“Just look at her and she’ll bruise.”
That’s what my mother used to say about my level of sensitivity.
And yes, it is true. I am extremely sensitive. My feelings get hurt easily. Criticism, especially for something I care about and have worked super hard on, eats me to the core.
People not responding to me when I’ve put myself out there is even worse.
I cry a lot. Sometimes I get paranoid. I try not to become immobilized by it, but it does get the better of me.
I’ve done the inner work to know WHY I am so sensitive and to be compassionate with it, but that doesn’t make it go away.
I wish telling myself, ‘Don’t take it personally. It’s part of the creative process. She/he is expressing their inner world…it’s not about me,’ and so forth made a real difference. But it doesn’t.
Can you relate?
Do you try to use logic to talk yourself out of emotional pain?
I think we all try to rationalize our hurt away. Depending on the level of consciousness of your friends, they may try to ‘fix’ your pain by offering blanket cognitive statements to wash over the discomfort of being around raw emotion.
But if you’re sensitive like me, that dismissiveness only gapes the wound wider and deeper. So I stay away from people like that or choose to keep my feelings to myself. I’ve learned the hard way to only share with people I feel safe with and in an environment that is conducive to warmth and reciprocity.
I don’t give my pearls to pigs. In reality, this means that I share my true feelings to a very select few and will wait for a long time until I can guarantee the environment is safe enough for me.
I do this because emotional pain needs genuine connection for healing, not cognitive correction.
Telling yourself things your body and brain don’t accept as true (statements/affirmations like ‘I’m not stupid. This is going to work out. This is going to make me a better person.’) does no good to dissipate your emotional pain. A few report talking themselves down may help temporarily, but most agree any relief is short-lived.
You can’t neutralize emotional, subcortical experiences with logic and cortical reason. The hurt won’t dissipate by muscling your way through a list of false affirmations you think you should believe and feel instead. Greeting pain with that type of force will never work.
You have to greet emotional pain on the same level where it lives – where it is tender and hurts – and you can do that by seeking out and receiving genuine human connection and love.
But so many of us are not skilled in receiving the connection and love we need. We push it away, are too fearful to ask for it, or dismiss it even when it is offered. This behavior keeps your pain tolerance high and your joy tolerance low.
Don’t mask over your wounds with false affirmations or false positivity. Greet the pain where it hurts. Invite a safe person in enough to experience connection instead of guarded protection because…
How are you ever to be free when you keep your heart chained to the hurt you know?
With truthfulness,
Angela
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