It’s hard to identify and convey degrees of pain which I suspect was part of your problem communicating with the nurses. Ultimately, with physical pain we can often muddle through with something like the 10 point pain scale doctors use as most of us have experience roughly equivalent truly intense pain and there isn’t that much interpersonal variation in how unpleasant we find different kinds of physical pain.
However, with emotional pain it’s almost impossible to convey how uncomfortable something should be to other people. For instance, we all dislike being called out but my wife finds it almost unbearable that a veiled suggestion she’s being insensitive to X people on an anonymous internet comment of hers can bother her for days. I’ll deliberately jump into such fights but the thought of unknowingly violating a social protocol and being seen as presuming more than my due bothers me enough that I go to great lengths to avoid having to ask people if they speak English (temporarily living in Israel). Both of us find intellectual disagreements completely troubling but I know people who can’t stand being in that kind of aggressive confrontation.
So how could I possibly give someone advice on how much apologizing will hurt? If they’re the type of person who takes embarrassment super seriously it will be totally different than if it’s not big deal.
I think it’s quite possible I’m misunderstanding what your suggesting. Maybe you could describe the kind of advice you think would be helpful.
If you actually follow the advice about glomarization it is no longer improbable that you will be interrogated by someone who has read the rationalist literature on the subject and thought through the consequences. Investigators do their homework and being committed enough to glomarize frequently enough to do the intended work is a feature that will stick out like a sore thumb when your associates are interviews and immediately send the investigator out to read the literature.
Now maybe most investigators aren’t anywhere near this through but if you are facing an investigator who doesn’t even bother looking into your normal behavior your glomarization is irrelevant anyway.