The apology we keep making
“Buckle up!”
“Sorry, I get really excited about this stuff”
“I’m probably being stupid but..”
“Sorry to bother you”
“TMI, sorry”
“Sorry, I’m crashing out”
“Someday I’ll get it together”
“Hot mess express over here”
Or if we add some midwestern flavor you might say “ope, sorry” while literally trying to exist and take up space in the grocery store.
If you've said some version of any of these, you're in good company. I hear it every single week. It shows up right before someone says something true, and right after they've let themselves feel something fully.
There's an image I stumbled upon that really landed in a soul-stirring way. A young woman stands in the dark, half her face hidden behind a cracked white rabbit mask. Over it is a line about wanting to apologize for being "too much," and remembering the Mad Hatter telling Alice she'd lost her “muchness”. She used to be much “muchier” (Burton, 2010).
The mask is the point.
She's holding it up herself.
Nobody is forcing it onto her face.
And yet you can see her eye peeking out from behind it, still there, still her.
Healing is unmasking
Here's what I believe about the work I do:
Part of the healing process for the clients I work with is unmasking and stepping into who they are. That means liberating from internalized shame and "too muchness."
Internalized shame is when other people's judgment becomes your own inner voice, so you no longer believe "I did something wrong" but "something is wrong with me." "Too much"-ness is one of its most common forms: the belief that your feelings, needs, energy, or honesty are a burden, and that you have to shrink to stay safe and loved.
Healing isn't about becoming a smaller, quieter, more manageable version of yourself. It's about taking the mask down and finding out who's been behind it this whole time. For many of my clients, especially neurodivergent folks and trauma survivors, that person has been in hiding for a very long time.
Where "too much" comes from
Literally nobody is born thinking they're too much. We learn it.
We learn it when our excitement gets an eye roll. When our tears get "you're being dramatic." When our questions, our intensity, our special interests, our big feelings, or our honesty get met with withdrawal, punishment, or shame. Over time, the lesson sinks in: the real me costs people something, so I'd better learn how to make myself smaller, stay out of peoples way, and keep my mouth shut.
So we mask. We monitor our tone, rehearse our sentences, rewrite text messages and emails, laugh at the right moments, and trim ourselves down to whatever size the room seems to allow. Masking is a survival strategy, and it often worked. It kept us safe, kept us “connected”, kept us out of trouble.
But it comes at a cost: exhaustion, disconnection, burnout, and a quiet, chronic sense that nobody actually knows us. Eventually the shame stops sounding like someone else's voice and starts sounding like our own.
Why you're "too much" for some people
This is what I want you to sit with
when someone tells you you're too much, they're usually showing you something about their own capacity, not your worth or who you are.
What may be going on for those people:
• They're carrying their own internalized shit. People who were taught to be small, quiet, and easy, often get uncomfortable around people who don't. Your expressiveness can poke at the parts of them that were silenced, and it's easier to label you "too much" than to feel that old grief.
• They can't handle the truth. Honest, direct people (um, hello, my neurodivergent people) say the thing everyone else is tiptoeing around. If someone's comfort depends on that thing staying unsaid, your honesty will feel like a threat. Period.
• You mirror something they're not ready to see. Your joy, your anger, your needs, your boundaries can reflect back parts of someone or themselves that they've exiled. It may undermine or challenge everything they thought they knew about someone, themselves, or a system. In IFS language, you may be activating their protectors. That reaction is real, but it belongs to them.
• Their nervous system is at capacity. Sometimes it isn't personal at all. People who are stressed, dysregulated, or carrying unprocessed trauma have a narrower window of tolerance. Anything with intensity, even good intensity, can push them past it. Many people don’t know this about themselves and if they do, they don’t know how to communicate it clearly.
• The environment was built for a different kind of person. Families, schools, and workplaces often reward the quiet, compliant, and neurotypical. If you don't fit that mold, the system names you as the problem, non-compliant, treatment resistant (yeah I said it), and/or difficult.
None of this means every bit of feedback is wrong, or that other people's limits don't matter. Boundaries go both ways. But "this is more than I can hold right now" sounds very different from "you are too much as a person." One is information. The other is shame.
To be clear, we can sit with compassion and empathy for these people, or don’t because you certainly don’t have to, while still holding true that these people said or did something that settled in a tender place and shaped how you show up today. Well intention does not negate how things land. Intention does matter AND so does impact.
Reclaiming your muchness
Unmasking isn't a single moment where you rip the mask off and never look back. It's slow and intentional, and it should be. You get to decide who has the privilege of knowing you, and where it's safe to be fully yourself.
A few questions to start with:
1. What parts of me did I learn to hide? Who taught me they were "too much"?
2. When I apologize for being a lot, what am I actually apologizing for?
3. Where do I feel most like myself, and who am I with?
4. What would I do, say, or wear if I weren't managing anyone else's comfort, opinions, or judgements?
5. Which relationships make room for all of me, and which require the mask?
Notice what happens inside of you as you answer. Some parts of you may feel relief. Others may feel scared. Both make sense and are allowed to exist at the same time. Those protective parts kept you safe for a long time, and they deserve compassion and love, not force. They’re brilliant, really.
You were never too much
You were never too much.
You were too much for people who couldn't hold you, in places that were never built for you.
The right people won't need you to be small, quiet, and easy. They'll want to know the version of you behind the mask: the curious one, the intense one, the honest one, the one who feels everything.
The much muchier one.
If you're ready to start setting the mask down and finding your way back to yourself, I'd be honored to walk alongside you. Reach out for a consult if and when you’re ready.
-Whitney
Burton, T. (Director). (2010). Alice in Wonderland [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.