"It's how I was raised"

A lot of readers will recognise the reflex from a house. Sorry was the safe word. Said early, said often, it turned away trouble before trouble arrived. A child who said sorry before being asked was a child who got less of whatever came next, and you learned it, and it worked, and here you are at forty in a doorway.

I'd separate what the house taught from whether it's still true. The house taught that you were, by default, likely to be in the wrong, and that the way to survive being in the wrong was to get the apology in first. That may have been accurate in that house. In some houses a child is in the wrong by default and sorry is a real strategy. But you've left the house, and the doorway at work isn't your father, and the colleague isn't going to do anything if you ask a question without a sorry in front of it, and the threshold you're running is the one that was set for a room you don't live in.

The NHS, in its guidance on low self-esteem, says that it often begins in childhood, with messages from teachers, friends, siblings and parents, and that for some reason the message that you're not good enough is the one that stays. The reflex sorry is that message, said aloud, in your own voice, forty times a day. Not because you believe it in so many words. Because a habit formed under it keeps saying it after the belief has gone.

The house isn't destiny. A threshold learned in one place can be reset in another, and the resetting is the method, which is to look at each sorry and ask whether there was a fault, and to discover, forty times a day, that there wasn't. Each discovery is a small correction to the house's message, and the corrections add up. The NHS's own suggestion for low self-esteem is to note the negative thoughts and write evidence that challenges them. The day's list from chapter 1, with its nearly empty second column, is that evidence, and you're writing it already.

Nothing here requires you to think badly of whoever raised you. They were raised somewhere too. You can be the place where the threshold moves.