Therapy for Highly Sensitive People
Learn to embrace your sensitivities as the superpowers that they are.
Does this sound familiar?
You have struggled with a diminished sense of safety and self-trust due to misattunement, invalidation, or even punishment received from your friends and family as a response to your sensitivities during childhood and other key developmental stages.
You often feel uncomfortable, like you want to crawl out of your skin or tell the world around you to be more quiet. You may even question whether there’s something “wrong” with you, because your friends and family don’t seem as affected by the things in your environment that really bother you.
You frequently struggle with the sense of being overwhelmed, and aren’t entirely sure why. You need ample time away from other people and overstimulating environments in order to recharge; you may feel guilty for taking time for yourself, or have trouble asking for the time and space away from others.
What is a highly sensitive person?
Highly sensitive people are a subset of the population who are high in a personality trait known as sensory-processing sensitivity. Studies on innate sensitivity, sensory processing sensitivity, and the highly sensitive brain have gained traction over the last 25 years, thanks to the work of Elaine Aron, Phd.D., who is widely recognized as the leading researcher in the study of highly sensitive people. Dr. Aron has developed a model that describes the traits of highly sensitive people called the DOES model, referring to the following key highly sensitive person traits:
D: depth of processing; highly sensitive people have a deep and rich internal world and often think very deeply.
O: overstimulation; highly sensitive people may be more easily overwhelmed by their environments (including other people!), and require downtime or solitude to recharge without excessive stimulation.
E: emotional reactivity and empathy; highly sensitive people usually feel their emotions very intensely and may be overly aware (or even overrun) by both their own emotions and the emotions of others.
S: sensing the subtle; highly sensitive people are extremely aware of subtleties within themselves, others, and their environments. This heightened sense of perception may be energetically draining and difficult to shut off for a highly sensitive person.
Are you a highly sensitive person? Find out by taking Dr. Aron’s Highly Sensitive Person Test Here.
Highly Sensitive People + Our Mental Health
If you’re like me, the practice of accepting and managing your sensitivities was probably not something you learned in school; you may have even experienced shame or judgment around your sensitivities, instead of being encouraged to celebrate and embrace them as the strengths they can be.
Research on the correlation between highly sensitive people and mental health struggles suggests two things:
1) children with innate sensitivities are more likely to experience mental health challenges later in life due to the way their bodies instinctively respond to experiences of adversity. This means that an adverse circumstance that would be extremely challenging for a non-highly sensitive child, would be experienced more intensely and with longer-term effects for a highly sensitive child. The accumulation of moments in which their systems are completely overwhelmed, without resources to cope, can lead to the eventual development PTSD and C-PTSD symptoms as the highly sensitive child’s body and mind naturally responds to the ongoing trauma.
2) adults who experienced trauma and complex trauma during their childhood and early adulthood, especially when the traumatic experiences occurred at key developmental stages in their lives, are more likely to present as highly sensitive later in life.
Research is ongoing as the ‘high sensitivity - childhood trauma - mental health struggles’ correlation versus causation hypotheses continue to be explored and studied. Interesting findings have shown the effects of pervasive stressors on not only a person’s nervous system over time, but even on their genetic makeup at the biophysical level. When we go back even farther and consider the effects of intergenerational and systemic trauma, there’s further evidence in the research that both a person’s inherent biological makeup, as well as their environment, play huge roles in the determination of a person’s sensory processing sensitivity.