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Hey guys, I'm Heidi Priebe. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. Today on this channel, I want to talk about something that I have noticed a bit of a pattern of over time, which is that a lot of people I've spoken
Heidi Priebe explains why people with CPTSD or emotional neglect often feel 'too sensitive' when they are actually dissociated from how hard their lives are, and how secondary suffering compounds pain
Key Takeaways
- Feeling 'too sensitive' may actually reflect dissociation from the real difficulty of one's life.
- Secondary suffering from judging one's emotions often causes more distress than the original pain.
- Taking everyday pain seriously and responding with compassion reduces long-term emotional intensity.
- Acknowledging how hard circumstances are is a prerequisite for addressing them effectively.
What the video covers
- Many people with complex PTSD or early emotional neglect see themselves as hypersensitive, yet often appear numbed to difficulties an average person would struggle with.
- Two core causes are proposed: mismatched expectations, where a hard, unsupported life is taken as normal, and the distinction between primary and secondary suffering.
- Primary suffering is the direct pain of life events; secondary suffering is the added inner turmoil from judging, shaming, or resisting one's own emotions.
- Growing up around stoic caregivers can lead people to compare others' calm exteriors with their own inner emotional experience, making their normal feelings seem wrong.
- Pathologizing emotions, such as feeling shame about sadness or anger about stress, prolongs emotional states instead of letting them move through.
- Taking low-level feelings seriously and responding with compassion tends to shorten emotional episodes over time.
- Dissociation from difficulty often becomes visible when a hardship is relieved and the person suddenly realizes how much they were struggling.
- Neglecting health, rest, and support are common signs, as is relying on willpower and suppression instead of addressing root causes.
- Asking 'What's wrong with me?' is often less useful than asking whether one has truly acknowledged how difficult one's life has been.
- Recognizing circumstances as genuinely hard allows people to respond to problems earlier and at a lower intensity.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Feeling Too Sensitive vs. Being Numbed
- 01:40Mismatched Expectations and Primary vs. Secondary Suffering
- 03:20Sign 1: Mistaking Stoic Exteriors for Inner Experience
- 06:40Meta-Feelings and Judging Our Own Emotions
- 09:00Recognizing Hardship Through Relief and Health Neglect
- 11:00Overlooked Stressors and Willpower Limits
- 16:00Locus of Control and Underestimating Difficulty
- 19:00Closing Thoughts and Questions
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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with, particularly those who have complex PTSD or early emotional neglect patterns, tend to think of themselves as hypersensitive or as really overly emotional. When in reality, those exact same people to me actually seem to be quite numbed out to
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a lot of things that the average person would really struggle with. And so what I want to talk about today is why this happens, as well as some of the signs that this might be something that you are struggling with without
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realizing it. And I think that there are kind of two core things behind this phenomenon.
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Okay, so one is a matter of which expectations we're holding. So if I grew up thinking that a really hard life with very little support is just a normal life, that's what it's like for everybody, right? Chronically stressful with no one to talk to about
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it or help support me through it. If that's the belief I have about what life looks like, I'm going to be very confused about why I might be feeling chronically overwhelmed, burnt out, on the verge of breaking down, whatever it
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is. Because I'm going to be thinking I have a normal life just like everybody else, I just happen to be coping with it worse.
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When in reality, other people might have lives that are both way less stressful than ours and way more emotionally or practically supported. So a lot of the time, I think that there's a perception issue at play that's causing a mismatch
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in our expectations for ourselves. And then the other factor we're going to look at throughout this video is what I'm going to call primary versus secondary suffering.
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So if we are telling ourselves that things that are in fact quite painful and difficult should not be painful and difficult and that we are crazy for having emotional reactions to them. This is actually likely to create a whole new
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layer of inner angst and turmoil that is genuinely not present for the average person who just accepts when things are hard, feels compassion for themselves as they're going through those hard things, and then deals with those problems as
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they're coming up at a lower level. And so, in that particular way, we might actually be suffering or be feeling more than the average person, but the suffering is coming from our unconscious resistance to taking ordinary forms of
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pain, like loneliness or exhaustion or uncertainty seriously. Rather than being weaker or more sensitive than the average person.
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And the reason why that distinction actually matters quite a bit is because we solve these types of suffering differently.
