← 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
#278 | The Secret To Healing Trauma & Stress as a Highly Sensitive Person and How To Finally Implement It
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Are you trying to "fix" your stress—only to end up feeling worse? Many Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) struggle with the pressure to treat emotional pain like a mechanical problem: find it, fix it, and move on. But what if that very mindset is...
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover why trauma and stress don't always respond so well to the disease cure approach to healing. 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 thinking about stress or trauma as a problem to fix doesn't always work so well. How to approach stress and trauma in a new way and HSP way and what this can look like on a practical level. Welcome to this edition of Self Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience. Have you ever known anyone who had a bad knee, maybe arthritis in the knee or something was degenerating in the knee and they went to the doctor and the doctor says, you know what? You need knee surgery. We're going to do a total replacement of your knee and replace the joint and let's just do a surgery to fix that. And of course they do that surgery and nine times out of 10 that's a really good solution. And they're on their way, they're walking again. And some people say they're out walking within the day after the surgery or same day even. So this is how we typically think of fixing the body in certain ways. Now it gets a little more subtle. If you say have high blood pressure and what do you do if you go to the doctor, they'll say, oh, you know, you need to take this high blood pressure medicine and take this pill and it will reduce your blood pressure again, we've fixed a problem, we've reduced the number there of the blood pressure and it works, prevents having a stroke, prevents all kinds of problems. And there's value to this approach. However, in this, I say this is a little more subtle because the doctor may or may not have looked at what was the actual cause of the problem, what's causing the high blood pressure. And maybe it's something that there's nothing you can do about it. Maybe it's just a problem with the kidney or something like that, but might be stress related and it might be something that could respond to meditation or respond to exercise or something like that. And so sometimes this fixing approach of medicine, even on the body level, doesn't work that well or is not incomplete. We can Say, but if you go even closer, when you start looking at the mind and emotions and we're talking about stress or trauma or things inside our psyche, then this approach of fixing becomes less and less effective. Fixing, in my experience, works best with concrete things. You know, when you have, you're working, you're doing woodworking and you have something that has like a rough area, then you use some sandpaper and you sand it down, or you cut with a chisel and remove a little piece of wood and then, oh great, it's smooth now. So when you're dealing with concrete objects and things and sometimes even the body, then this kind of fixing is a great approach. It works, it works. But the more abstract and subtle the thing is that you're trying to fix, the less effective this kind of top down approach is going to work. If you notice, surgeons don't generally make great therapists. They're really good at top down. You know, they see the problem, they come in with the chisel and they fix it. And that's a very proactive kind of approach. But the more nuanced aspects of life, the mind and the emotions don't respond so well with a chisel. If you come in with a hard hammer and chisel to your emotions and your traumas, then you're going to meet with a lot of resistance. You're going to probably, you're going to get rejected and there's going to be an exacerbation of the problem rather than an actual fix of the problem. So instead, mind and emotions and stress and trauma have to be treated respectfully. I like to say they should be treated like a human being, not just plowed over, not just bulldozed past, not just fixed in a kind of top down way. Because emotions are subtle, emotions are delicate and they're reactive. And stress and trauma sitting in the nervous system is something that has a, an intelligence in itself and is subtle in its, in its nature. So if I come in and try to fix it, whether it's somebody else trying to fix it or me myself trying to fix it, then I'm coming in with the wrong energy and it usually doesn't work that well. So how do you approach stress and trauma in a different way, A new way, I like to say in an HSP way. As HSP's highly sensitive people, we can understand this approach better than anyone because this is how we treat everyone. We try to treat people with respect, we try to be understanding, we try to listen. We don't assume we know what they're Going through, we don't assume, we know we have a solution for people. We do this really well with other people. And our stress wants to be treated in that way too. It wants to be treated with respect. Stress is like a person inside of us. It's an energy inside of us and it is trying to tell us something. It gets louder and louder because we're not listening and we're trying to come in with our solution based on our point of view. But there's another point of view inside of us. And that's what stress often represents. That's what these emotions often represent. There's something in here that you need to be aware of. It's. Some people talk about stress as being an alarm clock, just saying, hey, take a look, I've got something here you might want to take a look at. And if you come in with the HSP approach of listening, asking questions, open ended questions, engaging respectfully in conversation with that emotion, with that stress, with that trauma, you're going to start having a dialogue that is going to lead somewhere deeper. And that's when in my experience, stress and trauma starts to heal. So it's only waiting for someone to listen. And until you do, it's going to keep on crying and being obstinate and being just a pain. But if you treat it with respect, approach it gently, listen to it, hold it almost like you're loving a baby, and treat it with kindness, then the secret that it's holding will start to be revealed and the tightness with which it's gripping all of this will start to loosen. And it's also within our HSP capacity to not only listen, not only hold the space, but also gently challenge. And that is also a gift