Imi Lo, a psychotherapist who specialises in emotional intensity and giftedness, describes a particular kind of adult who arrives in her practice already mid-apology. They apologise for booking the appointment. They explain, at length, why they deserve to take up the therapist’s time. They pre-empt objections that haven’t been raised. As Lo writes in Psychology Today, these are people who were taught early that their needs were an imposition, their emotions were excessive, and their very presence required justification. The pattern followed them out of childhood and into boardrooms, relationships, and email threads where a simple “no” becomes a four-paragraph essay.
I recognise something in that description. Not because I’ve been in therapy for it (though I probably should have been) but because I spent my first two years in Copenhagen doing a version of the same thing. Every opinion I offered at the culture desk came wrapped in qualifiers. Every pitch started with an explanation of why I wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. I was the youngest person there, Australian, still stumbling through Danish, and some part of me had decided that all of this meant I needed to earn the right to speak before I’d even opened my mouth.
The pattern the title describes is real and specific. And the reason it stays invisible so long is that, in many cultures, it looks like politeness.
What “taking up space” actually meant when you were small
The phrase “taking up space” sounds abstract, but for the children who internalised the message, it was concrete. It meant: don’t be loud. Don’t ask for seconds. Don’t cry in a way that requires someone to stop what they’re doing. Don’t have needs that complicate the household schedule.
These messages rarely arrived as explicit instructions. More often, they were communicated through sighs, through the withdrawal of warmth when a child was “too much,” through praise that was reserved exclusively for being easy, quiet, accommodating. Research on how teachers respond to children’s negative emotions shows that even well-meaning adults often respond to children’s emotional expressions by minimising them or redirecting away from the feeling. The child learns the lesson fast: your feelings are a problem to be managed, not information to be heard.
The word that psychology uses for this is “parentification” in its emotional form. Research cited in Lo’s work on letting yourself take up space suggests a link between parentification and the impostor phenomenon: children who learned to manage their parents’ emotional needs grew into adults who felt fundamentally fraudulent, as though their competence was a performance that could be exposed at any moment.
The connection to over-explaining is direct. If you believe, on some deep level, that you are an impostor, then every decision you make needs evidence. Not for others. For yourself.
The anatomy of an over-explanation
You can spot the pattern in a single email. The three-sentence preamble before the actual request. The hedging qualifiers. The apology for the length of the message, which is itself adding to the length. The person is not communicating a need. They are building a case for why the need is legitimate, anticipating objections from a jury that was never assembled.
And here is the part that makes the pattern almost invisible: in many workplaces, this behaviour is rewarded. It looks like thoroughness. It looks like being a team player. It looks like someone who really thinks things through.
It is none of those things. It is fear wearing a suit.
The Danish correction
One of the things that rattled me most when I first moved to Denmark was how little people explained themselves. A colleague would state their disagreement plainly and then stop talking. No softening preamble. No apology for having a different view. No elaborate justification for the crime of thinking differently.
I found it harsh at first. Then I realised it wasn’t unkindness. It was a kind of trust: I trust you to hear my position without me having to protect you from it. The Danish communication style assumes that adults can handle directness. If you grew up learning that your presence required a running justification, this assumption can feel like being dropped into cold water.
This directness isn’t incidental to the culture. It’s structural. We’ve written before about how Scandinavian countries produce emotionally secure people, and I think part of it comes down to this: the social contract here doesn’t require you to justify your existence at every turn. You are allowed to need things. You are allowed to say what you think. The cultural infrastructure assumes your right to take up space, which means the constant self-narration that many of us carry simply isn’t necessary.
This doesn’t mean Scandinavians are immune to the pattern. Janteloven, the unwritten Nordic code that discourages standing out, can produce its own version of shrinking. But the mechanism is different. Janteloven says you are not more important than anyone else — a principle of equality, not erasure. The childhood message we’re talking about says something far more corrosive: you are too much. One produces a kind of awkward communal levelling. The other produces shame. And shame is the engine of over-explanation.
Living inside the Danish model for years is what finally made my own pattern legible to me. Not because Denmark fixed it, but because the contrast made it impossible to ignore. When everyone around you communicates as though their presence is already justified, your compulsive justification starts to sound very loud — even to you.
The impostor loop
Research on parentification and shame, also referenced in Lo’s Psychology Today piece, suggests that children who took on emotional caretaking roles for their parents developed a persistent proneness to shame. This shame didn’t stay contained in the family. It generalised. It became a lens through which every interaction was filtered: am I taking too much? Am I being too demanding? Should I have stayed quiet?
The over-explaining is what this shame sounds like when it becomes verbal. It’s the internal monologue leaking out. Most people who do it don’t hear themselves doing it, because to them, the explanation feels like basic courtesy. Of course you explain why you’re leaving the party early. Of course you justify why you chose this restaurant over that one. Of course you preface your opinion with hedging qualifiers that undermine your own authority.
The invisibility of the pattern is what makes it so durable. Nobody stages an intervention about your email style. Nobody typically intervenes to point out that explanations for routine decisions like sick days aren’t necessary. The behaviour just… continues. For decades, sometimes.
Until someone points it out.
What “pointing it out” actually looks like
The moment of recognition is usually small. A friend might observe that a simple refusal is sufficient without additional justification. A partner might express confusion at receiving an elaborate explanation for a simple preference question. A therapist might ask who the person feels they need to defend themselves against in the moment.
As Scandinavia Standard has explored with what it feels like when a Scandinavian partner tells you what they need plainly and without drama, there’s something almost destabilising about being met with directness when you’ve spent your whole life preparing your case. You realise you were always arguing before an invisible tribunal, and the courtroom was empty.
The recognition tends to land in one of two ways. Some people feel relief: oh, I don’t have to do this anymore. Others feel a wave of grief for all the energy spent over all those years, building cases for choices that never required one.
Both responses are valid. Both tend to arrive in your thirties, which is around the time the pattern has calcified enough to become visible against the background of an adult life. I wrote recently about the feeling that arrives in your late thirties when your parents become careful around you. For over-explainers, the thirties also bring a related recognition: you have been careful around everyone, always, and the carefulness was never reciprocated because nobody knew you were doing it.
The body keeps the tab
The cost of chronic over-explaining is not just social. It’s physical. When every decision requires a defence, your nervous system treats every interaction as mildly adversarial. You are always, on some level, braced for challenge.
Research published by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley has found that participants who reported higher levels of positive emotion had 23 percent lower cortisol levels and significantly better heart rate variability. The study also found that happier participants recovered more quickly from stress, as measured by EKG readings. The inverse is also true: people in a persistent state of low-grade vigilance, always preparing their case, always anticipating judgement, carry the physiological markers of chronic stress.
This isn’t the kind of stress that announces itself. It’s the kind that lives in your shoulders at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday when you’ve just spent four minutes composing a Slack message that should have taken ten seconds.
Over-explainers don’t feel stressed in those moments. They feel responsible. Thorough. Considerate of other people’s time. The reframe they need, and rarely get, is that the consideration is flowing in only one direction.
How to stop without overcorrecting
The instinct, once you spot the pattern, is to swing hard in the other direction. To become blunt. To strip every email to three words. This rarely works, because it replaces one performance with another.
What works better is smaller. It’s noticing, in real time, that you’re about to explain a choice that doesn’t require explanation, and then not doing it. Not as an act of defiance. As an experiment. Can I decline the invitation without a reason? Can I order the thing I want without narrating my reasoning? Can I state my opinion and then stop talking?
The answer, almost always, is yes. And the thing that happens after a simple, unadorned statement is: nothing. Nobody needed the explanation. The silence that follows is not the silence of judgement. It’s the silence of people who have already moved on to the next thought, because they were never keeping score in the first place.
I learned this the slow way, through years of working in a culture where directness is the default. The first time I gave a flat, unqualified opinion in a Danish editorial meeting, I felt like I’d walked into the room naked. Nobody blinked. The meeting continued. Whatever tribunal I’d been preparing for my entire professional life had never convened.
Research on how childhood play experiences shape adult behaviour across generations suggests that the messages we absorb about how much space we’re allowed to take up are deeply tied to the relational patterns of our earliest environments. Changing those patterns as an adult is possible, but it requires something harder than willpower. It requires noticing. And noticing requires someone, at some point, to say: you’re doing it again.
The permission nobody can give you
The most difficult part of all this is that the permission to stop over-explaining cannot come from someone else. If it could, the pattern would be easy to break. Someone would give you permission, and you’d take it.
But that’s the trap. If you need permission to stop seeking permission, you’re still in the loop. The exit isn’t permission. It’s a shift in what you believe about your own right to make choices without defending them.
Competence helps here. Not competence as the world measures it, but the felt sense of being someone whose judgement can be trusted. In my own career, the shift happened when I stopped deferring to editors and industry people whose opinions I’d been treating as more valid than my own, and started trusting my instincts. Nobody gave me permission to do that. I just did it enough times that the internal tribunal finally got tired and went home.
For the over-explainer, the work is similar. You practise saying the thing without the preamble. You sit in the discomfort of the silence after. You discover, gradually, that the silence is not dangerous. It is simply space. And research on how children share emotion with peers and adults confirms what most of us learn the hard way: the environments that allow for the fullest range of emotional expression are not permissive or chaotic. They are simply ones where presence is assumed to be welcome.
Taking up space is not an achievement. It’s a starting condition. Some of us just have to spend a few decades remembering that. And the remembering doesn’t happen in a single revelation — it happens in every small moment you choose to let the sentence end where it should, without the hedge, without the apology, without the case for the defence. You stop. The room holds. And you realise, finally, that it was always going to.
Photo by Zen Chung on Pexels