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So, that secondary form of suffering that comes from resisting or denying or trying to suppress our emotions, that type of suffering we solve not from becoming tougher or dismissing our feelings better, but ironically by taking the underlying pain of day-to-day
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life a lot more seriously. And actually starting to live like someone who we might think of as emotionally weaker than our current selves. So, I made a video a while back on neuroticism that I'll link in the description of this one that touches on
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a bunch of these themes a bit more deeply, but for now, we're going to get into some of the signs that this might be what you're up against. So, signs that you are assuming you're overly sensitive, when in reality, what you are
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is dissociated to just how hard your life actually is. Which again, I think is really, really common for a lot of people who dealt with early emotional neglect or who have CPTSD type wounds. All right, so, the first reason why a lot of us might
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mistake hypo-sensitivity for hyper-sensitivity is that we grew up mistaking other people's stoic exteriors for the entirety of their inner experience. And then we get confused when our inner world includes emotion. And we assume that it means that there is something
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wrong with us. So, I think this is a bias that a lot of us develop, particularly if we grew up in environments where we don't see our caregivers or the other people that we're modeling ourselves after displaying much emotion.
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Right? Because we all form our ideas of what is normal based on what the people around us are doing and how they are responding to things.
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So, if we grew up seeing people acting very stoic and very calm in the face of stress or challenge or even trauma, we might internalize stress is not a big deal, life is not that hard, and it's normal to not feel very much on a
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day-to-day basis. When in reality, of course, our parents or our caregivers might have been feeling a ton internally that they just weren't letting show.
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And so, the problem, again, is that we can get into that habit of comparing someone else's exterior to our interior.
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And then, when normal day-to-day life does its thing and emotions naturally come up, we think that those emotions are wrong or that we're overly sensitive for feeling them.
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Which in most cases probably is not true at all. But then it leads to that secondary problem of us starting to experience a whole bunch of meta-feelings or feelings about our own feelings.
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Okay, so we feel sad about something and then maybe a whole bunch of shame comes up about the fact that we're experiencing sadness over something that we perceive as so minuscule.
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So, we might start berating ourselves about the sadness instead of just feeling it and moving through it.
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Or maybe we feel stressed and we notice it's starting to impact our performance. And so that we get angry at ourselves for feeling stressed. Like why can't we just chill out and get things done?
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Right? I know what I need to do. Why can't I just do it? And so we start that process of beating ourselves up about the stress instead of taking it as a cue that we're feeling burnt out and maybe we need to start
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pacing ourselves differently. Or this can even happen with positive emotions, right? So maybe we get a crush on someone or there's some opportunity that we're excited about that comes up.
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And we start judging ourselves for being in that vulnerable state of wanting something that we do not have certainty over.
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And so instead of just wanting it and moving towards it and seeing if it could work out for us, we start acting all weird and incongruent around it because part of us wants it and then another part of us is preemptively trying to
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avoid the pain or the ego blow or whatever it is of not getting it.
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And so in all of these cases, we actually end up prolonging the amount that we spend in that internal angst and in those fairly emotionally aroused states because we're resisting the direct experience of the first emotion.
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Right? So that's sadness or that stress or that desire mixed in with vulnerability. Whereas someone who wasn't pathologizing of their own emotions might be way more likely to just go, "Oh, I'm sad.
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Okay, I'll respond to that with compassion. I'll give myself a day or two to cry and feel down so that emotion actually gets interacted with directly and moved through.
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And so it tends to pass or to transform into something else a lot more quickly.
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So this is a very counterintuitive process, but this is unfortunately really how emotions work.
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Right? Sensitizing ourselves to small stressors and treating them as real actually makes us less emotional in the long run because we spend less time resisting or arguing with our feelings and more time actually moving through them.
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But to make that switch, we have to be willing to start taking our low-level feelings more seriously rather than less. Now, I think for a lot of us, one of the most common ways we realize we've been dissociated from how hard something
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is is when someone makes that thing easier and we suddenly go, "Oh, wait. I was struggling?" And I think that this can be especially true when it comes to taking care of our health.
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So, we can put off seemingly small things like making an appointment to get a small concern checked out for ages because what we're actually procrastinating is a giant administrative headache, which is why I'm so excited about the sponsor of
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today's video, Zocdoc. I have historically been terrible at making doctor's appointments. I hate calling places. I hate playing phone tag. I hate finally getting through and finding out there's no appointment for months and then having to start that entire process
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over. And recently, I had this moment where I realized that it was time for me to have my regular yearly checkup. And in my head, I'd already turned it into this whole project. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to have to find someone, call
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I remember genuinely being like, "Oh, was that the whole task?" Because apparently, the thing that I'd been avoiding wasn't actually the doctor's appointment. It was the whole process I imagined that I'd have to go through to get one. But Zocdoc made that
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Thank you once again to Zocdoc for sponsoring this video and for helping us all take better care of our health.