that we bring from our conscious side to this subtle, ethereal, almost unconscious side of ourself where stress and trauma lie. We can bring that gentle challenging of like, okay, is that the whole story there? Are you seeing every piece of this? I'd like to see that you're looking at it from as many different angles as possible. Have you looked at it from this angle? Have you looked at it from this angle? All the while not pushing the stress to change, not pushing to fix it, not having an agenda to, to change it, but instead just being there, gently challenging the stress on its own level, but also saying, oh, that's enough for today. Okay, I can respect that. Then let's continue this conversation tomorrow or maybe in a week or something. And there's a feeling of allowing the stress to be heard and be seen and Be respected. So what does this look like on a practical level? On a practical level, it can mean simply allowing yourself to feel an emotion instead of trying so hard to get rid of it right away. A lot of times we think of negative emotions. Anger, sadness, fear, jealousy, any kind of negativity. We tend to think, this is bad, I want to get rid of it, let's take care of it. Sort of like rushing to take blood pressure medicine and not really looking at what's going on underneath it. Maybe it just. It's just a cry for a little bit of stress management and the blood pressure will go right back down. Or maybe it's. It's something else. So if you can allow yourself to listen to your emotions the same way you would listen to a friend or to someone in your own world, then you will be beginning this healing process right there, just doing that because the emotion has been trying to say something, it's got something to say. And if you ask it what it is trying to tell you, it will tell you. And so this is the beginning of healing. And once it's able to deliver its message, it relaxes, and then the emotion may actually reduce. So that's the idea of being available to your emotions instead of trying to push them away so quickly. Now, this doesn't mean that you avoid taking care of yourself, and you may also have support from other sides. To not have too much emotion then becomes overwhelming as well. But you'll find your balance with it. But the principle is that emotions, when listened to, are intelligent parts of ourselves, and that can actually be part of the healing process. Another variation on this is journaling. They've shown that journaling is very powerful for reducing stress, because what are you doing when you're journaling? You're listening to an uncensored version of your inner dialogue, and you're just letting out what is inside. You're letting the emotions be heard again. And this is powerful. And then if you want to take journaling to the next level, then questioning your stressful thoughts, getting them out is one thing. If you can then question them in a gentle, respectful way, then you're going to end up going beyond where you were. You're honestly expressing your emotions. But then if you challenge those emotions by questioning them, questioning the thoughts associated with them, you are starting to open up new possibilities of a new level of authenticity that may be less painful. And so letting the emotional part of you answer your questions when you pose them is how this works. Not just coming in and saying, oh, you know what? That's just such and such. Oh, you're just being, you know, silly, or this is because of this, that's not really engaging with the stress. What would really help is if you're asking the stress in a very open way, like, what is. What do you think? What is it? What is your opinion? Is what you think really true for you? Or is this just an exaggeration? Or where, where's your actual take on this? And then, you know, I use the work of Byron Katie, which is a powerful way to question thoughts. And there's just a really simple process of this, but it's how you hold that that makes all the difference. If you hold it in a way that is gentle, respectful to the thought that you're questioning, to the emotion that you're having, then you're going to end up with a very meaningful and powerful engagement with those parts and that is healing. And finally, what this can look like on a practical level is working with a professional who is not trying to push you, who or fix you. The more that any professional you work with holds the space for you and allows you to unravel your own stresses, the more you are going to be allowing this part of you that's stuck to actually find its opening. Yes, pushing can work in certain situations and it may be needed in certain situations. And there's value in coaches and therapists who use a more intervention kind of approach. And in extreme cases, this is maybe the only way to approach it. But as we're highly sensitive people and these emotions inside of us are highly sensitive, I find that working with people who are also sensitive and respectful of those emotions and not pushing to get a cure taken care of in a short amount of time, that's where I feel safest and that's where I make the most progress. So the feeling I'm left with today is that emotions are people too. They have feelings too. And if you treat your emotions and you treat your stresses with kindness, with understanding, with gentleness, with respect, they will work with you. And together you will find a new way of seeing something that will be beyond what you originally thought. In this episode, we looked at why thinking of your stress or trauma as a problem to fix doesn't work so well. And that's because on the subtle levels of life, pushing doesn't work. You can't do that. On the subtle level, you can do that great on the concrete levels, but on the subtle levels, you push and it pushes back and it just doesn't work so well. We also looked at how to approach stress and trauma in a new way. An HSP way, which is with gentleness, compassion, understanding and a lot of listening and a little bit of challenging as well. And then finally we looked at what this can look like on a practical level. Anything from just allowing yourself to feel emotions instead of trying to get rid of them. Journaling, questioning your thoughts, like doing the work of Byron Katie, or working with a professional who doesn't have an agenda to try to fix you. Thanks for listening. It's great to explore this with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Join me next time for Strategy Fridays, where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test@truinnerfreedom.com if you 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.