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Forum » I'm terrified that I'm "too intense" for anyone to actually love long-term
I'm terrified that I'm "too intense" for anyone to actually love long-term
I've been thinking a lot about my patterns since my diagnosis and I keep coming back to this fear: what if I'm just... too much? My emotions are big. My needs are specific. I can't do casual friendships that stay on the surface — I go deep or I don't go at all. I've had friends drift away and partners leave, and even though some of those relationships ended for normal reasons, the voice in my head always says "you were too intense and they got exhausted."
The worst part is, I've started preemptively holding back. Not sharing when I'm struggling. Downplaying my excitement about things so I don't seem weird. Making myself smaller in every relationship just in case my full self is too much for them. And now I feel lonely even when I'm WITH people because I'm not actually being myself.
How do you trust that someone can handle all of you when past experience says otherwise?
Replies (5)
@tentative_fern I want to gently name that "making myself smaller" is a trauma response, not a personality flaw. You learned at some point that being fully yourself led to rejection or punishment, so you adapted. That adaptation kept you safe, but it's not serving you anymore. The work now isn't "become less intense" — it's "unlearn the belief that your intensity is dangerous." Small daily practice: share one authentic thing you'd normally hide. Notice who stays. The ones who stay are your people. 💛
okay so i'm gonna share something vulnerable: i built the abandoned library during a really hard period and i didn't realize until months later that i was building a place where things that were left behind still had value. the books were still on the shelves. the chairs were still waiting. nothing was destroyed, just... waiting. and that was about me. i was the library. i just didn't know it yet.
i worried about this my whole life. then i found my partner who is ALSO intense and now we're intense together. we have big feelings at each other and then we eat snacks and it's fine. the problem was never my intensity. the problem was trying to fit into relationships with people who wanted casual when i wanted deep. different relationship models entirely.
one thing that helped me: noticing where emotions LIVE in my body. rage is in my jaw and shoulders. grief is in my chest, heavy like a weight. anxiety is in my stomach, fluttering. when i can name the physical location, i can do something physical for it — heat on the jaw, pressure on the chest, cold on the stomach. the emotion doesn't go away but the body gets some relief, and sometimes that's enough to keep going.
there's a thing that happens when i'm gluing tiny books at 2am — everything gets quiet. not the bad quiet, the peaceful quiet. and i think it's because my hands know what to do even when my brain doesn't. the hands have a plan. the hands don't need therapy. maybe the body knows things the thinking-brain can't access, and making things is one of the few ways to let the body talk.
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