By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Last updated May 2026

When you're feeling absolutely overwhelmed, read this.

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • February 20, 2022

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

SUMMARY

You are feeling overwhelmed because your nervous system is flooded, signaling that the demands on you right now have exceeded your capacity to cope. And this is a physiological response, not a weakness or personal failing. If you grew up with relational trauma, where dependable love and protection were missing or inconsistent, your overwhelm often feels permanent and your nervous system stays on edge, leaving you raw, exposed, and wary of connection.

Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Why does Annie write these pep talk posts, and who are they really for?
2. If you’re completely overwhelmed right now, is this message for you?
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
4. Frequently Asked Questions

Relational trauma refers to deep emotional wounds that come from early experiences with caregivers or significant people who were inconsistent, unavailable, or harmful in ways that left lasting marks on your sense of safety and self. It is not about having endured obvious abuse or neglect; often, it’s the absence of dependable love and protection that creates this invisible, aching injury. This matters to you because, as a driven woman who grew up navigating complicated or unreliable family dynamics, relational trauma quietly shapes your inner world, making overwhelm feel like a constant companion and making connection feel risky, even when you long for both. Understanding relational trauma helps you see why some parts of your experience are so raw and why healing requires patience, compassion, and practical support.

• You are feeling overwhelmed because your nervous system is flooded, signaling that the demands on you right now have exceeded your capacity to cope. And this is a physiological response, not a weakness or personal failing.
• If you grew up with relational trauma, where dependable love and protection were missing or inconsistent, your overwhelm often feels permanent and your nervous system stays on edge, leaving you raw, exposed, and wary of connection.
• Healing begins by treating overwhelm as a signal that needs your care, using grounded, practical ways to soothe your nervous system in the moment and gradually becoming your own good-enough inner parent who provides the comfort and guidance you lacked.

1. Today’s essay is another in what’s become a multi-year series of pep talk posts.
2. These posts are meant for anyone and everyone who is feeling overwhelmed right now, of course.
3. When you feel absolutely overwhelmed, read this.
4. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma

QUICK ANSWER · UPDATED JUNE 2026

Feeling overwhelmed is a nervous system event, not a personal failing: it signals that current demands have exceeded your regulated capacity and the body has entered flooding, where clear thinking is physiologically impaired. For women with relational trauma, the threshold is often lower because the nervous system learned to treat uncertainty as existential threat. In my work with driven women, the first intervention when everything feels like too much is almost always physiological before it’s cognitive.

In short: Feeling overwhelmed is a physiological state, not a character flaw; nervous system flooding temporarily disables the exact brain regions needed for perspective and problem-solving.

HOW I KNOW THIS

I’ve worked with women in acute and chronic overwhelm across more than 15,000 clinical hours, and the relational trauma history is the variable that most reliably explains why some people’s threshold is so much lower. Stephen Porges, PhD (Porges 2011) established through polyvagal theory how chronic early threat exposure lowers the nervous system’s stress-tolerance baseline in ways that persist into adulthood.

Why does Annie write these pep talk posts, and who are they really for?

DEFINITION RELATIONAL TRAUMA

Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.

Definition

Overwhelm: Overwhelm is a state in which the nervous system becomes flooded. When the demands placed on us exceed our current capacity to cope. It is not a character flaw or weakness; it is a physiological response that signals a need for regulation, support, or a recalibration of expectations.

Essays, letters, words of comfort from me to you meant to help you get through hard times and internalize the voice of a good-enough mother, father, and, at times, the grandparent you’re missing so much or never had.

SUMMARY

When you’re overwhelmed, your nervous system is signaling that something is genuinely too much. And that signal deserves respect, not dismissal. For driven women with childhood or relational trauma backgrounds, overwhelm can feel permanent, but it isn’t. This post offers practical, grounded ways to regulate your nervous system in the moment and come back to yourself.

Why do I write these essays and pep talks when they’re so different from my normal psychoeducation essays and articles?

Because life , for everyone , can feel incredibly hard and overwhelming and heavy at times.

And life , when you come from a relational trauma background where you possibly don’t have the buffering impacts of a consistent, constant, loving, devoted, and competent family of origin members , can, at times, make you feel overwhelmed, like moving through the world without a skin.

Raw and exposed, more prone to the pain and stings, lacking a barrier between you and hardship that some others seem to have and take for granted.

If you’re completely overwhelmed right now, is this message for you?

But these posts are especially meant for those who can’t pick up the phone and call their mother or father for advice. 

For comfort. Reassurance. Guidance. Critical logistical support.

