I was three sentences into explaining a project timeline to my team last Tuesday when I heard myself say it.

“Does that make sense?”

My colleague Laura - not a therapist, just someone who pays attention - tilted her head slightly. “You know you say that after literally everything, right?”

I laughed it off. But on the drive home, I counted. I had said “does that make sense?” eleven times in a forty-minute meeting. After explaining my schedule. After describing why I chose a particular research method. After telling someone where the coffee filters were.

The coffee filters.

I wasn’t confused about where I’d put them. I wasn’t uncertain about my own project timeline. I wasn’t struggling to articulate anything. And yet some part of me - some very old, very practiced part - could not finish a single explanation without turning to the room and asking, essentially: did I say that right? Was that okay? Am I allowed to have just been clear?

I’m forty-six years old and I still ask permission to have been understood.

And when I traced that habit backward, it didn’t land on a professional failure or a bad relationship. It landed on being eight, sitting at a kitchen table, trying to tell my mother about something that happened at recess - and being told, before I’d even finished, “That’s not what you mean.”

The Kitchen Table Correction

There’s a particular kind of childhood correction that doesn’t target what you said. It targets how you said it.

The child says, “The teacher was being weird today.” The parent responds, “She wasn’t being weird. You mean she was being strict. Say what you actually mean.”

But the child did mean weird. Weird was exactly the right word for what she experienced - a teacher who was behaving in a way that felt unpredictable, slightly off, hard to read. Weird was her word for the feeling she hadn’t yet learned to name more precisely.

She wasn’t wrong. She was eight.

But instead of being heard, she was edited. And the lesson that landed wasn’t about vocabulary or grammar. The lesson was: the way your mind organizes and delivers information is not trustworthy. You need someone else to tell you what you actually meant.

A 2007 study by psychologist Marsha Linehan and colleagues, published in Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, described what she called “invalidating environments” - households where a child’s internal experiences are routinely dismissed, corrected, or reframed by caregivers. Linehan found that these environments don’t just affect what children feel comfortable saying. They reshape how children relate to their own capacity to know what they think.

The correction doesn’t have to be cruel. It can be polite, even well-intentioned. “That’s not what you mean” often comes from a parent who genuinely believes they’re helping. But the child doesn’t hear helpfulness. The child hears: you can’t be trusted to describe your own experience.

What Gets Corrected Isn’t Words - It’s Trust

There’s a critical difference between correcting a child’s facts and correcting a child’s expression.

If a child says the sky is green, you correct the fact. But if a child says “the sky looks kind of sad today” and you respond with “skies don’t have feelings, say it’s overcast” - you haven’t corrected her facts. You’ve told her that her way of seeing the world is wrong.

Children who grow up with their expression constantly edited learn something very specific. They learn that between what they think and what they say, there’s a gap - and that gap is dangerous. The thought might be fine. But the way it comes out? Unreliable. Possibly embarrassing. Probably not quite right.

So they develop a habit. Not of thinking more clearly - they were already thinking clearly. But of monitoring how they sound. Of watching the listener’s face for signs of confusion. Of preemptively apologizing for their own clarity.

“Sorry, let me rephrase that.”

“I’m not explaining this well.”

“Does that make sense?”

These aren’t communication tools. They’re relics. They’re the verbal equivalent of flinching before a hand that stopped hitting you twenty years ago.

The Hedging Generation

If you grew up in a household where your explanations were constantly adjusted, you probably recognize more than just the “does that make sense?” habit. You probably recognize the entire architecture of hedged speech.

You start sentences with “I might be wrong, but…” when you’re not wrong. You say “I think” before statements you know to be true. You over-explain simple things because somewhere in your nervous system, you’ve internalized the belief that the first way you say something will be insufficient.

Psychologist Dana Jack, in her research on self-silencing theory published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, described how people - particularly women, though not exclusively - learn to mute, edit, or qualify their own speech to maintain relational safety. Jack found that self-silencing isn’t about having nothing to say. It’s about believing that the way you naturally say things will create friction, confusion, or disapproval.

The roots of that belief, for many people, sit right there in childhood. In the dining room where you told a story and were interrupted with “get to the point.” In the classroom where you answered a question correctly but were told to “say it differently.” In the car where you tried to explain why you were upset and were met with “you’re not making any sense.”

You were making perfect sense. You just hadn’t learned the approved dialect yet.

What “Does That Make Sense?” Is Really Asking

Here’s what I want you to understand about this phrase - because if you say it, you probably say it without thinking, and you probably believe it’s just politeness.

It’s not politeness.

