“Too Much and Not Enough”: The Story of Your ND Life

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Too sensitive. Too talkative. Too emotional. Too much.

Not open enough. Not organized enough. Not trying hard enough. Not enough.

Too much. And not enough. At the same time. In the same relationship. Sometimes in the same sentence.

If you know this feeling – if you feel it in your body right now, reading this – I want you to know something before we go any further:

You are enough. And you are not too much.

About this episode

Episode 4 is the one that might hit different than the others. The first three episodes were more educational: here’s how your brain works, here’s what’s happening neurologically, here’s the science.

This one is more personal. Because “too much and not enough” isn’t just a pattern. It’s a wound. And a lot of us have been carrying it so long we forgot it was there. We just think that’s… who we are.

In Episode 4, I walk through the four sources of the “too much/not enough” message – why your brain isn’t broken, why the system has been rigged against you, and the specific neurological and social reasons this story sticks so deep for neurodivergent adults. Then I give you three things you can actually do with it.

What you’ll learn

• Why “too much and not enough” isn’t a personality flaw, it’s a wound built by accumulation
• The basketball-and-the-rim metaphor: how you’ve been measured on a scale that was never built for your brain
• The masking paradox – why the version of you that “worked” eventually exhausts you, and why your partner falls in love with the mask
• How Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) magnifies a sigh into a verdict on your whole worth
• The accumulation effect: why one comment can hit like a thousand
• Three practical tools to start loosening the grip of this story – including how to separate feedback from identity and how to build a counter-evidence file your brain can’t argue with

You’re not overreacting to one comment. You’re reacting to the entire collection of records that have been playing on repeat your entire life.

Resources mentioned

• Free quiz – Is This My Brain or My Relationship? JennaDalton.com/quiz
• Send Jenna a DM on Instagram – @neurodivergentlovelab

Ready to go deeper?

If this episode hit home and you want to talk about what it looks like in your relationship specifically:

• Get on the waitlist for Love the Way You’re Wired. This workbook walks you through your own wiring, your stress profile, and how to bridge the gap with your partner
• Take the free quiz to figure out where to focus first
• Book a free 15-minute consultation if you’re 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 been carrying the “too much and not enough” wound and never had the language for it. This is the episode to share.

Episode transcript

Too sensitive.

Too talkative.

Too emotional.

Too much.

Not open enough.

Not organized enough.

Not trying hard enough.

Not enough.

Too much. And not enough. At the same time. In the same relationship. Sometimes in the same sentence.

If you know this feeling – if you feel it in your body right now, listening to this – I want you to know something before we go any further:

You are enough and you’re not too much. 

And today, I’m going to help you understand where that message came from, why it got its talons in you so deep, and how to start loosening its grip. Because it’s been hurting you long enough.

This is the Neurodivergent Love Lab. I’m Jenna Dalton – a psychologist who specializes in helping ADHD, autistic, and AuDHD humans make sense of love – and this is Episode 4: “Too Much and Not Enough: The Story of Your ND Life”

The Setup: The Message You’ve Carried Your Whole Life

I need to warn you. This episode might hit different than the others. The first three episodes of the NDLL podcast have been more educational: here’s how your brain works, here’s what’s happening neurologically, here’s the science. 

Today is more… personal. Because “too much and not enough” isn’t just a pattern. It’s a wound. And a lot of us have been carrying it so long we forgot it was there. We just think that’s… who we are.

It’s such a deeply ingrained part of our identity at this point.

Let me describe what I hear from clients. Because I hear some version of this from almost every neurodivergent person who walks through my door. The words change. The feeling never does.

“My partner says I’m too emotional about small things, but I don’t show enough emotion about the big things.”

“I’m told I’m overwhelmingly too much when I’m passionate about something, but then I’m told I don’t care enough when I go quiet.”

“I give too much at the start, and then not enough after.”

“I’m too rigid about my routines, but too disorganized about literally everything else.”

“I talk too much about things nobody cares about, but don’t say enough when it matters.”

Do you hear the pattern? No matter what you do, it’s the wrong amount. Too much of this. Not enough of that. Like you’re a thermostat that’s always set to the wrong temperature, no matter how many times you adjust it.

And over time – over years, over decades, over relationships – that message stops being something people say to you and starts becoming something you believe about yourself. It becomes your identity. You stop hearing “that was a lot” and start believing “I’m too much.” You stop hearing “I need more from you” and start believing “I will never be enough.”

