I have a confession: I’m a chronic apologizer.
I first became aware that it was a problem when I was a freshman in high school. A senior, one of the trombonists in the jazz ensemble I was playing in, was driving me around in her car, and I reflexively apologized for something small, maybe for interrupting her. She said she couldn’t stand empty unnecessary apologies, and I so suavely apologized for my apology. As she became increasingly agitated, more apologies ensued, profusely, reflexively. I was powerless to stop them.
“If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to hit you,” she said, turning the Alanis Morissette playing on her stereo up loud enough to drown out anything further.
In my defense, I’ve come a long way from those days, and the frequency and inappropriateness of my apologies used to be far worse. Over the years I’ve tried to monitor when I’m doing it (not hard because my friends point it out) and identify underlying causes for why I apologize for things that aren’t my fault. Early on in our relationship, Skyspook contributed significantly to the effort, administering behavior modification via clothespins to my tongue whenever I inappropriately apologized for something.
Still, residual verbal tics remain, learned behavior being extraordinarily resistant to extinction.
That brings me to the latest chapter in the long-running saga of “Page Apologizes Too Much”: I realized that my usual script for moving through crowded areas, etc, is “Excuse me. I’m sorry.” I started listening for this in others and realized I’m not the only one who does this (typically, it seems to be a verb tic for girls in their early 20’s or so).
Recently, I made a conscious effort to change my script for crowd movement to “Excuse me. Thank you,” and find that not only do I feel better (and less like I’ve done something that I need to beg forgiveness for) but people seem to respond better to being thanked than apologized to.
Very interesting.