The Systemic Lens: Why “Too Much” Is a Political Issue
“Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes?… But still, like air, I’ll rise.”
— Maya Angelou, And Still I Rise
“Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.” – Lois Wyse
“You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.”
MAYA ANGELOU, Poet, “Still I Rise,” 1978
A woman who is told she is “too much” is, in my opinion, as much as political issue as it is a personal issue.
What do I mean by this?
Well, to quote the famous feminist phrase, “the personal is political.”
This term – coined in the 1960’s to underscore how what was happening in an individual woman’s home lives (access to reproductive rights, wage equality, etc.) was a universal social and political issue – can, I think, also apply to what women have to deal with on a psychological level, too.
Since time immemorial, women’s power, presence, and emotionality has often been perceived as a threat by certain institutions and certain populations in power.
The arc of history is littered with examples of this. (the one-time pervasive medical diagnosis of “female hysteria” being but one small example.) Remnants of this mindset linger still today in the way society collectively attempts (and succeeds) at silencing, objectifying, labelling, and keeping women small. Small in size (“Don’t get fat!”). Or small in volume (“Don’t be so shrill!”). Small in accomplishments (“Isn’t being a mother and wife enough for you?”). Small in financial prosperity (.79 cents for every dollar a man makes.). And so on.
Through this lens, you being told you’re “too much” is as much a political issue as it is a personal issue.
I want to sit with this for a moment, because I think it matters more than we often let ourselves acknowledge. When an ambitious woman walks into a boardroom and is told she’s being “aggressive” for the same behavior that earns her male colleague the label of “passionate,” something systemic is operating. When a woman of color expresses displeasure and is immediately labeled “angry” — a descriptor that carries a particular and weaponized history — that’s not about her emotional calibration. That’s about who gets permission to have feelings, and whose feelings are deemed acceptable, readable, and safe.
The “too much” label doesn’t land equally across all women. Intersections of race, class, culture, and body size shape who receives this message most aggressively and from the earliest ages. In my work, I’ve sat with Black women who described a lifetime of managing the assumption that their directness was aggression. I’ve worked with Latinas who were told their expressiveness was “dramatic.” I’ve worked with women from immigrant families who were given the message, explicitly, that taking up too much space was a liability their family couldn’t afford. These aren’t isolated experiences. They’re patterns — and they’re rooted in structural dynamics that long predate any individual interaction.
Think about it: where did those around you learn those messages themselves?
At some level in this society we’re conditioned to believe that being “too much” as a woman is a Bad Thing. Hearing that you’re “too much” from your family/friends/coworkers/lovers is as much a political issue as it is a personal issue.
So the next time you hear this message, remember that women throughout the ages have had to deal with this very same message.
I say this not to diminish your personal experience, but rather to help you hold and consider that what you’re struggling with if you receive those messages is a product of a much larger, more systemic, entrenched social and political problem.
So what do you do about it?
“You’re not the same as you were before,” he said. You were much more… muchier… you’ve lost your muchness.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
I loved that moment in the 2010 film Alice in Wonderland when the Mad Hatter told Alice she’d lost her “muchness.”
Muchness may be a made-up word. But I think it perfectly captures the idea of wholeness, vitality, aliveness, uniqueness, loudness, boldness.
Muchness is what I imagine happens when a woman reclaims, owns and accepts all parts of herself. Despite what others would have her be/do/say.
In other words, “muchness” is what happens when a woman psychologically integrates herself.
Luckily, when it comes to reclaiming our own muchness, none of us need go up against a Jabberwocky. (Unless it’s the proverbial psychological Jabberwocky struggle in our soul that would sooner keep us quiet!)
Instead, what we are called upon to do is to acknowledge, own, and accept the parts of us. Parts we may have muted, gagged, bound, stifled and tucked deep down inside of us. (Or whatever flavor of coping you chose for fear of the consequences of “being too much”.)
Reclaiming begins not with a declaration but with a noticing. Before you can reclaim what was muted, you have to see clearly what was muted — and when, and by whom, and under what conditions. In my work with clients, this often starts with something I call a “parts inventory”: a compassionate mapping of the qualities, emotions, and expressions that you learned, somewhere along the way, were not okay. Your loudness, your anger, your neediness, your sexuality, your ambition, your grief. Each disowned part tends to carry a memory, often from early life, of the moment it was first deemed too much.
That doesn’t mean every session descends into childhood archaeology. Sometimes the most powerful reclaiming work is present-tense: noticing the moment you start to self-edit, pausing there, and asking, what am I afraid will happen if I don’t shrink right now? The answer, when you slow down enough to hear it, usually isn’t about the current conversation at all. It’s about something much older.
