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RELATIONAL TRAUMA
Upper Limits: How much goodness are you capable of letting in?
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
Upper limiting , the unconscious habit of sabotaging goodness just as it arrives , is one of the most under-discussed patterns in driven women with relational trauma backgrounds. Your nervous system has an internal thermostat for how much joy you believe you’re allowed to feel, set by early experiences long before you had any say in the matter. This post explores how upper limiting shows up, why it forms, and how to gradually expand your capacity to let goodness fully land.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
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SUMMARY
Upper limiting is the unconscious tendency to sabotage or diminish good things just as they’re arriving. An under-recognized pattern in driven women with relational trauma backgrounds. Understanding your nervous system’s ceiling for positive experience is the first step to genuinely letting goodness land.
Definition
Upper Limiting: A term from Gay Hendricks’ work describing the unconscious tendency to self-sabotage, create conflict, or diminish good experiences when they exceed an internal ‘upper limit’ for how much goodness we believe we’re allowed to have. Often rooted in childhood messages about worth, safety, and what we deserve.
Do you sometimes feel guilty for receiving good opportunities because the people around you don’t have the same thing going on for them?
Do you ever get completely freaked out when things start going well and, before you know it, find yourself self-sabotaging all those good things?
If any of this resonates with you, it may be that you wrestle with letting in more than a certain level of goodness and happiness into your life. You may have an Upper Limit Problem.
If you’re curious about what this is, how this might show up in your life and what to do if you do indeed have an Upper Limit Problem, keep reading…
Upper limiting, a term drawn from Gay Hendricks’ work on the upper limit problem, is the unconscious tendency to sabotage positive experiences, relationships, or momentum just as they reach a threshold of goodness that exceeds what the nervous system believes it deserves. The internal thermostat for joy and success is set early, calibrated by what was safe to expect in the original family system, and it operates automatically beneath conscious awareness. When good things arrive in excess of that threshold, the nervous system generates anxiety, conflict, or self-defeating behavior to restore a familiar level of toleration. In my work with driven women, upper limiting is one of the most invisible patterns , because the sabotage is always disguised as something reasonable.
In short: Upper limiting is the unconscious tendency to sabotage positive experiences the moment they exceed an internally set threshold for how much goodness feels safe to receive.
I’ve spent more than 15,000 clinical hours with driven women whose self-sabotage patterns trace directly to early relational conditioning about how much joy and success was safe or permitted. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, researchers who developed self-determination theory, documented how early conditional regard shapes the internalized sense of what one is permitted to want and receive (Deci and Ryan 2000).
What’s an Upper Limit Problem?
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.
I’ll be honest, the reason I’m bringing this whole Upper Limit Problem topic up with you is because I’ve recently had a flood of wonderful things happening in my own life: I recently got engaged, had several of my blog posts get picked up by a major mental health website, fulfilled some big career milestones, and have just generally been feeling good in my personal life, too.
And then recently I noticed how uncomfortable I was starting to feel about all these good things.
I started to notice how, frankly, unfamiliar and uncomfortable I was with this whole new level of wonderfulness. I started to reflect on this and dig into it to figure out why. That’s when I remembered this concept called “the Upper Limit Problem” that psychotherapist Gay Hendricks PhD coined. And I started to get curious if this was playing out in my own life.
Upper Limit Problems, according to my understanding of what Dr. Hendricks explains, assumes we have a sort of internal thermostat for how good we are willing to let ourselves feel.
What is your internal thermostat level for joy and success, and how is it set?
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