Sorry to Bother You
By Gardner McCullough, LCSW-C, Founder of Catalyst Counseling
A report went around at the end of August that looked at more than 1.6 million work emails and counted how often people soften what they’re about to say. The softeners were everywhere. Apologies for a delay, apologies for asking a question at all. “Sorry to bother” turned up hundreds of times on its own, and further down the list sat “sorry to trouble you” and “sorry in advance.”
The coverage that followed was almost entirely about credibility. Cut the padding, and stop framing a reasonable request as an interruption. That’s decent advice, and for plenty of people it’s the whole story, because they picked the habit up from a manager years ago and never looked at it again.
For other people, that sentence is not a habit. You can tell the difference by what happens when you try to take it out.
The half second after you delete it
Here’s the version I hear in my office all the time. Somebody writes a two-line email asking a vendor for a status update. They read it back, notice the apology on the front, and think, correctly, that it isn’t necessary. They delete it. And then the email sits there in the draft box looking, to them, like it was written by someone who kicked the door open. So the sentence goes back in, the shoulders come down a couple of percent, and it sends.
That whole sequence takes about nine seconds. Something registered a risk and moved to reduce it before any thought about credibility showed up, which is not how writing decisions work.
The clinical name for that move is appeasement. In 2023, a group of researchers including Stephen Porges proposed retiring the term “Stockholm syndrome” and replacing it with appeasement, on the grounds that placating a perceived threat is a reflexive survival response with a biological basis, not a strange emotional attachment and not a character defect (Bailey, Dugard, Smith, and Porges, European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 14(1), 2161038). Their argument is about extreme circumstances, hostage situations and long-term abuse, but the mechanism they describe is the same one running in the draft box. Calm the other person first, and do it fast, before you’ve decided anything.
What sits underneath it is usually shame, and shame does real damage. A meta-analysis published the same year in Trauma, Violence, and Abuse pooled 25 studies and found trauma-related shame correlated at .44 with symptoms of psychopathology and .49 with trauma-related distress (DeCou and colleagues, 10.1177/15248380211053617). Those are moderate, consistent associations across a lot of different samples.
And the long-term cost of the strategy itself is documented. A review published this year in Sex Roles synthesized three decades of research on self-silencing, the pattern of suppressing your own needs to keep a relationship steady, and found it tracks reliably with depression (Sikov and colleagues, 10.1007/s11199-025-01637-8). It works in the short run. That’s the problem with it. It keeps working just well enough that you never question the price.
Who this shows up in
Almost never the people who should be apologizing.
The reflex clusters in people who are, by any outside measure, easy to work with. The ones who arrive early, who reread a text four times before sending it and still lie awake wondering how it landed. Around here that’s a lot of federal managers, a lot of attorneys, a lot of clinicians and nurses and teachers, a lot of oldest children who ran a household at eleven.
It’s also extremely common in first responders, which surprises people. A fire captain I worked with described being able to key a radio in the worst ten minutes of a stranger’s life without his voice moving, and then getting home and finding he couldn’t ask his wife to pick up a prescription without building a case for it first. He wanted to know why the hard thing was easy and the easy thing was hard.
The best answer I have is that the radio comes with a script and a role, and nobody’s opinion of him is up for renegotiation while he’s using it. Asking his wife for something is unprotected. There’s no procedure. It’s just him, wanting something, with no justification attached, and for a lot of people that’s where the exposure actually lives.
It shows up between partners too, and there it’s quieter and more corrosive. One person prefaces every request with an explanation of why it’s reasonable. The other person, who has never once refused, starts to feel like they’re being managed, or like they’ve been cast as somebody difficult in a scene they don’t remember auditioning for. Neither of them is doing anything wrong. But over enough years, a marriage where one person pays a small entry fee every time they speak becomes a marriage where nobody is quite sure what the other one actually wants.
If asking for something used to cost you, and for many people it did, in a house where a request got you a sigh or a lecture about how hard everyone else was working, your nervous system did something sensible. It learned to pay up front. That’s a good adaptation. It’s also the thing still running at 8:40 on a Tuesday morning in an email to a colleague who has never once been anything but decent to you.
What actually helps
Not a rewrite guide. There are plenty of those this week, and if the habit is only a habit, they’ll work fine.
If it isn’t only a habit, deleting the word while the reflex is still running just leaves you standing in the doorway with nothing in your hands. People do it, feel worse, and conclude they’re bad at confidence. Nothing about confidence was ever involved.
Three things that do move it.
Notice without fixing. For a week, clock one email a day and ask a single question about the softener: did I choose that, or did it arrive on its own? Don’t edit anything. You’re just learning to tell chosen graciousness apart from paid permission. Most people find the ratio startling.
Find the original bill. Somewhere there’s an early scene where asking cost you something. Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes it’s so ordinary you’ve never counted it as anything. That scene, not your writing, is what set the price.
Reprocess it. This is where EMDR does its best work. Rather than arguing you out of the reflex at the level of language, EMDR goes at the memory that trained it, so the old moment stops setting today’s terms. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in the British Journal of Psychology found EMDR effective for adult PTSD and, in the one modeling study that looked at cost, the most cost-effective of eleven interventions compared (Simpson and colleagues, British Journal of Psychology, 116, 1128 to 1149). When it works, people rarely describe it as a new email strategy. What they describe is the question of whether they’re allowed to ask quietly going out of circulation.
One question worth sitting with
The next time you soften a request, try this before you send it. If the person on the other end could see exactly how much you paid to ask, would they think the price was fair?
If the honest answer is no, and you’d still pay it anyway, that’s worth talking about with someone.
Catalyst Counseling is a trauma-focused practice serving Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Our EMDR-trained therapists work with high-achieving professionals, couples, families, and first responders on where this started. If you’d like to start, you can schedule a consultation here.
References
Bailey, R., Dugard, J., Smith, S. F., & Porges, S. W. (2023). Appeasement: replacing Stockholm syndrome as a definition of a survival strategy. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 14(1), 2161038. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2022.2161038
DeCou, C. R., Lynch, S. M., Weber, S., Richner, D., Mozafari, A., Huggins, H., & Perschon, B. (2023). On the association between trauma-related shame and symptoms of psychopathology: A meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(3), 1193 to 1201. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380211053617
Sikov, J., et al. (2026). Advancing the next generation of research on self-silencing and depression: A narrative review and synthesis of three decades of research. Sex Roles, 92(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-025-01637-8
Simpson, E., et al. (2025). Clinical and cost-effectiveness of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing for treatment and prevention of post-traumatic stress disorder in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Psychology, 116, 1128 to 1149. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.70005
Client details in this piece are composites and identifying information has been changed.