Today, I will discuss five things about being an HSP. They’re my personal insights and not meant to be exhaustive. While I discuss personal challenges and therapy as a tool, I don’t aim to replace professional advice should you find yourself relating to the points I describe.
- You can be highly sensitive and still be disconnected from your emotions
- Being highly sensitive is not a curse
- Highly sensitive… to everything
- My creativity is rooted in my highly sensitive nature
- I’m not broken
A definition of the HSP trait
According to Elaine Aron, a pioneer in researching and explaining the HSP trait, as many as one out of every five people are highly sensitive. In its simplest definition, a highly sensitive person has a sensitive nervous system. Elaine Aron further defines the trait as being aware of subtleties in our surroundings and being more easily overwhelmed, particularly when in a highly stimulating environment. However, the key attribute she describes, compared to those without the trait, is that HSP process everything around them much more: they reflect, elaborate and make associations. We refer to it as “intuition” if this information is not processed consciously. In other words, an HSP “knows” but is not necessarily able to explain why or how.
In recent months, I’ve started to understand and embrace that I’m an HSP. I’ve always known that my feelings ran more deeply than most. That random acts of kindness and cheesy movie scenes move me to tears. Equally, my pain and my sorrow hit me deeply.
My journey to date
I grow up in an environment where I wasn’t safe to feel and supported to understand my feelings. I quickly (subconsciously) began to separate from my emotions; suppress them and avoid them. Because the high sensitivity applies both to the depth of emotions and their “physicality” i.e. how they manifest in the body.
I’ve recently started to understand that separating from emotions, from my body also cuts me off from myself and therefore others. It cuts me off from living and achieving what I’ve set out to do. Here I want to stress that what I describe is a subconscious defence mechanism. It protects me/my nervous system from overwhelm. Trust me: I wish I knew where the off/on button was…
Although I believe that we can’t know what we don’t know, I’ve been dealing with a lot of sadness when I realised just how much I’ve been preventing myself from experiencing, including relationships and friendships. It’s been hard to not want to change the past based on this new information. I will share more about my journey very soon in a future post.
For now, I wanted to share the five things I wish I’d known sooner, hoping this will resonate with fellow HSP (and perhaps others too).
1. You can be highly sensitive and still be disconnected from your emotions
I have touched on this in the above: I’ve always known that I experience everything more intensely than most, and certainly more than my parents and siblings. I have these memories of being more sensitive to pain for example. When I was about 4, I broke my elbow quite badly to the point of needing surgery and surgical screws. Of the surgery itself, I don’t remember much, but I do remember that when nurses tried to remove my stitches down the line. The pain was terrifying and made me scream my head off at the appointment. They had to tie me down to stop me from moving. Of course at the time, I didn’t know why and neither did the nurses or my mum. Now it makes sense.
I think this heightened sensory/physical sensitivity, combined with growing up in an environment where I didn’t learn to process and manage my emotions, is likely what caused me to go into a dissociative state when things get too much. This doesn’t stop the emotions, but it gives me some distance until it’s safe again to be fully present. I’m still learning to accept this. The hardest part is the distance it creates with people I care about, particularly where there is intimacy. There is no on/off switch, at least not one that I’m in control of. Knowing this has brought a lot of sadness recently.
My light at the end of the tunnel is therapy, and in particular using a protocol called Lifespan Integration. The hope and therapeutic goal is to heal the triggers that cause the dissociative state. This, in turn, will also lead to emotional regulation and give me the ability to stay in my body. To experience life more fully than just being at a distance all the time.
2. Being highly sensitive is not a curse
I’ve always felt burdened by my emotions. Others didn’t accept my emotions. I didn’t understand my emotions and I didn’t know how to control them. I remember feeling a lot a emotional distress as a child. Things that didn’t affect my siblings or peers had a profound impact on me, playful teasing for example. I cried easily, over what grown ups considered ‘silly things’. I have these memories of being unconsolable, and not having anyone to reassure me. On top of that, my mum was unable to understand and therefore tolerate my emotional states. I remember my siblings mocked me for crying “all the time”. I suppose that’s another element that contributed to my dissociative state: by trying to regain control, I stopped myself from feeling. Now I know that what I’ve always been longing for is emotional regulation, not control.
