You’re Not Too Sensitive. You Have Data.
When a small comment or conflict lands with the force of something much bigger, it can be tempting to call yourself too sensitive. This essay looks beneath that label at the protective intelligence of a nervous system shaped by old wounds, and at what becomes possible when the wound, rather than the reaction, receives care.
You came home from the dinner party and immediately replayed the comment Sarah made, the throwaway one, the one she probably doesn’t remember saying, and you’ve been sitting with it for three days, turning it over, checking it against other evidence, wondering if she meant something by it, wondering if you’re being paranoid, wondering why you can’t just let things go the way everyone around you seems to.
If you spent your childhood managing their emotional weather, my self-paced course Balanced After the Borderline names the terrain and gives you the recovery map.
Or maybe it’s simpler and worse than that: you overreacted at work again. Said something sharper than you meant to. Came this close to crying in a meeting, and then spent the rest of the afternoon managing the evidence, rebuilding the professional competence, pretending it never happened. And we tell ourselves the same thing in all of these versions: there must be something wrong with me.
Not overreacting. Not “crazy.” Not a character defect you need to manage more strategically. Not evidence of weakness. Not the thing your last relationship meant when it called you intense the way some people say exhausting.
That’s your nervous system. That’s your body trying to protect a wound that never healed. And there is a significant difference between those two things.
i don’t know what living a balanced life feels likewhen i am sad i don’t cry i pourwhen i am happy i don’t smile i glowwhen i am angry i don’t yell i burni don’t grieve i shatter, Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey
The proverbial house of life we build as adults, our careers, our relationships, our particular way of moving through a room, rests on a foundation we didn’t choose and didn’t design. And if that foundation was laid in an environment where love arrived with conditions attached, where the emotional climate shifted without warning, where you learned very early that your most ordinary feelings needed to be managed or hidden before they caused a problem, those cracks don’t announce themselves. They just make the house feel less stable than it should. Less safe than it looks.
What I want to talk about today is what those cracks produce. Not the achievement patterns, not the hypervigilance about work, not the insomnia. The reactions. The ones people call “too much.” The ones you call “too much” when you’re being honest with yourself.
The Wound Beneath the Reaction
(Names and all identifying details have been changed for confidentiality.)
Valentina’s Data
The first thing she told me was that she’d been sitting in her car.
She’d been in the parking garage for forty-five minutes after the meeting ended, hands still shaking a little, replaying her supervisor’s exact words: You’re very good at what you do, Valentina, but your emotional reactions make it hard for the team. She’d replayed them so many times she’d started losing track of whether they sounded worse each time or if she was just getting more afraid.
Valentina was thirty-four, a domestic violence advocate in Miami, work she’d been doing for six years with the kind of commitment that looks, from the outside, like pure vocation. She was the person her clients called when everything else had failed. Her supervisor had now mentioned her emotional intensity formally, in writing, twice.
She’d grown up in a household where survival was the primary language. Her mother had come to Miami from Havana at twenty-two, alone, carrying almost nothing, and had rebuilt herself with the fierce efficiency of a woman who’d survived something unsurvivable: through work, through will, through a love that was real and also couldn’t afford to tend to the emotions of a child while still managing her own. Valentina learned that feelings were something you managed, put away, folded up, presented in acceptable quantities. She hadn’t been able to do it. She’d always felt things at full volume, and she’d been paying for it since she was old enough to have that pointed out.
What she almost hadn’t let herself notice: the specific quality of exhaustion she’d been carrying for months, different from tired, a bone-level drain that only showed up when the workday ended, when there was nothing left to manage, nothing left to be professionally steady for. She’d been calling it burnout. It wasn’t burnout.
She didn’t say I think I’m broken. She said something close: “I think I… God. I think I might actually be crazy. That’s, I know that sounds dramatic.”
I didn’t say anything right away.
I let the words sit. Her voice was very quiet in the way of people who’ve just said the thing they’ve been carrying the longest, and are waiting to find out if they were right to say it.
“Ordinary interpersonal conflicts may provoke intense anxiety, depression, or rage. In the mind of the survivor, even minor slights evoke past experiences of callous neglect, and minor hurts evoke past experiences of deliberate cruelty.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, Basic Books
Why the Alarm Stays On
There’s a sentence I found in Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score that I’ve returned to more times than I can count when I’m sitting with someone like Valentina: “Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside.”
What this means in plain language: your body doesn’t know the difference between a threat that happened fifteen years ago and a threat that’s happening right now. Your nervous system, that entire intricate alarm system that learned its threat-detection skills in your family of origin, is still running the original software. Still scanning. Still reading emotional weather. Still protecting you from a wound that’s never been fully named or treated.
A nervous system threat response is the body’s automatic protective activation when it senses danger, including danger that resembles earlier relational harm.
In plain terms: a minor comment can set off an alarm that belongs to an older wound, even when your thinking mind knows you are not back in that old situation.
I read Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger when I was trying to understand why the body doesn’t simply reset once the dangerous environment is over. Levine found that the nervous system activates every physiological mechanism it has to deal with a perceived threat, and when that threat can’t be fully resolved, the system stays activated. Not because something is wrong with you. Because it’s still working. Still trying to do the job it learned when the job was, at times, genuinely necessary.