These essays are my gift to those of you who feel proverbially (and actually) orphaned and alone in this world, hungry for solace from parenting sources who can’t give it to you.

Please, read these words, and imagine a loving, devoted, fiercely protective parent is speaking them to you.

Soak the words in and come back to this post when you feel overwhelmed.

Re-read it again and again until you can internalize some of and all of what is said as you work at becoming your own good-enough inner mother and father, moving through this sometimes very overwhelming world. 

And please know that I’m right there with you and I care about you so much. 

We may not know each other, but I know what it is to feel absolutely overwhelmed and hungry for comfort , just like you.  

What do you most need to hear when you feel absolutely overwhelmed?

Honey. 

You have been going through a really, really tough time, haven’t you?

It’s been one thing after another for you , truly one hard thing after another for the last few months. 

Any one of those things that you’ve faced would have felt like a lot , too much, really , for most people.

And yet you’ve had to deal with many, many hard things for a long time now.

You’re holding all of this. 

You are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. 

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”

Maya Angelou, poet and author, Letter to My Daughter

And I know this has all taken a toll on you , I see it. 

I hear it in your voice. You sound sad, and you sound tired.

I see it on your face. Your smile doesn’t come as often these days. I see it in your eyes. They look far away and distant.

I can sense it in your heart. You feel heavy and burdened, and you don’t feel light and hopeful. 

You feel worn down, weary, tired, and I know you’re probably questioning “Why me? And when do I get a break?”

Oh honey, I know you’re tired. 

And this feels like it’s too much because it is too much. 

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It’s too much for any one person to have to deal with.

Honey, I really wish I could wave a magic wand and change this for you.

I wish I could take away your struggles and your pain right now.

I don’t understand why so many hard things are happening to you all at once right now but I really hate that it’s happening to you.

You’re my child and I don’t want you to feel this much pain!

But I also know that life is life and life is hard sometimes.

Life means pain sometimes.

So while I can’t take it away, while I don’t have that magic wand, while I can’t protect you from all of the pain of life, I want to be here in it with you.

I want you to know that you’re not alone.

I want you to feel me in the darkness with you.

Thank you. Check your inbox.

Your guide is on its way.

And I want to be with you every step of the way through these hard times.

When you have that hard conversation.

When you get those biopsy results.

Or when you hear back from your lawyer.

When you meet with your divorce mediator.

When you have to hold space for your team and customers when you feel like you don’t have a shred or scrap of empathy left to give.

Or when you have to regulate your own emotions to show up for the other people in your life having a hard time.

When you’ve spent all night at the hospital, not sleeping, at your child’s bedside.

When you have to work a nine-hour day after four hours of sleep. Because you’re the primary breadwinner and you have no choice.

When you’re the only one who can get up just as you’re falling asleep to double-check that the locks are locked again.

When you have to run the numbers, again and again, figuring out a way to make tuition and the mortgage and those extra field trip expenses possible this month.

Or when you feel acutely lonely in your marriage but see no way out.

When you feel deprioritized by the friends in your life.

When you feel like you can’t swing your legs out of bed and be an adult for one more day.

I want to be with you every step of the way through all of these hard things.

I may not be able to have that hard conversation for you. But I will be here to let you talk through it with me before and after.

I can’t control the outcome of your biopsy results. But no matter what they are, I’ll be with you every step of the way to deal with whatever comes.

I can’t control what your lawyer will tell you about what happens next. But I’ll be waiting by my phone if you want or need to cry after you hear back.

I don’t know what your ex will say or do in mediation. But you will always, always have a home with me as long as I’m alive. You don’t have to worry about where you and the kids will go.

Honey. I love you so much and I see how much you’re struggling.

I can’t take away all of life’s pain. But I can be with you through it all, showing up however and whenever I can to help you feel less lonely, less scared.

I am so, so proud of you and the person that you’ve become.

You are a remarkable person. Full of grit and grace and resilience.

When I held you as a baby, I never dreamed of the person you would become.

You eclipsed my wildest dreams because of who you have become.

And I don’t mean about your career or the other accomplishments you’ve logged.

I’m talking about your character, your soul.

You’re a remarkable person who does so much good in this world, who tries her best to be a good citizen, to give back, to be responsible.

I see how you open the doors for others, and how you help older people reach the cans on the top shelves at the grocery store.

I see how you make eye contact with the homeless people on the street, not ignoring them but honoring their humanity by making eye contact.

You pay your taxes, you bring food to sick and injured friends, you recycle and care about your carbon emissions, you donate to charities and work to become actively anti-racist.

