You Don't Need An Apology to Move On

Have you ever thought something like, “If my ex would just take accountability for his actions and apologize, then I could finally move on” or something similar, then this episode is for you. It’s possible that you’re waiting for two words that feel like they would change everything: “I’m sorry.” This conversation will help you see the real cost of that wait and the real freedom on the other side of it. I’m talking about the kind of closure after divorce that doesn’t depend on someone else’s insight, remorse, or character growth.
 
I share a coaching moment that starts with a simple question that will help you identify what’s really behind the need for an apology. For so many of us, the answer is not about the past at all. It’s about wanting to feel seen, significant, and like we matter. From there, we look at how resentment can quietly drain your energy and keep your ex living in your head rent-free, and why self-trust after divorce grows when you stop outsourcing your healing.
 
We also talk about an important truth in emotional healing: you don’t have to forgive to move on, especially if you were harmed. You can set boundaries, co-parent if you need to, and still reclaim your life without forcing yourself into fake forgiveness. I’ll walk you through how to create the feeling you’re chasing from the inside out by practicing self-regard and choosing thoughts that support your next chapter.
 
Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a rating or review to help more women find their way back to themselves.

To download your FREE "Becoming You Again Podcast Map" click here. 

To schedule your complimentary consult with Karin click here.

Struggling after divorce to get to know yourself? Click here to grab my $7 guide to get started!

If this podcast resonated with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Welcome To Becoming You Again

