Being highly sensitive is not the same as being weak

I came out of Hellen’s office emotionally drained. I sat in my car, head tilted back on the headrest, eyes closed, trying to assimilate what we talked about. I felt exposed. I felt like I was standing on a stage naked, waiting to be judged and found unworthy. I had opened the curtain of my life and let Hellen into my inner sanctum of thoughts and feelings. I realized this was a part of myself that I had revealed to few, including my husband. I have worked hard to build an exterior that the world sees as a strong woman who is able, capable, and willing to take on whatever life throws at her, and in the process, I walled off parts of my identity that I thought was the opposite of strength. Without fresh water and sunshine, they couldn’t grow.

I came to the decision that, regardless of how much it hurt, this year really was going to be the Year of Me. I was determined to understand what drives my self-destructive side to set expectations that, in many cases, are impossible to achieve, which fed my underlying feeling of “lesser-than,” causing me to set more expectations -- and so went the vicious cycle.

In deciding to put myself first, I gathered that the Year of Me needed to be about the good, the bad, and the ugly. In order to live my best life, I needed to get to the root cause of some of my behaviours and my darkest thoughts. I needed to peel back the layers of my life like an onion. The only way I could find the Girl in the Red Hat was to get to the heart of who I was and how I got to be who I was today. I took a deep breath and set off for home. Tonight, my husband and I had lots to talk about.

Hellen had given me some homework. She recommended I read two books: The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People and When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough. I decided I would start by understanding more about Empaths and Sensitive People. I wanted to empower myself with the knowledge to steady the helm and steer the course of the relationships I had with my loved ones, friends and colleagues. Like the researcher I am, I spent some time learning about the author, Dr. Judith Orloff, before I cracked the spine on her book and dove into learning more about empaths and the highly sensitive. An empath herself, she specializes in treating highly sensitive people in her psychiatry practice. According to Dr. Orloff, “being empathic has incredible benefits such as greater intuition, compassion, creativity and a deeper connection to other people.” Her work addresses the consequences of living in a state of high sensitivity, such as becoming easily overwhelmed, over-stimulated, exhausted, and absorbing stress and negativity from others. Once you acknowledge you are an empath, one of the key things to learn is that you do not have to feel too much or become overwhelmed, but you need to learn how to center yourself.

The book starts with a quote by His Holiness the 14th Dali Lama “Our innate capacity for empathy is the source of the most precious of all human qualities.” I don’t exactly know when or why I would qualify discussions by stating “I’m not an empath, but I know I have an innate ability to sense feelings”. I’ve always known I rate high on the empathy scale. I always look for the best in people. I have been known to take too long before cutting an employee loose, feeling that if I just worked harder, I could get them to where I need them to be. At work, my empathic side has gotten me into trouble more times than I can count and certainly has put me on the opposing side when we’re debating a decision as the Leadership Team.. Reading that empathy is the most precious of all human qualities gave me a sense of hope and made me realize that what I have been perceiving as a weakness could really be one of my greatest strengths.

The book itself is only 213 pages long, if you ignore the 48 pages that include a summary of the Protection Strategies, Index, and recommended readings. I’m a voracious reader. As I turned to the first page, I thought I would be able to knock this off easily in a couple of days. I quickly learned I was wrong. Instead, I found that each chapter could take hours or days to read. Some days I found I could not pick the book up. I was not mentally capable of opening the lid to the internal area that I had confined my emotions to. I had never realized that a book could make you think and feel so much. I would find myself reading a paragraph and then reflecting on how it made me feel. Did it resonate with me? Did it provide an answer to an unknown question?

Sometimes, my emotions would become overwhelming and I’d feel silent tears slide down my cheeks. In hindsight, when that happened, I think I was acknowledging that I had been trying to keep my highly sensitive side secreted away in the darkest recesses of my psyche. I think the tears were a way of forgiving myself and giving permission to my sensitive side to flourish. I came to peace with the fact that if I was going to be authentic and live my best life, I was going to have to acknowledge that I was highly sensitive. I was going to have to come to terms that while many see the ability to express emotions as a negative this was in fact not the truth. I was going to have to come to terms with what some would think I needed to get a thicker skin. Instead, I would have to learn and develop strategies to not let other people’s emotions, positive or negative, impact or unbalance me. If I could master that, I would be able to master my emotions.

Originally published on November 29, 2020 (https://girlintheredhatblog.wordpress.com/)