Strength and Clarity for the Sensitive Soul
“By noticing and processing so many details around them — not to mention their own internal thoughts — highly sensitive people are doing far more cognitive work than most others. Being overstimulated and frazzled is something anyone can identify with, but for HSPs, it happens much more easily.”
Some of you know already I’m an empath and a highly sensitive person (HSP). While I have never liked labels, I don’t mind using a few here because they are common terms most of us have come to accept and understand.
I have felt very differently than everyone else around me since I was a child, because I seemed to be the only person in the room who was able to sense subtle energies no one else could — what was clear to me was invisible to others. I also seemed to be the only person who trusted her intuition more than the facts given to her, and made decisions from it. I was often that person who made no logical sense to the people around me. I struggled for many years to explain myself, fit in, relate to others, and feel like I belong in this world. I even fought with and discounted my intuition and tried to diminish it by ignoring its cues.
After many years of trials and breakthroughs, I’ve come to realize my sensitivity is a true gift. Not only has it been trying to show me the right path, it’s been trying to show me the people who belong in my life. By ignoring my senses for the sake of trying to be “normal,” I’ve alienated my most trustworthy gift, therefore myself, from those who would understand and accept me as a sensitive being.
Sensitivity is relative
I recently met another HSP who has struggled with his sensitivity. He shared that during an outing with friends, one of them called him “too sensitive,” which caused him to feel hurt and inadequate. Having been someone who was called “too sensitive” most of her life, I immediately empathized with him. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine what life must be like for a highly sensitive straight male living in America.
The thing is, sensitivity is relative, just like every other quality. You are only sensitive compared to someone who is insensitive. You are only “too sensitive” to those who most likely go through life ignoring their own senses, and the senses of others.
We live in a rather desensitized world that values logic and facts more than feelings and intuition. It is this widespread cultural desensitization that causes many social groups to feel alienated and become reactive.
When you compare yourself to others, there will always be a greater than and a less than. If you allow yourself to use someone else as a standard then you will always find yourself feeling inadequate. There is no standard measuring tool for sensitivity that determines the right amount of sensitivity you should experience. You are always going to be just you. You are the perfect amount of sensitive you allow yourself to be. You are no more and no less sensitive than your senses allow you to perceive at any given moment.
Being sensitive is being in tune
I now believe sensitivity is a gift because not everyone came into this world highly in tune with their senses. I have met many individuals who actually train and practice consistently in order to become more in tune. For those of us who were born highly sensitive, we have the natural gift of heightened awareness. So it saddens me to meet other HSPs who spent their life resenting this amazing gift instead of exploring it.
I personally believe everyone in the world is sensitive, whether they are aware of it or not. Many grew up in families or cultures that do not encourage sensitivity, so they end up disconnecting from their senses and work towards developing their knowledge and skills instead. Over time, disconnection becomes distrust, and distrust becomes total dismissal. And this is how most people come to disable their intuition — the very tool gifted to them for creating a fulfilling life.
Sensitivity is an abstract quality. Unlike physical strength and productivity, sensitivity isn’t really quantifiable, at least, not in a structured way. But sensitivity is a much-needed quality, one that is scarce in our society today.
Sensitivity allows us to:
Cultivate compassion, inclusivity and loving communities
Explore our imagination and develop new innovative ideas
Detect disharmony and smooth over important relationships
Because sensitivity is usually accompanied by attention and thoughtfulness on subtle details, it is a quality needed to succeed in areas of building community, unconventional thinking, interpersonal relationships, etc. A healthy amount of sensitivity breeds love and connection between people.
Emotional regulation for the HSP
Sensitive beings can often feel like they fall behind in the emotional maturity category, which isn’t necessarily true. Because of their empathic and sensitive nature, emotions can feel overwhelming and hard to control at times. That has little to do with maturity in processing emotions; there are simply a lot of senses you are feeling. Learning and practicing emotional regulation is key to the success of an HSP.
With the right perspective, this actually puts HSPs on a fast track for rapid emotional growth and self-regulation. With practice, you might find the best thing that could have happened to you is your sensitivity, because it has allowed you to experience a spectrum of heightened emotions others don’t usually experience, which forces you to inspect your inner world more closely and become crystal clear with what’s going on.
The whole journey of trying to emotionally regulate might feel painstakingly slow and frustrating for an HSP. Patience and faith are the ingredients necessary to encourage an HSP to trust the process and keep going. Over the years, I’ve focused on these 3 areas to regulate my emotions:
Identifying the trigger(s) of each emotion — What am I feeling? Is it more than one emotion? Why am I feeling this? What was the original incident that caused this emotion?
Establishing emotional boundaries — Is this emotion mine, or am I empathically feeling someone else’s? Is my emotion a reaction to someone else’s emotion?
Releasing emotions by healthy expression — What is the most effective approach for me to talk about my emotions? How can I express my emotions creatively? Which way of expression would leave me the happiest?
While this is an ongoing work in progress, emotional regulation is actually not as complicated as we believe it to be. While emotions (especially when heightened) can feel confusing, I have found over the years that dealing with our emotions is actually simple and straightforward, if we allow it to be. It is often that our analytical mind gets in the way of processing our emotions. The minute we try to explain our emotions with logic, we begin to complicate things and add to the confusion. In order to keep things simple, you must release guilt, judgment, justification, blame, and own your emotions by acknowledging no one else gave you these emotions—they are yours alone.
When your sensitivity is complemented by emotional maturity, your world will become clearer and your future much brighter. Believing in your gift of sensitivity and mastering emotional regulation gives you the tools to follow your senses while not letting them get the best of you. The irony, as I have found, is that over time, my emotions became calmer while my sensitivity became stronger. It’s almost as if I’ve found the on-off switch to my sensitivity. Though the switch is never truly “off,” it now knows when to automatically switch “on” when I most need it. So if you are a sensitive soul reading this, I hope you keep believing in yourself and find your on-off switch too.