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[music] Now, the second reason why I see a lot of people, particularly those who had some of that early emotional neglect patterning, assuming that they are too sensitive, is because those of us who had those emotionally under-nourishing early
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environments might have a tendency to regulate in unusual ways. Okay, so that might look like getting really attached to a specific routine, or specific habits that we really strictly adhere to.
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Or developing really strong attachments to items that we own, or places that we like to go. And then to think that there's something weird or wrong about us because we feel so strongly about like a pair of shoes that we want to
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buy, or a particular way of making our coffee in the morning that we cannot ever diverge from, or a restaurant that it feels like we have to go eat at if we're feeling stressed out, whatever it is.
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And then, because we don't see other people getting fixated on things the same way that we do, we judge ourselves for being overly rigid or overly sentimental or weird in some way. When actually, there might be a very logical
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reason for why we are feeling so much about those particular things. Because usually what those things are are regulation strategies that we developed in lieu of more common place ones.
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So if we didn't have access early on to strategies like talking about our feelings as they're coming up or finding ways to reduce our stress load when we get overwhelmed or learning to cope with uncertainty through being part of a community and
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relying on other people when life gets hard. We might get really attached to anything that works sort of well enough to regulate us through periods of stress even if those strategies feel kind of weird or unusual.
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And then we might be thinking of those regulation strategies as extra things that we need on top of what everybody else needs to stay feeling okay. When in reality we are probably lacking a lot of those kind of first line of defense
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resources that other people reach for when they're struggling. So it evens out to the same amount of regulation needs.
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They just get expressed and satisfied differently. So an example of this is every once in a while I will meet someone who is quite avoidantly attached or who may be a CPTSD type wounding who has very very few people in their lives. Like maybe
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they'll get two to five hours of human interaction a week. And then they'll make a new friend or they'll get a crush on somebody and they'll be really into them and then they'll get into this headspace of what
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is wrong with me? Why do I get so obsessed with people? Is this limerence?
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Is this anxious attachment? Whatever it is. When in reality what they actually are is so avoidant that they've almost completely disassociated from their needs for companionship or close relationships all together.
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It's like their loneliness doesn't even register to them as loneliness, right? It just registers as what it feels like to be alive.
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And so then, every time they do experience a hit of connection, it feels totally overwhelming to their system.
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Like sort of like if you never drink caffeine, and then you have one super strong coffee once a year.
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But trying to solve the problem by trying to lessen the dependency that they feel on those two people is kind of like telling someone who's starving to just say no to the two chocolate bars that they're given a day, because they
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must be abnormally obsessed with chocolate. Most people don't eat two chocolate bars a day.
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Right? When in reality, the real solution to their problem is to start getting more healthy food into their body every single day.
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Not to be less obsessed with the food that they are getting. So again, that person who's super isolated might have no idea that a lot of people are getting somewhere between 40 to 60 hours of human interaction time
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a week between work and family and friend time, which is a big reason why they tend to not get as obsessive about the individual relationships in their lives.
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Because those connection needs are getting chronically met for them. So sometimes, the issue we're up against here is that we're not aware of just how different other people's lives are.
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And just how much access they might have to forms of regulation that we don't have access to.
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So I've always noticed that during the periods of my own life when I'm the loneliest or when I'm feeling the least fulfilled, I'm also the most particular.
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So I'm the most fixated on my apartment feeling perfectly cozy, or my diet being perfectly optimized, or whatever it is.
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Whereas during the periods where I've been living in communities that have felt really meaningful to me or have had work that I felt really aligned with, a lot of those hyper fixations have sort of naturally fallen by the wayside, or
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at the least felt way less compulsive and vital. Because during those periods, other things are doing most of the heavy lifting of keeping me regulated.
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So, I can afford to be more chill about the secondary stuff. And so, it's when those secondary means of regulating ourselves become the primary strategies that we rely on that we often develop what might seem like strange attachments to them. But in
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reality, that is just our systems trying to keep themselves in homeostasis in the best way they know how.
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Now, the third reason we're going to talk about today why some of us might perceive ourselves as too sensitive is because we might be in the habit of internalizing abnormally painful situations as normal and then judging ourselves for the reactions that we're
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having to them. So, this is similar to point number one, but rather than the pain of everyday life, what we are looking at here is the pain of particularly demanding situations that we might be a little bit more predisposed to ending up in.
