They Called It Oversensitivity. It Was Self-Knowledge. Let’s Take It Back.

For the neurodivergent adults who were told they felt too much and believed it.

digital illustration- Alice Bramhill

The word oversensitive was never a diagnosis. It was a management strategy, used by people and systems that needed you smaller than you actually were.

I want to start there. Because before we talk about rebuilding self-trust, we need to understand why it went missing in the first place. And that story is not about you being faulty. It is about what happened to you, and what you learned in order to survive it.

I say this as a soon to be 52 year old therapist with over thirty years of clinical experience. I also say it as someone who was diagnosed with ADHD at 47, and with autism at 50, and who spent the decades in between genuinely believing that the chaos of their inner life was a character flaw rather than a nervous system response to a world that was never built for them.

What Self-Trust Actually Is

Self-trust is not confidence. It is not certainty. It is not having all the answers.

Self-trust is the capacity to treat your own internal signals as valid information. To feel something in your body and not immediately dismiss it. To make a decision and not spend the following three days catastrophising about whether it was wrong.

Neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on the predictive brain helps us understand why this matters so much. Barrett’s work on constructed emotion shows us that our brains are constantly making predictions based on past experience, and that interoception, our ability to perceive internal body signals, is central to how we regulate emotion, make decisions, and understand ourselves. When we lose access to our own internal signals, we lose our primary navigation system (Barrett, 2017).

For neurodivergent adults, that loss of access was by no means accidental. It was taught.

The History of How We Lost It

Operant conditioning has shaped mainstream education and parenting for over a century. B.F. Skinner’s behavioural models, developed in the 1930s and 1940s, established the idea that behaviour could be shaped through reward and punishment. Schools adopted this wholesale. Good behaviour charts. Attendance awards. House points. Detentions. The entire architecture of compliance-based education is built on the premise that children need to be managed rather than understood (Skinner, 1953).

For neurotypical children, the cost of this is significant. For neurodivergent children, it is devastating.

An autistic or ADHD child is not misbehaving when they struggle to sit still, when they need to move to think, when the noise of a classroom overwhelms their sensory system, when they cannot transition without warning, when they need to know the reason before they can follow an instruction. They are communicating. They are signalling genuine need.

What compliance-based systems did to those signals was simple and catastrophic. They ignored them, punished them, or pathologised them.

“Stop overreacting.”
“Everyone else is managing.”
“You’re too sensitive.”
“Just get on with it.”

Researcher Peter Gray, in his work on self-directed education and the psychology of play, identifies how the suppression of children’s autonomy, particularly in environments that prioritise obedience over curiosity, produces adults with significantly impaired capacity for self-direction and self-trust (Gray, 2013).

When you are told repeatedly that your internal signals are wrong, unreliable, or too much, you stop consulting them. You start consulting other people instead. You outsource the job of knowing yourself to anyone willing to take it on.

And then, decades later, you sit in front of a therapist and say: “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know who I am without other people’s opinions.”

This is the culmination of what was done.

What Happens in the Nervous System

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory gives us the neurological framework for understanding why self-trust is, at its core, a body issue and not a mindset issue (Porges, 2011).

Our nervous systems are constantly scanning the environment for safety or threat. Porges named this process neuroception. When our nervous system reads the environment as safe, we can access the ventral vagal state, which is where social engagement, curiosity, creativity, and connection live. When it reads threat, we move into sympathetic activation, fight or flight, or dorsal vagal shutdown.

For neurodivergent people who spent years in environments that were genuinely threatening to their sense of self, the nervous system learned to default to threat responses. A chronic case of hyper vigilance.

A nervous system that has been in survival mode for decades does not suddenly feel safe when you receive a diagnosis that explains everything. The understanding arrives in the mind. The safety has to be rebuilt in the body.

This is why self-trust cannot be thought your way into. It has to be felt. Slowly. In small moments. In the body.

Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands makes the case with both clinical grounding and profound humanity that trauma lives in the body, passed down through nervous systems across generations, and that the path back to safety is somatic before it is cognitive. His work on body-based healing asks us to slow down and feel rather than analyse and override (Menakem, 2017). Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a searingly honest account of living with complex PTSD, shows from the inside what it costs when that somatic processing never happens, and what becomes possible when it finally does (Foo, 2022).

The body keeps its own record. And for neurodivergent adults who spent years being told their physical and emotional responses were wrong, the work of rebuilding self-trust starts there, in the body, not in the mind.

