What people are really saying when they tell you : “You are too sensitive.”

I thought I would share the following from Nancy Van Dyken’s excellent book on rejected feelings and narcissism, Everyday Narcissism : Yours, Mine and Ours today to explain what other’s really mean when they invalidate our emotional reality or expression. We should be aware that its not really our problem.

Have you ever been told, “You’re too emotional” or “You’re too sensitive”? Often this translates as :

I’m uncomfortable with the feelings you’re expressing, I don’t know how to take care of my own feelings, let alone yours. I am caught up in Myth 2 (of everyday narcissism : Other people are responsible for – and have power to control – the way we feel and behave), so I expect you take care of me and make me feel comfortable by no longer expressing your own feelings. Because of my EN, I never learned how to manage my emotions, so I need you to help manage them for me. Please don’t express yourself authentically.

Notice this statement says everything about the speaker and little about you. (In any case, I’ve always wondered how people measure being “overly emotional”. That scale seems to vary from one anxious, critical person to another.)

Our natural response to such phrases is to feel judged and rejected. If we hear the words such as these over and over, we begin to imagine that the feelings that arise naturally in us must be wrong (instead of authentic guides to our lived experience) in some way. Eventually we may stop trusting our own emotions… they are even more painful when adults (say) them to kids. And when most of us were kids, such phrases were repeatedly said to us… (we were) taught that there is something wrong with strong or painful emotions in general, or certain feelings in particular. Because other people felt uncomfortable when we expressed these feelings around them, they told us that we were wrong or bad to express those emotions – or even to experience them at all.

According to Van Dyken such responses say the following to us covertly : Please don’t be who you are or do what you are doing. Above all, please don’t be authentic. Instead, I need you to act in way that feel safe and familiar to me.

We were not put on earth to make others feel safe, we were put on earth to live as our authentic selves.