← Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
#232 | I Used to Dread Conflict — Here’s What Changed Over Time as a Highly Sensitive Person
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Are you a highly sensitive person who freezes up during conflict, wishing you could just disappear? You're not alone—and you're not broken. In this episode of Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, Todd Smith dives deep into the hidden...
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Todd Smith
By the end of this episode, you'll discover how inner work gradually transformed my experience with conflict from dread and shutdown to clarity and self trust. Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I'm your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I'm a highly sensitive person myself. In this episode, you'll discover why conflict used to feel overwhelming for me and what made it so hard to face as an hsp. How inner work helped me approach hard conversations with more clarity, calm and confidence and the subtle shifts that began changing my response over time. This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays where I share real stories of transformation from highly sensitive people, clients, listeners and my own journey. Getting along with conflict has never been one of my strong suits. I'm a peace lover. I love quiet, I love peace, and I love getting along with others. And so when I'm faced with conflict, it can be jarring for me, it can be stressful. I'm the type of person that avoids politics and heated discussions. It's just not my thing. I grew up in a family of highly sensitive people. I'm a highly sensitive person as well, and I just never heard much arguing going on. Our whole family was very subtle in the ways that we disagreed and mainly we just didn't disagree. It was almost against the rules, so I didn't get much practice. I didn't have a brother to get into it with in some ways. Even though I had two sisters, I had always had my own room. It's almost like I was an only child in a certain way. And so I didn't get much experience in the school of hard knocks in terms of conflict. Now, this may be common for you as well as an hsp, and it's very normal for us to be conflict averse because we're so sensitive and because we want. We're so empathetic and we're emotional as well and we want things to remain in a quiet place. If I look at my family again, it's there was a certain quietness to it, but there were things going on underneath the surface. And my sister will tell me that there was a lot more than I even was paying attention to or chose to pay attention to. We tended to get over things quickly. We tended to believe that conflict was bad and we tended to agree, or at least I did to keep the peace. In other words, I'D let go of personal desires or even preferences to keep everything calm and quiet. And we all paid attention in my family to the subtle cues of what other people wanted. And so this kept us able to avoid conflict. I'm actually really skilled at avoiding conflict. I even remember someone in high school coming up to me and saying, yeah, you want to fight? You know, come on, you want to fight. And. And I don't know what I said, but I just. There was just no energy there for fighting. And it's just like, completely. I shape shifted out of that, and there was just no issue. So I'm good at that. I can read cues, I can avoid conflict, and it's one of my skills. But sometimes you can't control that, and sometimes it comes right into your face, and that can be stressful for me especially. And I think that's common for HSPs. Where this showed up for me first in my life in a significant way was with my partner, my significant other, who comes from a very different kind of family in this. In their family, in his family, everyone speaks directly and strongly. They're emotional and they show it. And there's just none of this kind of quiet feeling out where other people are and adjusting your desires in the process. They don't pay attention to subtle cues the way my family did. And then when you look at my partner and I specifically, my partner's an astrologer, and he always gives the analogies of that. It's like he says he's fire and I'm water. And he always says, like, lion. The lion roars. You know, he's got some. Some Leo in him. And I. I don't. And so my experience coming into that environment was it's as if my hearing aids had been turned all the way up for all these years since I was born, I guess. And. And then here's somebody roaring into my hearing aids. It's like, oh, my God. It was. It was overkill. Like, really super stressful for me to be experiencing this contrast that I was not used to as a highly sensitive person. Also, there were other skills that he had that I didn't have. Like, kind of. I call it the skill of fighting dirty. Like, again, if I had had a brother, I probably would have learned some of these things, like how to. How to use intimidation or how to, like, make the other person wrong, even if they're not wrong, or use a loud voice to force things. Like, I didn't learn those skills. They're not natural to me, and they may not Be natural just on a. In general for highly sensitive people. But suddenly I was