The Inner Critic Was Never Your Enemy

One of the most important things I want to say in this piece, and one of the things I see misunderstood most often in the wellness space, is this: your inner critic was not created to destroy you, it was created to protect you.

Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model describes what he calls protective parts. These are aspects of our internal system that developed, often in childhood, to shield us from pain, rejection, or danger (Schwartz, 1995). The inner critic is one of the most common protective parts. Its job was to get to you before anyone else did. To manage you into acceptable behaviour so that you would not be rejected, humiliated, or unsafe.

For neurodivergent people who were repeatedly told they were wrong, the inner critic became extraordinarily vigilant. It learned to scan constantly for evidence of failure because failure was genuinely dangerous in the environments they grew up in.

This is by no means a personality flaw. This is an adaptive response to a very real problem.

The work is not to destroy the inner critic. The work is to show it that things are different now. That you are not eight years old in a classroom that punishes you for being yourself. That you have survived. That you can be trusted to look after yourself.

Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion demonstrates that relating to our own suffering with warmth and understanding rather than judgement is not only psychologically beneficial but neurologically transformative. Self-compassion activates the brain’s care system, reducing cortisol and activating the parasympathetic nervous system. It is, literally, physiologically different from self-criticism (Neff, 2011).

The inner critic kept you safe. Self-compassion helps you feel safe enough to need it less.

The Double Bind of Late Diagnosis

Something I need to say to anyone reading this who received their diagnosis as an adult: the relief is real, and so is the grief.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD, I cried for about a week. And I have been a mental health professional for three decades. I know what the diagnosis means. I know the neuroscience. I know the research.

And still, it hit somewhere deep.

Because suddenly I was looking back at forty-seven years through a completely different lens. All the jobs I nearly lost. All the relationships I misread. All the times I was too much and not enough simultaneously. All the times I pushed through sensory overload because I did not know that is what it was. All the times I cancelled plans not because I did not care but because something in my nervous system simply could not get out of the door.

Late diagnosis gives you the explanation. It does not automatically restore the self-trust that was taken in the process of not having one.

That restoration is a separate piece of work. And it is absolutely possible. For all of us.

What Reclaiming Self-Trust Actually Looks Like

I am going to be honest with you. It does not look like a montage. It does not look like a sudden transformation. It looks like very small, very ordinary moments that quietly accumulate.

It looks like ordering what you actually want from the menu instead of scanning the table to see what everyone else is having first.

It looks like leaving a social event when you are done, not when you have judged it appropriate to leave.

It looks like sitting with a feeling for thirty seconds before deciding it is wrong.

It looks like noticing the difference between what your body says and what your inner critic says, and choosing, just once, to go with your body.

Interoception research, particularly work developed by Sarah Garfinkel and colleagues at the University of Sussex, has found that autistic individuals often show differences in interoceptive accuracy, the ability to accurately perceive internal body signals. This is not a deficit. It is a difference that means we may need to practise interoception more deliberately and consciously than others (Garfinkel et al., 2016).

You can learn to hear yourself again.
You just have to start treating your signals as worth listening to.

A Note on Systems

I want to be clear about something before I close this piece.

The erosion of self-trust in neurodivergent adults is not a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of systems, educational, medical, social, that were not built for our nervous systems, and in many cases actively punished us for having them.

The work of rebuilding self-trust is yours to do. But the cause of losing it was never yours to carry.

There is a difference between taking responsibility for your healing and accepting blame for the fact that you needed healing in the first place.

We were not born doubting ourselves.
We were taught to.
And what is learned can, with time and the right conditions, be unlearned.

Where To Begin

If you are reading this and feeling the particular heaviness of someone who recognises themselves in everything above, start here.

Notice when you are about to override yourself. It might be a slight shift in your mood, your breathing, your heart rate.

You do not need to do anything differently yet. Just notice. That noticing is the beginning of the whole thing. Your nervous system has been waiting a long time for you to start listening.

It kept sending the signals even when you weren’t. That, if you need evidence of anything, is proof that some part of you never stopped knowing what you needed.

Big Love, Alice

References

Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Foo, S. (2022). What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. Ballantine Books.

Garfinkel, S.N., Tiley, C., O’Keeffe, S., Harrison, N.A., Seth, A.K., & Critchley, H.D. (2016). Discrepancies between dimensions of interoception in autism: Implications for emotion and anxiety. Biological Psychology, 114, 117-126.

Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.

Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press.

Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton.

Schwartz, R.C. (1995). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.

Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior. Macmillan.