← 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
#337 | How to Heal Old Wounds & Overcome Trauma to Reduce Your Stress as a Highly Sensitive Person
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover how to heal old wounds and gently work through trauma in a way that honors your sensitivity instead of overwhelming it. 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 how unresolved emotional wounds quietly shape your stress, confidence and relationships. The real reason HSPs often avoid the very inner work that could set them free. And a gentle approach to healing that actually works without re traumatizing your system. This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. One of my big wounds was my parents divorce when I was about 15. And at the time it didn't seem like any big deal in a way, but I remember it hitting me when I was in college and realizing I was going through some stress and I wanted to go home and I didn't know where home was anymore. I think on a certain level that's been something that's continued to be there in some degree, to some degree or another throughout my whole adult life. So each of us gets traumatized in different ways, and traumas can seem like they're not really that big of a deal, but they are impacting us, and they don't have to be things from the distant past. You can have a kind of trauma from an argument or from some kind of situation that stressed you out and it just hasn't quite been digested. And so the result is that your nervous system stays on high alert. You end up having a kind of background noise in your nervous system that never quite goes away. It's kind of like if you're running a big program in the background on your computer, it takes up all of the memory and can end up slowing down your whole computer because you have, you have a limited amount of resources to run that task. So you might end up feeling a little bit on edge without knowing why. Or a small comment later on, not related, can trigger a whole flood of stress. Your system can become hypervigilant, kind of scanning for cues of rejection or disapproval or danger in some way. And another thing that can happen is you can stop trusting your reactions and your intuitions when past pain hasn't been processed, then all people and HSPs in particular can often internalize a message that maybe I did something wrong, or maybe especially as an hsp, I was too much or something along those lines. And you can start questioning your good gut instincts and you can start second guessing your emotions. And so you start shrinking your self expression to avoid seeming dramatic or too sensitive. And this erodes confidence. And then another place that this shows up is in relationships. Old wounds often come with silent beliefs. Can be something like, if I speak up, I'll be abandoned, if I show my true needs, I'll be too much, or if I don't keep everyone happy, I'll be punished. And you may have had experiences that confirm this. And so this becomes like a trap where you can't actually be yourself in relationship. You can end up over functioning by always being the peacemaker or the helper or the fixer. Or you can end up under functioning by pulling away emotionally to avoid risk. Or you can end up masking by pretending to be fine when you're not actually fine. So the problem is, is you still crave closeness, but you may keep people at arm's length and you may end up giving more than you receive and you may end up feeling alone even when you're not. So unhealed wounds don't just stay in the past, they kind of recreate themselves in the present. They shape your choices, they color your perceptions, and they can quietly limit your life until you gently turn towards them. So why don't we tend to move towards our wounds and look at them more closely? I think there's a number of reasons, especially for highly sensitive people. Because as HSPs, we process things deeply and so we instinctively know that opening emotional doors will bring a lot to the surface. And so there may be some fears there. You know, if I start crying, I may never stop, or if I look at that memory, I don't know if I'll come back from it. And this isn't like over dramatization, it's self awareness. We don't skim, we go deep, we drop in. That is our nature as highly sensitive people. And so that can sound scary or feel scary, that the intensity is going to be too much to hold. Another reason we kind of shy away from doing the inner work that could set us free is that we may have been shamed for feeling too much before. And so many HSPs carry wounds not just from what happened, but from being invalidated when it happened by being told that we were too sensitive or that we should get over it, or that it wasn't that bad. So when inner work asks us to revisit those moments, another fear can surface. You know, what if I judge myself again? What if I become the one who says, this shouldn't, shouldn't hurt so much. You're too much. And we can end up judging ourselves. So that can also prevent us from looking a little closer. Another really interesting point is that it's easy to sometimes confuse insight with healing. As HSPs, we're usually great at understanding things. We can analyze things, we can reflect, we can read, we can listen, we can really comprehend things deeply. But true healing is different from, from insight. It's not just, I know why I do this, it's I've felt through what is still hurting and I've released it. That's a very different thing. So understanding only goes so far. And that deeper step can feel kind of mysterious and vulnerable and new. And so it can keep you from stepping towards that and, and doing the actual work that can release you from some past trauma. There can also be a fear of what you'll find. Sometimes the fear is, maybe I will uncover something really dark or the pain will be worse than I remembered, or what if