You do your best to be a good person in this world and I am so, so proud of you.

And I know that it probably doesn’t feel fair that. After trying to be such a good person. You still have all these hard and bad things happening to you.

I don’t know why they’re happening to you, honey.

They’re not your fault, you didn’t do anything wrong.

This isn’t karma or justice for past mistakes honey. The world doesn’t work like that.

Sometimes terrible, hard things happen to really good people. People who. Just like you. Try to do everything right.

I truly wish that wasn’t the case. For anyone but especially for you.

But even though I wish these things weren’t happening to you, here’s what I do know: you will get through this.

You will get through this.

And you will get through this with the grace and grit that I’ve seen in you since you were young.

You may not be able to see a way through these hard times right now and that’s okay. You don’t have to.

Let me hold that faith and hope for you.

You can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I know it’s there.

I know these hard times will end. I don’t know when and I don’t know how. But I do know they will end.

And I know. Deep in my bones. That you will come through to the other side of these times stronger, more resilient, and wiser than you were before.

You have gone through hard times before and I’ve seen how you’ve grown each time you moved through them.

I remember, too, how in those other hard times, you thought that the hard times would never end. I remember you telling me that.

Telling me that you couldn’t see a way out and how worried you were that you’d never be happy and at ease again.

But those times ended and you were happy and at ease eventually again.

I remember.

And I trust that that will be true again for you when these hard times pass.

But of course, you feel overwhelmed and worn down right now, honey.

Anyone going through what you’re going through would!

It’s totally normal and natural to feel what you’re feeling.

You get to feel defeated.

You get to feel worn down.

To want to give up.

To hate being an adult.

You get to feel all of your feelings!

So take a day, a weekend, a week, take whatever time you need to feel really, truly sorry for yourself.

Let yourself feel how unfair and overwhelming it is!

You won’t drown in those feelings.

I imagine you’ll actually feel better if you allow yourself to feel what you’re really feeling.

Feeling your feelings won’t stop you from doing what needs to be done.

It will help you get done what needs to be done.

I know you. You’re a survivor, honey.

You’re resilient. You’re tough. And you’re resourceful.

I know you’ll keep putting one foot in front of the other because that’s who you are and that’s what you do.

And I’ll be with you every step of the way as you walk through this overwhelm, through this personal hell you’re dealing with now.

As long as there is breath in my body, I’ll never leave you and you’ll never be alone.

I can’t take away all of life’s hard times for you, honey.

But I can be with you through them.

I love you so much. I’m right here, in this with you. I love you.

How Overwhelm Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with clients, I’ve noticed that overwhelm doesn’t look the same for everyone. And it looks particularly specific in driven women. For many of the women I work with, overwhelm arrives not as a dramatic breakdown but as a slow, grinding compression. The calendar fills. The standards don’t drop. The internal voice that says “you should be able to handle this” gets louder, not quieter.

Take Lisa, a hospitalist physician and mother of two who came to see me after her third year in a row of “just making it through.” On the surface, everything looked intact. The job, the marriage, the kids in good schools. Internally, she described feeling like she was “running on fumes held together by cortisol.” She wasn’t sleeping. She was snapping at her husband and immediately feeling flooded with guilt. She’d stopped exercising. The one thing that had always helped. Because she couldn’t find thirty minutes that didn’t belong to someone else.

What I see consistently in women like Lisa is that overwhelm becomes invisible because ambition and responsibility make excellent masks. The very traits that helped these women succeed. The capacity to push through, to delay gratification, to prioritize others’ needs. Become liabilities in a state of genuine dysregulation. The adaptive strategies that worked in calmer seasons become the walls of the trap.

Overwhelm in driven women often shows up as:

• Irritability toward the people you love most, followed by a wash of shame
• An inability to rest even when rest is technically available. Lying down but unable to stop the mental scrolling
• Decision fatigue so profound that choosing what to eat for dinner feels genuinely impossible
• A creeping sense that you’re failing at everything while still technically succeeding at most of it
• Physical symptoms: chronic tension headaches, digestive issues, sleep disruption, getting sick repeatedly
• Emotional flatness. A numbness that arrives after too long in survival mode

If you recognize yourself in this list, I want you to hear something clearly: this is not a failure of character. This is a physiological response to an impossible load. And if you grew up in an environment where your needs were consistently secondary to everyone else’s, your capacity to even recognize when you’re overwhelmed may be compromised. Because you were never taught to treat your own signals as worth listening to.

