Why Do I Feel Like I Am Too Much?
The Pattern
You feel your feeling and immediately apologize for the size of it. You cry and then explain why you should not be crying. You ask for something and add three reasons it is a small ask. The voice in your head says, you are too much, before you have even finished the request. That voice is not yours. It was installed by someone who was overwhelmed by you and needed you smaller in order to manage their own life.
Origins & Context
Elaine Aron's research on the Highly Sensitive Person trait documents how a subset of people are born with a more reactive nervous system that takes in more sensory and emotional information than the average. In a regulated family system, this becomes a gift. In a dysregulated one, the child is treated as a problem, and they learn early that their natural intensity is a flaw to manage.
Alice Miller's work on the gifted child traces how parents with their own unmet needs experience the emotionally vivid, curious, alive child as a threat. The child who is too much is often the child whose presence reflected back to the parent everything the parent had buried. The labeling was less about the child and more about what the child evoked in the adult who could not handle being evoked.
You were never too much. The room you grew up in was too small for what you are.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You meet someone new and pre-shrink. You decide which parts of you to introduce and which to leave at home. You make jokes about your own intensity before anyone can criticize it. You celebrate your wins quietly. You bring softer versions of your opinions. You read every room and adjust before you enter it.
It shows up most painfully in close relationships. The person who said they loved your fire begins to find it difficult. You feel the temperature change. You start to manage yourself in their presence. By the time the relationship ends, you barely recognize yourself, and you wonder if you were too much after all. You were not. The room was too small.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Too Much Wound, the internalization of a caregiver's overwhelm as a verdict on the child's worth. Alice Miller names a related dynamic in The Drama of the Gifted Child, in which the emotionally alive child is conscripted into managing the parent's fragility. Elaine Aron's framework names the underlying trait as High Sensory Processing Sensitivity, a neurological reality that is often pathologized in cultures that reward muting.
Related entries in this library: Highly Sensitive Person, Shame, the Inner Critic, Self-Abandonment, the Good Girl Wound.
Nikita's Note
I want to tell you that the size of you was never the problem. The room you grew up in was too small for what you are. That is not your fault and not your shame.
The people who can hold you exist. The work is becoming willing to stop pre-shrinking long enough for them to find you. To risk being the full size of yourself in a world that may not always know what to do with that.
From the work
You were never too much. The room you grew up in was too small for what you are.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.