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So, there are absolutely certain situations in life that we kind of only can end up in if we are quite used to ignoring our emotions.
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So, work environments where we are never really off for any period of time and we might need to respond to an emergency at any hour of day or night.
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Or relationships where we're being chronically criticized or treated with contempt. Or living in a way that just requires us to constantly hide or mask elements of who we are on a day-to-day basis just to get through the day.
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Right? There are a lot of scenarios that we can end up in in life where if we're kind of thinking of emotional pain on a scale of 1 to 10, most people might turn back in any situation, whether that's a job, a
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relationship, whatever it is, that is routinely triggering a four or five out of 10 level of pain for them.
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Right? So, they might go, "I need to leave this job or this relationship or whatever it is because it's not worth the stress that it is causing.
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But, if we tend to tune out from pain, if it's below, let's say, an eight or nine out of 10, we are, ironically, probably going to end up genuinely experiencing more level eight or nine pain over the course of
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our lives because we didn't stop and turn back at the early warning signs. We waited until it reached that threshold point, and then that threshold point is probably a fairly extreme place.
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Right? So, it might take a pretty bad work environment or a pretty unhealthy relationship for us to register it as bad and for our systems to log it as painful.
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Sort of like if you have dull pain receptors in the body, you're not going to feel hurt until your body is probably already pretty harmed or under pretty severe distress.
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And so, then our own thinking might turn to something like, "Wow, I keep perceiving all of my work environments or all of my partners as toxic by the time I leave them, and must just be hypersensitive, or I must just be the
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problem here." When, in reality, it might be that your hypo-sensitivity is allowing you to persist for as long as you do inside of contexts that the average person would find unbearably painful and get themselves out of much earlier.
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And again, the more that we can do that contexting for ourselves and recognize what's happening as hard, the better a chance we stand at being able to deal with it directly and starting to respond to those problems when they're at that four or
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five out of 10, rather than waiting until we're way over our heads at that eight or nine.
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Now, the fourth instance or circumstance where we might judge ourselves inaccurately as too sensitive is when we are being worn thin from being in a chronic survival response.
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So, I have a video that I'll link in the description of this one that goes over some of the signs that you might be chronically outside of your window of tolerance and responding from one of those fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
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responses. But, the idea is that some of us have spent a whole lot of our lives in a state of low or high-level dysregulation.
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And the thing about being dysregulated or being stuck in those survival responses is that they eat up a humongous amount of our energy and our emotional bandwidth.
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So, this is a scenario where we might genuinely start feeling more sensitive. So, more reactive, more thin-skinned, more quick to anger or cry than the average person.
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But, it's not because we are inherently more sensitive than them. It's because we are using up too much of our internal emotional reserves too often.
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With too little opportunity to rest and recover. Okay, all of us have a finite amount of willpower available to us.
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Right? So, that capacity to go against what we want or need in the moment and get the thing that needs to get done, done. Nobody has an endless supply of that.
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And so, if we're constantly using up all of our willpower on just getting through day-to-day life.
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So, forcing ourselves to comply with people who we feel belittled by on a day-to-day basis. Or rallying ourselves up to advocate for ourselves inside of unfair systems that we rely on for our survival.
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Or chronically having to figure out where we're living or how we're going to make ends meet over the next couple of weeks or months. Even the strongest person on Earth is going to get depleted. That is just how nervous
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systems work. And then, we're going to have less ego strength available to us to do things like stop ourselves from crying or getting frustrated or letting some of our responsibility slide.
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But again, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're being too sensitive. It might be a sign that what we are is severely under-resourced.
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And so the point here is that even if it takes a long time for us to find our way back to a more resourced place, it can be incredibly useful just to diagnose the problem accurately.
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Okay, so just to remind ourselves that this probably isn't a problem that's going to get solved by suppressing our emotions better.
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The emotions are a symptom of a much deeper problem, which is that our needs are going unmet.
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And that's the level that we need to be working on to solve the problem at its core.
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Can we work to get ourselves to a place where it's automatically easier to regulate on a day-to-day level because we're not dealing with an overwhelming level of challenge or adversity day-to-day.
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Those are the circumstances where our emotions naturally start to regulate themselves because we're not constantly resisting or working against them just to get through the day.
