The Feedback I Received Starting Young

I was a child who felt things intensely and showed it. This was noted early. By elementary school I had received feedback, in various forms, that my emotional responses were disproportionate, excessive, exhausting. Teachers described me as "reactive." Family members used the word "dramatic." By the time I was a teenager I had developed a whole infrastructure of self-monitoring designed to bring my responses closer to the acceptable range. The message I received, repeated across enough contexts that it became its own kind of truth, was that my inner experience was too large for the rooms I was in. That I needed to reduce myself. I spent roughly twenty years trying to do that.

What "Too Sensitive" Actually Means

The phrase is almost never about sensitivity. It is about inconvenience. A child who cries when something is unfair is not experiencing something invalid—she is detecting something real. The inconvenience is that detecting the thing out loud requires the adult in the room to respond to it. Dismissing the sensitivity is faster than addressing whatever produced it. This is not a new observation. But it took me a long time to understand it not just as an idea but as something that applied to my actual history. The times I was told I was being too sensitive were often the times I was most accurately reading the room and least willing to pretend I wasn't. Research from the University of British Columbia studying what psychologists term "high sensory processing sensitivity" found that individuals who scored highly on sensitivity measures showed more activation in brain regions associated with attention, awareness, and integration of information—regions associated with depth of processing rather than emotional dysregulation. Sensitivity, in this framing, is not a deficit in emotional regulation. It is a feature of how information gets processed, with costs and benefits that depend heavily on environment.

The Part That Took Longest to Untangle

The cruelest effect of being told you are too sensitive is that you learn to dismiss your own perceptions. This is more insidious than simply having your feelings minimized. When you are told repeatedly that your read on a situation is excessive, you start to trust other people's reads more than your own. You check with others before concluding that something hurt you. You apologize for your interpretation of events before the other person has even weighed in. This is a form of self-abandonment that can persist long after the original environment is gone. I was well into my thirties, in genuinely healthy relationships with people who had never once told me I was too much, and still instinctively checking whether I had the right to feel what I was feeling. A longitudinal study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development found that emotional invalidation in childhood—being told that one's feelings were wrong, excessive, or inappropriate—predicted lower interoceptive accuracy in adulthood: a reduced ability to accurately identify one's own emotional states. The participants did not stop having feelings. They became less able to read them.

The Tangent About Physical Space

There is a physical version of this I have not talked about enough. I take up less physical space than my body requires when I am in environments where I have historically felt too much. I hunch. I fold inward. I position myself at edges of rooms. A bodyworker once pointed out that I breathe shallowly in social situations in a way that I do not when I am alone, and when she asked me to breathe normally in the room with her I started crying, which surprised both of us. The body has its own memory of having been too large.

What I Know Now

My sensitivity is not a flaw. This is not a self-help affirmation. It is a factual statement about the mechanism by which I process the world. I notice more than average. I am affected by more than average. This makes some things harder—loud environments, conflict, unexpected change—and some things considerably better. I make good friends. I am a careful listener. I notice when something is wrong before it becomes a crisis. I am rarely bored. I find meaning in things that other people walk past. The woman who told me I was too sensitive was operating from a model of emotional life in which control is the goal and visibility is the enemy. I understand where she got that model. I no longer find it accurate, or worth organizing my life around.