Sensitivity, Awareness, and Me

“I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders and feel overwhelmed and exhausted.” a client lamented. I certainly could identify with her since I, too, felt overwhelmed for many years and made it worse by chastising myself for being a bad mom, wife, therapist, or whatever other hat I was wearing at the time. Yes, raising four kids, learning to live with two husbands—spectacularly unsuccessfully with one—running a household, cooking, and creating two careers, as well as doing the everyday necessities can be very exhausting. But I exacerbated the difficult feelings by neither understanding nor taking care of myself as well as I could have.

Noticing how often I felt overwhelmed, a friend recommended I read Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Survive When the World Overwhelms You. In the preface, the author states, “Having a sensitive nervous system is normal, a basically neutral trait. You probably inherited it. It occurs in about 15 to 20 percent of the population.” (xiii) Professor Aron goes on to explain that highly sensitive people’s nervous systems are physically wired in ways that cause them to become overaroused and overstimulated more easily than most people.

Taking the self-test in the book showed beyond a shadow of a doubt, I was a highly sensitive person, an HSP. What an incredible relief to be labeled “normal” and to begin to let go of the gnawing fear that I was fundamentally defective or emotionally flawed beyond repair. Understanding that nervous system wiring—a physiological phenomenon—made me a sensitive person, not a weak wimp, or worse, a teeth-grinding bitch, continues to be an incredibly freeing insight.

Excerpted from The Woman's Book of Mindfulness by Sue Patton Thoele. Available on Amazon.