← 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
#244 | When Visiting Family No Longer Hurts: A Highly Sensitive Person’s Healing Journey Through Daily Inner Work
00:14:11
Many highly sensitive people (HSPs) carry the weight of family dynamics that leave them emotionally and physically drained. What if the solution to that stress isn’t in changing your family, but in shifting your inner world? In this breakthrough...
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Todd Smith
By the end of this episode, you'll discover how one highly sensitive person used daily inner work to heal long standing family triggers, and how a visit that would have once brought pain was not stressful at all for her. 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 what used to make visiting her family so overwhelming and why it always ended in emotional and physical exhaustion. Three specific ways she used inner daily work to unravel judgment, build resilience and reconnect with her family. And the moment she realized she didn't need to rehearse or defend because she wasn't being triggered anymore. This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path toward inner freedom. A member of my Inner Freedom community had a breakthrough recently that she shared with me and she said she would love to share it with you as well. She has had challenges with her family of origin, especially with her mother, for her whole life, and though she lives in a different country and she doesn't see her parents that often, she would go back maybe twice a year to visit. And what she noticed is every time that she went, she started to dread the experience. She noticed her body was feeling exhausted, she was often angry, she often felt headaches, back pain while she was there, and even leading up to going on these visits. And this pointed to a lifelong challenge for her with her mother since she was young. And it seemed like one of those irreconcilable differences, one of those things that is just so challenging that it's just in your face and you just don't know what to do because every time you get triggered. Probably all of us have some person in our life. I know I have had that, and there's often one, I call them teachers, who is just immovable like they get us every time, time and again, time and again. And for this person, it was her mother. The dynamic here was that she would tend to swallow her feelings, as many of us HSPs do, to maintain outer harmony. And the problem was it maintained a certain level of harmony, but on the inside there was turmoil. And that showed up, as I mentioned, with even the physical experience of back pain or headaches or feeling exhausted or angry. Her description was that she felt like she had been holding in pain for 20, 30, 40 years and it just grew heavier and heavier with time. So obviously going and facing what seemed to be the source of that pain was not something that she looked forward to. She joined the community where I teach the work of Byron Katie about a year ago and she took the Work 101 course, which is a nine week course. And she started applying this method on a daily basis in her life. She started doing this work every day on a whole range of situations. Not always on her mom, not always on family, sometimes on, you know, boyfriend, sometimes on just situations at work. Whatever was coming up, she just trusted whatever was coming up that was going to be the one to work on. And it often did lead to work on her mother. And she described the way she did her work is she tended to do it very thoroughly. She would take write a worksheet on a situation. There might be 10 or 15 statements on like big stressful thoughts that she found around that situation. And she would question them one after the other, one by one, day after day. She might spend a week or two working just one situation. She would question things like, you know, my mother should love me in the same way as my brother, or she shouldn't say those things to me. She had just took practical situations and that's the way this work works. And she dove into them and started to find new ways of experiencing the same situation. What happens when you do the work is that you start to see your part in things. And that's exactly what she described. She's like she realized that, that she had been judging her mother silently, even while her mother was judging her more overtly. But she was doing a similar thing and she was trying to maintain a quiet and preserved peace, but it was not peaceful on the inside. She started noticing her own internal dialogue, which was harsh. She was saying the same kinds of mean things to herself that she resented hearing from her mother. And so it's, it's not that her mother was not off in some way, it's that she took it to the next level and that's what made it even more stressful for her. So she started to find a little bit of wiggle room in this and started to see that she had more control over her experience than she thought. And what was interesting is as she gained confidence in this, she actually shared some of these discoveries with her parents in a very vulnerable and honest conversation and even talked about childhood experiences a little bit. And this was already starting to build a bridge that just happened Spontaneously, as she was starting to see the same situation from a different point of view, starting to see her part, starting to see how she contributed to the dynamics. And it was very freeing, very healing to begin to talk about that. She also began more