Why being an HSP feels a lot more like a curse than a blessing
For too many years our societies have undermined the value of “feeling.” By feeling, I don’t just mean the experiencing of emotions, either. I mean the value of intuition, too, and the value of “knowing” without seeing physical proof…and then receiving validation for it. In over-accentuating the belief that the only real truth is “fact,” that logic reigns supreme over all else. As if one could ever separate the human from the experience! And in my view, since human-ness is a constant, there will never be a time that human emotion is not involved on some level. Society’s paradoxical relationship with “sensitivity” is at the core of our misconceptions and underappreciation of the idea of “sensitivity.”
Society’s paradoxical relationship with “sensitivity”
On the other hand, we have religion existing alongside science in a painfully obvious paradoxical relationship. We have more and more people who can’t seem to tell the difference between truth and lies by the very people invested in the spin. We have sexual deviance running rampant in the same world run by people who are the perpetrators of such violence.
We have become insulated from who we really are and all the abilities we could be sharing to further the state of conscious awareness, love of the fellow members of our species (and all living creatures), and the nature of humanity at large.
It is not my intention to delve into politics—or science or religion. I am not an expert in any of those subjects. I am, however, pretty darn well versed in what it means to be a highly emotional, intuitively driven, fairly intelligent, and (hopefully) spiritually evolving human being, and an HSP.
The most recent book I’m reading on high sensitivity is Christian-based. In other words, if you are sensitive it’s okay, but you need Jesus’s help to deal with it productively. Without disparaging this philosophical approach, I would like to posit that, by and large, such advice is not all that helpful if or when you’re truly addressing the desire to know who you really are. At least not by other people’s standards based on religion or politics or socioeconomic status or anything else.
We are who we are
It is not possible to entirely cut the cord between ourselves and the environment in which we live, nor from the upbringing that we have had. It is possible, however, to consider our opportunities to live differently.
Love energy is the most powerful energy there is
As I continue to explore how high sensitives interact with the world (or avoid it) and how we feel like second-class citizens, I am reminded of what my husband used to tell me…almost every day. “Heidi,” he’d say, “You are not the weakest because you are the most loving, as people would have you believe, but the strongest.” It took me many years to begin to understand the truth in that statement.
In my way of thinking, love is the most powerful energy there is. Science cannot measure it necessarily, and religions cannot own it or call it theirs, yet most of us have felt it, experienced it, and desired it at some point in our lives. We might say that we can see a loving act, but the feeling of love is something else entirely. Furthermore, the heart, at least in the sense we might use the word to tap into sensitivity, is what balances out the mind. Without it, not much is left.
HSPs tap into what matters
All energy works the same way. High sensitives tap into energy, first and foremost. The telepathic ones tend to tap into people’s thoughts, the empathetic ones into people’s feelings, and so on. The key is not to stop being sensitive, but to start understanding that you can have it all. You can understand how people feel, for example, without actually feeling what they are feeling. It’s about respecting the “thought boundaries” of others without blocking them out, but rather by aligning yourself with your own energy…and staying there.
For everyone’s sake.
