Why Am I So Sensitive?

Someone walks into the room, and before a word is spoken, you already know. The mood shifted, and you felt it land on your skin. A hard conversation ends and everyone else moves on, and you are still carrying it three days later. Somewhere along the way you got handed a label for this. Too sensitive.

In this episode, Dr. Alon Aviram treats sensitivity as a skill instead of a defect. Through the story of a woman named Eve, who walked out of every gathering carrying everyone's feelings in her own body, he reframes "too sensitive" as standing at the open end of a spectrum: a fine instrument that plays at full volume all day, with no case and no knob. The work is not to feel less. It is to find your hand on the knob, so open becomes a place you choose, not a place you are stranded.

Not advice. Not a diagnosis. A closer look at the gift that exhausts the person holding it, and the small practice that puts a hairline of space between you and a feeling that was never yours.

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Where We Are is a podcast about where you are, not what's wrong with you.

Hosted by Dr. Alon Aviram, psychotherapist. The show is built on the framework he uses in his practice: a way of finding where you're standing across the different parts of a life — the body, the self, relationships, groups, and meaning — and finding your way back to movement.

If something in this episode landed, you can go deeper at dralonaviram.com, where a free tool helps you find where you actually stand. The newsletter, The Shift, lives on Substack. And you can follow along on Instagram.

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Transcript

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Someone walks into the room and before a word is spoken, you already know the mood shifted. You felt it land on your skin like a change in the weather. And for the rest of the evening, some part of you is quietly managing it. This thing nobody else even noticed, this current in the air that you cannot stop picking up. A hard conversation ends and everyone else moves on, and you are still carrying it three days later. A sad film, a stranger's bad news, a tension between two people across the room. It all gets in, all the way in, and it stays. And somewhere along the way, you got handed a label for this. Too sensitive. As if the volume you were born with were a flaw to be corrected. As if the answer was simply to feel less. My name is Dr. Alon Aviram. I'm a psychotherapist. This is where we are, a podcast about what's actually happening in you. I want to tell you about a woman I'll call Eve. Eve came to see me exhausted, and the exhaustion confused her because on paper her life was not especially hard. What was hard, it turned out, was other people, not in the way you might think. Eve loved people. The problem was that she could not stop absorbing them. She walked out of every gathering carrying everyone's feelings in her own body. She knew who in the room was struggling before they did. She felt her friend's disappointment as if it were her own, and then spent the night unable to sleep, sorting through a sadness that had not even started out as hers. I'm just too sensitive, she told me, and she said it as an apology. She had been saying it as an apology her whole life. Turn it down, people had told her in a hundred kind and unkind ways. Do not take things so personally. Grow a thicker skin. So I asked Eve about her sensitivity as if it were a skill instead of a defect, because that is what it is. And a different story came out. This was the woman her friends called first in a crisis, because she understood before they finished the sentence. This was the one who noticed the child at the edge of the party, the colleague about to break the thing unsaid under the thing said. Her sensitivity was not her malfunction, it was her genius. It was the finest instrument she owned. The trouble was never that the instrument was too fine. The trouble was that it had no volume knob and no case to put it away in, and so it played at full sensitivity all day, whether she wanted it to or not. There is an axis in every one of us, and it governs how much of the world gets in. At one end, you are open, permeable. The world comes through you. Its colors, its moods, its griefs, and you feel them fully. At the other end, you are guarded, filtered. The world has to knock, and much of it does not get an answer, and you stay clear and undisturbed. And here is what I need you to hear before anything else. Neither end is the good one. We pretend the guarded end is the mature one, the strong one, the grown up one. It is not. It is just an end. The guarded person misses the child at the edge of the party. The guarded person is clear and calm, and sometimes a little bit absent from the actual texture of being alive. Openness is not weakness that guardedness has outgrown. It is a different and beautiful way of being built. Eve was standing all the way at the open end. And standing there has real gifts. The ones we already named, the deep knowing, the fine attunement. The way she could love people at a resolution, most people never reach. But standing at the very far edge of open, with no way to close, even for a moment, has a real cost too. You take on what is not yours. You cannot tell your feelings from the feelings you absorbed. You go through the world with no skin, and the world which does not slow down for the skinless, wears you to the bone. So the work with Eve was not to make her less sensitive. I would sooner ask a musician to lose their ear. The far end, the guarded end, was not a place she needed to move to and live in. It was a capacity she had barely developed, because openness came so naturally that she never learned its opposite, the ability to close briefly, to let something be someone else's to carry, to put the instrument down and let the room play without her for an hour. That capacity was not missing from her. It was underused, and an underused capacity can be built. The goal was not to turn the volume down for good. The goal was to give her a hand on the knob, to let her stay open, gloriously open, when openness serves her, and to be able to close a little when the openness is drowning her. Not less sensitive, more free. Maybe you are the sensitive one. Maybe you have been apologizing for it your whole life. Let me say something to you that you may not have been told. Your sensitivity is not the problem. It is very likely one of the best things about you. And the people who love you well know it. Even if the people who raised you did not have room for it. You feel the world at a resolution most people cannot reach. That is not a malfunction to be medicated out of you. That is an instrument, and also an instrument that plays at full volume all day, with no case and no knob, will exhaust the person holding it. That is real too. If you go through the world absorbing every mood, carrying every sadness home, unable to tell where other people end and you begin, you are not too sensitive. You are open, all the way open, standing at one end of yourself with no practiced way to close. The closing is not the enemy of who you are. It is the part of you that never got built, because you were so good at the opening. It is buildable, not to make you hard, to make you free enough to choose. That is not a verdict about being too much. It is a position, and positions are not permanent. So here is the small practice for this week. It is a way to find a knob you were told you did not have. The next time you feel a feeling arrive that is strong and sudden, pause and ask one question. Is this mine? That is all. Is this feeling mine? Or did I just pick it up off someone else? You will be surprised how often the honest answer is, this is not mine, I absorbed it. And simply naming that, this belongs to them, not to me, creates the tiniest bit of space between you and the feeling. A first hairline gap where before there was none. That gap is the volume knob. You just found it. And then once this week, practice closing on purpose, in a safe moment. Before you walk into somewhere crowded, take a breath and decide quietly, I am going to let some of this stay outside me tonight. You will not do it perfectly. You do not need to. You are not trying to become a guarded person. You are just proving to yourself that the knob exists and that your hand can reach it. You are not turning down your gift, you are learning to hold it so that it stops holding you. Someone walks into the room, and you already know, that knowing is not a flaw. It is one of the rarest and finest things a person can be. And I would not take it from you for anything, and neither should you. You were never too sensitive. You were open, standing at the far end of open, with no one to ever show you that closing, a little sometimes, is not the same as going cold. It is just your other hand, the one you never had to use until now. You do not have to feel less. You only have to learn where the knob is so that being open becomes a place you choose and not a place you are stranded. And a place you can choose is a kind of freedom. I'm alone. I'll see you next time.