Why You Take Things So Personally (Even When You Know You Should Just Let It Go)

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It’s about ten at night, and you’re crying about forgetting to water the flowers.

Not even a fight about the flowers. A comment. Six words, maybe, said by your partner in a completely calm voice, about how you keep forgetting to water them.

And you can see yourself spiralling. That’s the worst part. There’s a version of you sitting in the back of your own head, arms folded, watching this happen and going, oh no. Not again. Keep it together. It’s just flowers.

And your partner says the thing. Not cruelly. Genuinely baffled. “I don’t understand why this is such a big deal. Why do you take everything so personally?”

And here’s what breaks your heart: you agree with them. You’d give anything for it to not be a big deal. You have no idea why your body is doing this over flowers. So you go to bed, and you don’t sleep, and at one in the morning you’re writing an apology in your head for having feelings. Again.

You’re not overreacting. You’re having a full-sized reaction to something much bigger than flowers – with a nervous system with a very specific set of dials. And once you can see the dials, none of this looks like a character flaw anymore.

About this episode

A couple of weeks ago, in Episode 14: You’re Not Overreacting — You’re Flooded, I gave you the Pause Protocol – what to do in the middle of the fire. This episode is about everything around the fire, which, honestly, is where most of the actual relationship damage lives.

Because the moment isn’t really the problem. What happens in the hours after is. The replaying. The over-apologizing. The quiet decision to make yourself smaller for a few days so you don’t cost anyone anything…. That’s where the mask goes back on at home (the one place it was supposed to be able to come off.)

In Episode 18, I walk you through why “calm down” backfires every single time, the three dials that actually run your reactions, the eggshells loop most couples are stuck in without knowing it, and the tools that raise your capacity between the storms – because regulation is mostly decided before the moment ever arrives. This is the women-specific version of the story, too: the crying-in-the-bathroom-for-eleven-minutes-then-making-dinner version nobody teaches you to name.

What you’ll learn

• Why “overreacting” was never the right word – and what emotional dysregulation actually is (it affects most adults with ADHD, and it got left out of the diagnostic manual)
• The three dials – onset, intensity, and recovery – that run your reactions, and why the slow one causes a very specific, brutal misunderstanding
• Why you’re not having a big reaction to a small thing – you’re having a proportionate reaction to a large thing nobody else can see
• What the “shame hangover” is, and why the hours after a fight do more damage than the fight itself
• The eggshells loop your partner’s kindness is quietly making worse – and the one conversation that dismantles it
• The capacity audit: a ten-second daily habit that makes your reactions stop feeling random
• The after-script and the one sentence to hand your partner, so they finally know how to help instead of trying to fix it

It’s not about the flowers. It’s what the flowers landed on. And everybody else can only see the last thing that got put on the pile.

Resources mentioned

• Free guide, How to Stop the RSD Spiral: JennaDalton.com/rsd
• Free quiz, Is It Actually Me?: JennaDalton.com/quiz
• Episode 14: You’re Not Overreacting — You’re Flooded: the Pause Protocol episode
• Come say hi on Instagram: @neurodivergentlovelab

Ready to go deeper?

If you’re tired of feeling blindsided by your own reactions and want to actually work with your wiring instead of against it:

• Take the free quiz, Is It Actually Me?: figure out whether what you’re navigating is your wiring, your relationship, or the intersection of both
• Grab the free RSD guide, How to Stop the RSD Spiral: four tools sorted by time, so your brain doesn’t write a horror story while you’re trying to come down
• Book a free 15-minute consultation: if you’re in Alberta and curious about working together one-on-one

Loved this episode?

Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a rating wherever you listen, and send this one to the person who has watched you spiral over something small and never understood what was actually happening – or to the partner who keeps saying “calm down” and genuinely doesn’t know it makes it worse.

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Episode transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Open

It’s about ten at night and you’re crying about forgetting to water the flowers.

Not even a fight about the flowers. A comment. Six words, maybe, said in a completely calm voice, about how you keep forgetting to water the flowers.

And you can see yourself spiralling. That’s the worst part. There’s a part of you sitting somewhere in the back of your own head, arms folded, watching this happen and going, oh no. Oh no, not again. Keep it together. It’s just flowers!

And your partner says the thing. Not cruelly. Genuinely baffled. “I don’t understand why this is such a big deal. Why do you take everything so personally?”

And here’s what breaks your heart. You agree with them. You completely agree with them. You’d give anything for it not to be a big deal. You have no idea why your body is doing this over flowers.

So you go to bed, and you don’t sleep, and at one in the morning you’re writing an apology in your head for having feelings. Again.

