HSP — Living Freely — Lesson #1
I’m highly sensitive. What that means? If you are an HSP yourself, you will know.
If not: you can find it out here.
I found out about my sensory processing sensitivity by the age of 31 and currently I’m 35 years old. So until that moment I realised that I am not an alien, not sick and not punished for life I was living with a completely wrong mindset.
What helped me most to be finally free, successful and self-loving?
I want to share that with you, so you can benefit from it as well. Positive vibes and responses by other HSP make me more than happy. It’s pure bliss.
Here you go.
My most powerful and life-changing realisations:
1. Other people are not as sensitive as you are.
Do you remember a situation where you took extra care about not making loud noises? Or avoiding conflicts or even mentioning your needs and desires?
That’s what I did all the time. And I still catch myself doing it.
The majority of people are not as sensitive as you are and therefore can either deal with external stimuli more easily or they don’t even notice.
I remember where my sensitive mother (she still rejects the idea of her being an HSP) pushed me back when I tried to ask the taxi driver in India if he could turn the volume a bit more down. She said it might affect his religious practice, or something like that. I surrendered and suffered.
I remember not telling my business partner that I don’t want to continue like that because I had the fear of hurting her. So we continued until the big bang, friendship broken, competitor made.
I remember re-writing E-Mails and WhatsApp messages four times and then not sending them. I remember changing words, greeting formulas, good bye messages and synonyms seven times.
I remember not standing up for my rights just to please others as in not to harm them. They would have handled these topics with ease. I just thought they feel the same as I do. They don’t.
Implementation strategy:
Train yourself to realise you can allow yourself much more than you might think right now. Everything can be trained as a muscle: thoughts, behaviour, recurring patterns, mindset, muscles.
The more and more you balance yourself into a healthy relationship with the outer world the more and more it will be implemented into your life. Experience is key and has to be done in real life. No theory can help you. To be able to actually learn and implement it has to go through your whole nervous system.
That’s how you learn and integrate. No other way.
So whenever you have the thought: Oh, that might be too tough for that other person — do the reality check.
New thoughts and behavioural patterns will show their first reasonable effects after 21 to 28 days of continuous practice minimum. For some people a new automatism can be created within that short time frame, some will use a bit longer. Keep up building and optimising it and your life will become more amazing every second you invest in that.
2. If others seem to be harsh, most of the time they aren’t
Lots of times I thought: ‘What an asshole’.
They aren’t.
They just don’t know better.
And other’s actions and words should not affect the way you feel anyways.
There’s a parallel you can use for that topic to understand the mechanism behind it better.
Imagine someone with a hearing discrepancy or difficulty. The most visible or hearable effect will be: they speak differently.
It’s the same with sensitivity and behaviour: if you can deal with that, others can too. So if one can deal with what you might call ‘harshness’ she or he thinks that you can too.
See? It’s exactly the same where your thought patterns are coming from, just the other way round.
I will continue writing about my most helpful learnings here on Medium from now on. If you want to make me even more happy: clap your hands, follow the white rabbit or clap here digitally and follow me and my next articles. Thank you.
You are awesome and we need you and your abilities here on planet earth.