DEFINITION
AFFECT INTENSITY
A stable individual difference in the strength with which people experience their emotions, independent of their valence (positive or negative) or frequency. First formally characterized by psychologist Randy J. Larsen, PhD, Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, affect intensity describes the subjective magnitude of emotional response — people high in affect intensity don’t just experience more emotions; they experience each emotion with greater force. Research by Larsen and colleagues established that affect intensity is a heritable, trait-level characteristic, not a symptom of pathology or an indicator of poor coping. It is associated with both the depth of positive emotional experience and greater vulnerability to emotional pain.
In plain terms: If you feel things deeply — joy, grief, love, frustration, awe — more intensely than the people around you, you’re not broken and you’re not “too much.” You may simply be someone with high affect intensity. That’s a temperament, not a disorder. It means you’re likely also capable of deeper connection, greater creativity, and more profound experience of beauty and meaning. The work isn’t to turn down the volume. It’s to build the inner capacity to hold what you feel without being capsized by it.
Both/And: You Can Be Too Much AND Still Be Exactly Right
Here’s what I want to say carefully, because toxic positivity helps no one: sometimes the feedback that you’re “too much” has landed in relationships or situations where there genuinely wasn’t a fit. Sometimes you have flooded a partner who needed more quiet. Sometimes your intensity did overwhelm a colleague who wasn’t resourced to meet it.
Holding that reality doesn’t mean the original message was true. It means you get to hold both things at once.
Both/and thinking is one of the most powerful tools in psychological reclaiming work. It lets you step out of the binary — either I’m fine exactly as I am, or I am in fact too much — and into something more honest and more spacious.
You can be too much for that relationship AND exactly right for the right one. You can have moments where your emotional intensity isn’t serving you AND still know that your depth is a gift. You can be in the process of learning to regulate AND refuse to pathologize your feelings. You can acknowledge the ways your wounding has shaped your behavior AND stop apologizing for the size of your soul.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s integration. And it’s the actual work.
I want to add something here that I don’t see discussed enough: the difference between learning to regulate and learning to perform regulation. Many of the women I work with have become extraordinarily skilled at the latter. They’ve learned to look calm in meetings when they’re actually flooded. They’ve learned to respond to conflict with measured words when internally their nervous system is in full alarm. They’ve mastered the art of appearing regulated, which is not the same thing as actually being regulated — and the chronic gap between those two states is one of the most exhausting things a person can maintain.
Real regulation isn’t about managing how you appear to others. It’s about genuinely widening your capacity to be with your own emotional experience — so that you’re not constantly fighting your own nervous system to perform a version of yourself that feels safe enough for the room. That’s the work that actually frees you. And it takes time, support, and usually a good therapist who isn’t intimidated by the size of what you carry.
What does the work of psychological reclaiming actually look like?
The work of psychological reclaiming is not some bulleted step-by-step guidance I can script out in this article. Instead it’s a journey. A long, ever-unfolding psychological journey akin to an archaeology dig where you get in touch with all of you – your loudness, your bigness, your lusts, your dreams, your hungers, your deep desires and big feelings – and work to accept and allow all of these parts back into your life again.
This is how you reclaim your “muchness.”
So if you’ve ever been told that you’re “too much” or any other iteration of this message AND you’ve felt shame, guilt, or rejection about these parts of you, that’s a terrific starting point for doing some self-reflection, boundary-setting, some therapy, some psychological reclaiming work on parts of you that may still need to be integrated within yourself.
The next time someone tells you that you’re “too much” and you feel shame, consider this a gift. An opportunity, a doorway into reclaiming this part of you, your “muchness.”
In practical terms, this work often unfolds across several layers. There’s the cognitive layer: beginning to identify and challenge the internalized beliefs about how much space you’re allowed to take up. There’s the relational layer: deliberately seeking out and staying in relationships where your full self is welcomed — and learning to tolerate the vulnerability of being truly seen. And then there’s the somatic layer, which is often the deepest and most necessary: working directly with the body, because the “too much” message didn’t just shape your thoughts. It lives in your muscles, your breath, your posture, the way you habitually make yourself physically smaller in a room.
Modalities like EMDR, somatic experiencing, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) are particularly well-suited to this work because they reach the places that insight alone can’t touch. You can intellectually understand that you weren’t too much — you can have a therapist tell you so, you can read every book on the subject — and still brace your shoulders every time you walk into a meeting, still lower your voice mid-sentence, still feel the familiar tightening in your chest when someone looks displeased. That’s because the healing that needs to happen isn’t primarily cognitive. It’s physiological. It’s relational. It’s being witnessed, fully, by someone who doesn’t flinch — and letting that experience, over time, rewrite the older one.