When you say “does that make sense?” after explaining something you understand perfectly well, you are not checking whether your listener comprehended you. You are asking whether you are allowed to have been clear.

That’s a very different question.

The first question - “did you understand?” - comes from confidence. It assumes you communicated well and checks whether the message landed. The second question - “was that okay?” - comes from a childhood where the landing was never guaranteed, because someone was always standing between you and your own words, adjusting them.

A 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Jennifer Crocker and colleagues examined what they called contingent self-worth - the phenomenon of basing your sense of competence on external approval rather than internal assessment. Crocker found that people with contingent self-worth don’t lack ability. They lack the internal permission to trust their own ability without someone else confirming it first.

“Does that make sense?” is contingent clarity. You explained something well. You know you explained it well. But you can’t let the explanation stand on its own because a very old voice in your head is still saying: “That’s not how you say that.”

The Apology Before the Sentence

It extends beyond meetings and professional settings.

People who grew up with corrected expression often apologize before they’ve said anything. “This might be a dumb question.” “I don’t know if I’m saying this right.” “Bear with me, I’m not great at explaining things.”

They are, almost always, excellent at explaining things.

But excellence was never the issue. The issue was permission. The child who was told her explanations were wrong didn’t grow up doubting her intelligence. She grew up doubting her delivery. And delivery, for her, became everything - because the content was never the problem. The packaging was the problem. The way it came out of her particular mouth in her particular way using her particular eight-year-old vocabulary.

So she learned to wrap every statement in a disclaimer. A pre-apology. A way of saying: I know this might come out wrong, and I’m sorry in advance, and please don’t correct me because I’ve already corrected myself three times before this sentence reached my lips.

That’s exhausting.

If you recognize that exhaustion - the fatigue of monitoring your own speech in real time, the low hum of self-consciousness that runs underneath every conversation - it might not be anxiety in the clinical sense. It might be a very old program running in the background, written by someone who loved you but couldn’t hear you without editing you first.

Why This Isn’t About Confidence

People will tell you to “just be more confident.” They’ll say you should stop hedging, stop qualifying, stop asking if you make sense. They mean well.

But confidence was never the missing piece.

You are confident. You know your material. You know your own mind. The problem isn’t that you doubt your thinking. The problem is that somewhere between thinking and speaking, there’s a checkpoint - an old, automatic, deeply worn checkpoint - where your words get scanned for potential wrongness before they’re allowed out.

Other people’s words just leave their mouths. Yours go through customs first.

That checkpoint was installed in childhood, by a parent or teacher or older sibling who treated your natural way of expressing things as a rough draft that always needed revision. And over time, you stopped treating your first expression as valid. You started treating it as a starting point - something that would need to be refined, rephrased, softened, or explained again before it could be accepted.

The “does that make sense?” is the last step in that process. It’s the final checkpoint. You’ve already revised internally three times. Now you’re asking the listener to stamp the passport.

The Child Who Made Perfect Sense

Here’s what I wish someone had said to that eight-year-old at the kitchen table. The one who said “weird” when she meant weird. The one who told a story in the wrong order because she was excited. The one who used the long way around to describe something because the short way hadn’t been invented in her vocabulary yet.

I wish someone had said: “I understand you.”

Not “say it again.” Not “that’s not what you mean.” Not “you’re not making sense.”

Just: I understand you.

Because she was making sense. She was making perfect sense in the only language she had. And the fact that her language didn’t match the adult version wasn’t a failure of clarity. It was the natural condition of being a child - which is to say, a person still building her toolkit, still discovering which words go where, still learning that a feeling can be translated into a sentence.

She didn’t need correction. She needed someone to listen past the rough edges and hear what she was actually saying.

Research by developmental psychologists at the University of Cambridge, published in a 2019 edition of Child Development, found that children whose caregivers practiced “meaning-focused listening” - responding to the intent of a child’s communication rather than the form - developed stronger emotional vocabularies and higher self-efficacy in expressing complex ideas. The children who were form-corrected, by contrast, spoke less over time. Not because they had less to say. Because they learned that saying it was a risk.

You Make Sense

If you are someone who ends every explanation with “does that make sense?” - I want you to hear this.

You make sense.

You made sense when you were eight and you used the wrong word for the right feeling. You made sense when you told the story out of order. You make sense now, in meetings, in conversations, in the quiet moments when you explain something and then immediately wonder if you should have said it differently.

The habit won’t disappear overnight. It’s been running for decades. But maybe the next time you catch yourself saying it - “does that make sense?” - you can pause and notice what’s underneath it. Not a question about clarity. A question about permission.

And maybe you can answer it yourself, quietly, before anyone else does.

Yes. That made sense. You always did.