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And the fifth and final sign that you might assume you're hypersensitive when what you actually are is dissociated from how challenging your life is is that you have an incredibly rigid internal locus of control. Now, very quickly for those who don't know what
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that term means, having an external locus of control means believing that your life is primarily shaped by forces that are outside of you. So by other people, by luck, by circumstances or fate, whatever it is.
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Whereas having an internal locus of control means believing that it is your own choices and actions and mindset that have the biggest and most meaningful influence over the direction of your life.
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And generally, an internal locus of control is actually a wonderful thing. Okay, so it's associated with resilience, persistence, agency, a whole whack of useful skills.
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But, like every psychological strength, it also comes with a failure mode. And the failure mode here is that if we over-rely on an internal locus of control, we start using the tool of self-responsibility to try to solve every problem we come
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across. So, as soon as we're struggling, our minds automatically default to what about me needs to change.
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So, maybe I can set better boundaries, or develop better habits, or better emotional regulation, or better discernment, or maybe I failed to account for some variable that I really should have seen coming down the line a long time ago. And now I can make better
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predictions in the future. So, we hyper-fixate on our own agency, while very often turning a blind eye to the fact that in some situations the highest leverage move we can possibly make is recognizing the limits of our agency.
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Okay? Sometimes we really are operating inside of a no-win situation. And we're becoming as exhausted, as burnt out, as emotionally reactive as we are, because we're trying to use persistence to solve a problem that would better be solved by acknowledging that we're
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vulnerable, or we're in harm's way, or we need outside help. Right? But, in order to recognize those things, we have to accurately register what our environment is actually doing to us and how it's impacting us, which can be really hard, particularly
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for those of us who err more avoidant on the spectrum, to do. Because if we've spent our entire lives desensitizing ourselves to how much other people, or unhealthy environments, or chronic stress, or impossible expectations are actually affecting us,
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we'll probably be consistently underestimating how hard our lives actually are. And so, instead of coming to the conclusion that, "Hey, this situation is pretty overwhelming." when we're in an overwhelming situation, we're more likely to go, "Oh, I'm just
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not handling things well enough." Or instead of asking things like, "Is what I'm dealing with too much for one person?" What we'll ask ourselves is, "Why am I so much weaker than everyone else?" So, very simply put, what might feel
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like hypersensitivity from the inside is, in a lot of cases, actually the opposite. It's a kind of hyposensitivity to the cumulative impact that your circumstances are having on you.
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And at the end of the day, this is really what we've been talking about throughout the entire video.
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Right? We can get so used to underestimating the loads that our nervous systems are bearing that we can't even see how much heavy lifting we're already doing.
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So, we might get so used to dismissing low-level loneliness that we don't notice it until we are desperately attached to the first person who comes along.
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Or we get so used to tuning out chronic stress that we don't realize we're burnt out until our nervous systems are completely fried and we collapse.
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Or we're so used to adapting to unhealthy relationships or impossible workloads that we mistake the eventual exhaustion that they produce as a personal weakness rather than a perfectly understandable response to what we have been enduring. And then, once again, if we never fully register
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what our circumstances are costing us, we can end up creating that second layer of suffering where we start asking, "What's wrong with me?" When often the much better question is, "Have I actually acknowledged how difficult my life has been?"
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Because I think that one of the biggest costs of having something like emotional neglect in our history is not just that we're not comforted or supported enough, it's that we lose our sense of proportion.
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So we normalize feeling overwhelmed or functioning outside of our window of tolerance on a daily basis.
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And we carry around these expectations for ourselves that would exhaust pretty much anybody. And the thing is that healing from those wounds is not about becoming tougher, which might be what we've been telling ourselves for our entire lives. It's
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actually about becoming more sensitive. So noticing at a much lower level things like stress or loneliness or a need for support or becoming sensitive to and aware of how other people and our circumstances are impacting us. Because when we start
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accurately registering what our lives are actually demanding of us and our nervous systems, we stop mistaking those perfectly understandable emotional responses for weakness.
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Which means we can start solving the problems of our lives on the level that they actually exist at.
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Which ideally looks like starting to build a life that asks a lot less of our nervous systems in the first place.
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All right, that's all I'm going to say on this topic for today. But as always, any thoughts, any questions, anything coming up for you as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comment section below. I love you guys. I hope
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you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again really soon.
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[music]
Topics:complex PTSDemotional neglectdissociationsecondary sufferingemotional regulationself-compassionhypersensitivityHeidi Priebeemotional validationburnout
