RELATIONAL TRAUMA

Upper Limits: How much goodness are you capable of letting in?

RELATIONAL TRAUMA RECOVERY • May 15, 2016

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

SUMMARY

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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. What’s an Upper Limit Problem?
2. What is your internal thermostat level for joy and success, and how is it set?
3. What are some common examples of Upper Limit Problems in everyday life?
4. References

Have you ever had a string of good or great things happen to you and suddenly caught yourself wondering when the other shoe was going to drop?

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.

Related Reading

• What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
• Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
• Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

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…

What’s an Upper Limit Problem?

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.

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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When we surpass our set “thermostat level,” we unconsciously or consciously act out. This is to help regulate our internal emotional state back to a place where it feels more comfortable, more familiar. That’s when Upper Limit Problems start to show up. 

Upper Limits Problems – or in other words, how much joy and goodness we’re willing to let ourselves experience before we start to self-sabotage – like most of our patterns and behaviours, were likely formed by some cluster of formative early life experiences and messages which showed and told us (implicitly or explicitly) “You’re only allowed to feel *this* much goodness.”

When we surpass the level of goodness we unconsciously or consciously believe we’re allowed to have, it’s common for most of us to feel discomfort and perhaps even to act in self-sabotaging ways.

What are some common examples of Upper Limit Problems in everyday life?

What are some examples of how Upper Limit Problems might show up in your own life? The leading questions to the blog post are great examples. But here are some other ways upper limit issues can manifest:

• An inability to tolerate happiness and peace and calm. Instead, scanning the horizon for danger, problems to solve, or things to worry about. Because being anxious is more familiar than being at ease;

• Picking fights with your honey when everything’s going swimmingly because being in a state of conflict is more familiar;

• “Forgetting” deadlines, important emails, or critical details in your work after leaping to a new level of growth. Because struggling at work is more familiar than succeeding;
• Getting sick the day before a big talk that you’ve been dreaming to deliver because some part of you feels threatened or anxious about playing big.

These are just some of the limitless ways Upper Limit Problems might manifest – the possibilities are really endless. In order to help you get clearer on how you personally unconsciously self-sabotage or play out your own Upper Limit Problems, I’ve crafted a series of prompts for you to help deepen your awareness and understanding.

Upper Limits and relational trauma: when “too good” is genuinely terrifying

For most people, Upper Limit Problems are mild and occasional — a touch of anxiety when things are going particularly well, a momentary impulse to pick a fight when life feels almost too sweet. But for women who grew up in homes where safety was unpredictable, where good things had a habit of being suddenly taken away, where joy was followed by punishment or chaos — the Upper Limit Problem runs much deeper.

When you have a relational trauma background, “too much goodness” doesn’t just feel unfamiliar. It can feel genuinely dangerous. The nervous system that learned good things don’t last and hope leads to disappointment and when things are going well, brace yourself — that nervous system doesn’t forget those lessons just because you’re 35 and successful and rationally know things are different now.

Maya, a 41-year-old marketing director I worked with, had built an extraordinary professional life. She’d climbed from an entry-level role to leading a department of forty people. She’d recently bought her dream apartment. Her relationship with her partner of three years was the healthiest she’d ever been in. And she was miserable with anxiety.

“I keep waiting for it to fall apart,” she told me in our second session. “I can’t just enjoy it. Every time things are good, I find something to worry about. I start picking fights with my partner. I stay late at work on Friday nights. I honestly don’t know how to just… be in the good.”

When we traced this pattern back, Maya described a childhood with a mother whose moods were volatile — periods of warmth and connection followed, unpredictably, by withdrawal or rage. The message her nervous system had absorbed: the good never lasts, and the better it feels, the harder the fall. She had developed extraordinary sensitivity to positive emotional states as a warning signal rather than something to lean into.

This is what Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, means when he writes that trauma lives in the body — in the automatic, below-conscious responses that fire before the reasoning mind has a chance to intervene. Maya’s upper limit wasn’t a belief she could think her way out of. It was a somatic pattern that required somatic healing.

The recalibration work, then, isn’t just cognitive — it’s also relational and somatic. It’s learning to stay in the body while good things are happening. To notice the impulse to sabotage and pause before acting on it. To build, slowly and with support, a new set of experiences that teach the nervous system: good things are safe. Joy is allowed. I don’t have to brace myself.

