shadows

Reblog: Are You a Highly Sensitive Person?

Find Out If You're a Highly Sensitive Person with This Test

I’m reblogging the below article as this concept is something I’ve been mulling over the past years. Most of my life, I’ve experienced myself as fairly and emotionless. Actually having feelings is really difficult for me.

And then, something happens and the skin on my entire body prickles and the center of my chest hurts and I’m overwhelmed with hurt or shame or anger or whatever.

And then I remember how I was when I was 4, 5, 6 years old, and how sensitive I was–people teasing me made me cry, seeing people in pain on tv and I’d cry. And I realize that this is a lot of why I’m an introvert, because I feel too much, too hard. I came up with walls starting at about age 5, when kids started teasing me. I remember very intentionally working to freeze over. It’s a skill I learned to cope with the world, to cope with the kids that verbally abused me every single day.

Doing a lot of personal growth work in the past decade, I began to understand that I have an incredibly thin skin, with a big set of plate armor. Once I started taking off that armor, the occasional times when I have an emotion, it’s fairly overwhelming. However, learning that I’m actually thin-skinned has helped me to better cope with things like, romantic rejection, or, getting an email rejecting a proposal of some project, or other things that emotionally set me off.

I have found, over time, that one of the keys to self transformation is first knowing myself. Once I know what’s going on, then I can look at what I want for my life, and how to modify and adapt.

Reblog:

Find Out If You’re a Highly Sensitive Person with This Test

Dr. Elaine Aron identified this trait way back in the mid-nineties, but it’s still a characteristic that’s misunderstood or just unknown to many. People who are HSPs tend to be more sensitive both physically and emotionally. Loud noises can be especially startling, for example, or clothing tags can be unusually irritating.”

*Note: check out the original article here as there are some excellent links. http://lifehacker.com/find-out-if-youre-a-highly-sensitive-person-with-this-1497152169?utm_campaign=socialflow_lifehacker_facebook&utm_source=lifehacker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow


Filed under: Personal Growth Tagged: Personal growth, personal transformation, self knowledge, shadows