Just because someone is high-functioning doesn’t mean they’re not highly sensitive. All it really means, at least if they’re in a healthy state of mind, body, and soul, is that they’ve somehow learned to direct their sensitivities and kick them up a notch or two.

Anderson Cooper is a journalist, and a great one. But he’s also, apparently, an emotional and loving father. You have to imagine he’s pretty adept at organizing his life, and was probably a darn good student as well. All great qualities, but nothing to do with the qualities of being an HSP.

Could Anderson Cooper be one of US? Could he be an HSP?

I think he might be. How do I know? Because—though I’m the first to admit that I’m no Anderson Cooper in a zillion different ways!—I am, and have been, high-functioning for a large percentage of my life.

But the real point I’m trying to make is that being an HSP does not preclude being deliberately, determinedly, and successfully high-functioning.

On the other hand, just because you’re high-functioning does not necessarily mean you’re happy or even content. It certainly doesn’t mean self-satisfied, self-reliant, or full of self-worth.

All it means is that you have the skills to do whatever it is you want or have chosen or sometimes have been coerced to do well enough to get the job done. You could be a dishwasher or you could be a museum curator. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re convinced you’re good at it or feel good doing it. It’s even possible you suffer from Imposter Syndrome, where, no matter how good you are at what you do, you still feel inadequate.

Ever wonder why actors tend toward screwed up personal lives?

We usually attribute their “problems” to too much fame and fortune. And, certainly, without those things they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.

But there’s more to it than that. There’s also the obvious fact that so many of them are highly sensitive people.

Can you imagine being an HSP who knows you take on other people’s energy, but don’t know what to do about it? Can you imagine being on a movie set with hundreds of movie people all milling about doing their jobs—many of them interacting with you—for hours and hours every single day? Can you imagine what it’s like to feel the feelings of the character you’re acting without feeling some kind of aftermath of leftover energy trails?

I can’t.

Sure, I’ve worked as a musician in orchestras; a human resource trainer in corporate America; a counselor for teenagers. But at no point did I recognize that the tremendous weight I carried around was due to all the energy of others flooding my being.

Sadly, even once I had an inkling that was what was going on, I still had no idea what to do about it.

Sometimes people seem to figure it out on their own.

Anderson Cooper seems to have figured it out on his own. Not that we have any idea what it’s like being Gloria Vanderbilt’s son, born and bred in his unusually eccentric circumstances. Maybe he’s had years of therapy, right? I mean, who can say? We surely don’t know how much of what we see is an act, being that he’s a TV personality and all.

But when I heard him talk about the loss of his brother to suicide and the recent death of his mother and how he wants nothing more than to pass on to his children who these people were to him “without it being cloaked in sadness,” I felt his willingness to dip into the pain of the loss and rise out again through love for his children.

We are not all Anderson Coopers.

We are not all super smart or super rich or super talented.

Yet, as HSPs, we are ALL fully capable of bringing out the best in ourselves by elevating the sensitivities we have so they serve us and all of humanity.

The post High-Functioning versus High-Sensitive: Are they mutually exclusive? first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.

It’s no wonder that being a person with heightened sensitivities carries with it an extra charge around the experience of loss. I mean, think about it. Put a person that experiences your deeper than average feelings and sensations and add the death of someone beloved? It’s a recipe for combustion.

But it’s also a recipe for freedom.

It’s really not enough to say, “I’m more sensitive, so of course I’m going to be more affected.” The fact is that we are constantly looking for ways to express how we feel—the freedom to express how we feel—because so much of our time is spent trying not to express how we feel. You  know, all the sticky stuff. The things for other people that may seem all in a day’s work, but for us mean trepidation or panic or pain or exhaustion.

What happens when death is involved

In our society, when you lose someone to death, suddenly an opening occurs. You are offered a sort of reprieve from the “buck up and deal with it” way of life. People are more willing to let you cry openly, talk about your feelings, reveal your emotional state through what you say, do, eat, or undertake. Even if it still makes them miserably uncomfortable.

In other words, grieving becomes a logical reason for your emotional state, which somehow makes it easier and more acceptable for others to handle.

Is grieving a good thing?

The thing about grief is that being in that state also makes it okay for us. You know, the ones who are doing the grieving. It opens the door for our more authentic selves to peek through the curtains behind which we are constantly, dedicatedly, hiding. We get more leeway to be who we are, act the way we might act, and respond the way we might respond when we can point to loss as the reason behind it all.

I’m not saying that we are using death as an excuse! All I’m saying is that it takes an inordinate amount of energy to plug the valve of your state of being on a constant basis. Energy to control, mitigate, calm, or annihilate through whatever means you decide works for you. Is it food? Or drugs? Or isolation? Whatever it is, it takes a powerfully high level of energy to deflect attention from the state of your being. It’s as if we’re storing it up like a bunch of nuts in a squirrel’s hideaway that we never get to use unless something “acceptable” comes along. Something like death.

Death sucks

I’m also not saying that death of someone you love (or have any kind of relationship with) isn’t a big deal. In fact, there’s pretty much nothing like it on the scale of what sucks. Still, I know that if I hadn’t been so weighed down, so burdened by my own need to hide what I felt about everything under the sun, I might not have collapsed so completely upon the death of my husband. The plug in the value came off and out came years of repressed, suppressed freak-out.

The first step in not feeling you have to hide is accepting your HSP-ness for what it is: A true blessing. In order to do that, we need to dedicate ourselves to knowing there is another answer beyond “coping.” A much easier, user-friendly approach that is committed to opening, heightening, and exemplifying.

We all admit that loss and death are part of life, but that doesn’t usually help us when the time comes to deal with it. As a Highly Sensitive Person, though, death does not have to crush us like a bolder on an ant.

Know yourself. Express yourself. Be yourself. Love yourself. That’s where it all starts.

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Check out my posts on the Psychic Octopus (globbing onto other people’s energy); your UES (how to identify and stay in your Unique Energetic Signature); and your IGS (how to confidently and consistently tap into your Intuitive Guidance System.

Thank you for shining your light into the world!

The post Death, Loss, & The HSP first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.