← 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
#361 | How to Work with Trauma as an HSP Without Re-Traumatizing Yourself
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By the end of this episode, you'll learn how to approach trauma work safely as an HSP so you can heal without feeling flooded or shut down. In this episode you'll discover why trauma often feels more intense for HSPs and what that actually means. How pushing yourself to process it can quietly re traumatize your nervous system. And what a gentle, effective approach to trauma work looks like for highly sensitive people. 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. Maybe you decide that you're ready to deal with something, a big stress from your past. Maybe it's something a long time ago, or maybe it's something recent. And you start to journal intensely and you replay the memory in detail and you try exposure based techniques you read about and you push yourself because you don't want to avoid it anymore. At first it feels brave and then you can't sleep and your body feels wired or heavy and you're irritable for days and you feel fragile and easily triggered and you start avoiding everything. And then self judgment kicks in. Why is this still so big? Other people can talk about their trauma. Maybe I'm just too sensitive. The thing is, you're not avoiding healing, you're overwhelming your system. HSPs have a different nervous system than the rest of the population. We make up about 15 to 20% of the population and we have a unique nervous system that is sensitive by definition. That means that when we look at things that were traumatic to us, that are still traumatic to us when we think about them, then our nervous system gets activated and we reach the point of overwhelm much sooner than other people do. This is part of our nature. It's not a shortcoming. It's what allows us to perform very subtle tasks in life. It allows us to be very aware of things in our environment and within ourselves. But when stress comes into our nervous system, it affects us more and more strongly than other people. So what happens when HSPs re traumatize themselves? What happens is they can lose trust in their own capacity, may start thinking, oh my gosh, I'm weak. All I did was start thinking about this and now I can't even get out of bed. They become afraid of their own inner world, which is very debilitating because our inner world is so intimate to ourselves. And so we start trying to avoid and then we focus outward and we look at distraction and can get into addiction and all kinds of things. We can also associate healing with danger. And so something that we as HSPs naturally love to do to heal can now have this negative connotation of being something that we better be careful of because we might reactivate something and, and get re traumatized. And so you can end up concluding that it's safer not to go there. And the deeper layer is that you may start to believe that your sensitivity is the problem, that you're too much or that you can't handle your own story. And this adds a layer of shame or blame or a feeling of being a victim to your already stressed nervous system. And this is not necessary at all. When trauma work is not approached gently, then this can continue to have effects on your relationships because you become dysregulated. You are kind of at your wit's end to begin with. And then the regular day to day stresses of life feel like they're too much. So it affects even our relationships. And you can end up oscillating between being going into hyper processing and then total shutdown. And you can stop and start your healing over and over again. And you can start avoiding support because it feels like it's going to be too destabilizing. And worst of all, you either push too hard and flood your system or you avoid the inner work entirely and just stay in a stuck place. There seems to be no middle ground. So the problem is that we as HSPs often are thinking that healing requires going all the way into it. It's sort of our all or nothing thinking and our perfectionism thinking that can come in as HSPs. And so we want to do things really well and then we go in with enthusiasm and we end up getting overwhelmed as a result. Also, we sometimes think that if we don't fully feel it, like really feel it, like go into it, then we're avoiding. So again it's black and white thinking and we tend to think like, oh, the only way out is through, so you better just go there. And so we can keep re traumatizing ourselves over and over again by holding ourselves in some past memory that it doesn't actually go anywhere, it's just making it feel, making us feel more and more stressed in reality. For HSPs, healing is not about intensity, it's about titration. It's about working at the edge and not past that. Our nervous systems were designed to handle subtlety, detail and to be extremely thorough. They were not designed for overload. Our nervous systems are finely tuned. And when you override this in the name of courage. You don't get healing, you get overwhelmed. But we're also the types of people who try to be the most responsible in doing our inner work. So it's an ironic situation, and it can be one that can catch us, and you can end up feeling like it's frustrating not to be able to do the work that you need to try to heal something that is catching you up. I studied for a long time with an Ayurvedic doctor, and I learned that the approach to healing that he used was very similar, very, very gentle. He's like, people want to go in and detox their bodies. And so they come in with heavy detox protocols. And yes, it detoxes some of the toxins out, but it damages the channels on the way out of the body. And so people with, say, toxins in their liver start doing some kind of heavy detox and they end up damaging their, their intestines because of the acidic chemicals coming out of the liver and then getting stuck or getting reabsorbed in the intestines. So this is the same thing on a physical level that can happen on a mental, emotional level when you're doing inner work. If you go in and try to just detox some traumatic experience out of your life, like, try to really work it through, you can end up having too much of the, of the activation and reactivation that that's happening there, that it ends up not being a positive gain, ends up being like a negative loss. And so that's why going slowly and that was the brilliance of this doctor, was he just went so slowly. It's like patience. We're going to give minute amounts of treatment. And then slowly the system became stronger, became able to handle more. Then over time, the toxins did come out. I actually did that with him, and I really saw a huge difference in my own toxicity physical through just a very gentle approach. Over years, this same kind of approach can be used for highly sensitive people when doing inner emotional work. This kind of work is sustainable. It's not going to cause problems. And it's something that will deepen over time, which is something we're very accustomed to thinking about. So the way to do this is to work in small increments to pendulate between activation and safety and to use ways that process the activation when it occurs so that it becomes diffused in a very quick way Instead of reactivating everything and then being, what do I do with all this? It's like, oh, just focus on one piece of it and then look at it and see what's going on, see the energy there, but then re integrate that and find the balance in that. In fact, heal that, that one little piece. So the focus is on regulation, not just excavation, and it's on building capacity before revisiting intensity. Like give some rest and then try another step. We don't necessarily heal best by diving into the deepest part of the wound. We tend to heal better by expanding our nervous system's capacity slowly over time. So if you're tired of trying to be brave with your trauma and ending up flooded or shut down, and you don't want to keep swinging between pushing yourself and avoiding everything, but what you really want is to heal in a way that feels steady, grounded and safe, then this is exactly the kind of work that you can explore with me in one on one sessions. Because trauma doesn't resolve through force, it resolves through safety. In our work together, we go at a pace your nervous system can actually tolerate. We build capacity first, we strengthen your inner ground, and we approach difficult material without overwhelming you. If you're ready to stop re traumatizing yourself in the name of healing, then go to the Show Notes and click on the first link you find or go to trueinnerfreedom.com Working together, you don't have to prove your strength by enduring intensity. You can heal gently and deeply at the same time.