Most of us have heard the words "I'm sorry." But have you ever walked away from an apology feeling just as hurt—or even more hurt—than before?
That's because not all apologies are created equal.
In this eye-opening episode of Now What?, therapist Amy Neufeld explores the subtle but powerful difference between true accountability and what she calls the ultimate "sorry, not sorry" apology. Through a compelling real-life story involving infidelity, couples therapy, and an apology that completely missed the mark, Amy reveals why some apologies help us heal while others leave us feeling unseen, unheard, and emotionally stuck.
If you've ever struggled to move on after receiving an apology—or wondered why certain apologies never seem to land—this episode will help you understand what's really happening beneath the surface.
In This Episode You Will Learn
✅ The difference between a genuine apology and a non-apology
✅ Why some apologies actually make people feel worse
✅ The hidden purpose behind "I'm sorry you're hurt" statements
✅ Why accountability is so difficult for many people
✅ The three essential components of a meaningful apology
✅ How explanations often get confused with accountability
✅ Why your nervous system recognizes a bad apology before your mind does
✅ How to identify common "sorry, not sorry" phrases
✅ What healthy repair actually looks like in relationships
✅ How to respond when an apology doesn't feel complete
Timestamps
(00:00) Why some apologies leave you feeling worse
(01:38) The couples therapy story that inspired this episode
(03:12) The infamous "I'm sorry you're hurt" apology
(05:27) Why explanations aren't the same as accountability
(07:14) The psychology behind non-apologies
(09:03) Why people struggle to take ownership of their actions
(11:41) The three parts of a meaningful apology
(14:16) Common apology phrases that miss the mark
(16:33) Why your body often knows when an apology isn't genuine
(18:42) What healthy repair looks like after betrayal or conflict
(20:57) How to respond when an apology doesn't land
(23:14) Amy's final challenge for listeners
Key Takeaways
🔹 A true apology focuses on accountability—not explanation
🔹 "I'm sorry you're hurt" is often empathy without ownership
🔹 Genuine repair requires acknowledging impact, not just intent
🔹 Your nervous system can often recognize an incomplete apology before your mind does
🔹 Lasting healing requires accountability, understanding, and changed behavior
🔹 Not every apology deserves automatic acceptance
About the Host
Amy Neufeld is a therapist, speaker, and creator of Intentional Action Therapy™. Through her work, Amy helps people understand emotional patterns, build healthier relationships, and create meaningful, lasting change.
Has anyone ever apologized to you and somehow you felt worse afterward? Like the sorry just missed. The word was there, you heard it, but something felt off. Well, today we are talking about the ultimate sorry, not sorry, apology.
I have a client that comes to see me for individual therapy. And just for the record, she has given me full permission to podcast this puppy out, with of course any identifying details changed. Okay. This client of mine, she has also been recently doing couples therapy. She just found out about her husband's affair. And she is processing everything: the betrayal, the marriage, what she wants, what she doesn't know yet, all of it.
And she tells me about a session they had recently. She spent that whole session asking for one thing: not reconciliation, not a plan, just a frickin' apology. And he couldn't do it. In the room with their therapist sitting close for support, he couldn't get there. So the therapist gave him an assignment. She said, if it's too hard to say in session, write it.
Go home and write her an apology. So he went home and he wrote an email. Uh-huh. You heard me. An email.
It could have been a conversation with him reading what he wrote. No, it was an email sent. When my client comes in for our session, before her bottom reaches the couch, the words just spill out of her. He sent me his apology.
So, of course, I do the therapist thing and I lend her some of my calm. I take a slow breath and I give her a gentle gesture to the couch. And I, of course, ask, okay, how was it? She unlocks her phone and begins to read. So sorry you're hurt. She pauses for a second and I thought, ⁓ my God, it got worse.
So sorry you're hurt. You have to understand I was so lonely for so long. I would come home from work and you'd already be asleep with the kids. I needed some of you and I just didn't have it.