I read Lindsay Gibson’s work on adult children of emotionally immature parents when I was trying to understand why so many of the driven women I worked with described themselves the same way: people who absorbed everything, who could feel the emotional temperature of a room before they finished crossing the threshold. Gibson writes about people who “react to life as if they were an emotional tuning fork, picking up and resonating with vibrations from other people and the world around them.” What the culture labels too sensitive. What the clinical literature recognizes as an extraordinarily refined capacity for attunement, one that was, in all likelihood, absolutely necessary once.
There’s a phrase Resmaa Menakem uses in My Grandmother’s Hands that I keep thinking about: the body’s memory, the kind that isn’t stored in language or narrative but in the belly, the chest, the jaw, the hands that know how to brace for impact even in rooms where there’s nothing coming. He calls the vagus nerve the “soul nerve”, the body’s primary signaling system for safety and danger. The soul nerve doesn’t forget. Even when you’ve managed to.
And Pete Walker’s work with complex trauma changed how I understood what I was seeing in my practice: the way fear lives not in identifiable flashbacks but as a fixed state, woven into the baseline of how life feels. A low hum. A constant readiness. This is not a disorder. This is what we do when we are small and the people responsible for our safety make the world feel uncertain. We become experts at vigilance. We feel everything first and fast and hard. We carry that expertise with us.
Hypervigilance is a sustained state of scanning for possible threat, often learned in environments where emotional safety was unpredictable.
In plain terms: you may notice the emotional temperature of a room before anyone else does because your body learned that noticing quickly mattered.
The lemon juice in the bathtub. That’s what ordinary life is, full of ordinary stressors, ordinary frictions, the everyday abrasions of a world that doesn’t cushion itself for anyone. If you’re whole, those frictions sting a little. If you’re carrying open wounds, emotional lacerations laid down years ago, never treated, never even named, the same frictions land as something else entirely. The reaction isn’t the problem. The wound is the problem.
When she feels a restriction, she is too much; she registers too much; she leaks from her container… She is too much. She is too much, too. She is too, too., Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Duke University Press
The Cost of Calling Women Too Much
Here is the structural argument I want us to sit with.
Seventy-five percent of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, historically the clinical label most associated with “too much feeling,” emotional lability, and relationship instability, are women. Not because women feel more or feel worse. Because the behaviors that emerge from unhealed relational trauma in women have, for centuries, been categorized as disorders of character rather than responses to wounding. The word “hysterical” descends from the Greek word for uterus. We have been medicating and institutionalizing women’s relational wounds for as long as we’ve had the authority to do so, and what we have not done, in any systematic, cultural, or political way, is ask what it would actually take to heal them. To ask what happened to her, rather than what is wrong with her.
Her nervous system adaptation was formed in a real environment, with real forces acting on a real child. AND she now lives in a culture that looks at her reactions, strips out all of that context, and hands her a label: too much, too emotional, too intense, intensity as liability, sensitivity as weakness. Neither the original wound nor the cultural response to it is her fault. Neither is sustainable. Both are true.
I’m not saying the reaction didn’t have costs. I’m not saying the intensity, unexamined, doesn’t do real damage, to her, to the people around her. I’m not saying anyone in her life was wrong to feel the impact. I’m not saying the answer is to feel everything louder. I’m not saying this excuses anything.
What I’m saying is that the intensity was never the original problem. The wound is the original problem. And you cannot heal the wound by managing the reaction.
Here is what becomes possible on the other side of the foundation work: sleeping through the night without the inventory that starts at 2 AM. Walking into a room without scanning the corners before you finish crossing the threshold. Feeling your partner say fine and staying curious rather than braced. Having a reaction to something small and being able to name it, feel it, set it down, without needing a parking garage and forty-five minutes to find your way back. Not because you’ve become less sensitive. Because you’ve become safer inside your own body.
Both things. Same woman. Neither is a fantasy.
Here it is: /the new way of living with the world /inside of us so we cannot lose it, /and we cannot be lost., Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
Think of the last time a small wound landed like a big one. The throwaway comment. The flat fine. The forty-five minutes in the parking garage, hands still shaking, replaying a sentence that should have taken thirty seconds to move past.
Place one hand on your sternum.
Not to fix anything. Not to decide whether you were right or wrong, appropriate or excessive, too much or not enough.
Just to acknowledge that in there, in that chest, in that body, is someone who has been carrying open wounds for a long time, in a world that keeps handing her lemon juice and calling her reaction the problem.
She doesn’t need to be corrected. She needs to be understood.
If you’re willing, I’d love to hear: when was the last time someone called you “too much”, or when did you call yourself that, and looking back, what do you think was actually happening?
Q: Why do small comments sometimes feel overwhelming?
A: A present-day slight can land on an older wound. The intensity may be your nervous system responding to both the current moment and what similar moments once meant.
You spent your childhood managing their emotional weather.
A focused self-paced course on the specific damage of being raised by a borderline parent, the emotional dysregulation, the chaos, the role you had to play to survive it. Including what you were never given social permission to grieve.
Q: Does being sensitive mean something is wrong with me?
A: No. Sensitivity can reflect an adaptive capacity for attunement that developed when emotional safety required close attention.
Q: Is the reaction itself the problem?
A: The essay distinguishes the reaction from the original wound. Reactions can have real consequences while still pointing toward pain that needs understanding.
Q: Can insight alone stop a threat response?
A: The essay describes how the nervous system can remain activated after danger has passed, which is why understanding the pattern is only one part of healing.
Q: What can I do in the moment?
A: Place a hand on your sternum and acknowledge the open wound beneath the reaction, without deciding whether you were too much or not enough.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. Trained in EMDR, psychodynamic, and somatic modalities, she is licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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