If you recognize yourself in Maya’s story, you’re not alone — and you’re not broken. But this kind of work often requires more than journaling and mantras. It requires the corrective relational experience that comes from trauma-informed therapy — a space where you can practice receiving goodness (including the goodness of being genuinely seen and supported) in the presence of another regulated nervous system.

How do Upper Limit Problems show up in your own life?

Crack open your journal or a fresh Google doc and jot down your answers to the prompts below. Trust me, you’ll receive far more value from this exercise if you write your answers down versus just read through the questions.

• What are the messages you received growing up about being happy or having good things happen to you?
• Do you believe there’s only a certain amount of good things you’re allowed to have happen to you?
• Do you ever feel guilty or uncomfortable when good things happen for you but not for others around you?
• Would you say that it’s more familiar for you to feel discomfort than to feel peace and ease and joy?
• What do you know about your own capacity for tolerating good things? Is there a certain point at which you feel saturated and like you’ve hit your limit?
• What do you know about how you might sneakily act out in order to sabotage your own happiness? (hint: these sneaky ways might show up in the categories of fighting, freezing, or fleeing.)
• Why do you imagine you act out in those ways in particular? Are those patterns familiar for you? Did you watch anyone in your family-of-origin also do this?
• What are you afraid of if you go past your limit of happiness? What might happen or become true for you?

How to recalibrate your own Upper Limits

If you read through this article and saw yourself in my words and are thinking to yourself, “Yep, I definitely have Upper Limit Problems, now what do I do?” I have some suggestions for you about how you (and I!) can begin to recalibrate our own Upper Limits.

First of all, I think that you’re doing the biggest and most important part of the transformational work already: you’re bringing curiosity and awareness as to whether or not you have Upper Limit Problems and how they might show up in your life. Good for you!

Once we begin to bring our awareness to our issues, we begin the process of change because when we’re conscious about something we actually get to have a choice as to whether or not we continue acting in that way.

I’m not saying that changing the way we act is going to be easy, but over time and with continued awareness and repeated new behaviors, I really think it is possible to change and expand how much goodness and happiness we’re willing to let in, essentially recalibrating our own Upper Limits.

Here are some behaviors you can practice that may support recalibrating your own Upper Limits:

Talk it out

Talk to your friends, partner, your therapist. About how much goodness and happiness you feel comfortably letting yourself have. Talk about what you do when you hit your “max.” Get curious with them about why this is and how you can work on it.

Expand your container

And by container, I mean your body, the container of your soul and psyche and heart and mind. One suggestion I received from a mentor long ago was to practice literally stretching and expanding my container through yoga, dance, or movement that felt good when I was trying to expand my capacity to tolerate new and bigger feelings. Try it out and see if intentionally stretching out your tissues helps you make more room for your issues.

Mantras

I’m a big fan of compassionate self-talk to help transform limiting beliefs and I think that when dealing with Upper Limit Problems, it can be particularly helpful to repeat a few mantras to ourselves in the form of compassionate self-talk reminders. I encourage you to create your own phrases but here are a few example mantras to get you started: “I get to receive this – it’s okay for me to feel this happy and to have good things.” “I am worthy of joy, goodness, love, and luck. It’s okay to feel this way.”

Persist

If you find yourself acting out in self-sabotaging ways to limit your own happiness and the amount of goodness you feel comfortable tolerating, persist and keep going. Keep publishing those articles, keep being in relationship, show up for that talk, say yes to that second date, keep up your healthy self-care practices. Keep going in the direction of goodness and know that you may meet resistance. That’s okay and, in fact, it’s normal and natural. We all have Upper Limit issues. The goal is not to get rid of Upper Limits but to continue expanding our capacity to tolerate more and more goodness in our lives. So persist in your plans and keep putting one foot in front of the other, and don’t forget to breathe into it all.

What does moving forward look like once you’ve identified your Upper Limit Problem?

I hope today’s article felt useful to you in some way and that you now have a better understanding of what Upper Limit Problems might look like and how they might specifically show up in your own life.

Now I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

Leave me a message in the comments below and I’ll be sure to respond.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Resources:

• The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks, PhD*

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Self-Sabotage: A Therapist’s Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Hendricks, G. (2009). The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level. HarperOne.
• Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The Impostor Phenomenon in Driven Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice.
• Siegel, D. J. (2010). The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration. W. W. Norton & Company.
• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.

Both/And: You Deserve Goodness AND You Have a History That Makes Receiving It Hard

Here’s the most important both/and in the Upper Limit conversation: you genuinely deserve goodness and your nervous system has real reasons for finding it difficult to tolerate. Both are true. Neither cancels the other out.