“Even to me the issue of “stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest” sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices.” – Brené Brown, PhD
We as women still, sadly, live in a world that would sooner see us small, quiet, and pleasing. Than to be “too much” of anything, really.
(We needn’t look further for reinforcement of this double bind of being a modern woman than the sexist hyper-scrutiny of her emotionality, composure, and relatability that Hillary Clinton is facing in this presidential campaign.)
But when we steep and surround ourselves with supports that actually encourage us to be more of who we are, resources that call out and nurture all those disowned and rejected parts of ourselves, when we keep company with those who are not intimidated by our bigness, loudness, boldness, intelligence, ambition, hungers, etc., we give ourselves the nurturing and permission we may need to reclaim our “muchness.”
This list of resources below at the close of the article is a small collection of supports that I’ve personally found valuable.
And I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. What are some additional resources you’ve found that have helped encourage you to step more into your “muchness”? Leave a message in the comments so our community of blog readers can benefit from your wisdom.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
You’ve been carrying the weight of other people’s limitations for a long time. You’ve been making yourself smaller to fit into spaces that were never really big enough for you. And the fact that you’re still here — still feeling, still reaching, still asking questions like the ones in this post — tells me something about the size of your spirit.
You don’t need to earn the right to take up space. You don’t need to become less so that others can feel comfortable. The women who’ve been told they’re too much are, almost without exception, the ones the world needs most right now.
Your muchness isn’t the problem. It never was.
Resources
- Women and Spirituality, a trio of documentaries exploring the power of the sacred feminine in mythological, historical, and cultural contexts
If you recognize yourself in these words — if you’re a driven, ambitious woman whose intensity has always felt like both your greatest asset and your deepest vulnerability — you may want to explore therapy for driven and ambitious women. I work with women like you every day. You can also book a complimentary consultation to see if we’re a good fit.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q: Is being “too much” actually a trauma response?
A: Often, yes. When children are told repeatedly that their feelings, needs, or presence is too much, they learn to either suppress those parts entirely — or to amplify them as a way of being heard. Both can be trauma adaptations. What looks like “too much” in adulthood is frequently an unmet need that never found a safe landing place. It’s not a character flaw; it’s a response to an environment that couldn’t hold you.
Q: How do I stop dimming myself down in relationships?
A: Start by noticing the moments you self-edit — mid-sentence, before sending a message, in a meeting when you almost spoke up. The dimming is automatic, which means it lived in your nervous system long before it lived in your mind. Therapy helps, particularly approaches like EMDR or Internal Family Systems that work directly with the parts of you that learned to go small. So does deliberately choosing relationships and spaces where your full self is welcomed, not managed.
Q: What’s the difference between being intense and being dysregulated?
A: Intensity is a trait — a depth of feeling, passion, or engagement that is part of who you are. Dysregulation is a state — when your nervous system is flooded and you’re reacting from a place of overwhelm rather than choice. You can be an intense person who is well-regulated, and a low-intensity person who is frequently dysregulated. The goal isn’t to become less intense; it’s to build enough nervous system capacity that your intensity becomes an asset rather than a liability.
Q: My family always told me I was “too much.” How do I know what’s true?
A: The most useful question isn’t “was I too much?” — it’s “too much for what?” Your family had their own capacity limits, their own unprocessed wounds, their own inherited beliefs about how much space a woman should take up. That’s real, and it shaped you. But it doesn’t define the objective truth of who you are. Seeking out relationships, communities, and a therapist who can witness the fullness of you — and not flinch — is how you begin to calibrate a more honest answer.
Q: Can therapy help me reclaim the parts of myself I’ve been told are too much?
A: Yes — this is some of the most meaningful work that happens in the therapy room. Approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, and somatic therapy are particularly effective at reaching the exiled parts of you that went underground under the weight of those early messages. Therapy won’t make you less; it will help you become more — more integrated, more at ease with yourself, more able to choose when and where to bring your full presence. If you’re ready to begin, reach out here.
References
- Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books. View source
- Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 12, 213-226. View source
- Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press. View source
- Hanisch, C. (1970). The Personal is Political. Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation. View source
- Showalter, E. (1985). The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Virago Press. View source
- U.S. Census Bureau. (2023). Poverty in the United States: 2022. U.S. Government Printing Office. View source
- Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality. Farrar & Rinehart. View source
- Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. Norton & Company. View source
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. View source
- Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press. View source
- Larsen, R. J., & Diener, E. (1987). Affect intensity as an individual difference characteristic: A review. Journal of Research in Personality, 21(1), 1–39. View source
- Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Gotham Books. View source
- Kahn, K. F. (1996). The Political Consequences of Being a Woman: How Stereotypes Influence the Conduct and Consequences of Political Campaigns. Columbia University Press. View source
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About the Author
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT #95719 · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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