One thing that i think isn’t mentioned enough in posts about “people who apologize too much” is that this is often a culture clash.

What I mean is: Often, if apologizing is part of the expected social script in your culture, you won’t even realize you’re doing it.

For example:

“Excuse me” –the thing you say to ask a person to move aside or to repeat what they said– literally means “forgive me.”

“I beg your pardon?” literally means you are begging for forgiveness.

And the figurative message – “please repeat what you said” – can also be conveyed by “Sorry?”

This isn’t random. These little apologies actually do convey the same thing, on a small scale, as a big apology.

Which is, “I know I’m causing you some unpleasantness – even if it’s necessary, and even if it’s just the tiniest little inconvenience, like requiring you to repeat a word or move a few steps to the side. This is just to acknowledge the fact that I’m asking for something from you, and that it will inconvenience you a little, and that therefore I will appreciate it very much if you are nice about it instead of getting mad at me.”

And it’s because of that acknowledgement that “Excuse me” sounds more kind and gentle than “Move out of my way.”

So, if you’ve ever said “Excuse me” as a polite request for someone to move, you know what it feels like to apologize as part of a social script.

You know it doesn’t mean blaming yourself. You know it only means polite acknowledgement that you’re causing something a little bit outside their usual routine.

And some cultures just use different words for the same thing.

For instance, where I grew up, the scripted apologies tended to scale with the amount of inconvenience you admitted you were causing.

If your car broke down and you had to call a friend to ask for a ride, you might go as far as “oh my god, I am SO SORRY!” –and this still wouldn’t be taken as blaming yourself! It would just be a recognition of how much trouble this unavoidable misfortune happened to cause your friend. And the friend would likely reply, “No, don’t worry, it’s totally okay, not your fault!” And that, too, would be part of the social script.

It would still be true, usually! But it wouldn’t mean they ever actually thought you were blaming yourself for the car breakdown. Just acknowledging that they don’t blame you for it.

So, when a person who grew up with this kind of social script meets a person who didn’t…. sometimes there’s a genuine misunderstanding of what’s meant. And sometimes, an apology that’s no more inherently self-blaming than “Excuse me” or “I beg your pardon?” gets analyzed as if it were a glaring symptom of an inferiority complex.

On the other extreme: By means of this same explanation, I once helped an autistic friend understand the value of apologizing in the situations where an apology usually is considered necessary.

This person had previously refused to apologize even if he’d lost his temper and shouted at people for what turned out to be no good reason, or if he’d broken a promise, or betrayed a confidence, or any of the other bad behaviors where an apology is normally expected.

His reasoning was that even if he now realized what he did was wrong, he should not have to apologize for these things, because when he did them he didn’t know they were wrong. That is, in the moment, he felt that whatever he was doing was justified, and that he had sufficient reason to do it.

I had to point out to him that this is practically the definition of making a choice. And that if apologies were only expected from people who made choices they didn’t think they had sufficient reason for– then apologies would pretty much never happen at all.

See, the line between “causing unavoidable inconvenience, like asking someone to move aside or repeat a word” and “causing hurt by doing something you incorrectly thought was worth doing, like yelling at a person you were angry at” …. isn’t such a clear line. It’s a gradual spectrum. And people trying to learn social skills like rules in a rulebook tend to have trouble with a gradual spectrum.

But when I explained that an apology is not so much about blaming yourself, and is more about acknowledging the hurt you caused, and respecting the other person’s feelings– it made a real difference for him. He actually came back later saying that I’d improved his social life a lot, just by helping him realize that.

And I sorta think that people who complain about over-apologizers and pathologize their behavior, without considering the cultural factors, are in a similar place to where he started out. Just not as far toward that extreme as he was.

4/15/25, 6:45pm. edited to add, because my mind is still going…

I know the part about the gradual spectrum may be an unpopular take, in circles where people make a big deal of how Discomfort or Inconvenience is a different thing from Harm.

But they’re not inherently, fundamentally different.

The difference is quantitative, mostly. The tiniest discomfort and the worst harm are different intensities of the same type of thing. It’s a spectrum. And YES, the difference between the ends of that spectrum is an important difference, in terms of deciding what behaviors are acceptable.

But it’s not a black-and-white, binary difference. Something on that spectrum could be agony for one person and barely noticeable for another. And you cannot know in advance which it’ll be, not for certain.

The reason for such a difference could be something like an inherent level of sensitivity– for instance, autistics who can’t stand flickering lights. Or it could be the past experience of putting up with the same tiny annoyance for years on end, until the camel’s back can’t take one more straw.

For instance, how asking “where are you from?” can be a racist microaggression against someone who always gets mistaken for a foreigner based on appearance.

Or how hearing the same song on the radio three times in an hour can be annoying, but being forced to listen to the same song nonstop for days is a literal torture technique used in Guantanamo.

Intent matters, but not that much. If someone somehow accidentally locked me in a basement for a week with the Barney the Dinosaur song on loop the whole time, I don’t think it being accidental would make me feel much better.

Sure, I’d be more likely to forgive the person, if I found out afterwards that they didn’t realize I was in there when they locked their basement door, and didn’t realize their kid had left that cursed thing playing the whole time in his bedroom next to the vent that led right down to where I was, or whatever.

But the point is, I’d still want the apology. In fact, I’m fairly sure I’d rather have that person’s apology than an apology from someone who deliberately kidnapped and tortured me because they believed I was a worthless person who deserved it.

There’s not much that person could ever say that’d make me feel ANY better at all. Not even if they’d turned their whole worldview around and genuinely repented since then. The fact that they ever were the kind of person who’d do that… Well. I guess I’d be glad they’re not anymore, but I can’t imagine wanting to hear them talk about the time when they were.

But from the person who hurt me by accident? Yes. I’d want them to acknowledge that I went through something bad because of their mistake, and that they care about what happened.

That acknowledgement is what an apology conveys. And the absence of an an apology conveys a message too: the message that they don’t care about what happened to me.

I’d just rather have kindness. It’s that simple.