I don’t want to carry anymore? What would scared parts of me need to know in order to feel comfortable trying this out?
What would it be like to choose—to consent to—who and when I share my emotions with, and how, both honoring what naturally comes up without apology, and also, honoring the sense of safety my body needs to fully feel emotions as they move through my body? ←this one right here can feel like a doozy. For me, this requires s p a c i o s n e s s to even begin to explore.
There’s so much more I want to chew on here, going down rabbit trails about autonomy, masking, and spiritual shoulds, especially for women… but for today, there’s a windy Scotland waiting for me to spend some time with her, and some sweetness with friends to savor before I head off on a roadtrip up the coast.
Thank you for slowing down here with me.
*** Oh and one last tidbit here… here’s a poem I wrote a couple of weeks ago. After a long day, I decided to relax with a silly movie. I didn’t watch the full trailer so I didn’t realize I’d be crying in the first five minutes, and then crying on-and-off the next two hours. It turned out to be exactly what my body needed that day, making me realize there was a reservoir of tears that had been held down for weeks. I couldn’t help but get curious about how and why those tears had stayed back if there were so many of them…! And out came these words :) ***
Lomond Hills, June 2026
If you’re unfamiliar with IFS or parts-work and are curious to learn more, I poured my heart and soul into these pages to share how I have encountered parts-work in my own professional and personal therapeutic experiences. For more: for IFS specifically, look up the work of Richard Schwartz, I especially like this audiobook. For parts-work from a trauma-specific perspective, anchored in the body, see Janina Fisher’s work, she’s been the biggest influence on my work with parts, especially anchoring parts with what’s happening in the body.