I was invisible in my own home. I needed to feel wanted. I hope one day you can understand where I was coming from. My client wasn't only furious though. She was also doing that thing that so many people do when they get a non-apology. She was trying to be fair. Well, he did take the time to write it, and maybe he was lonely. I mean, I was asleep with the kids a lot.
So now she's sitting there with two completely opposite feelings. One part of her is like, what the actual hell was that? And the other part of her is trying to make his apology make sense for him, which is exactly why this kind of sorry is so slippery. I need everybody out there to understand what just happened.
This man was assigned one job. He went home, sat down, opened his laptop, and turned in a bill. She didn't get an apology. She got an invoice, an itemized invoice with receipts. You were tired. You fell asleep with the kids. I was lonely.
This is what we call sorry, not sorry. An apology shaped object. It has the right word in the first sentence,
But then it immediately gets to work explaining why none of it was really his fault. And the most insidious part, it puts her in this impossible position where now she's supposed to feel bad for him while also apologizing to him while he is the one who did the hurtful thing. my gosh, I need a moment. ⁓
Here's what I want you to understand about non-apologies. They are almost never malicious. mostly they come from people who genuinely cannot tolerate the discomfort of full accountability. Because saying, I did this, I hurt you, I caused this, requires sitting in a level of shame and responsibility that a lot of people simply do not have the emotional capacity for.
So they find an exit ramp.
They use the language of an apology while avoiding the substance of one. I want you to listen again to that apology.
So sorry you're hurt. He's not in that sentence. Not a single word of ownership. Not a single word of him. It's just her hurt floating there, unattached to anything he did. And that is why she felt worse after she heard it.
Not because she was being dramatic or she was asking for too much, and she definitely she wasn't waiting for the perfect words. It was because the apology didn't hold the thing that it was supposed to hold. It didn't have any responsibility in it, it didn't hold her pain, it didn't hold the truth. All it did was hold his discomfort and then handed it to her.
Ugh, that's the part that can make you feel crazy because the person did technically apologize. The word was there. You heard it, I heard it, she heard it. So now you're sitting there thinking, Why the hell do I feel so bad? Why didn't that help? It's like eating a full bag of Doritos and thinking, Why am I still craving something else? Why isn't this satisfying?
It wasn't actually an apology. That's why. It was a performance of regret without the weight of any ownership. Here's the thing about a real apology that I don't think gets said enough. When someone's actually sorry, like genuinely in their body, sorry, the apology isn't that hard to recognize.
Not because it's fancy or has all the perfect words in it, but because you can feel, actually feel that they are not trying to escape what they did. And they're not making you hold it.
A real apology has a different feel to it. You should be able to hear what they actually did. Not, I'm sorry, things got difficult. Things don't get difficult on their own. People do things. You should be able to hear the behavior.
I made you feel like you were crazy when you weren't. Specific, behavioral, theirs. In my client's case, what she needed to hear was not so sorry you're hurt. She needed to hear: I betrayed you. I lied to you. I broke your trust. I
understand that my choices changed, how safe you feel with me. That's a completely different sentence. That sentence has a person in it. It's got a behavior in it. It's got ownership in it. And then
you should be able to hear that they understand the impact on you, not just how bad they feel, because I feel terrible about all of this, maybe true, but it's still about them. And sometimes that kind of apology becomes another request for comfort. Now you're supposed to reassure them. Now you're supposed to say, I know, I know, you're not a bad person. So now the apology has
somehow turned into you taking care of the person who hurt you. That's not repair. That's a job transfer. A real apology does not make you manage their shame. It makes room for your pain.
It sounds more like, I understand why this broke your trust, or I understand why this changed how you see me. That's not begging for comfort. That's giving it. That's saying your pain makes sense. And for so many people, that is the part they've been waiting for. Not the word sorry, the recognition, the moment where the other person finally says, I see what this cost you.
Because that's what was missing in my client's email. He gave her his loneliness and his reasons and his sadness and his evidence,
But he never gave her the one thing she needed. He never said, I understand what I did to you. And when someone cannot find that sentence, when they keep swinging and missing, when every apology somehow circles back to their pain, their stress, their loneliness, their intention, their childhood, their fear, their hard weak, their unmet needs, all of it. That is worth it.