I’m fundamentally bad at love. That’s the belief. That’s the wound.

But here’s the thing – and come closer because I really need you to hear this: you are not bad at love. The system is rigged against you. And I’m going to show you exactly why I wholeheartedly believe this to be true.

The Education: Where the “Too Much/Not Enough” Message Comes From

This message doesn’t fall from the sky. It doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It has very specific neurological and social origins. And once you see them, you can’t unsee them. So let me walk you through four of them.

Source 1: You’re Being Measured on a Scale That Wasn’t Built for You

Okay, imagine this. You’re five foot two-ish – which happens to be my height – and someone hands you a basketball – side quest: this is a sport I used to love playing with my dad. 

Okay. You’re handed the basketball. 

The person says, “You need to dunk.” And you try. You try really, really hard. You jump as high as you can. You stretch your arms out as far as they can possibly go. You start from a running leap. And when you can’t reach the rim, they don’t say “the hoop is too high for you.” They say “you’re not trying hard enough.”

That’s what’s happening.

Most of the world is built for neurotypical brains. The social norms, the relationship expectations, the communication styles, the emotional expression rules… all of it is built on neurotypical averages. 

There’s an invisible rulebook that everyone is supposed to follow, and that rulebook says things like: this is how much emotion is “normal” to show. This is how much talking is “too much.” This is how much alone time is “healthy.” This is how much enthusiasm is “appropriate.”

And when your brain processes emotion at a higher intensity, or needs more sensory regulation, or communicates with more words or fewer words than the neurotypical average, or needs different amounts of alone time, or expresses enthusiasm at a volume that the rulebook didn’t account for… you are always, always going to register as “too much” or “not enough” to someone reading from that rulebook.

But that’s not you being wrong. That’s the scale being wrong for your brain. You’re not miscalibrated. You’re being measured with the wrong instrument.

It’s like trying to weigh flour on a bathroom scale and then being told the flour is broken because the number doesn’t make sense. The flour is fine. You need a kitchen scale.

Source 2: The Masking Paradox 

This one is painful. And it’s one of the things I feel most passionate about helping people understand, because masking is at the root of so much relationship pain.

Here’s what happens: Many neurodivergent people – especially women and non-binary people who were socialized female – learned very early in life to mask. You learned that your natural way of being wasn’t acceptable. So you adapted. 

You learned to suppress your stims. Modulate your voice. Perform the right facial expressions. Regulate your interests so they were “acceptable.” Match the energy of the room instead of bringing your own. You built a whole performance-based self to the stage, and that performative self got you through school, through work, through friendships, through first dates, through life.

And here’s where it gets cruel: the mask works. That’s the problem. The mask is so effective that people fall in love with it. Your partner meets the masked version of you and thinks that’s who you are. The composed, regulated, socially appropriate version. That becomes their baseline for you. That’s the person they signed up for.

But masking is exhausting. It’s like holding in your stomach all day. You can do it for a while, but at some point your body just… lets go. And in a relationship – especially one where you’re living together or spending significant time together – the mask eventually slips. Not because you’re careless. Because you’re human and your regulatory resources are finite.

So the most authentic version of you comes out. This can include the intense emotions. The sensory overwhelm. The need for solitude. The deep dive into a special interest at the expense of everything else. The shutdown during conflict. The inability to do the dishes even though you know they need to be done. The meltdown over something that seems “small.”

And your partner – who fell in love with the mask – is confused. Alarmed. They didn’t sign up for this. Where did the composed, easygoing version go?

You’re “too much” when the mask slips. 

And here’s the kicker: you’re not failing. The masking system is failing. You were never supposed to perform neurotypically 24/7. Nobody can do that. The solution isn’t a better mask. It’s a partner, a relationship where you don’t need one.

Source 3: Rejection Sensitivity Turns the Volume to 11

For those of us with ADHD, there’s an additional layer here, and it’s called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I talked about RSD briefly in Episode 2 as one of the patterns that gets rewritten after a diagnosis, but I want to go deeper here because RSD is one of the primary engines that keeps the “too much/not enough” narrative running.

RSD is essentially your brain’s threat detection system being cranked up to max sensitivity. It takes a small piece of feedback – a tone of voice, a facial expression, an offhand comment, even a pause that lasted a second too long – and magnifies it into a global statement about your worth as a human being.