Here’s the thing. You’re not overreacting. You’re having a full-sized reaction to something much bigger than flowers, on a nervous system with a specific set of dials — and I’m going to show you exactly which dials they are.

Intro

This is the Neurodivergent Love Lab. I’m Jenna Dalton, a psychologist who’s AuDHD. I help ADHD, autistic, and AuDHD women feel truly understood and deeply loved. And this is Episode 18: Why You Take Things So Personally (Even When You Know You Should Just Let It Go).

Now, a couple of weeks back — in Episode 14: You’re Not Overreacting, You’re Flooded — I gave you the Pause Protocol, which is what to do in the middle of the fire. Today we’re talking about everything around the fire. Why “calm down” makes it worse. What happens in the hours afterward, which is honestly where most of the damage lives. The eggshells loop that couples get stuck in. And the thing nobody tells you, which is that regulation isn’t just about the moment. It’s mostly about your capacity when the moment arrived.

The setup: the word “overreacting” is doing a lot of work

Let’s start with that word — “overreacting” — because it’s been following you around your whole life. Overreacting. It’s probably giving you some sort of body sensation just me saying it, right?

It suggests that there’s one correct size of reaction, that everybody agrees on it, and that yours is wrong. And the person who gets called it is almost always a woman. You know this. Dramatic. Sensitive. Emotional. Intense. Too much. There’s a whole vocabulary in the English language for a woman having a feeling, and none of it is flattering.

So here’s the actual clinical picture, and it’s going to be a relief. What you have is not a character problem. It’s called emotional dysregulation, and all that means is that your emotional responses come on faster, hit harder, and take longer to come down than most people’s. That’s it. That’s the whole definition.

And this is the part I need you to hear. It’s estimated to affect somewhere between seventy and ninety percent of adults with ADHD. It’s not a fringe thing. It’s not a small subgroup. It’s most of us.

It was in the earliest clinical descriptions of ADHD. One of the founding researchers argued it should be a core type of its own. And then, when the official diagnostic criteria got written, it got dropped. It’s not in the manual.

Sit with what that does to a person. The single loudest, most defining, most life-shaping part of your experience is officially not part of the condition. So when you went looking for an explanation, you couldn’t find one, and instead somebody handed you anxiety, or depression, or a personality label, or just the word “sensitive.” You spent years being told a main neurodivergent trait you have was a personality defect — because the diagnostic system decided it didn’t belong in the book.

And there’s a gendered shape to how this shows up, too. Men more often turn it outward, into visible anger. Women more often turn it inward. Rumination. Self-criticism. Shame. Going very quiet and very small while an entire storm runs underneath. Which means your version might not have looked like a tantrum at all. It might have looked like a woman crying in the bathroom for eleven minutes and then coming out and making dinner like nothing just happened.

The education: the dials, and what happens afterward

Part one. Three dials, not one flaw.

Here’s the model I use, and it makes this so much easier to talk about with a partner. You don’t have “a temper” or “a sensitivity.” You have three separate dials, and they’re set differently to most people’s.

Dial one is onset. How fast the feelings arrive. Yours is fast. Zero to a hundred with very little in between. Most people get a runway. You launch straight up.

Dial two is intensity. How big the feelings get. Yours go big. Not “a bit annoyed.” So annoyed you can’t feel your toes and your eyeballs are about to explode.

Dial three is recovery. How long it takes to come back down. Yours is slow, and this is the one nobody accounts for. Your partner might be genuinely over it in fifteen minutes. You’re still, physically, in it two hours later. Same fight. Two completely different recovery settings.

And that third dial is where a specific, brutal misunderstanding lives. “We already sorted this out, why are you still upset?” You’re not still upset because you’re holding a grudge. You’re still upset because your body hasn’t finished recovering and your brain is still processing. The conversation is over, but your wiring means it’s basically impossible for you to just walk away from it and be totally fine in twenty minutes or less.

Now, the second thing, and this is an important reframe. You’re not having a big reaction to a small thing. You’re having a proportionate reaction to a large thing that nobody but you can see.

Because the comment about the flowers didn’t land on a clean surface. It landed on top of a full day of masking. On top of a sensory load nobody else can see. On top of the fourteenth time this week that you tried to do something right and got it slightly wrong. On top of thirty years of being told you’re doing it wrong. On top of a mental load you’re carrying that has no name and no thank you attached to it.

So the reaction is not out of proportion to the flowers. It’s exactly in proportion to the pile those flowers are sitting on top of. Everybody else can only see the last thing that got put on the pile. And this is what I want you to be able to say out loud, because it’s true and it’s fair: “It’s not about the flowers. It’s what the flowers landed on.”

