Maybe You Were Never Too Sensitive
Maybe You Were Never Too Sensitive
I'm at the tail end of a lake trip with my family, and I've caught myself doing all the things I do when I'm sharing space with people for a long time: walking around at night dimming lights, turning down the TV, unplugging the Glade plug-ins because the smell is making me lose my mind, finding little pockets of quiet when everything starts to feel like too much, sitting outside listening to the bugs without my phone.
None of this is new.
Growing up, I was more sensitive than most of my peers, and definitely more than most of my family. Back then, sensitive was practically a dirty word. "Don't be so sensitive" lived in the same neighborhood as "don't be a sissy". It meant weak, or dramatic, or too much, and somewhere along the way, I absorbed that.
I used to wonder why I seemed to notice everything, feel everything, and couldn't just let things roll off my back the way other people apparently could.
So I did what a lot of us do. I toughened up. I learned to override myself, push through discomfort, sit in loud rooms and draining situations, and ignore what my body was telling me because everyone around me seemed perfectly fine.
At some point, I started passing out frequently. We went to doctors, ran every test they could think of, and never landed on a real answer. Looking back, I think it was my body's way of shutting down what it couldn't get me to notice any other way.
Toughening up worked, in the sense that I could function. But it also cut me off from my intuition, my creativity, my ability to read a room, my emotional depth, and my capacity to sense what was happening underneath the words being spoken. Turns out some of the very things I'd been trying to get rid of were connected to my magic.
I spent years dulling my shine, trying to jam a multifaceted, vibrant human into a culturally acceptable straitjacket. It took me decades to start unraveling that. Maybe you can relate.
Here's the myth I want to bust: sensitivity and fragility are not the same thing. Sensitivity is just our capacity to notice and register information ~ sound, light, touch, emotion, tension, pleasure, discomfort, the subtle feeling that something is right for us or very much isn't. That's it.
(For what it's worth, there's real research showing women tend to have more nerve endings in certain areas of skin than men do. I'm no scientist, but it does make you wonder whether "stop being so sensitive" was ever fair advice to begin with.)
Now I don't think I was too sensitive. I think I just never learned to trust what I was sensing. And this is a big part of why so much of my work comes back to the body.
We slow down enough to notice what's actually happening inside. In workshops, we experiment with practices that take us just outside what's familiar, so we can feel ourselves respond in real time. In coaching, we get curious about the subtleties ~ the contraction right before you blurt out the automatic yes, or the resentment that's been quietly building until it finally shows up as a snap judgment.
We start turning the sensitivity back on. Not so we're overwhelmed by everything we feel, but so we can stay connected to ourselves while we feel it.
And here's where I think our culture gets it wrong again: there's no pill, hack, affirmation, or single Eureka! moment that reconnects you to yourself after decades of overriding what you know.
You practice. You notice. You forget. You override yourself again. You catch it a little sooner next time. You talk about it. You try something different. And slowly, you start trusting the information coming from inside you again.
Lately I've been wondering how many of us spent enormous chunks of our lives trying to become less sensitive, when what we actually needed was to learn how to work with it instead of against it.
Were you ever told you were "too sensitive"? Did you learn to toughen up to fit into your family, your workplace, your relationships? Has your relationship with your own sensitivity changed as you've gotten older?
If any of this is landing for you, I'd love to talk it through together. I offer free coaching calls where we can start unpacking what your sensitivity might actually be trying to tell you, and what it could look like to trust it again.