Karin Nelson 0:00

You are listening to Becoming You Again, episode number 260, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. All you smart, amazing women. As always, I am so happy that you're here. So let's start off this podcast with my little reading corner that I like to do every so often and keep you updated on all of the books that I am reading. I am really obsessed with my Audible right now. You know me, I really love to listen to books because I just find that I can do it while I'm doing other things like exercising or driving in the car or, you know, making dinner or something like that. Um, and so I do read books in bed at night, but I'm always so tired when I get into bed that it's hard for me to keep my eyes open. So I can't actually read a book for very long in terms of actually having the tangible product in my hands. I do love doing that. I just, it's harder for me. So I listen to a lot of books. And wow, I've been on a terror lately of the books that I have been reading. Um, so let me just dive in and let you know what I've been reading. I would love to hear from you. Come and find me on Instagram or TikTok and message me and let me know what you're reading, what your recommendations are. Without further ado, before I jump into the podcast episode, which is going to be really helpful. So if you don't want to listen to the books, just fast forward a little bit and dive into the podcast. Otherwise, this is just gonna take a second or two. So the books that I have been reading lately are The Color Purple. I don't know how I have never read this book until my 48th year on this planet. This book was beautiful, amazing. I loved it so, so much. If you have not read it, please read it. I've never seen the movie, so I plan to watch that within the next couple of weeks. Um, if I can find it somewhere, I actually haven't looked if it's streaming anywhere, but I think it probably is available at my library on DVD. I would be surprised if it's not, so I may have to just go that route, but wow! Beautiful book. Loved it so much. Check it out if you haven't read it yet. Um, The God of the Woods is a book that I just finished a couple days ago. I have mixed feelings about this one. I'm not gonna give any spoilers. I liked a lot of it. There were things that I did not enjoy about it. I did actually just read the other day that they are making a series of this book. Maya Hawk is slated to play like the main detective in the book, which I think she'll be great as that role. I it's a m it's like a mystery, basically, of a missing child. And um I love mysteries. They're some of my favorite kinds of books. So if you like that kind of genre, you may really like this book. I thought it was engaging and interesting. There were just some things that I wasn't super happy about. And so those are the two that I've finished recently. Right now, I am right in the middle of the perks of being a wallflower. I have seen the movie of this book many years ago, and I absolutely loved it. And I thought, you know what? It's high time that I actually read the book. So, planning on doing that. I'm really liking it so far. I'm not too far into it. I wouldn't even say I'm halfway through. I'm probably maybe like a hundred pages in. Really love it so far. Tell me what you're reading. Tell me what is happening for you in terms of book. But if you'd like to read, I would love to hear what you're reading. Come message me at Karen Nelson Coaching on Instagram or TikTok. All right, let's dive in to this podcast episode. I think it's gonna be really useful. I say that every week, but it's true. I think if you take these things that I am teaching you and talking about and the tools and the remedies that I am giving you in the podcast, and you actually do the work to implement them into your life, your life is gonna be better. You're going to feel better. And that is what we all want, right? We all want to just feel a little bit better than we did the day before. Let's go for it. Okay. So I was coaching a client a few weeks ago, and during our session, my client posed the question, Do you ever think that he'll apologize for the way he treated me during the marriage? It was something like that. And to her question, I asked, What do you think that you will feel if he apologizes? Like for many of us going through a divorce, there are wrongs that have been done throughout our marriages, and those wrongs feel heavy, and they are. I'm not trying to discount things that have happened to you or things that have been done to you that aren't real or heavy. And like that is real. Maybe you were mistreated. Maybe you lived a life unseen. Maybe you just carried all of the mental load your entire marriage. Maybe your partner cheated on you. Maybe there was like a lack of integrity on their part, meaning like they were saying lots of things that they were gonna do, but then they would just never follow through with what they would say. Like their words did not match their actions, right? Or maybe something else. And so often when we get divorced, we carry around this burden of pain and resentment of all of the wrongs that have happened to us that have been done to us during our marriage. And what's really fascinating is often we will focus on all of these wrongs and pay attention to them and carry them around waiting or hoping that someday our ex is gonna see the error of their ways, they're gonna see how much they hurt us, and they're going to take some kind of accountability for it. And then they're gonna come and they're gonna apologize. And this resentment and this desire for them to take accountability, it feels really important. Like we have this story going on in our head that's something like, well, if they could just do that, if they could just take accountability for it, then I could just forgive them and move on, or I could just let go and move on. Or if they would just own up to it, then I could just leave it all in the past and then I would be able to move on with my life. And so we wait. Like there's no price attached to our waiting for that apology. But I want to slow things down for just a minute, and I really want you to take a look at if that waiting is truly free, or is there a price attached to it for our own sake? Like your ex is probably living in your head rent-free because you're waiting around for this apology that you think that you need, right? But all of that focus and energy you're giving him, it isn't actually free. Because let's look at what it's actually costing you. Like, how much time do you spend replaying those moments when you wished you would have spoken up? Or how many times a day do you think about the hurts and the abuses and the things that happened to you that were caused or done to you by him? How often do you look for evidence that karma has somehow caught up to him? How many conversations have you had with others, with your friends or family or whoever about what a terrible person he is? All of that focus and all of that energy is costing you the ability to move on. And then telling yourself that you need to hear the words, I'm sorry, from him is keeping you stuck. It's keeping you stuck from taking ownership over your life and living it the way that you would like to live it. I know what you're thinking. You're in the middle of divorce, or you're on the other side of it, and you found yourself thinking, I don't even know who I am anymore. First of all, you are so not alone in this. And second of all, I made something just for you. It's called 115 Ways to Get to Know You, and it's a $7 guide filled with ideas to help you reconnect with yourself, your wants, your passions, your personality, in ways that you might have forgotten were even possible. I'm talking about creativity, adventure, self-care, joy, emotional healing, all of it. And the best part? You get to pick what feels good to you. There are no pressures, there's no rules, just permission for you to explore. Because the truth is, your relationship with yourself is the most important one you'll ever have. And it's never too late to start building it. Find the link in the show notes to grab your copy today for just seven dollars. I can't wait for you to dig in. Now, I do not want you to hear me wrong in this moment. I'm not saying you should just forgive him and move on with your life. Like be done with him so that you can just forgive him and move on. No. No, I am not saying that at all. You never have to forgive him or anyone for anything that ever has happened to you, especially if they abused you or caused you tremendous harm in some way. I'm not expecting you to forgive. I don't actually think that forgiveness, in my opinion, is the thing that we need to be able to move on in our lives. Maybe you never forgive that person. That's totally okay. Like, as many of you know my story, my ex cheated on me during our marriage, and he really was not a good husband in many, many ways. There was a lot of mistreatment going on. And I have never once said the words to myself or to him, I forgive you. Not one time. And he has never apologized to me for the way he treated me, for cheating on me, for any of that. And yet, I have been able to fully move on in my life. We co-parent very well. We can be in the same room and we can do things together with our kids, and it's not a problem. I can be around him and I don't harbor like these hateful animostic feelings. Now, again, not saying that you have to be in the room without hateful and animostic. Animostic? Is that even a word? I don't know if that's a word. Animosity is a word. Animostic, I might have just created a word. It's fine. You guys kind of get what I'm getting at, right? But I'm not saying that you need to be able to be in a room with him without feeling certain things. You don't. You don't ever have to be around him again. That is not what I'm saying. Again, please don't take my words out of context. All I'm saying is you do not need to forgive him in order to be able to move on. And you also don't need him to apologize to you to be able to move on. Here's why. Let's go back to that question that I asked my client. What do you think you would feel if he apologized to you? Like we believe there's somehow magic in the apology. Like it's gonna change everything. It's gonna go back and it's gonna right the wrongs, and then we're gonna feel something different. But when we look a little bit deeper, what is it that we're actually wanting that apology to do for us? It's to give us permission to feel differently than we do now. It's to have some kind of acknowledgement that I matter, that I matter, that I'm seen, right? So if you're struggling with this, I want you to answer that question that I asked my client. What do you think you would feel if he apologized to you? My client's answer was I would feel seen. I would feel significant in their eyes, like I matter in some way, right? What would your answer be? My guess is it would be probably something similar, but only you can answer that, right? I can't answer that for you. Once we know what it is that you're actually seeking to gain from the apology, the next steps are to figure out how to create that feeling that you're seeking for yourself. Nothing outside of us and no one outside of us can ever make us feel some sort of way. What they can do is they can give us permission to believe that we can feel that on our own, right? Because all of our thoughts create our feelings. It's how we think about things that create our feelings. Now, this is really good news because that means that you don't have to wait for an apology to come before you can feel differently than you do now. You don't have to wait for somebody to change or to own up to their own shortcomings or their own mistakes or their own abuse for you to feel better, for you to move on. You don't have to wait for that apology to come for you to regard yourself, for you to feel significant, for you to feel seen. You can start to do that right now. If it were the case that we had to wait for other people outside of us to change so that we could feel differently or so that we could move on, do you know how many people will be waiting their entire lives to be able to believe in their worth or to see their value or to feel seen? Most people never get that from anyone else, right? How many times outside of your marriage have you wanted someone to apologize for something and they just never did? Probably at least once, many, many times, probably, right? So I'm telling you this because I want you to see that you hold all of the power here. You get to be the person who sees you, you get to be the person who regards you, you get to be the person who recognizes your significance. You don't need an apology to set you free so that you can move on with your life. You've held that power of your own freedom to be able to move forward all along. The only thing that you need to do is recognize that you hold that power and your life is going to become bigger because you are no longer going to be weighed down by waiting for someone else to change so that you can give yourself permission to move on. You can just give yourself that permission today, right now. All right, my friends. I hope that you found this helpful. That is what I have for you today. Thanks for being here. I will be back next week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin Nelsoncoaching.com. That's www.k-ar-i-n, n-e-l-s-o-n coaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.