spontaneously to love herself independently and to approve of herself without needing her mother to approve or change. And so she noticed that she was becoming less and less dependent on outer harmony and outer calmness and people doing it right and more and more authentically peaceful on the inside. Basically, what she did over the course of that year was bit by bit, dismantle a belief system that she had about her mother and about her family. And she did that one judgment at a time. So then when she went to visit her family, it was like a complete surprise, like, who. Who am I? What is this? Because without doing any extra preparation or reviewing her notes or anything like that, she noticed that she was not getting triggered. Mother was still doing the same things, but it wasn't getting to her. She didn't brace herself for, you know, what's coming. She didn't have to overthink about how to respond, and she didn't need to rehearse how to keep the peace. Basically, she was able to be herself. And this was a very big contrast to the way that she normally showed up in her family. And she started to experience the way her mother was with her in a different way. She said sometimes it felt like her mother was condescending, but she actually saw it as something more like caring that she had never seen before. So instead of reacting and her mother might say, you know, like, familiar kind of situation, that, oh, you're going to be late, and remind her, don't be late and don't be late. And it was kind of one of her things. And this is that condescending feeling that she had felt before. But as it shifted through her inner work over the past year, she started to see that as possibly a kind of caring in her own weird way. And so instead of reacting, she could say something back like, oh, thank you for caring. I've never been late before. I'll be on time. But there was no need to defend or explain or resist. She wasn't taking it personally anymore. So she saw the difference between her past reactions and her new calm. And she said, it's like we're having a conversation now instead of an argument. And her nervous system didn't go into alarm and red alert and panic and stress. Her mind didn't create big stories out of it. There was room for love and this was a very different experience. So it came from doing a little bit of work every day on little situations, one by one, and seeing them in slightly different lights. And cumulatively, what happened was it was a change, a very large change on her experience. And the best part about it, about it, is that she didn't have to try to be, you know, more loving or try to be more patient or it was no effort. It was a kind of integration. It was who she actually was. Now. She was seeing her mother differently. She was seeing what her mom does differently. She wasn't trying to be calm. She was calm. And the same words that her mother once used no longer felt like attacks because she no longer saw them that way. So without trying, she found herself at peace. And that's the quiet power of consistent inner work. In this episode, we looked at what used to make visiting her family so overwhelming and why it always ended in emotional and physical exhaustion. What we saw is that it's the thing thinking that she was believing that what she was thinking, believing about her mother, that made it stressful. She did not change her mother. Her mother did not change. She still kept doing the same things, but because she had questioned what she thought, that meant it changed her experience. And we looked also at three specific ways that she used daily inner work to unravel judgment and build resilience and reconnect with her family. And we saw that she did the work daily, she did it thoroughly, and she once she found some things, she even shared that with her family, which is another level of inner work, brings it outward as well. And finally we looked at how she realized that she didn't need to rehearse or defend because she wasn't being triggered anymore. And this was just such a poignant experience for her that she could be in the same place where it would have been total trigger, total stress in the past. And she was present. She was able to hear her mother. She was able to be clear. She wasn't being bullied or moved by her mother. But she also was not being mean or retaliating or going into kind of trigger. And she wasn't attacking herself either. So this is where clarity comes in, and it stems from that regular practice that she did. So I leave this session with a feeling of hope that any situation, no matter how stressful it may be, can be worked through. It may take time, it may take some patience and dedication, but in not a short amount of time, a lifetime of stress has been loosened. And of course, it can always be deepened and new levels of freedom can be found, but freedom is available if you're willing to do a little bit of work. So thanks for listening. It's always great to share with you. This podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Self Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. Tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test@truinnerfreedom.com you'll also find a link in the show notes. The test will reveal your unique sensitivity profile, including how your nervous system naturally responds to stimulation, emotions, social energy, and more. You'll also gain a clearer picture of how stress might be amplifying that sensitivity. Take the HSP Stress Test now. It's a powerful first step on your journey to true inner freedom.