At a glance
The size of a reaction tells you about its meaning, not about the event that set it off. You can know a remark was minor and still feel it for hours, and both of those are true at the same time. This article looks at what makes a small moment land hard, and what to do with the gap between the two.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The trigger is rarely the subject. When clients bring me a reaction that embarrasses them, the thing that set it off is almost never what the session ends up being about.
- The body moves before the thought arrives. Clients describe the heat, the tightening or the flood of words reaching them a second or two before they have any idea what they are reacting to.
- Reactivity runs highest where something matters most. The relationships and the rooms where my clients react fastest are usually the ones they most want to go well.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does a small thing set off something this big?
A reaction is sized by what the moment means, not by what the moment was. A tone of voice. A reply that took two days. A correction made in front of other people. By any fair measure the event is small, and the reaction is not, and afterwards your own judgement sides with the other person. This did not warrant what I felt. It happened anyway.
What I see in the room is that the moment touched something with a history behind it. Not a memory you can produce on demand, but a meaning you already know well. You are not being taken seriously here. You are about to be left out of this. You are going to be found wanting. The remark is the doorway. What stands behind the door is older and larger than the remark, and it is what you are actually responding to.
That is why the arithmetic never comes out. You keep trying to make the reaction match the event, when the reaction was never a response to the event alone.
How strongly a person reacts to ordinary daily events matters more than it is usually given credit for. In a study of 711 adults aged 25 to 74 who reported their daily stressors and their mood over eight consecutive evenings, those whose mood dropped more sharply on the days a stressor occurred were more likely to report affective distress and an affective disorder when they were followed up 10 years later.1 That is an association across a decade in one sample, not a forecast for any individual, and it does not establish what drives the link. I read it as a reason to take your reactivity seriously as information, rather than as something to be ashamed of.
Am I reactive, or is my reaction telling me something?
Calling yourself reactive closes the enquiry at exactly the point where it should open. People arrive having already passed sentence on themselves. Too much. Oversensitive. Irrational. The verdict is efficient, because it ends the matter, and it throws away the only useful information in the whole episode.
The more productive move is to turn the judgement back into a question. What would this moment have to mean, for what I felt to be a proportionate response to it? Asked that way, the reaction stops being a fault in your character and becomes a signal with a subject. Getting specific is most of the work, and these four things are where I start.
- Intensity. How big was it, measured against your own ordinary range rather than anyone else’s.
- Speed. How much time passed between the event and the feeling arriving.
- Duration. How long it was before you felt like yourself again.
- Subject. What the accusation was, written out as a full sentence in its own words.
None of that is a test, and a high answer to any of it diagnoses nothing. It is a way of getting close enough to the episode that the pattern underneath it has a shape you can look at. The last one is the one most people cannot do at first, and it is the one that changes things.
Why does it take so long to come down?
Coming down is a physical process, and it does not take instructions. The feeling arrives first. The body follows, with the heat in the chest, the shallow breathing, the hands that will not settle. The thinking arrives last, and finds that the situation has already been decided without it.
Clients tell me they know within a minute that the reaction is out of proportion, and sit inside it for a long time afterwards regardless. Knowing is not the same as subsiding. Then the rehearsing begins: the reply you should have given, the version where you stayed calm, the sentence that would have made the other person understand.
The rehearsing feels like processing and does something close to the opposite. Every pass keeps the meaning live and the body switched on. Something that matters this much does not become unimportant because you have decided it ought to be, and arguing with yourself about whether you are entitled to the feeling adds a second difficulty on top of the first.
Why is it worst with the people closest to me?
Reactivity concentrates where you have most to lose. A slight from a stranger costs you nothing, so it passes through. The same words from a partner, a close colleague or a parent carry a question about whether you are safely held in that relationship, and a question like that gets answered fast, by the part of you that is not waiting for evidence.
There is a second difficulty that follows from the first. The person on the receiving end sees the size of your reaction and has no access to the meaning underneath it, so they respond to the size. You then have two people reacting to each other’s reactions, and the thing that started it never gets discussed. Each response makes the next one more likely, which is how a disagreement about a tone of voice takes an entire evening.
That is not a claim that two people in a pattern like this are contributing equally. Sometimes one person is doing something the other is right to react to, and the reaction is the most accurate thing in the room. Working out which of those you are in is part of what the work is for, and it is difficult to do from inside it.
Here in Copenhagen I hear a particular version of this from people who have moved. A directness that Danish colleagues and in-laws read as plain and respectful can land as a rebuke if you grew up somewhere that carried warmth in the wording. Your reaction is then accurate to how the moment felt and inaccurate to what was intended. That is a difference in convention rather than an explanation of anybody’s character, and it is worth checking before you decide what the moment meant about you.
What can I do when I feel it starting?
The useful work happens in the few seconds before, or in the hours afterwards. Very little is available in the middle. That is worth knowing in advance, because most people spend their effort in the part of the episode where effort has the least purchase, then conclude they have no self-control.
- Name the accusation. Not the event, the charge. Put it in a full sentence: I heard that I do not count here. Said plainly, it becomes something you can examine instead of something you are simply inside.
- Buy a gap. Leave the room, finish the conversation later, reply tomorrow. You are not swallowing the feeling, you are giving the thinking time to catch up with it.
- Go back to it. Reactions that are never discussed tend to return. Raising it a day later, with the charge named and the heat gone, is the step most people skip and the one that stops the repetition.
- Watch the conditions. Short sleep, hunger, and a week spent braced for something all lower the threshold. Treating that as information about the week rather than a flaw in you is more accurate and more useful.
Those four help with a pattern you can mostly see. They are not enough when the reaction arrives with no subject you can find, when it has started to cost you work or a relationship you want to keep, or when what you face is not reactivity at all but an accurate response to something that needs changing rather than regulating. A reaction that will not yield to any of this is usually attached to something that has not been looked at properly, and that is slow work done with another person.
Questions people ask
Can therapy change how reactive I am?
Yes, though what tends to change first is the gap between the feeling and the response, rather than the size of the feeling. Most clients notice they have a second or two more room to work with before the intensity itself shifts.
Will I have to talk about my childhood?
Only as far as it explains something you are living with now. I start from the reaction you brought in, and we go back only where going back makes the present clearer.
What if I cannot remember what set me off?
That is common and it is workable. We start from what you can describe, which is usually the body and the aftermath, and the subject tends to arrive once there is room for it.
Is this individual work, or couples therapy?
If the reactions happen mostly with one person and you both want to look at the pattern between you, couples therapy addresses it directly. If you want to understand your own reactivity wherever it turns up, individual psychotherapy is the better fit.
How long does this take?
I cannot give you a number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. What I can say is that the shape of the pattern usually becomes clear early on, and that much of the change shows up between sessions rather than inside them.
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How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
