Your family stopped expecting you, and apologies will not change that. Rebuild one relationship with small, boring, repeated reliability, and expect it to take longer than you think is fair.
Pick one relationship and one small commitment you can keep every week without negotiating. Turn up to it, at the same time, for three months, without mentioning that you are doing it. Reliability is the only thing that moves this, and apologies mostly make it worse, because they have been offered before and nothing changed.
That is slower than you want. It is also the version that works.
Why the apology does not land any more
You have probably said sorry several times. Each time you meant it. And each time, within a fortnight, a deadline arrived and the pattern resumed.
So the words now carry information they did not used to. To the person hearing them, "I'm sorry, it's going to be different" has become the sound that comes just before nothing changing. Saying it again does not reset the counter, it advances it.
There is also a quieter problem. An apology is an event, and events are the currency you already deal in: the big weekend away, the expensive holiday, the grand gesture at Christmas. Those are easy for you, because they are projects. What went missing was not events. It was ordinary presence, on ordinary Tuesdays, and that cannot be repaid in a lump sum.
The NHS names the cost directly in its addiction guidance, listing work among the things people become addicted to: "if your relationship, family and social life are affected and you never take holidays, you may be addicted to work". The people at home have been living the first half of that sentence for years.
Start with what was actually lost
Before you fix anything, get specific about what went. Vague guilt produces vague action.
Sit down alone and write, per person:
**What they stopped asking for.** Almost every family has a moment where they stopped inviting you, because the answer was always no. That date matters more than any argument you remember.
**What they had to handle alone.** Not just the logistics. The hospital appointment, the school problem, the hard week.
**The recurring thing you missed.** Bedtime, Sunday lunch, the Thursday call with your mother. Recurring absences do more damage than dramatic ones, because they are the ones that taught people not to count on you.
**What they say about you.** Sometimes as a joke. Jokes at home are usually load-bearing.
This list is not for showing anyone. It is so the repair aims at the right thing.
Reliability beats intensity
One commitment. Small enough that a bad week at work cannot break it.
Not "I'll be home more". That is unfalsifiable and it will be assessed by someone who has stopped giving you the benefit of the doubt. Instead:
Home for bedtime on Tuesdays and Thursdays, phone in another room.
Saturday morning, the two of you, out of the house, every week.
The school run on Wednesdays.
Half an hour with your partner after the children are asleep, laptop shut, four nights a week.
Rules for choosing it. It has to be recurring, it has to be at a fixed time, and it has to be small enough that you can keep it in your worst week rather than your best. People overpromise here to demonstrate seriousness, and the overpromise is exactly what breaks in November.
Then protect it the way you protect anything at work: a calendar block others can see, a device that enforces it, and a cut-off routine that runs whether or not you feel finished. [Notifications, devices and a real boundary](/guides/work/notifications-devices-and-a-real-boundary) covers the mechanics.
Say one sentence, then stop talking about it
You do have to say something, or the change reads as random.
Keep it short, specific, and free of promises about the future:
"I've been working through everything for a long time and you've been carrying it. I'm home for bedtime on Tuesdays and Thursdays from now on. You don't have to believe that yet."
Three things that sentence does. It names the fact rather than explaining it. It states one concrete commitment rather than a change of character. And it removes the demand that they respond well, which is the part most of these conversations get wrong.
Then stop reporting on it. Do not narrate your progress, do not point out when you kept it, do not ask whether they have noticed. Being asked to notice turns their relief into your admin, and it is a way of collecting credit for turning up, which is not something anyone else gets credit for.
Expect the reaction to be worse before it is better
This surprises people and it is normal.
**Anger arrives when it is finally safe.** Someone who has spent five years managing without you may not be pleased when you appear. Anger held for years often comes out at the point the danger passes, which is when you start showing up.
**The gap gets more visible.** Being present means being present for what you missed, including how well they now run without you. That is uncomfortable, and it is also evidence of what they had to become.
**They will test it.** Sometimes deliberately, usually not. Something will land on your protected evening. What you do that night is worth more than anything you say for the next six months.
**Children respond to time, not conversation.** With teenagers particularly, the useful move is being available in ordinary time, in the car, in the kitchen, without an agenda. Sit down opposite them for a talk about your absence and you will get very little.
Do not turn the repair into another project
The specific failure mode for someone whose work took over is turning family back into work: a schedule, a system, metrics, an optimised weekend. Then when it does not go to plan, the old feelings arrive, and the fastest known relief for those feelings is work.
Keep it deliberately unimpressive. One commitment, kept, boringly. If you find yourself building a spreadsheet for it, that is worth noticing, and [what you get from working late](/guides/work/what-you-get-from-working-late) is the piece about what is being reproduced.
When the home is part of what you were avoiding
Sometimes the honest answer is that work was not stealing you from home. It was where you went because home was hard: a relationship that had already gone quiet, grief nobody talked about, an illness, a child struggling.
If that is the case, reliability alone will not fix it and the repair needs help of its own. Relationship counselling is a reasonable route, and so is your GP if what is at home is a health or mental health problem. There is no shame in the discovery that the hours were doing a job.
If you are struggling to cope, the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, at any hour, and they take calls about anything.
Renovyn can log whether the protected evening held and let someone you trust see it, which is more honest than your own memory at the end of a busy month. It is a tracking tool rather than treatment or counselling.
Common questions
**How long does it take for them to trust me again?** Longer than feels fair, and roughly in proportion to how long the pattern ran. Months of small kept commitments rather than weeks. The useful sign is not them saying they trust you, it is them starting to ask you for things again, which happens quietly.
**Should I apologise properly first?** Say it once, briefly, and attach it to a specific change rather than to a promise about the sort of person you are going to be. Repeated apologies without changed behaviour cost you credibility, because they have already been tested.
**My partner says it is too late. What now?** Then keep the commitment anyway, without using it as an argument. Sometimes it changes things and sometimes it does not, and either way the person you live with gets a more reliable household. If the relationship ends, being reliable is still what your children will remember from this period.
**What about the years my children were small?** You cannot get those back, and pretending otherwise with an extravagant holiday tends to land badly. What is available is now, in ordinary time, at their current age. Children and adult children mostly measure the present tense, and they are more forgiving of the past than most parents expect.
Sources
[NHS, Addiction: what is it?](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/addiction-support/addiction-what-is-it/): The definition of addiction, work named directly alongside the effect on relationships and family life, and the Samaritans line.
[Workaholics Anonymous, Am I a Workaholic?](https://workaholics-anonymous.org/am-i-a-workaholic/): The self-check questions on work taken to bed, weekends and holidays, and on excitement about work over family.
[WHO and ILO, Long working hours increasing deaths from heart disease and stroke](https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2021-long-working-hours-increasing-deaths-from-heart-disease-and-stroke-who-ilo): What sustained long hours are associated with, for the reader weighing what the pattern has already cost.
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