Though I’m still on my journey to accept this new insight, I can also see its gifts. Having access to a depth of feelings that few can experience has made me a better storyteller. I published 2 novels as well as stories on Wattpad. Readers praised them for my emotionally complex characters, and for what they felt and how real they believed my stories were. Being an HSP has also been an invaluable asset in my professional career in Human Resources. Because I’m deeply attuned to other people, especially one-on-one, I’m able to show greater empathy and understanding. I know what people need. It’s also a talent in recruitment: in spite of their CV, I can tell whether someone is a match for a role, whether they’ll fit in and often times what other vacancies they could be better suited for.
It all comes from being to being able to access subtle cues and information that some call intangible.
3. Highly sensitive… to everything
One of the most mind-blowing things I’m learning to embrace as an HSP is intuition. It’s the same as my feelings, I’ve always known that my intuition is particularly good. I know things before they happen or pick up on someone’s intentions and often be right. When I’m not pushing it away, my intuition has become pretty sharp thanks to hours and hours of personal development work. Again, as a child, I remember I had this innate knowing that I couldn’t explain, and sensed things that couldn’t be seen. And because no one could help me make sense of it, it’s another thing that has contributed to burying the HSP trait and gifts.
A tiny bit on HSP & spirituality
For me, this is where spirituality has offered some supplementary insights. A common precept in spirituality is that everything is energy, and therefore everything connects through energy. Time or space don’t bind energy. We are wired to pick up on intangible information that energy carries. But we don’t realise it or we’re too scared to connect to it.
I’ve experienced ups and downs in how I relate to spirituality. At times, it is easy to access all this information. That’s what feeds intuition: you can picture it like a radio that lets you tune into a certain frequency to receive information. It can be invaluable. But the flip side is that for someone who struggles to be in my body in the first place, this tuning into energy frequencies can exacerbate physical dissociation. I often feel these frequencies as so much lighter, more joyful and harmonious. It’s still a way to escape the very real and tangible reality of feeling and being in the body. Of being where I am and experiencing things as they are, in the now. Not in some parallel non-tangible reality.
Which is also why deeper therapeutic work can be so helpful. We wouldn’t try to escape reality if we didn’t have a reason, whether it’s because of current circumstances or because of what the subconscious mind stores. Regardless of whether you’re HSP or not, healing the mind is often the key to experiencing life more fully. And for me, to no longer look for an escape.
4. Creativity is rooted in my highly sensitive nature
Elaine Aron discusses this in her book, and I’ve personally observed that highly creative people are often highly sensitive, whether they know it or not. For the large part, this comes from the ability to feel deeply on all levels.
I’ll be honest, in the last few years, I have struggled with creativity. I used to write a lot. And I also remember that it started as an escape. Things at home were at times too much to handle and so I started to write. I wanted to give my characters what I didn’t have. For them to get a happy ending, despite their flaws and their challenges. To find love and acceptance. So I wrote love stories, often involving characters who thought they were broken or that life had broken, and who found redemption with and in each other. I loved writing. I think it was also one outlet to process my own emotions and my own aspirations.
My ability to write fiction has been impacted by the healing work I’ve been doing in recent years. I’m not sure why, but my theory is that because writing used to be an escape, this gift probably had to be ‘taken away’ for a while so that I would no longer escape, face and heal the things that made me want to escape in the first place.
The gift, however, has been that my creativity has manifested in new ways. Ways that I remember I longed to be able to explore as a child but couldn’t. Things like music and singing, painting and drawing. I also express it through physical activity; recently Pilates.
I think creativity also comes from the richness of all the information an HSP can access, including, as mentioned above, things that are intangible.
5. I’m not broken
Understanding that I’m HSP, understanding some of the traits I’ve expanded on here, was the missing piece in my healing journey.
I’ve had a hard time accepting my dissociation for all the things it has taken from me, but knowing one of the underlying reasons has helped. Primarily because it means there is a way out, which I’m fully engaging in.
However, healing and changing the perception that I was broken doesn’t happen overnight. A friend once told that I’m closer to where I want to be than I think, and I have to remember that the days that it’s harder to trust the process.
My family’s misunderstanding of my trait growing up layers the belief. I remember all too well that my family labelled me “too emotional”. It’s also not something we have discussed since. I’m still busy making peace with what being an HSP means to me, and know that I’m not yet ready to discuss it with them. It would reopen wounds that I havent’t healed yet and I want to be able to regulate my emotions when we do speak about it.
Being an HSP is not a curse and doesn’t mean we’re broken. Once we understand who we are, we’re able to see and embrace the many gifts that being HSP comes with. It’s a learning for sure. But we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have anything to learn.
Over and out
Fatima
If you’d like to work with me, do get in touch!