There’s a third piece, and it’s specific to us. Hyper-empathy. If you’re the kind of person who feels other people’s emotions in your own body, and a lot of neurodivergent women are, then during any conflict you’re not regulating one nervous system. You’re regulating two. You’re managing your own storm while also absorbing theirs. That’s an enormous load. And it’s completely invisible from the outside. From the outside you just look upset. From the inside you’re doing double the work.

Part two. The afterward, and the loop it builds.

Okay. Here’s the part of this that I don’t think gets nearly enough airtime, and honestly I think this is where most of the actual relationship damage happens. Not during. After.

The wave passes. Your body comes down. And now you’re sitting in the wreckage, and here comes the second thing, which I call the shame hangover — especially if no repair attempt was made and you’re just left alone with your thoughts.

You replay it. Every word. The tone of your voice. Their face. Over and over, at a level of detail that would be genuinely impressive if it weren’t destroying you.

Then comes the over-apologizing. And notice what you apologize for. Not “I’m sorry I said that harshly,” which would be fair and healthy. You apologize for the existence of the feeling. “I’m sorry, I’m being crazy.” “I’m sorry, ignore me.” “I’m sorry I’m like this.”

And then comes the part that costs you the most, which is pre-emptive shrinking. You decide, quietly, without announcing it, to be smaller for the next few days. Easier. Lower maintenance. You don’t raise the next thing that bothers you, because you’ve decided you’ve used up your allowance. That right there is where the mask goes back on at home. Which is the one place it was supposed to be able to come off.

And now, the loop. This is the one I want you to be able to spot, because most couples are in it and almost none of them know it’s happening. It goes like this.

One. You have a big reaction to something.

Two. Your partner learns that certain topics cost a lot, so they start not raising things. They’re not being sneaky. They think they’re being kind.

Three. But you catch it. Of course you catch it. You’re the one who reads a room before you finish walking into it. So you feel the carefulness, you feel the withholding, and you don’t have a name for it, you just feel it.

Four. And unnamed withholding, to a rejection-sensitive nervous system, feels exactly like something being wrong that nobody’s telling you. Which is threat. So your baseline goes up.

Five. Which means the next thing lands on an even higher pile.

And around you both go. Your partner’s kindness is quietly making it worse, and neither of you can see it happening.

Here’s the way out, and it’s not what most people expect. The way out isn’t you having smaller reactions. It’s naming the loop out loud, together, while you’re both calm, before you find yourselves in it again. Something like: “I think we’re doing a thing. I think you’ve stopped bringing stuff up because you don’t want to set me off, and I can feel you being careful, and the carefulness actually makes me worse than the honesty would. I’d rather you told me things.” That one conversation dismantles more eggshells than a year of trying to just be calmer.

The tool: raise the floor

Alright. Let’s talk about the tools. And notice that only one of them happens during a hard moment, because a lot of the helpful work actually happens outside the hard moments.

Move one. The capacity audit. Stop being surprised by yourself.

Here’s the thing about regulation that nobody tells you. Almost all of it is decided before the moment ever arrives. Your ability to handle a comment about the flowers on Tuesday has very little to do with your character and a great deal to do with how much you had left in the tank when the comment arrived. So we stop trying to win the moment and start raising the floor.

For one month, track five things. Just five. Notes app, one line a day, ten seconds. How many hours you masked that day — meetings, school pickup, small talk, all of it. How you slept. Your sensory load — noisy day? Bright? Crowded? A lot of touch? Where you are in your cycle, if you have one. And I mean it — we’re doing a whole episode on this in a few weeks, because the hormone piece is one of the biggest and least-discussed parts of this whole thing. And then, at the end of the day, one number from one to ten for how regulated you felt.

Within about three weeks, and I’ve watched this happen with clients, you’ll have a map. And you will discover that the thing you thought was random is not random at all. It’s astonishingly predictable. And predictable is powerful, for two reasons. One, you can plan around it. You can stop booking the hard conversation for the day after a big social event. Two, and this one matters more than it sounds, it’s the end of “what is wrong with me.” Because the answer stops being “I’m unstable” and starts being “I had eleven hours of masking and four hours of sleep, and it was day twenty-four.” That’s not me choosing to be difficult. That’s me at such a low capacity it’s shocking I didn’t get even more dysregulated.

Move two. The after-script. Apologize for impact, not for existing.

