There's a difference between being emotionally dysregulated and being a person whose emotions were consistently treated as inconvenient, excessive, or manipulative.
One is something to work on. The other is something that happened to you.
The people who told you that you were too much — were they also the ones who benefited from you making yourself smaller?
Walking on eggshells. Rehearsing conversations before having them. Apologizing before you even knew what you'd done wrong. Checking their mood the second they walked in the door.
At the time it felt like 'being a good partner.' Now it has a different name.
Therapists call these adaptations — responses your nervous system developed to survive an unpredictable environment. They made sense then. They cost you now.
What's yours? Naming it is part of releasing it.
(This community is a safe space — share as much or as little as feels right)
They moved on fast.
Like… really fast.
Big compliments, expensive dates, talking about a future after just a few weeks.
And for a second, I questioned everything.
Was I the problem? Why didn’t we have that?
But then I remembered…
I’ve seen this before.
It’s not depth, it’s intensity. And those aren’t the same thing.
I kept waiting for that one conversation.
The one where they’d explain, take accountability, or at least acknowledge the damage.
It never happened.
And I realized, closure doesn’t come from someone who benefits from your confusion.