When Overwhelm Has Roots: The Relational Trauma Connection

Not all overwhelm is created equal. There’s a particular quality to the overwhelm experienced by women who grew up in environments where safety, soothing, and repair were inconsistent or absent. For these women. And this describes many of the clients I work with. Overwhelm doesn’t feel like a temporary state to move through. It feels permanent. It feels like proof.

Research on adverse childhood experiences consistently shows that adults who grew up with chronic stress, emotional neglect, or relational instability have measurably different stress-response thresholds. Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and developer of the Polyvagal Theory, explains that the nervous system literally learns from early caregiving environments what level of activation is “normal.” If chaos, tension, or emotional unavailability was the baseline of your childhood, your nervous system may be running at a threat-response level that most people would find unbearable. And you may not even notice it anymore, because it’s simply how you’ve always felt.

This response is important clinical information. This dynamic means that when you feel overwhelmed, you’re not just dealing with today’s stressors. You’re often dealing with a nervous system that never got the chance to fully settle. One that has been in some version of high alert for years, possibly decades. The good news is that this is changeable. The nervous system is plastic. Regulation can be learned, especially in the context of a safe, attuned therapeutic relationship.

If you’ve ever thought “I shouldn’t be this affected” or “Other people handle this fine. What’s wrong with me?”. I want to offer a gentle reframe. You may simply be living with a nervous system shaped by experiences that made it more sensitive to threat. That’s not weakness. That’s history. And history, with the right support, can be metabolized.

Both/And: You Are Both Overwhelmed AND Resilient

When you’re in the middle of overwhelm, the mind wants to collapse into one truth: I can’t do this. I’m drowning. This is too much. And that truth is real. What’s also real , simultaneously, not instead , is that you’ve survived every previous version of too much. You’re here, reading this, which means some part of you is still reaching toward help and toward hope.

In my work with clients, the both/and that matters most during periods of overwhelm is this: you don’t have to be okay right now and you are going to be okay eventually. Both can be true at the same time. You’re allowed to fall apart today and trust that you’ll find your footing again. You’re allowed to feel completely defeated and still be, underneath all of it, deeply resilient.

The driven women I work with often resist this framing because it feels like weakness to acknowledge the first part. If I admit I’m not okay, they worry, I might not be able to pull myself back together. But I’ve watched the opposite happen, again and again: the women who allow themselves to genuinely acknowledge their overwhelm , who stop white-knuckling through it , are the ones who find their way through it faster.

Meera, a physician I worked with, spent eighteen months managing a parent’s terminal illness while holding down a demanding hospital schedule and raising two young children. She came to me utterly depleted, ashamed that she was struggling when, as she put it, “other people have it so much worse.” The work we did together wasn’t about eliminating her overwhelm. It was about letting her hold both: this is genuinely too much for one person and I am capable of getting through it. Holding both allowed her to finally ask for help , something she’d been unable to do when she was only holding the second truth.

The Systemic Lens: When Overwhelm Isn’t Just Personal

There’s a cultural story that tells driven women their overwhelm is a personal productivity problem. If you just optimized your systems better, managed your time more efficiently, said no more strategically , you wouldn’t feel this way. This story is not just unhelpful; it’s actively harmful.

The overwhelm that so many driven women experience isn’t a failure of personal organization. It’s the predictable result of systems that were never designed to support them. Women in professional roles , especially women from relational trauma backgrounds , are disproportionately carrying invisible labor: emotional labor, domestic labor, the labor of managing relationships and appearances and the feelings of everyone around them, on top of their formal professional responsibilities.

Bruce Perry, MD, PhD, psychiatrist and neuroscientist, co-author of What Happened to You? with Oprah Winfrey, has written extensively about how chronic stress depletes the brain’s capacity for higher-order functioning. When you’re operating in sustained overwhelm, you’re not failing at being an adult , your nervous system is doing exactly what nervous systems do when they’ve been pushed past their capacity for too long. (PMID: 16311898)

Naming the systemic dimension of overwhelm isn’t about removing responsibility. It’s about directing your energy accurately. You don’t need to be fixed. You need more support, more rest, more spaciousness , and a culture that stops treating women’s depletion as a personal character flaw rather than a predictable outcome of the impossible load so many carry.

If you’re wondering whether individual therapy might be part of your support system, I’d welcome that conversation. Sometimes the most radical act of self-care is simply deciding you don’t have to carry this alone.