This is the one that stops the shame hangover from doing its worst damage. Once you’re back, you need words. And the words have to do a specific job, which is to separate two things that have been welded together in your head your entire life. What you did, and the fact that you had a feeling at all.

So here’s the shape: “I’m sorry about how I said it. And I’m not going to apologize for being upset.” And then, if you can, one line of explanation that isn’t an excuse: “It wasn’t about the flowers. That landed on top of a really full day, and I didn’t have much left. That’s on me to manage, and I’m working on it. But I do want you to know it wasn’t nothing. To me, it felt like a lot.”

Read that again and notice what it does. It takes ownership, honestly. It doesn’t excuse anything. And it does not throw your own feelings under the bus to buy peace. Because here’s what happens every time you say “sorry, ignore me, I’m being crazy.” You teach both of you that your reactions are noise. And once your reactions are noise, nobody’s listening for the signal in them, including you. So the actual problem, the pile underneath, never gets addressed, and it grows. Own the delivery. Give yourself permission to have the feeling. Every time.

Move three. Give your partner the one sentence that actually helps.

Your partner wants to help. In the moment, they usually do one of three things, and all three make it worse. They try to fix it, which tells your body it’s a problem to be solved rather than a wave to be ridden. They try to argue you out of it with logic. Or they say “calm down.”

Let’s do “calm down” properly, because it’s worth understanding why it detonates. “Calm down” asks for a state your body physically cannot produce on command. Nobody can. But worse than that, it adds a second problem on top of the first one. Now you’re upset, and you’re also being told you’re wrong for being upset. So there’s the original feeling, plus shame, plus the urgent need to defend the legitimacy of the feeling. You’ve just doubled the load.

So here’s what you give them instead. One sentence, agreed on in advance, when you’re both calm. “When I’m like this, don’t try to fix it, work on your own regulation, and don’t leave. That’s all. Sit near me, help me bring my energy down, and stay. I just need time and your simple presence — without you trying to solve the problem — to help me.” Three instructions. Don’t fix. Don’t leave. Lower the input. Any partner can remember this.

And there’s a beautiful thing that happens with that. Co-regulation. Human nervous systems calm down near other calm nervous systems. It’s not a metaphor, it’s how we’re built. A partner who can stay steady and near, without pushing and without disappearing, is doing something genuinely powerful. They just usually don’t know that’s the job, because everyone told them the job was to fix it.

I find this to be especially true for many of my clients whose partners were raised to be fixers — often, though not always, the men. You fix the problems for the people you love; that’s what a good partner does. So reframe that. The fix here is sitting with them and being their co-regulator, rather than rushing off to make it better in some other way.

The RSD guide

Now, there’s one more thing that runs through all of this, and if you’ve listened to this show for any length of time you’ll know what I’m going to say. Rejection sensitivity. Because a lot of the time, the thing that turns a moment into a wave is your brain deciding, in about half a second, that this means you’re about to be left. Rejected. Abandoned.

That’s what my free guide is for. It’s called How to Stop the RSD Spiral, and it’s four tools sorted by time. What to do right now. What to do in the next twenty minutes so your brain doesn’t write an entire horror story while you’re trying to come down. How to reality-check with your partner once you’re back, instead of treating the story your brain wrote as the truth. And what to change long-term so there’s less ambiguity for your brain to fill in the gaps with “I’m an awful partner. Who would even want to be with me anyway?”

If you take one thing and put it into practice this week, honestly, make it the twenty-minute one. That’s where most of the damage gets done. Grab it free at JennaDalton.com/rsd. That’s JennaDalton.com/rsd, and I’ll put the link in the show notes.

Close

Here’s what I want you to walk away with. You are not too much. You have a fast dial, a big dial, and a slow dial, in a body that has been carrying more than anyone can see, in a culture with an entire dictionary of unkind words for a woman with a feeling.

And the thing that’s going to change this is not you getting better at not feeling. That was never on the table, and honestly I don’t want it for you. The same wiring that makes the wave big is the wiring that makes you notice everything, and care so hard, and love with your whole body. You can’t remove one without the other.

What you can do is raise the floor. Track it, so it stops being random. Own the delivery without disowning the feeling. And give the person who loves you three simple instructions so they can stop guessing.

It was never about the flowers. And you were never overreacting. You were reacting exactly the right amount to a pile that nobody else could see. Start the tracking this week, and go grab the RSD guide at JennaDalton.com/rsd.

Thanks for being here with me. Remember, you deserve to feel truly understood and deeply loved. I’ll talk to you soon.

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Neurodivergent Love Lab is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for therapy or mental health care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a local crisis line or emergency service.