faced with some of those tactics and what am I going to do? It was. It was very overwhelming. So what I found, what I experienced was a lot of overwhelm, a lot of. I would freeze. I would just. My brain would just go like completely shut down as soon as he raised his voice or the tone changed. Didn't even have to be that loud. It's like I couldn't fight back. And there's kind of an underlying belief in there that I need to be nice or kind or gentle, which is, which are the values that I hold. But what could also happen is it would build up in me. This anger would build up of, of kind of being taken advantage of or not treated as an equal or something like that, because I couldn't communicate well in that kind of situation. And then it would blow up and it could be just some small thing that my partner would say and I would, I would really get angry and I would just be out of control for a little bit or I would continue to be angry for, for like two or three days after a blow up like that. It's like I. I couldn't forgive. It was just so, so deep. So if you're an hsp, you may recognize this and there's not anything wrong with us. There's not something we need to fix here. So I want to just mention that right out of the gates, sometimes the solution is just to be with someone else, someone that is more compatible or that has the ability to be easy with your way of being easy. Kind of like the way my family of origin was, we kind of got along and there was a way that worked for us. But there's also room, and I'm mentioning this because there's also room for growing resilience even as an hsp. And in my experience, that's the path that I seem to have chosen is I've stayed in the relationship and my, my. I've chosen to do inner work on the issues that are brought up to me. And what has happened is a lot of resilience has come as a, as a result. So how has inner work helped me approach these hard conversations? Learn to be more clear and calm and confident. It has been a process. You know, I've been in this relationship for, for many years, probably 25 years at this point. And I have been. I have been doing inner work my whole life. I've been meditating. And what this relationship brought was it brought me in contact with another tool of inner work that I hadn't done up to that point. I tend to think of two kinds of inner work. One is meditation, where you're reducing your overall stress, giving yourself more distance and peace, getting in touch with yourself. And from there you will come into a more peaceful existence with the things around you just naturally over time. But another form of inner work is going directly into the sticking places where you are, are frustrated or stressed and finding balance in those, like actually trying to neutralize those by bringing in the opposite value and finding peace there. So I had been doing the deep meditation, just general meditation. I practiced tm. I've been doing that since I was a kid and that gave me a lot of resilience anyway. But once I got into my relationship with my partner, he actually introduced me to the work of Byron Katie as a way of dealing with some of those sticking places that I wanted to work on and see if I could deal with some of the specifics. So I started doing this work, the work of Byron Katie on a regular basis. And I started working on the overwhelm and the conflict and the issues that were going on between my partner and I. I actually thought when I got into it that I would be finding a way out of the relationship. But instead what I started to see is that I do some of the same things that my partner does. Like even those dirty fighting tactics. I've got some, you know, I use rejection, I use exaggeration, I use passive aggression, I withhold love. Uh, and so sometimes, and sometimes I do the same thing on the inside, even raising my voice and loud and, and mean just in my thinking. And so regardless of whether I'm expressing or not, there's a lot of similarity between my partner and I. And what I discovered is that I started to see how he and I are actually quite a match for each other and how we actually are just mirroring a lot of things to each other. And I started seeing, started seeing him as my equal more and more. And the work gave me a chance to get some of that anger out onto paper, gave me a safe outlet for all that bottled up rage and negativity and having to keep, keep it secret almost that I'm not happy and I would just rage out onto paper, just write like a madman, like my stressful thoughts about a particular situation and allow myself complete freedom for my ego to speak, for my anger to speak and to, to get it out. That alone was super therapy, therapeutic. Then to work with another person and to be heard and seen and understood and that also was very helpful. And then finally to. With the work of Byron, Katie, what you do is you actually kind of play devil's advocate to yourself and you question the very thoughts that you just wrote out onto paper. And those honest, stressful thoughts, while they're honest, they still have stress in them, and they often have untruth in them as well. So you challenge yourself on that and find different opposites and different ways of looking at it. And what would happen