Your Sensitivity Is A Gift For You, Not Them

I cried every day in kindergarten.

Not for myself. I cried because I could feel it when the child beside me didn’t understand the lesson, or missed their mother, or felt left out. I was a raw, exposed nerve walking around in a cold, harsh wind.

Over the years, I learned how to regulate my emotions. I learned to steady myself, to smooth my face, to keep going. But underneath it all, I was still a little sponge, absorbing everyone around me — their moods, their needs, their pain.

What I did not understand until much later is that this exact tenderness — this bottomless capacity to feel other people — is the very thing that made me a target for some of the most abusive relationships I would ever have.

Most of the people I work with have something in common. They are never the weak ones. They are never the naïve ones. They are some of the most intelligent, strong, creative, kind, generous, empathetic, deeply feeling, altruistic, and inspiring people I have ever met. I could be biased, because I truly love everyone I have ever worked with. But I do not think it is a coincidence that some of the brightest lights are the ones targeted by darkness.

And it is not only something I have noticed. There is research showing that people like this — the deeply empathic, the highly attuned — are targeted and harmed at higher rates, not lower. Predators are looking for something, and it is so often exactly this.

If I had to put a clinical word to what these bright lights share, I would call it neurodivergence. First, because I am neurodivergent myself. And because so many of the people who sit across from me have been diagnosed with autism, or ADHD, or some type of learning difference. The ones who have not are almost always either exceptionally intelligent or profoundly empathic — and I have come to consider both of those a kind of neurodivergence too.

Because this is the other thing we share. From the time we were very small, we were told we had to work to fit in. We were asked to take the enormity of our spirits and squeeze them down to fit inside a finite and cold world. We were told we cared too much. That we felt too much. That we needed to toughen up. We were made to feel strange for knowing, or sensing, or seeing something that most people around us simply could not see.

So we learned to hide our intelligence, to swallow the thing we wanted to say out loud, to bury our sensitivity, to dim our own light. We got so good at it that most of us forgot we were doing it at all.

And as painful as that already is, there is a more painful truth underneath it. Every dimming, the shrinking, the hiding, the practiced disappearing of ourselves, is the exact thing that primes us for a narcissist.

Think about what a lifetime of masking and people pleasing actually trains a person to do. It trains you to prioritize everyone else over yourself. To put your own needs last, or to forget you have needs at all. To manage how everyone else feels and to call that love.

Now think about what a narcissist is looking for. Someone who will set their own needs aside, prioritize theirs instead. Narcissists are extraordinary readers of people, and they do not choose at random. They choose the empathic, the forgiving, the optimistic, and the caregivers.

You were not chosen because you were naïve or not enough. You were chosen because you were powerful in a way that they needed.

Most of us arrived already hurt and carrying a wound of rejection. Long before this relationship, we were called weird, difficult, dramatic, or too sensitive. We were told our reactions were wrong and our perceptions could not be trusted. We walked in already carrying complex trauma and carrying it inside a body that feels more than most bodies do.

It is not only that neurodivergent people carry more complex trauma, though we do. It is that we feel it at a depth that other people rarely have to survive. Our joy runs high. Our grief runs deep. Our fear can swallow us whole. When something hurts us, it does not tap us on the shoulder; it wrecks the whole house.

It’s a common mistake to think that everything that’s biological is genetically caused. — Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté has spent much of his life pointing at this overlap. He believes that a great deal of what we call neurodivergence and a great deal of what we call trauma are far more entangled than we like to admit. A sensitive child becomes a kind of early-warning system, absorbing the stress in the room and adapting to it long before there are words for any of it.

Your sensitivity is yours, and it never needed to be explained away. But a nervous system this open, living in a world this cold, gets wounded early and often. Both are true at once.

So when an abuser tells you that you are too sensitive, that you misunderstood, that you are overreacting, it does not land as a warning. It lands as something all too familiar. It matches a story the world had already written about you, years before this person ever appeared.

And so the pain turns inward. Instead of asking what is being done to me, you ask what is wrong with me. But that question was never yours. It was handed to you a long time ago, and you have been carrying it quietly ever since.

So what does a body do when it feels everything and has been told feeling is wrong?

It shuts down.

When the feeling is too much and leaving is not possible, the body reaches for its oldest mercy. Stephen Porges named this state dorsal vagal, the shutdown that lives beneath fight or flight, the place a nervous system goes when there is nowhere else to go. For many of us, it does not look like a collapse. It looks like coping. I call it functional freeze, and I think you may know it from the inside.

