An Apology Won’t Set You Free

Don’t give someone else power over your ability to move on

“Why hasn’t she apologized?” Fiona sat in my office with her head buried in her hands. “If she would just apologize, I could move on.” We’d been talking about this for months and nothing had shifted. She’d gone from hurt to angry to exhausted, and now she just wanted to be over it.

Two years earlier, Fiona had been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition — the kind that reorganizes your entire life, where doctor’s appointments replace plans and fatigue swallows everything else. Most of her friends showed up in some way. Jennie didn’t. Not during the diagnosis, not during the months of treatment that followed, not even with a text that said, “Thinking of you.”

The worst part is that Jennie told friends that they “just drifted apart,” and from the outside, that’s how it looked. But Fiona knew that drifting is mutual. This was one person disappearing when things got hard.

To be fair, Fiona never confronted her. She kept waiting for her friend to realize on her own — to text, to acknowledge what had happened, to say, “I know I wasn’t there, and I’m sorry.” The apology never came. And now Fiona was physically better but still drafting texts she’d never send and compulsively checking her social media.

Most of us have a version of this. (I’ve definitely spent more time than I care to admit stalking exes over the years.) Maybe it’s a parent who never acknowledged what your childhood was like. An ex who rewrote the relationship so they were the victim. A boss who pulled the rug out from under you and acted like nothing happened.

We believe there is fairy dust in an apology — that if it is just said in the right words, the pain will lift. And sometimes an apology helps. When you’re trying to repair a relationship, accountability is often a requirement to rebuild trust. It allows you and the other person to move forward together.

But that’s not what most of us are actually waiting for. Fiona didn’t want to be friends with Jennie again. She wouldn’t have accepted the apology even if it had come. She was holding on to the fantasy of one because she believed it would make the pain stop. And I think this is what keeps people stuck — not the absence of an apology, but the hidden belief that someone else holds the key to your relief. Because as long as you believe that, you’re powerless.

There’s a common saying in therapy: anger is sadness’s bodyguard. I think resentment works the same way. It gives you somewhere to put your attention that isn’t grief. As long as you’re angry at them, you don’t have to feel the sadder thing underneath: that someone you loved didn’t show up for you, and they might never understand why you’re hurt.

We treat the waiting like it’s free. Like holding on is costing us nothing while we go about our lives. But think about how much time and energy you’ve spent. The conversations you replay looking for the moment you should have said something, the social media you check for evidence they’ve changed or that karma caught up. You are essentially running a constant low-grade surveillance operation on someone you say you’re done with.

To be clear, I am not saying you must forgive someone to move on. Quite the opposite. You do not need to forgive anyone for any reason, especially if they caused you great harm. But you do have to stop waiting for them to make it better, because only you have the power to move forward.

So how do you do that? First, you witness and tend to the pain underneath the resentment. Ask yourself, “What would this apology actually give me? What am I looking for?” Because when most of us dig deeper, the answer sounds less like “To know they’re sorry” and more like “I need to know I matter.”

That’s not a desire for apology; it’s a need for acknowledgment. But this is actually good news, because this need can be met by other people in your life. You’ve been so focused on one person that you’ve stopped noticing everyone else. Think about your coworker who checks in on you after tough meetings, or your barista who always remembers your order. These are people telling you that you matter. But you’ll miss all of it if you’re still waiting for one person to say it in exactly the right way.

When Fiona stopped waiting for Jennie’s apology, she didn’t forgive her. She didn’t confront her. She just got tired of giving so much of her life to someone who wasn’t even in it. She still hasn’t gotten her apology, and I don’t think she ever will. But she stopped waiting for it to be the thing that set her free. And her life got bigger the moment she did.