is I would, on a deep feeling level, start to see the situation differently, start to see my partner differently. And that had a extremely healing effect. Interestingly, it doesn't all look like, you know, peace and quiet and what you would think of as spiritual development. A lot of my turnarounds actually kept pointing me to standing up for myself, to speaking directly, to actually raising my voice, which sounds crazy. That sounds like, wait a minute, you're regressing out of spiritual development into something other than that. But this is what I needed for balance. And each one of us finds our own balance through this kind of a process. We start with what's stressing us, and then we. We start to look for what's the opposite that will bring that balance. So someone who's like me, maybe too peaceful, they may need to. Actually, I need, for me, the balance is to. To speak up or to say something in a little stronger way. Whereas someone who's maybe too strong, they're going to be doing a different kind of piece of work, following their stress, and they're going to start to find that they need to tone it down. So it's all about balance. It's all personal. And you can't use someone else's turnarounds. You have to find it for yourself. So that's the process that I went through for. Have been going through now for many, many years. And what I've found, some of the shifts that have happened over time is that, you know, one. I remember one situation. I was living in Ojai at the time California, and my partner and I were together. And I remember after doing a piece of work on a situation where he had raised his voice, it happened again. And out of that work, I kind of came to the idea that I'm willing to have him raise his voice again, or even I'm looking forward to him raising his voice, which is one of the turnarounds in that work. And what I experienced when it happened again is that it was like watching a thunderstorm like this scary but almost beautiful experience of dark clouds and lightning and loud Noise. And there was this ability to appreciate it with a little bit of distance. I wasn't completely sucked into the middle of it. And that's how it began to shift. I started getting some distance on the conflicts that we were having. I started saying what I was thinking more instead of hiding it just to be nice. And turns out it wasn't really nice because it wasn't nice to me. And it's actually not connected because I can be nice. But then I end up being distant. I used to think I can predict that he's not going to like something that I think. And so I won't say my opinion. That was my M.O. and to some degree that's still an operative M.O. for me, but it's gotten toned down a lot. It's softened a lot. Now what I often see is that, okay, he's not going to like this, but I have to be honest with myself and with him. And when I do, it's much better for both of us. So there's more courage coming in as a result of doing this kind of inner work. I remember a big shift where I realized that someone being upset by what I said is actually a sign that I communicated it well. For example, if I want to tell somebody no, my partner, or it could be anyone, then I was wanting that person to be happy about it. I want them to be like, okay, no, no problem. That's great. Take your time. You know, that's fine. And while that's all good, the problem is that's not often the way people actually honestly react. And what I found is that, like, I had questioned the thought I want him to be happy with my no. And what I found is it's okay for him not to be happy with my no. And that was like a eye opener for me because now suddenly the goal isn't to keep everybody happy. The goal is to be honest with myself. And sometimes that's not going to make him happy. In fact, my biggest issue with saying no is that I tend to sugarcoat it so much that people just take the sugar off and eat the sugar and leave the no. I've softened the no and make it so diminutive that they don't even hear the no. And so I've had to up the volume of the no, take some of the sugar off of it. And, and, and then what happens is somebody's like, oh, I don't like that. That's. But, but you said before, and you know, there's all kinds of protesting that happens. And now I'm expecting that I'm like, oh, okay. That means that I was actually effective in my communication rather than keeping everything all nice and calm. But they really didn't get my message. So this is the kind of thing that has been shifting gradually as I've continued to do my work and continue to put it into practice. Now I'm not completely conflict free with my partner by any means. We still get into arguments, we still have our things that we work out. There are compromises we have to make and we. It's not always easy, it's not always seamless. But what I find is that conflicts happen way less than they used to and they don't tend to smolder the way they used to. I'm also less afraid of the loudness than I used to. I'm paying more attention to myself. And so if there's some kind of ruckus that happens as a result of that, it's not as shocking to me. It's still, I'm an HSP still. Like that hasn't changed. But there's a little perspective on top of being an HSP and that is giving me