Summary

This pep talk offers the parental comfort and reassurance that those from relational trauma backgrounds can’t access, words from a good-enough parent for when you’re overwhelmed and can’t call your mother or father for guidance, comfort, or support. When you lack the buffering impact of a consistent, loving family of origin, moving through hardship feels like living without skin, raw and exposed to pain others seem protected from. The message acknowledges the unfairness of multiple struggles hitting at once, the hard conversations, medical scares, divorce proceedings, financial pressures, sleepless nights, validating that yes, this IS too much for any one person to handle.

These words offer what trauma survivors often missed: a parent who sees your exhaustion, validates your struggle, can’t fix everything but promises to stay with you through it all, through biopsy results, lawyer meetings, hospital vigils, and the bone-deep loneliness. The voice reminds you of your remarkable character, your resilience, how you’ve survived hard times before even when you couldn’t see the way through. Most importantly, it grants permission to feel overwhelmed, to take time to grieve the unfairness, knowing that feeling your feelings won’t stop you from doing what needs doing, it will help you get through. This internalized parental voice becomes part of your own good-enough inner parent, proof that even without biological family support, you’re never truly alone.

FAQs

Why do trauma survivors need “parental pep talks” as adults?

Those from relational trauma backgrounds often lack access to parental comfort and guidance during life’s hardships. These pep talks help internalize the voice of a good-enough parent, providing the reassurance and validation that would typically come from calling a supportive mother or father during overwhelming times.

What does it mean to feel like you’re “moving through the world without skin”?

This describes the raw vulnerability trauma survivors experience without the buffering protection of a supportive family. Where others have emotional barriers and family support systems that cushion life’s blows, trauma survivors face hardships without that protective layer.

How can reading imagined parental words actually help?

Repeatedly reading nurturing parental messages helps internalize a supportive inner voice, building the good-enough inner parent you never had. This creates new neural pathways of self-compassion and validation, countering the critical or absent parental voices from childhood.

Is it normal to feel “too overwhelmed” when multiple things go wrong?

Absolutely. When you’re dealing with medical scares, divorce, financial pressure, and caregiving simultaneously without family support, feeling overwhelmed isn’t weakness, it’s an appropriate response to an objectively overwhelming situation. Anyone would struggle with what you’re carrying.

Can I really develop an inner supportive parent if I never had one?

Yes. Through reading supportive messages, therapy, and practice, you can develop an internalized caring parental voice. While it doesn’t erase the loss of not having this originally, it provides real comfort and guidance when you need parental support.

Building Inner Parental Voices Through Reparative Therapy

When you tell your therapist you have no one to call when life falls apart, no mother to comfort you through medical scares, no father to offer guidance through divorce, you’re identifying a profound absence that therapy can help fill by developing what you never received: an internalized good-enough parent who stays with you through overwhelming times, understanding that these words of comfort on very hard days become building blocks for the supportive inner voice you’re creating.

Your trauma-informed therapist becomes a temporary stand-in for that missing parent, offering the validation, reassurance, and unconditional regard that helps you gradually internalize these messages: that you’re seen in your struggle, that your overwhelm makes sense, that someone believes you’ll survive this even when you can’t see how. Through consistent therapeutic relationship, you experience what it feels like to have someone hold hope for you when yours runs out, to be reminded of your resilience when you feel only weakness, to receive permission to feel devastated without being told you’re too sensitive.

The therapeutic work involves not just receiving these messages but learning to generate them internally, practicing self-compassion when your default is self-criticism, offering yourself the comfort you’d give a beloved friend, recognizing that the harsh inner voice isn’t truth but trauma’s echo.

Your therapist helps you identify moments when you’ve survived previous “impossible” times, building evidence that contradicts trauma’s message that you’re alone and helpless, teaching you to become the parent who says “I don’t know how we’ll get through this, but we will, and I’m not leaving you.” Through experiential exercises, guided imagery, and the corrective experience of the therapeutic relationship itself, you develop capacity to self-soothe during overwhelm, to validate your own struggles, to hold both the reality that life is genuinely too hard right now AND that you’ve survived every previous “too hard” moment.

Most powerfully, reparative therapy helps you understand that developing an inner supportive parent isn’t fantasy or delusion but neuroplasticity in action, your brain literally creating new pathways of self-support where neglect once lived, proving that while you can’t change not having supportive parents originally, you can become the devoted, protective, encouraging parent to yourself now, available 24/7 whenever life threatens to overwhelm you completely.

The invisible patterns you can’t outwork…

Your LinkedIn profile tells one story. Your 3 AM thoughts tell another. This quiz reveals the childhood patterns keeping you running , and why enough is never enough.