Emotional sensitivity is not something that receives a lot of press, unfortunately. Most especially in today’s society it can be difficult to understand how it is to live with emotional sensitivity and to accept that this emotional sensitivity leads to certain reactions and styles of being which to those who are not emotionally sensitive just are not understood.
I have been doing a lot of reading on emotional sensitivity lately. One fact that many of us who are emotionally sensitive may know is that emotional sensitivity combined with an emotionally unattuned and invalidating environment is known now to lead to a diagnosis of Borderline Personality disorder. To my way of thinking this is a way of labelling the victim who has reacted to pain in an intense way, with a degree of intensity that others just do not understand. We can also be trained to invalidate our own emotional sensitivity in a quest to be accepted or loved and this just doesn’t really work because then we can turn against ourselves and become very inwardly self critical, full of self blame and shame mirroring how we were truly unmirrored.
In addition we may not be able to truly recognise that there was nothing really wrong with us in the first place, we just did not get raised in an environment where our emotional sensitivity could be understood, managed or soothed well. And the bitter and painful truth is that much as the emotionally sensitive amongst us would love to live in a world where we were recognised, realism dictates that this is not always going to happen for us, for others who are not like us are going to find it hard to truly know where we are coming from.
Part of the reason I like to blog is to write about and share information that I think may be of help to others. The other great thing about being part of this blogging community is that I get the opportunity to share what others share and learn from them too. So this week I am sharing about the following resource which I found at my local library this which has been helping me to connect so many of the dots in my own emotionally sensitive life.
In future blogs I would like to share some of the information in the book which includes mindfulness and other self awareness practices that can help those of us who are emotionally sensitive both to better understand ourselves and others as well as become more realistic in our acceptance of those who do not understand or truly get how it is for us to be emotionally sensitive. There are steps we can take to learn how to self calm and how to become more adept at facing, feeling, calming and soothing rather than running from or defending against our at times heightened emotions which can overwhelm us as emotionally sensitive people.
Emerging From The Dark Night 