Adults who keep apologizing for taking up time aren’t necessarily shy. They may have been raised around people who treated attention as a finite resource someone else was always more deserving of

Picture the colleague who slips into a meeting two minutes early, waits for a lull, and prefaces her question with: Sorry, I know we’re almost out of time, this’ll be quick, I promise. She was invited. The question is relevant. No one is checking the clock except her. For years it seemed obvious that people like this were just shy or socially anxious. Sometimes they are. But often, after reading the clinical literature on childhood emotional neglect and adult over-apologizing, a different picture emerges...