it's really my fault? These are genuine fears. And this can keep you from finding the courage to actually go and look and discover in a safe way what happened and digest that experience. So the fear of it can keep you from moving into it. And then also you may have thought that you've tried this before and it didn't help. And so many of us as HSPs have done different kinds of therapy and journaling, and you may have found it exhausting rather than healing. So you may conclude that you're too broken, or maybe this stuff doesn't work for me, or maybe I'm just destined to live with this. And what you may not realize is that it may not be you. It may just be that the approach didn't meet you at your depth. So HSPs avoid inner work not because they're unwilling, but because they often feel like they already feel too much and they're afraid of tipping over into a flood that they can't control. And that's why inner work has to be safe. It has to be gentle, it has to be grounded, it has to be compassionate, it has to be somatic, and it has to be completely free of judgment. Once we feel safe, then we don't resist inner work as HSPs, we're actually drawn to it. We love to get to the bottom of things. And that's what can happen when you find a way of doing this that works for you. The way that works for me, and I've been doing this for about 20 years, is a method called the work of Byron Katie, which is four questions and turnarounds as a way of questioning stressful thoughts in a stressful situation. Could be something from a long time ago, could be something that happened today. In any case, when I experience stress, there are thoughts connected to that stress. And when I question those thoughts, it shifts my experience. So when I work with clients as a facilitator of the work, I've come to really appreciate the gentleness and the power of this approach. It's always gentle, always gentle, but it's also very powerful. So here's why I believe that this approach is especially effective for highly sensitive people. One is that it begins already with what is coming up today. You don't have to dig or go searching through your past to do the work. You can't. But you can also simply start with a stressful thought that's alive with you right now, no matter how small. You know something like, she shouldn't have said that, or I can't handle this or whatever. It is just a judgment about someone because the work starts on the surface. But you're not like you're being led into something deeper. And when you do the work on some small, seemingly trivial thing in your day to day, you will be touching the roots of what's upholding that which is really addressing those older, deeper wounds that are still there. This approach is a nice, safe way to do work that doesn't have to go back to a huge upheaval to be effective. It also doesn't require that you relive the pain. The work is done in a way that invites you to witness the thought from a place of inquiry. Instead of reimmersing yourself in the full emotional charge of an event, you're not being asked to feel the trauma again. You're being asked to notice how a thought is affecting you and how like, what it would be like with that thought or without that thought in the same situation. So it shifts from identification to observation. And that allows you to be safe even while you're doing this work. This creates a kind of space between you and the story, right? It's like, okay, I had an experience, okay, what was the thought that I was having in that experience? And you start to see that the thought is not necessarily the fact, even though we were believing it. And so you start to disidentify with the thought and you start to experience what the actual experience was, which is often way less stressful than the story that I had running. Another reason I love the work of Byron Katie is that you get to control the pace. We never have a, a motive of getting to a certain place with work, you're not being pushed, you're just questioning what comes up naturally. And you can pause any time. So it's very self directed and this is critical for HSPs who need to feel that safety to be able to go deep into whatever they're working on. And then finally it integrates mind and body very gently. So even though the work is an inquiry based process, you use questions and you think about stressful thoughts. What it really is is a felt experience. And when you land in one of these questions and see what arises from within you, you often start to experience things differently. And so this can lead to a physical shift. You may feel a sense of lightness or deepening of your breath or just a more clarity in your experience. So it's not a mental exercise, it's actually somatic integration without any forcing. So the feeling I'm left with today is that working with trauma can be a safe and even fascinating path of self exploration when you have a way to effectively process any negative experience. We don't want to make the experience worse, we want to find balance in that situation. In this episode we looked at how unresolved emotional wounds quietly shape your stress, your confidence and your relationships. And it's like having a program running in the background of your computer that's just slowing the whole computer down. We looked at the real reason HSPs often avoid the very inner work that could set them free. And it's basically a fear of getting overwhelmed, getting sucked in and not being able to get out. And finally, we looked at a gentle approach to healing that actually works without re traumatizing your system. And this is the work of Byron Katie and it's a way to question the thoughts connected to a stressful experience, allowing the whole perspective to shift through gentle inquiry. So thanks for listening. It's great to explore with you. This program 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. Sam.