Why “Good Girls” Live In Emotional Hypervigilance

Photo personnelle Sophie Chesnoy Trentesaux

I thought being lovable meant being emotionally convenient.

My body eventually rebelled against that version of me.

At six years old, I boldly wore a pair of jeans and a shirt I was incredibly proud of to school.

That day, I was told I had gone too far. My teacher publicly humiliated me, calling me a “little princess” before hitting my fingers the old-fashioned way.

It marked me deeply, and from that moment on, I began to believe that my worth depended on my ability to be “easy to love.”

I never wanted anyone to walk away with a bad impression of me. So I learned to soften my reactions, to tone down my emotions and to stay calm.

“Looking forward to your reply” became a barometer for my behavior and the intensity of my emotions. I had a tendency to smooth out what I felt in order to make it more acceptable in the eyes of others.

As we approached the launch of the first product I had developed with my team, while working in cosmetic research and development, my own energy suddenly turned against me, triggering severe panic attacks.

I could not understand what was happening. My body was collapsing while my mind was still clinging to the image of someone gentle and in control. Maintaining that façade required an enormous amount of energy, while everything inside me was beginning to crack and anxiety was rising relentlessly, leaving me with almost no relief.

I was living in a constant state of tension without even realizing it. My body had developed an incredibly efficient response to control my emotions, so efficient that it eventually turned against me.

I became the victim of an emotional boomerang. What had once helped me hold everything together was now hitting me back with full force.

I spent a tremendous amount of energy trying to stay calm, which paradoxically prevented me from fully feeling what was happening inside of me.

The more I held back, the more my body absorbed. The more I tried to remain gentle, the louder something inside me screamed.

These panic attacks manifested as intestinal cramps. Emotional numbness created a form of paralysis, and my body kept trying to express itself more loudly, screaming STOP to “that gentle person.”

“You refuse to stop and you’re going too far, so I, your body, will force you to stop,” it seemed to say.

In personal development, emotional regulation is often presented as the solution. As a psychologist, I personally explored and practiced many emotional regulation techniques, yet none of them significantly reduced my anxiety attacks.

Today, I believe my body was not simply trying to calm down. It was trying to make me feel. To feel fully, without cutting off the emotion before it had even moved through my body.

For a long time, I believed regulating meant holding back, controlling and remaining pleasant. But emotions we prevent ourselves from fully experiencing do not disappear. They accumulate in the body.

I avoided confronting my own emotions, leaving the door wide open for anyone else to unload their emotional baggage onto me. Gentle people often remain tense without even realizing it. Letting go is not easy when the body has spent years living in vigilance.

And yet, our body is a precious ally. It supports us when we allow it the time to process what moves through us. It is the accumulation of repressed emotions that exhausts us and keeps us in a state of emotional hypervigilance What restores us is allowing ourselves to feel fully, even when it is uncomfortable and does not make us appear pleasant in the eyes of others.

This does not mean dumping everything onto people around us. But perhaps it means no longer abandoning ourselves the moment an emotion appears.

Emotions need to move through the body in order to be transformed into feelings and lived experiences.T oday, while walking through the Singapore Botanic Gardens, a violent storm suddenly broke out. Thunder roared endlessly like pounding drums. Fear of lightning rushed through me as rain poured heavily from the sky. I quickly took shelter and, for once, allowed the sound of the storm to move through me, knowing I was safe.

Even nature allows itself to be shaken by storms. It trembles, overflows, erupts, and eventually finds balance again. Nature is not always gentle, yet no one asks it to become something else in order to deserve existing.

For a long time, I believed that to be loved, I had to remain calm, pleasant, and irreproachable. Today, I am simply trying to stop abandoning myself whenever an emotion moves through me.

And I believe sensitive people do not need to become less deep or less intense in order to feel safe. Perhaps they only need to learn that they are allowed to fully be themselves, even when the storm is raging inside.

This story has been first published on medium in Reader's hope