In my work with clients, the driven women who struggle most with Upper Limit Problems often carry a private conviction that if they’d just had more discipline, more self-awareness, more willpower, they wouldn’t sabotage the good things in their lives. They treat it as a character flaw. It isn’t. It’s a logical adaptation to early experiences that taught them goodness was temporary, dangerous, or undeserved.

You can want more joy, more ease, more genuine receiving of good things and be genuinely understanding with yourself about why it’s hard. You can practice expanding your capacity for goodness and stop shaming yourself for the times your old ceiling snaps back into place. The self-compassion isn’t weakness — it’s the prerequisite for change. We can’t recalibrate a thermostat we’re simultaneously beating ourselves up for having.

The both/and that heals: I deserve more goodness than I currently let myself have and there are real reasons I find it hard, and those reasons deserve compassion, not contempt. When you can hold those simultaneously — not collapsing into self-blame or helplessness — the actual work of expansion becomes possible.

The Systemic Lens: Why Upper Limiting Is a Cultural Pattern, Not Just a Personal One

Upper Limit Problems are almost always framed as individual issues — your fear, your self-sabotage, your upper limit. But when we zoom out, a different picture emerges. The belief that you’re only allowed a certain amount of goodness isn’t just a product of your particular childhood. It exists in a culture that has very particular ideas about what women — especially ambitious, driven women — are allowed to want and receive.

There is deep cultural ambivalence about women who want too much — who are too successful, too happy, too visible, too powerful. Women absorb this ambivalence early. It shows up as the automatic qualification of good news — yes, I got promoted, but the team really did all the work — and as the reflexive minimizing of achievement. It shows up as the guilt of wanting more when you already have so much.

This matters because the women I work with almost universally blame themselves for their upper limits when those limits were, in part, installed by systems that benefited from women staying small and grateful and not wanting too much. The internalized message “I don’t deserve more than this” didn’t appear from nowhere — it was transmitted through families, through culture, through a thousand small communications about what ambition in a woman looks like and whether it’s acceptable.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild, author of The Second Shift, documented how women carry disproportionate invisible labor — and how that labor conditions them to deprioritize their own needs. The exhaustion many driven women feel isn’t just personal depletion; it’s the predictable result of navigating systems that extract their energy without proportionate return. Expanding your Upper Limit in this context isn’t just personal healing — it’s an act of quiet resistance against structures that have a vested interest in keeping your thermostat set low.

If you’d like support in doing this work, reaching out is a good first step. You don’t have to keep hitting the same ceiling alone.

How to Raise Your Upper Limit: A Path Forward

Raising your Upper Limit isn’t a one-time decision. It’s an ongoing, iterative practice — and it happens at the level of the nervous system, not just the mind. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Name the upper limit when it’s happening. The moment you catch yourself bracing for the bad news, manufacturing conflict out of thin air, or shrinking just as something good arrives — name it. “I’m upper-limiting right now.” That naming, even in the middle of the pattern, creates a microsecond of space between the trigger and the response. That space is where change lives.

Get curious about the ceiling, not critical. The ceiling isn’t evidence of your brokenness. It’s a nervous system response with a history. Ask it: What was I taught about how much goodness I was allowed? What happened the last time things felt this good? What am I afraid will follow this feeling? You’re not excavating for the sake of suffering — you’re creating enough understanding to stop acting unconsciously on old instructions.

Practice tolerating good things in small doses. Notice when something genuinely good is happening — a compliment, a moment of ease, an unexpected pleasure — and stay with it for three seconds longer than you normally would. Don’t immediately qualify it or redirect to what’s still wrong. Let it land. This is a trainable skill. The nervous system learns by repetition, not by insight alone.

Maya, a 38-year-old physician I work with, started keeping a small notebook of moments she’d typically deflect: a patient’s gratitude, a Sunday morning with nothing pressing, a meal that was genuinely delightful. “I wasn’t journaling about them,” she told me. “I was just marking them. Saying: this happened and I let it in.” After six months, she noticed something shift. Not that the ceiling had disappeared — but that she had more time between the good thing and the flinch. That gap is where a bigger life gets built.

If you’re ready to explore what’s underneath your Upper Limit — the specific early experiences that set your thermostat — working with a trauma-informed therapist can make that process significantly more accessible. This is exactly the kind of work I do with clients, and it’s work that can change the quality of your entire life.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

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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