Paying attention to my friends, because it might not be that they don't know how to apologize. It might be that they're not actually there yet. They haven't fully felt it. And an apology that isn't felt yet isn't ready to be given, which means if you're waiting for it to land, you might be waiting for something that doesn't exist yet.
And that is not a you problem. That's a them problem.
So be on the lookout for the sorry, not sorry lines. Like, I'm sorry, but you have to understand I was under a lot of stress. The but there, guys, negates everything before it. The sentence after but, that's what they actually mean.
I'm sure you've heard. I already said I was sorry. What more do you want? Hmm. Translation for that one. My discomfort with apologizing matters way more than whether it actually landed. Or how about, how about I was just being honest. This one's not even trying. It's not doing anything. This one just showed up to the apology and PJs.
And there's this one. You know, I didn't mean it like that. This one actually asks you to do the apologizing. You're now supposed to say, ⁓ I know, I know, it's fine. The apologizer just handed you the apology and walked away. And
Of course, how could I forget the star of today's episode, So sorry you're hurt, which sounds soft, but it's not soft. It's actually slippery because it moves the focus from what they did to how you feel about what they did. And those are not the same thing. If any of those that I just handed you, those sorry not sorry lines,
felt familiar to you, you may have been holding a non-apology and calling it closure.
Most of us were never taught how to apologize
We were taught to say the word. Cindy, go say sorry right now, young lady.
We were not taught what the word was supposed to carry. And that's why so many adults still think an apology is complete once the word sorry leaves their mouth.
But a real apology carries three things. And when you are on the receiving end of one, you should be able to hear all three. First, you should hear ownership, not vague sadness, not I'm sorry this happened, or I'm sorry you feel that way. You should hear what they did. Because when someone cannot name the behavior, they are usually not ready to own the behavior. Second, you should hear impact.
Not a speech about how hard it was for them, not a list of reasons. You should hear that they understand what it was like for you. They get why it hurt. And third, this is the one that I want to drive home. You should see some action because an apology without behavior, it's just words. And words are cheap. They're easy. They can be handed to you in about 2.2 seconds by AI. Behavior is harder.
It takes real ownership. It's vulnerable. It concedes that what happened was not just unfortunate, it was wrong. And that is exactly why it matters so much, because it's the only part that can't really be faked for very long. It doesn't mean reconciliation and it doesn't mean everything gets back together and lives happily ever after. But if someone is genuinely sorry, if they actually feel it, showing sorry is not optional.
It's just what happens next. They don't have to be assigned it as homework or begged into basic accountability. They start showing you that they understand. An apology is essentially it's a promise, not a promise that everything goes back to normal or that trust is instantly restored, but a promise. A promise that says, I see what I did, I understand what it cost you, and I am going to show you I mean that. Without that third part.
The first two, they're just damage control. And this is why my client's body knew the email wasn't an apology before her brain even had finished reading it.
Because our bodies are often better at detecting emotional truth than our brains are at explaining it. And her brain was trying to be fair. He did say sorry, he did write the email, he did the assignment, but her body knew.
This didn't repair anything. It didn't move toward me. This just gave me hurt and asked me to make room for it. And I want to say this clearly to you listening. You don't have to blow it up when you get a non-apology. You don't have to make a whole big thing. But you also don't have to accept it and pretend it landed when it didn't. You are allowed to notice that it didn't feel like ownership and it didn't feel like repair.
that it felt like you were being asked to take care of their feelings your now what.
If you get a non-apology, try one of these. I hear that you're sorry. Can you tell me what you're apologizing for? Or
I'm hearing why it happened, but I'm not really hearing you understand what it did to me. Or if you can't swing those, you can simply just say, that didn't land for me. Can you try again? but if you've received one already and you've been holding a non-apology for a while now, it feels really heavy inside of you. I need you to say these words out loud. I forgive myself.
for carrying the hurt they were not ready to own. And then I want you to put it down because it was never yours to carry. Alrighty, be on the lookout for those sorry not sorries. now you know what to do.
