Quick summary: Chronic excessive apologising, even to inanimate objects, often stems from the fawn response, a trauma-based survival strategy that prioritises appeasement and self-erasure to manage anxiety and avoid rejection. This automatic behaviour signals a deep internalised belief that one’s worth depends on being minimally inconvenient to others, which erodes personal agency and authentic connection over time. Recognising and interrupting such patterns can begin the process of reclaiming space, reducing self-abandonment, and supporting healthier mental well-being.
It was a Tuesday morning in a coffee shop. I was carrying my bag on one shoulder and my coffee in the other when my hip caught the edge of a chair. An empty chair. Nobody in it. Nobody within earshot. And I said sorry.
Out loud. Without thinking. To the chair.
Three steps later I stopped walking, because the word had left my mouth before my brain had authorised it, and something about that felt worth sitting with. Not funny, not embarrassing. Important in a quiet, specific way I could not yet articulate.
I had spent my whole life apologising for taking up space. I had simply never caught myself doing it to a piece of furniture before.
I have always been a person who apologises. Not in the large, meaningful way of someone reckoning genuinely with something they have done. In the chronic, ambient, background-noise way. The sorry that opens a question I have every right to ask. The sorry that follows someone else walking into me. The sorry that arrives before any offence has occurred, as if its job is to pre-clear the air, to signal: I know I am here, I know that costs something, and I am already sorry for it.
For years I understood this as a form of consideration. An awareness of others. A small social kindness that cost me nothing.
I was wrong about what it was costing me.
The psychologist Pete Walker, writing on complex trauma, describes a survival strategy he calls the fawn response: a fourth option alongside fight, flight, and freeze. Where the others meet threat with aggression, escape, or stillness, fawn meets it with appeasement. With agreeableness. With scanning the emotional weather of a room and reconfiguring yourself accordingly, making yourself as small and as unthreatening as the situation seems to require.
This response tends to develop in environments where a child learns, not through any single lesson but through years of accumulated signal, that their safety is tied to the emotional state of the adults around them. The child who internalises this becomes remarkably skilled at it. The adult they become often has no memory of learning it and no awareness that they are still doing it, because by then it is not a strategy. It is just who they are.
The apology is less about the other person and more about managing the apologiser’s own anxiety. It is a pre-emptive bid against anticipated rejection, dressed up as social grace.
I had been making that bid my entire life. On that Tuesday morning, I made it to a chair.
I think I learned early that I was most loveable when I was least inconvenient. No one communicated this directly. It arrived the way these things always do, through repetition and atmosphere, through what was rewarded and what was not, through the slow accumulation of small moments that calcify into a belief before you have ever examined it as one. And somewhere in that process I became, without choosing to, the person who was always fine. Who anticipated every inconvenience and neutralised it before anyone had the chance to notice. Who pre-empted every need so efficiently that having needs became almost theoretical.
I thought this was being easy to be around.
What I was actually practising was making myself disappear.
The chair did not change me. These moments rarely do, not immediately, not completely.
What it did was remove the possibility of continuing to not notice. I had absorbed the instruction to shrink so thoroughly that I was carrying it out even in an empty room, even with no relationship at stake, even with no emotional consequence whatsoever. The behaviour had become entirely self-contained. It no longer needed a reason. It did not even need a person.
I think about that chair with something that has come to feel, over time, like gratitude. Not for any lesson it taught me, but for the specific, undeniable clarity of the thing. Years of careful self-examination had not surfaced what one Tuesday morning in a coffee shop made suddenly impossible to ignore.
After that I stopped apologising to furniture.
It sounds like a small thing. It was where everything else began.
Ann Angatia is a Kenyan medicine and surgery student, mental health advocate, and founder of ClearHealth, a platform making mental health information accessible and clear. She writes about everyday psychology, survival patterns, and small moments of self-revelation to help people feel less alone.