You keep going. You show up to appointments, answer emails, and smile on cue. From the outside, your life looks whole. But somewhere behind your eyes, there is a pane of glass between you and your own days, and you find yourself watching your life instead of living it. “I’m fine” leaves your mouth on its own while the truest part of you waits somewhere far off, somewhere quieter, somewhere that doesn’t hurt.

This is not a failure. This is intelligence. When you feel as deeply as you do, numbing was the only way left to stay standing. Your body chose survival, the way it always has.

Immobilization in the face of terror is not a choice. It is the body’s ancient, automatic wisdom. — Stephen Porges

And a mind like ours does one more thing: it opens a loop that cannot close. So the relationship does not end when it ends. It keeps circling in you. You replay, re-read, searching for the answer that would finally make it make sense. An answer a narcissist will never give. And so you stay tied to it, long after you have walked out of the room.

And this is where I begin with most people I have worked with. They are at the very bottom of the trauma ladder, stuck in a frozen state. They have been there so long that they often don’t even know they are in a hole. They think this is just how life is and how they are.

I was once there too. I spent so many years completely disconnected from myself, my body, and life. I crawled out of the hole once too. I know this terrain now. I know the way home. And I am reaching out my hand to guide you whenever you are ready.

Everything that kept you stuck is the same thing that will set you free.

The empathy they turned against you turned toward yourself, finally letting you believe your own pain instead of arguing with it. The sensitivity they call too much is not too much. It is intuition. And all that attention you spent a lifetime pointing outward, you get to turn it around now toward yourself.

Nothing about you needs to be fixed. You do not need to become less sensitive, less deep, less feeling. You are not broken and in need of fixing. You are tender, and perceptive, and deeply human, and in need of healing.

That is what we are here to Unlearn. That your Super Powers were weaknesses.

The freeze can thaw, too. Not by force but in doses small enough for the body to adjust to and trust. This is how the part of you that went away slowly learns that it is finally safe to come home.

And that coming home has already begun because you are still here, still asking, still reading to the very end of a letter like this one.

With you in it,

Erin

Find ten quiet minutes and your journal. There is no right way to do this, and nothing you write has to be shown to anyone, ever. If a question feels like too much today, let it go and simply rest a hand on your heart instead. That counts too.

One — Where you feel it.

Bring to mind a recent moment when a feeling arrived far bigger than the situation seemed to call for. Don’t judge it — just describe it. Where did you feel it in your body? What older moment did it seem to echo? Your feelings are not too big. They are carrying information you are meant to have.

Two — Where you go quiet.

Where in your life do you move through the motions while feeling far away? When do you first remember learning that going numb was safer than feeling? When you are ready, write one sentence to the part of you that learned to freeze: “You kept me safe by going quiet. Thank you. It may be safe to come back now.”

Three — Turning the gift around.

Name one way your sensitivity has protected someone else. Now imagine pointing that same care at yourself this week. How would you speak to someone that you deeply love? What would you do to take care of someone who was going through something similiar?

When you’re done, finish this sentence in your own words, and let it be the thing you carry out of the week: “I am powerful. My superpowers are ___________”

This letter is companionship, not treatment. Neurodivergence and complex trauma are real and heavy things, and you were never meant to carry them alone — if you are struggling, please reach for a trauma-informed therapist, and in a crisis, your local emergency or crisis line.

Arrondo, G., Osorio, A., Magallón, S., López-del Burgo, C., & Cortese, S. (2023). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as a risk factor for being involved in intimate partner violence and sexual violence: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291723001976

Book, A., Costello, K., & Camilleri, J. A. (2013). Psychopathy and victim selection: The use of gait as a cue to vulnerability. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 28(11), 2368–2383. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260512475315

Haruvi-Lamdan, N., Horesh, D., Zohar, S., Kraus, M., & Golan, O. (2020). Autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder: An unexplored co-occurrence of conditions. Autism, 24(4), 884–898. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320912143

Mazefsky, C. A., Herrington, J., Siegel, M., Scarpa, A., Maddox, B. B., Scahill, L., & White, S. W. (2013). The role of emotion regulation in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 52(7), 679–688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2013.05.006

Wheeler, S., Book, A., & Costello, K. (2009). Psychopathic traits and perceptions of victim vulnerability. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 36(6), 635–648. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854809333958