Am I too much or not enough? The map is not the territory

Some wounds arrive wearing their everyday smart casual clothes, relaxed, without drama. They are not loud. They don’t trip over the threshold of your boundaries into your life, waving a big red flag. Rather, they slide into our lives disguised as relationships, romance, or as spiritual connection, as if “he/she/they, just wants what’s best.” And before we know it, we’re standing in front of someone we love or care for, shrinking ourselves again.

Of course, that shrinking can take many forms. You might laugh a little quieter. Cry only when they’re not looking. You soften your hunger for life or food, make it a point to tone down your brilliance, and underplay your complexity to be easier to swallow. You attempt to become a version of yourself that you think will be more palatable. More desirable. More… lovable.

Something to consider perhaps; If love or friendship or a relationship requires you to be less, is it love, friendship, or a nourishing relationship in its fullest sense? Or is it a type of performance? And we know performances, however exquisite, eventually come to an end, leaving us to make some kind of meaning of it all.

The wound I’m writing about in this article isn’t always obvious. It lives in the between-spaces: the wince when you show vulnerability, the tightening of breath when you ask for more, the silent inventory you take after a date – “Was I a bit too intense? Too emotional? Not quite fun enough?” This is the ache of a person self-contorting into someone else’s idea of beauty or competence, or mystery, or emotional availability. We bend. We contort ourselves. We rehearse charm like it’s a survival skill.

We might become clever instead of open. Helpful instead of honest. Sexy but never needy. Mysterious, but never messy. We flirt with wit instead of saying, I actually want to be seen. We become endlessly agreeable, the “easy friend,” the “chill partner,” the “fun one”, all personas designed to bypass rejection, all roles played with the grace of someone who suspects that being ordinary just won’t be enough. If we’re especially practised, we might do all this without even realising we’re doing it.

Contorting into their idea of strength, of stability, of ease, trying to become trustworthy by never truly revealing what we are really thinking or feeling. We strive to be worthy of love by never asking for it outright, editing our rage, refining our eccentricities, and we may even convince ourselves it’s emotional maturity-when really, it’s just fear wearing its best dressing-up clothes. At the core of all these contortions is a single deeply felt unspoken question: What version of me will you stay for?

The downside of this, of course, is that even when they do stay, we know it's not really us they’re staying for because we haven’t fully given them us. It’s the echo of what they want, a version of us we have curated for them, and so, we remain loved, perhaps, but not met and never fully seen.

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described 'le regard', the gaze of the Other, as a moment when we become objects rather than subjects. We are seen, yes, but not witnessed. We are interpreted, measured, and, ultimately, managed. In the gaze of someone who cannot hold our fullness, we become a character in their script, not the author of our own narrative. Almost as if in the theatre of conditional love, we are both performer and captive.

But, it is important to say not every gaze is a cage. The writer Martin Buber, in his work on relational philosophy, reminds us of the I-Thou relationship – a meeting of souls where no one is edited, no one is consumed. It’s rare. visceral, perhaps. But when you’ve been trained to adapt, to contort, to audition for love-you begin to accept a different kind of relationship; Buber’s concept of the I-It relationship as your normal. You begin to believe that love should require shrinking and contorting yourself, and according to Buber, that you are the ‘object’, the ‘it’ of affection. That love is something you earn by erasing those parts of yourself deemed inappropriate, unacceptable or just plain inconvenient.

Erich Fromm, a German American psychoanalyst, social psychologist, and humanistic philosopher, also had some thoughts on this topic. He wrote this during his exploration of how modern society affects individual freedom, identity, and mental health: ‘Love is not a feeling, but an art.’ He goes on to explore the idea that love is a practice, an ethical act of tending to the becoming of another. Real love, he says, does not flinch at your immensity. It does not recoil from your deeply felt, uncomfortable emotions. It does not ask you to collapse so that it can remain comfortable.

A beautiful concept, yes, but if we’re honest, many of us learnt a very different script.

For example, we were too much for a mother who didn’t know how to hold her own emotions. Not enough for a father who only saw our achievements. We learnt to translate rejection as “my fault,” to see abandonment as proof of unworthiness. And we carried those stories into our adult relationships, where we continue rehearsing them, over and over, like some Greek tragedy that never quite ends.

Therapy, in this context, is less about bandaging or patching up the ache. Instead, it aims to explore the metaphorical dance between the lover and the loved in its many forms, parental, platonic, familial, romantic or agape love and asks questions like: Whose gaze am I still performing under? And what might return if I stepped out of the spotlight entirely? In the therapeutic space, we can wonder, explore and become curious, we can hypothesise and rehearse and try feelings on for size, get honest and raw, we can move and make noises, we can sit with silence and sometimes get really, really snotty before we enact anything outside our safe space.

When I work with clients entangled in these dynamics, we begin with a gentle enquiry. I think of it as differentiation mapping. Together, we dig into the sediment of their relational history, we might explore things like: What parts of you have been sent into exile in the name of being loved? Which feelings have you silenced? Which hungers have you medicated or hidden? What rises to the surface is often fierce, unapologetic, and misunderstood: Eroticism misread as threat, ambition recast as arrogance, grief distorted into manipulation.

This is the raw code of being human, misunderstood in a world that is too often uncomfortable with depth. To dismiss them is to miss the truth they carry, but when we witness them clearly in therapy, it can help us to finally begin listening to those parts we have abandoned in ourselves in the hope we are acceptable enough to be loved.

We might also explore gaze reversal in sessions. It’s emotionally intimate work. Almost erotic; in the therapeutic context I’m referring to here, this means feeling vitality, creativity, presence, and emotional depth. We shift the perspective inward. Not to the narcissistic gaze, but the curious one. We might ask things like, “Who am I when no one is watching?” It can be extraordinarily freeing to recognise just how much life is buried beneath the need to be acceptable.

Developing boundaries that feel more in line with your personal truth is also useful work; seen through the eyes of self-awareness, boundaries become a return to inner truth and emotional safety. They might sound like: I will not shrink to be kept. I will not trade my truth for proximity. Or simply: I will not offer my silence in exchange for crumbs.

To be told, directly or indirectly, that you are “too much” or “not enough” is to be offered a false narrative. Some people might prefer you to simply be a garden they can manicure. But if you manage to access your unique wholeness, you are much more likely to be a vast wilderness with a diversity of inner life which exists in the daylight and life which prefers to remain in the darkness. I have a favourite quote by Alfred Korzybski, a Polish American philosopher and semanticist. He simply says, ‘the map is not the territory’ It’s a reminder that no external judgment or interpretation can ever fully represent the depth, truth, or richness of who you are.

As a final thought, I have found personally and in my client work that there is a clarity and peace that comes with no longer seeking to be loved for your containment. Gaining the insight and capacity to recognise and welcome those who can meet you metaphorically in your forest or in your fire, and who are willing to love you in your unedited form, is rich, uncharted territory for most of us.

This is not easy work, it might begin with a reframe of a simple question. Instead of asking yourself  How can I be loved better? How about, who was I before I made myself smaller for love?

References

• Buber, M. (1958) I and Thou. Translated by R. G. Smith. New York: Scribner. (Original work published 1923).
• Fromm, E. (1956) The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Row.
• Sartre, J.-P. (1956) Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by H.E. Barnes. London: Methuen. (Original work published 1943).
• Korzybski, A. (1933) Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics.