You know exactly how to dim.
You can read a room in four seconds. You know when the opinion you’re about to share will cost you, so you soften it. You know which win to mention and which to leave out. At a dinner party you let him tell the story, even though it’s your story, and he’s telling it wrong.
You run a team. You close deals. People bring you their hardest problems. And somewhere between the car and the front door, you turn yourself down a few notches. Not all the way off. Just enough.
“You’re too much.” “Tone it down.” “Who do you think you are?” “Why do you always have to be so intense?”
Here’s what nobody told you while you were busy managing everyone’s comfort: dimming yourself doesn’t make anyone else brighter. It just makes the room darker.
Dimming Was Never Humility
This is the part I want to take apart first, because it’s the part that kept you dimming the longest.
Somewhere along the way, someone told you that making yourself small was the godly thing to do. That a woman who takes up space has a pride problem. “Pride comes before a fall.” “Let him lead.” “Don’t make him feel small.”
So you learned to call your shrinking humility.
But Scripture defines humility differently than the people who wanted you quiet:
“Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment.” (Romans 12:3)
Sober judgment. Not low judgment. Accurate judgment. Humility is seeing yourself as you actually are, gifts included. Underselling what God put in you isn’t humble. It’s inaccurate. And a woman who tells herself something inaccurate about herself every single day isn’t growing in holiness. She’s being trained.
False humility is just fear with better manners.
Why You Learned to Dim
There is no blame here in this. You didn’t dim because you were weak. You dimmed because you were smart.
When your brightness was met with a cold shoulder, a silent weekend, a cutting remark in front of friends, or a sermon about submission, your nervous system did the math. Shine, and pay for it. Dim, and buy peace. So you dimmed. That was a survival strategy, and it probably worked. It may have kept you safer than you’ll ever know.
Control works by making you smaller. Rarely all at once. Usually by inches: a correction here, an eye-roll there, until you’re editing yourself before anyone has to.
And here’s the thing about the person who needs you dim: your light was never the problem. It was a threat to the version of him the world gets to see. A bright woman notices things. A bright woman has options. So the brightness had to go.
But here’s the turn. The strategy that kept you safe in that house will keep you small in this life. At some point, the thing that protected you starts costing you.
What Dimming Costs
You already know what it costs you. You can feel it. The exhaustion of performing a smaller version of yourself all day. The loneliness of never being fully known by the person who’s supposed to know you best.
“Imagine having to stifle God in you because of fear of showing up.”
That’s the real cost. The light in you isn’t just your personality. As a Christ-follower, it’s His presence in you, the part of you that touches the souls of those around you. It shows up not because of what you do, but because of who you are. When you dim yourself, you’re dimming that too.
God will still do what He does. He’ll still tug hearts toward His. But you might not get to see how He would have used you.
Jesus didn’t leave much room for ambiguity here:
“Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.” (Matthew 5:15)
Nobody lights a lamp to hide it. So it’s worth asking: who handed you the bowl? Because I’ve watched it happen for years, and it’s usually handed over with a Bible verse attached.
The Servant Who Hid It
There’s a story Jesus told that almost never gets preached to women. It should be.
A master gives three servants money to steward. Two of them put it to work. The third buries his in the ground. And when the master asks why, the servant gives an honest answer:
“I was afraid, and went out and hid your gold in the ground.” (Matthew 25:25)
I was afraid. That’s the whole explanation. And the master doesn’t praise him for playing it safe. He’s the only one in the story who gets rebuked.
I’m not telling you that to pile on. You had good reasons to be afraid. I’m telling you because someone taught you that hiding what God gave you was the faithful option. In this story, it’s the one option Jesus didn’t commend.
“A Gentle and Quiet Spirit”
You’ll hear this one used like a dimmer switch, too. 1 Peter 3:4.
Here’s what’s worth knowing: the word Peter uses for “quiet,” hēsychios, shows up in one other place in the New Testament. Paul uses it for every believer, men included: pray, he says, “that we may live peaceful and quiet lives” (1 Timothy 2:2).
Nobody reads that verse and concludes that Christian men should stop having opinions.
A quiet spirit is a settled spirit. Unhurried. Unshaken. It describes a woman who isn’t scrambling for approval. A quiet spirit is a settled one, not a silenced one. And honestly? There’s nothing more settled than a woman who has stopped apologizing for the light she carries. If you want the fuller picture of how these verses get bent, start with what biblical submission actually means.
And if someone holds up the Proverbs 31 woman as your standard, read her closely. She buys a field. She runs a business. She trades. Her husband is respected because of her, not in spite of her. And this is my favorite line about her:
“Her lamp does not go out at night.” (Proverbs 31:18)
Scripture’s model woman keeps her lamp lit, not because she’s working to make people see it. She simply lets it shine.
“Who Do You Think You Are?”
That question will come back the moment you start to brighten. Sometimes from him. Sometimes from your family. Most often, from inside your own head.
Shame tells you the answer is “nobody special.” Then the guilt that shows up the first time you speak up at the table will try to convince you that you did something wrong.
You didn’t. Feeling exposed when you stop hiding isn’t evidence you should go back into hiding. It’s evidence you’ve been hiding a long time.
So answer the question. Who do you think you are?
You’re a woman God fashioned with purpose and personhood. You don’t have to earn that, and nobody else gets to revoke it. Somebody turning the lights down doesn’t change what you are. It only changes what people can see.
And what you are is not too much. You were just in a room that wanted less.
Turning the Light Back On
Not all at once. Nobody comes out of years of dimming and goes straight to floodlight, and you don’t have to. Here’s where I’d start.
Notice where you dim. For one week, just watch. The opinion you swallow. The win you skip. The “sorry” before a perfectly reasonable request. Don’t fix anything yet. Trusting your own read again starts with noticing what you actually see.
Stop pre-apologizing. Drop the “this might be dumb, but…” Say the thing. Let it stand on its own.
Tell your story in your own voice. Even to one person. Share how God carried you through what you couldn’t carry yourself. Your story is one of the brightest things you own, and it’s yours to tell, not his to narrate.
Walk alongside someone else. Use what you’ve learned to help another woman see her way through. Light doesn’t get smaller when you share it.
Let weakness be part of the light. “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). You don’t have to look invincible to be bright. The cracks are often exactly where the light gets out.
Choose rooms that can hold you. Some rooms will always want you dimmer. You don’t have to keep auditioning for them. Brightening will look like the step everyone calls crazy to some people. Let it.
One important note: if being seen still carries real risk in your home, your brightness can be private for now. Light a lamp in a journal, in a counselor’s office, or with one safe friend. Safety first. Always. The light doesn’t go out just because it’s not on display yet.
So Here’s the Deal…
The secret to inner strength was never about trying harder or holding it together better. It’s that the light in you didn’t come from you, so nobody else ever had the authority to switch it off.
They told you shrinking was humility. It was survival. You can honor it for what it did and still decide you’re done with it.
Stand firm in what you know. And if the grace you were offered always came with conditions, remember that a gift was never meant to be an invoice.
You don’t owe anyone a dimmer version of yourself.
Dimming yourself doesn’t make anyone else brighter. It just makes the room darker.
Take the bowl off the lamp.
Next Steps
- Tools for Healing: my guided journal for women healing from emotional and narcissistic abuse. Nine chapters and 36 questions, rooted in faith and written to be lived with slowly. A private place to turn the light back on first. Instant download.
- Identity Recovery Groups: a small group of women who won’t ask you to be any less. Small on purpose.
- One-to-one coaching with me or Identity Recovery Coach Lauren Rose, when you want someone in your corner while you find your full volume again: booking portal.
Find yourself. Keep yourself.
About the author. Sharmen Elaine Kimbrough is an identity strategist and the founder of LiveFound, Inc. She holds a Master’s degree in professional counseling and spent more than ten years developing and leading the women’s programs at the Marriage Recovery Center. She writes for women recovering a self after emotional abuse, coercive control, and spiritual bypassing. More about Sharmen →
