You meet up for lunch with your best friend, who’s been going through a tough time lately. When you hear the pain in their voice, you find your own eyes tearing up a little - it feels almost as if what they’re describing happened to you. It’s important to you to be there for them and you really want to help, but by the end of your time together, you find yourself feeling drained and depressed along with them.
You find your favorite books, movies and TV shows totally immersive - you can look up from the page or screen and vividly imagine the details of the fictional worlds and the feelings of the characters. You love to look for the deep, existential meaning and contemplate how it relates to your own life. It seems like other people don’t always look at these things as deeply as you do. It’s just a show! You’ve heard people say. But it’s more than that to you.
You want to keep up on current events, but the negative headlines you see on social media overwhelm you quickly. You do your best to avoid those ads for charities that show children or animals suffering. It viscerally hurts you to think about all the pain in the world, and you wonder how you can justify feeling happy yourself with all that’s going on.
If this sounds like you, you may have a highly sensitive temperament.
People with this trait are more strongly affected by things in their environment, from the physical (strong odors, temperature changes, textures of clothing) to the emotional (the feelings - even subtle ones - of people and animals around them) and the creative (the deep underlying meanings in art, music and literature.) Living in the world as a highly sensitive person comes with a different set of strengths and challenges, and you need a therapist who gets that and can support you in learning how to work with, not against, your temperament.
Your high sensitivity is a resource. When you work with me, you’ll learn how to treat it like one.
You find your favorite books, movies and TV shows totally immersive - you can look up from the page or screen and vividly imagine the details of the fictional worlds and the feelings of the characters. You love to look for the deep, existential meaning and contemplate how it relates to your own life. It seems like other people don’t always look at these things as deeply as you do. It’s just a show! You’ve heard people say. But it’s more than that to you.
You want to keep up on current events, but the negative headlines you see on social media overwhelm you quickly. You do your best to avoid those ads for charities that show children or animals suffering. It viscerally hurts you to think about all the pain in the world, and you wonder how you can justify feeling happy yourself with all that’s going on.
If this sounds like you, you may have a highly sensitive temperament.
People with this trait are more strongly affected by things in their environment, from the physical (strong odors, temperature changes, textures of clothing) to the emotional (the feelings - even subtle ones - of people and animals around them) and the creative (the deep underlying meanings in art, music and literature.) Living in the world as a highly sensitive person comes with a different set of strengths and challenges, and you need a therapist who gets that and can support you in learning how to work with, not against, your temperament.
Your high sensitivity is a resource. When you work with me, you’ll learn how to treat it like one.