Your partner sighs. That’s it. Just a sigh. Maybe they’re tired. Maybe they’re thinking about work. Maybe they just remembered that one time they were so close to beating the final boss in Mortal Kombat and then died. But your brain? Your brain translates that sigh as: “You’re exhausting. You’re too much. You’re doing it all wrong.”

Your partner glances at their phone while you’re talking. Your brain’s translation: “You’re boring. You’re not interesting enough to hold their attention. You’re not enough.”

Your partner says, “Can we talk about this later?” Your brain’s translation: “They don’t care about what you’re feeling. Your emotions are an inconvenience. You’re too much and not worth their time.”

Maybe none of those translations are accurate. But they feel accurate. They feel like objective truth. And that’s what makes RSD so insidious – it doesn’t feel like an overreaction. It feels like you’re finally seeing the truth that everyone else has been too polite to say out loud.

Over time, RSD creates this running internal monologue – this background radio station that’s always playing the greatest hits of “you’re too much and not enough.” Even when nobody is saying it. Even when your partner is perfectly happy. RSD is in there, scanning for evidence, interpreting neutral data as rejection, and reinforcing the narrative every single day.

It’s exhausting. And if nobody has told you this before: it’s not your fault that your brain does this. Your threat detection system is miscalibrated. You’re not choosing to be this way. It’s simply how your brain works.

Source 4: The Accumulation Effect 

Here’s the last source, and it’s the one people don’t talk about enough.

These messages don’t hit you once. They accumulate. Over a lifetime.

The teacher who said you were “too chatty” in class. The friend group that excluded you for being “too intense.” The ex who said you were “a lot.” The parent who told you to “calm down” every time you expressed enthusiasm. The colleague who described you as “overwhelming” in a performance review.

Each one of those moments is a data point. And your brain – which is excellent at pattern recognition, by the way, because that’s part of being neurodivergent – collects those data points and builds a model. And the model says: I’m fundamentally, consistently, across all environments and all relationships, too much and not enough.

By the time you’re in an adult romantic relationship, that model has decades of evidence behind it. It feels unshakeable. It feels like fact. And when your partner says something that even slightly activates it…. boom. The whole model lights up. It’s not just about what they said in that moment. It’s about every teacher, every friend, every ex, every parent who said some version of the same thing.

No wonder it hurts so much. You’re not overreacting to one comment. You’re reacting to the entire collection of records that have been playing on repeat your entire life.

The Tool: Rewriting the Story

Okay. Deep breath. I know that was a lot to take in. And if any of that landed in a tender spot, I want you to know that’s normal and that says something good about you, not something broken.

You are here because you want to gain a deeper understanding of yourself and sometimes that means looking more closely at the wounds that have developed over time. That’s hard. 

I’ve got you.

So. We’ve named where the message comes from. Now, what do we do with it? How do we start loosening the grip of a story that’s been running for decades?

I’m going to give you three things to help support you right now. Not five. Not ten. Three. Because if your brain is anything like mine, it’s probably pretty close to capacity right now, and that’s okay. We’re going with three. We’ve got this.

One: Separate feedback from identity.

This is the foundation. Everything else builds on this.

When your partner says “that was a lot,” your brain is going to want to do what it always does: translate that into a statement about who you are. “That was a lot” becomes “I am too much.” Feedback about a moment becomes a verdict about your entire being.

I need you to practice – and it is practice, this doesn’t happen overnight – hearing it as information about that moment only. “That was a lot for them, in that context, at that time” is a fundamentally different thing than “I am too much as a human.”

Think about it like weather versus climate. A rainy Tuesday doesn’t mean you live in a rainy city. One moment of being “a lot” doesn’t mean you are, fundamentally and always, too much.

Start by just noticing when your brain makes the leap. You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to argue with it. Just notice. “Oh – there it goes. They said one thing and my brain just extrapolated it to mean I’m fundamentally flawed.” The noticing itself is the first crack in the pattern. And cracks let the light in.

Two: Name your needs without apologizing for them.

Okay, this one. This one is likely going to feel uncomfortable at first. Because if you’ve spent your whole life being told you’re too much, you’ve probably developed a reflexive apology habit. You apologize before you even state the need. Like you’re pre-emptively defending yourself against the judgment you’re sure is coming.

“Sorry, I know this is a lot, but could we maybe turn the music down? I’m sorry, it’s just a sensory thing.”

“Sorry, I know I always do this, but I need a minute before I can talk about what happened.”

