When you’re taught that feeling deeply is wrong
If you’re ever found yourself uttering these words: “It’s my fault. I’m just being over-sensitive” we need to talk.
More precisely, you and your body need to talk.
Because this level of self-dismissal is no longer acceptable.
What your body wants you to know right now (desperately!) is that your ‘sensitivity’ is not an issue. It’s not your deepest problem. In fact, it’s not even a problem at all.
What is an issue, however, is the judgement and shame you’re carrying about your sensitivity.
Recently I heard the poet David Whyte describe heartbreak as a ‘measure of how much you care’.
What a reframe! My little mind was blown. 🤯
To think about heartache not as proof of dysfunction, or something to be released, healed or ‘worked through’ but as beautiful, raw evidence of your love, devotion, and appreciation. The invitation to approach your emotions as an indication of something profoundly meaningful, even nourishing, is radical when you’ve been taught (trained!) to read your emotional responses in the opposite way—as signs that you’re excessive, unstable, weak, or somehow failing at life.
For years—perhaps decades—I brought my feelings into therapeutic and healing spaces with the quiet assumption that they needed to be corrected. Beneath the surface was the belief that if I felt too much, reacted too strongly, or took too long to settle, then something in me had gone wrong. I was simply ‘too sensitive’.
The goal of my healing efforts was not to listen to my inner world, but to regulate myself into acceptability.
If I could just stop feeling this way, if I could just control my emotions, if I could just correct my emotional reactions…
I recognise now that the intention of my healing was being completely guided by the quiet voice of shame.
Shame does not simply say, this hurts. Shame says, you should not be hurt by this. It turns a nervous system response like ‘anxiety’ or ‘overwhelm’ into a failing and a character flaw. Instead of asking, ‘What do I need in order to feel safe, steady, or supported?’ the shamed voice asks, ‘What is wrong with me that I cannot handle this like everyone else?’
While my conscious mind believed my therapy was targeted at self-understanding, it was unconsciously aimed at self-correction.
Where does this incessant need for self-correction come from?
Often the shame around sensitivity is inherited. It is passed down through families, schools, workplaces, and cultures that are uncomfortable with emotional vulnerability.
In these environments, what was mirrored back to you when you expressed deep emotions, when you recoiled from harshness, or when you needed more time to recover from intensity?
There’s a good chance you were met with impatience, ridicule, silencing, dismissal, or correction. And so along the way, your sensitivity stopped feeling like a natural part of your makeup and started feeling like evidence that something was wrong with you. You learned that it was something to be ashamed of.
This is the one of shame’s most harmful effects, it teaches you to participate in your own wounding. The pain doesn’t just come from your original emotion, but from your judgement of yourself for having it. You become the one who questions your tears, mistrusts your reactions, minimises your distress, and compares your threshold against some imagined standard of what a well-adjusted person should feel.
You become increasingly incapable of validating your own feelings and responses.
Rather than assessing whether your emotional responses make sense in light of your history, your wiring, or what just happened, you label yourself as ‘too sensitive’ and turn yourself into a problem to be managed.
Who gets to judge your sensitivity?
So often in sessions, when clients are judging themselves for their emotions and reactions, I challenge them to identify what the appropriate response should be.
Is there a rule book on acceptable emotional responses? Who wrote it? Who decided how much sadness is too much, how quickly disappointment should pass, or which experiences are worthy of grief? At some point you’ve adopted the idea that there is a correct way to feel and a correct amount to feel it—and that anything outside those invisible lines is indulgent, dramatic, or immature.
W.T.A.F?
This may come as surprising news, but your emotional life is not a courtroom, and sensitivity is not a crime. There is no universal authority deciding whether your response is proportionate or acceptable.
I remember a client arriving late to a session, deeply distressed after an incident at Flinders Street Station. A man had shoved past her, causing her to fall into the gap between the train and the platform. She lifted her skirt to show a dark bruise running the length of her thigh. Ouch.
What troubled her most was not the pain or shock, but the guilt she felt for being so angry. She didn’t believe anger was a valid response. But as the session unfolded, it became clear that the incident had touched something much older: a lifetime of feeling pushed around, and a buried rage that had finally found an opening. Who’s to say her anger had no validity? 🤷🏻♀️
Breaking the cycle of sensitivity shame
This shows that when you judge yourself for overreacting or responding inappropriately, you’re continuing the cycle of shaming a body that has all along been trying to find a way to express what has been held back. And perhaps, you have an opportunity to break this cycle of shame by accepting your emotional responses, however irrational or disproportionate they might be. And curiously, this might just help you move through them more quickly.
Healing is not only about learning how to regulate your system and manage your sensitivity. It is also about disentangling sensitivity from humiliation. It is about noticing when your suffering is coming less from the feeling itself and more from the belief that you should not be feeling it. It is about making room for the possibility that your sensitivity may be accurate, intelligent, and worthy of respect—even when it is inconvenient, even when it asks more of you, even when it asks more of others. It is about releasing the often-lifelong habit of making yourself and your body wrong.
Perhaps the work is not to become less sensitive, but less ashamed. Less apologetic for having a responsive nervous system. Less willing to abandon yourself to keep up the appearances of being strong, resilient, or even professional. From that place, sensitivity can become easier to hold—not because it disappears, but because it is no longer carrying the added burden of self-rejection.
If this speaks to you and you’d really like to know how listen to your inner world and build a more trusting relationship with your body, my Kinesiology Self-Testing – Master the Art of Talking to Your Body online course offers a practical place to begin.