a lot of resilience. So inner work is what changes my perspective on a deeper level. It's not just following some recommendations or some advice that is plentiful everywhere. To speak up, to say no, to make space for yourself, like that's good advice. But if I had just followed advice it would not be the same because that's like doing something on an external level without taking care of the internal. And so when I've, when I've taken the other approach of looking inward and questioning my own thinking and coming to conclusions that are opposite what to what I normally think, it's coming from somewhere deep inside. It's coming from a place that is actually foundational. And as a result my behavior has just spontaneously become stronger and more clear as a result. So that's why I love doing inner work as a basis for outer relationship success or outer relationship just communication. I had to feel it first and then I could act on it. And so the work of Byron Katie is just one way that really gets into it so deeply and allows you to on your own in a way work through stress, step by step, one situation at a time. And for me it's just left me get feeling just cleaner and more sane and more balanced as I've continued this process. I do this pretty much every day, part of my routine. It's like some people journal. I sit down and I do the work in Writing and it allows me to see things that I hadn't seen. It allows me to digest frustrating experiences in a very short amount of time, actually. So one last thing to leave you with is that this is different from a pre planned strategy of like setting a goal and working towards it. Instead, what I'm doing is I'm letting life show me what is getting me. It's like what are, what are the triggers in me that are getting triggered? And so life will show me. And then I follow that lead, I follow the lead of my stress and then that shows me what to work on. It leads me to the stressful thoughts to question. And then as I question them and turn them around, I start to find truths and I start to feel things in a different way. So it's very organic in that way. And I'm following something that is in a way bigger than me. And it feels really amazing because whatever's next for me to explore just seems to show up right on time. And I'm a willing student and that makes all the difference. In this episode, we looked at why conflict used to feel overwhelming and what made it so hard to face for me as an hsp. And it comes down to the fact that my hearing aids were turned up, that I'm interested in the subtle paying attention to that. And that made me kind of shocked by the kind of conflict that can show up in life. As a highly sensitive person, I think we're wired this way. This is for good reason and we do have to protect ourselves to a certain degree. But that said, there's also a way to become stronger at the ability to handle it. Maybe learning how to turn down the hearing aids a little bit, or if not that, then learning how to see situations differently so that they don't actually feel like a threat when we experience them. Next we looked at how inner work helped me approach hard conversations. Difficulty in relationship with more clarity, calm and confidence. And I looked, I mentioned the kind of two kinds of inner work. One is just a meditation which is super powerful. And then the other is the work of Byron, Katie, or inner work. Or it could also be work with a therapist or any kind of inner work that you may do. It's going in and getting in touch with feeling part getting in touch with the actual experience and then letting that be something that you explore and look at as objectively as possible. What happens is what I thought was true may end up not being true. And these opposites cancel each other out and can leave the mind and the heart in a less sticky place. And then finally we looked at the subtle shifts to begin changing my response over time. Just noticing that this kind of anger in my partner was like a thunderstorm. Seeing a little more distance on that, noticing that it's, it's okay if my partner gets upset. I don't have to. Even though I can see he's going to do it, I still do it because I have to be honest. And it's what connection actually is. And then seeing that when someone gets upset, it may be that it's because I've communicated clearly my no. And they just don't like it and they're allowed to not like it and they're allowed to have some reaction to that. So all this just gives a feeling like there's almost a feeling of safety even in conflict. And that's a growing sense that's been coming in me for many years that I'm safe. And even though conflict may bubble up here and there, it's not as threatening as it once was. So I will still always choose non conflict. I love peace and that's just my preference. And I think that's natural for all of us as HSPs. But I'm becoming able to live in a world where that's not always possible and to be able to deal with conflict when it arises. So thanks for listening and I look forward to being with you again in another episode. Have a great day dreaming of a stress free balanced life. Visit trueinnerfreedom.com and complete the HSP Stress Survey. 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