“I’m sorry I’m so much right now.”

Let’s try those again. Without the apology.

“I need the music lower. It’s a sensory thing.”

“I need some time before I can talk about this. It’s not about you – it’s about how my brain processes conflict.”

“I’m really into this topic. I appreciate you listening.”

Notice there’s no “sorry” in any of those. Not one. Because you are not apologizing for having your unique brain. You’re communicating what you need. And those are massively different things.

You don’t apologize for needing glasses. You don’t apologize for being allergic to peanuts. You don’t need to apologize for needing lower lights or processing time or extra stimulation. Those are features of your operating system, not bugs.

And I’ll tell you something else: when you stop apologizing for your needs, your partner actually takes them more seriously. 

An apology communicates, “I know this is unreasonable but I’m asking anyway.” A clear statement communicates, “This is real and it matters.” Your partner can’t meet needs you’re undermining before you even finish stating them.

Three: Start collecting counter-evidence. Deliberately.

Remember what I said about the accumulation effect? Your brain has been collecting evidence for “too much/not enough” for years. Decades, probably. It is really, really good at this particular scavenger hunt. Every sigh, every raised eyebrow, every “calm down” – filed away. Case closed. Verdict rendered.

So you need to start a competing file. Deliberately. Intentionally. Like you’re a lawyer building the case for your defence.

The moment your partner laughed at your weird, niche, very specific joke that nobody else would have found funny. The time they said they love how passionate you get about things. The friend who told you you’re the most thoughtful person they know. The colleague who said your attention to detail saved the project. The time your intensity was exactly what someone needed to get them out of their funk. The time your deep dive into a topic taught someone something they didn’t know. The time your sensitivity caught something everyone else missed.

Write them down. I’m serious. Keep a note on your phone. A journal. A sticky note on your mirror. Whatever works for your brain. Because when RSD hits – and it will, because RSD doesn’t retire – and your brain starts spinning the “you’re too much” highlight reel, you need receipts. You need evidence your brain can’t argue with. Not affirmations. Not positive thinking. Actual, documented, receipts of times when exactly who you are was exactly right.

Your brain is going to try to dismiss them. It’s going to say, “Yeah but that was one time” or “they were just being nice.” Let it say whatever it wants. Write them down anyway. Because over time, that competing file gets thicker. And it starts to create doubt in the narrative. And doubt is the beginning of freedom.

A Note For Partners

Before I close, I want to say something to the partners listening. Because I know some of you are here because the person you love sent you this episode.

If you’ve ever told your neurodivergent partner they were “too much” or “not enough” – I’m not here to shame you. I get it. Neurodivergent-neurotypical relationships are genuinely challenging. The communication gaps are real. The sensory differences are real. The frustration is real. You’re not a bad person for having struggled.

But I want you to understand what those words land on. When you say “you’re too much,” you’re not saying one thing. You’re activating a lifetime of those same words from dozens of other people. You’re adding to a pile that already feels crushing.

The most powerful thing you can do is learn to express your own needs without making your partner’s brain the problem. Instead of “you’re too much right now,” try “I’m at my capacity and I need a break.” Instead of “you never pay attention,” try “I need us to find a system that helps us both remember the important things.”

Same need. Different framing. World of difference in impact.

Thank you for supporting your neurodivergent partner.

The Close

I want to leave you with this:

You are not too much. You are not not enough. You are a specific, precise, beautiful amount of exactly who you are. And the right relationship isn’t one where you shrink yourself to fit or inflate yourself to fill. It’s one where both people learn what the other person needs and build a space that holds all of it. All the intensity. All the quiet. All the weird, wonderful, specific, sometimes-inconvenient, always-valid stuff.

That’s not easy. But it is possible. And it starts with understanding your brain and believing – not just knowing, believing – that the way your brain works is not the thing that’s wrong with your relationships. It’s the thing your relationships need to be built around.

If this episode stirred something up and you want to talk about what this looks like in your specific relationship, come find me on Instagram – @neurodivergentlovelab – and send me a DM. I’m serious. I want to hear from you. I want to know how this episode felt in your soul. 

Next week, we’re going to break down exactly what’s happening in your brain when you shut down during a fight – and why the experience is completely different depending on your neurotype. That one’s going to be really practical. Bring a cute notebook if you’re a notebook person.

I’m Jenna Dalton. Your brain isn’t broken. It’s beautiful. I’ll talk to you soon.