Is This Mine? Why Feeling So Much Doesn’t Mean Something Is Wrong With You
There’s a moment many of us know intimately.
An emotion rises — heavy, sharp, tender, confusing — and before we can even locate it in our body, we’re already trying to do something about it. We analyze it. We explain it. We ask where it came from. We try to calm ourselves down. Or we turn outward, trying to soothe, fix, or stabilize someone else.
Most of us were never taught how to simply feel without immediately intervening. And so we grow up believing that if emotion is present, something must be wrong. But what if that belief is the real source of exhaustion?
Feeling is not the problem. Fixing is.
In my work, I see this again and again: people who feel deeply, sense atmospheres, and pick up on emotional undercurrents often believe they are “too much.” Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too impacted by others.
But what’s often happening isn’t that they feel too much — it’s that they’ve never been shown how to stay with feeling without collapsing into responsibility. So emotion becomes something to manage instead of something to move through.
If you’re curious why the urge to fix emotion is so strong — and what actually creates emotional coherence — I explore that more deeply here.
Different nervous systems, different emotional experiences
Through the lens of Human Design, we can name something that many people intuitively recognize but rarely have language for.
Some people experience emotion as an internal wave — something that rises and falls within them over time, independent of what’s happening externally. Others experience emotion more through their environment and relationships — amplifying, reflecting, or sampling the emotional field around them.
Neither experience is better. Neither is more evolved. They are simply different ways of sensing and processing life.
But when we don’t understand this difference, unconscious dynamics form. People who feel emotion internally may believe they need to control it to be safe or loved. People who feel emotion relationally may believe they need to fix it — in themselves or others — to restore equilibrium.
And suddenly, emotion becomes something everyone is working hard to avoid.
Why so many people feel overwhelmed or shut down
This is where emotional overwhelm and emotional repression come from — not because emotion is inherently overwhelming, but because we don’t trust it to move on its own. When emotion isn’t given space:
it builds
it leaks out sideways
or it gets stored in the body
Many people oscillate between:
feeling too much
and feeling nothing at all
Both are responses to the same conditioning: that emotion is unsafe unless it’s controlled.
A gentler question
One of the simplest, most relieving shifts I’ve experienced — personally and relationally — is learning to pause and ask: Is this mine?
Not as a way to distance or disconnect, but as a way to create space. If it is mine:
What does it actually need right now — movement, rest, expression, time?
If it’s not mine:
Can I let it pass through without fixing, absorbing, or carrying it?
This question doesn’t shut emotion down. It gives it room to breathe.
You don’t need to understand your emotions to honour them
This is especially important to say. You do not need to know why you feel something in order to feel it with integrity. Emotion doesn’t require explanation to move. It requires presence.
When we stop demanding clarity before allowing sensation, something softens. The body begins to trust itself again.
And over time, capacity grows.
A different relationship with feeling
A world where people are allowed to feel — without being fixed, managed, or suppressed — is a very different world. It’s quieter. More spacious. More honest. And it starts, always, in the body.
I explore this inquiry more fully — including lived examples from partnership and parenting — in the companion podcast episode Is This Mine?
