Embrace Highly Sensitive Person Traits and Start a New Chapter
Understanding your highly sensitive person traits, learning to love them, and embracing them is key to being a happy sensitive person.
Many highly sensitive people have at some point in their lives wondered what the hell is wrong with them. Luckily, most of us come to understand that the answer to that is simple: there is nothing wrong with being highly sensitive.
Understanding Highly Sensitive Person Traits
However, understanding your highly sensitive person traits is key to feeling more comfortable and happy in your own skin.
Knowing how your highly sensitive person traits impact you and your behaviour is key to eradicating the doubt that others make you feel about yourself.
Feeling Lost
Being introvert, being highly sensitive, can mean not matching up to society’s expectations. It can mean feeling lost in a world that is focussed on being busy, making noise and blowing your own trumpet to get higher and further. Square peg. Round hole.
Motherhood Helped Me Understand Highly Sensitive Traits
Being the mother of highly sensitive children made me understand my own sensitivities. Motherhood helped me accept my highly sensitive person traits, rather than see them as negative traits. Or worse still, see myself as fundamentally flawed.
Motherhood made me realise there are some things I cannot change about how I am. I also came to understand that there are things I shouldn’t want to change. Because this is me, this is who I am.
Becoming a mother to three highly sensitive children helped me understand which parts of my personality are down to being highly sensitive.
Which Traits Make You a Highly Sensitive Person?
Ponder for a minute what being highly sensitive means to you. What makes you highly sensitive? Make a list. Write them down. Get to know them. Learn to understand your highly sensitive person traits.
Here’s my list:
I don’t like busy shopping streets and browsing around shops in busy periods. What environments do you not enjoy being in?
I don’t like being jostled by crowds. What makes you physically uncomfortable?
Music often brings tears to my eyes. A sad scene in a film can have me in floods of tears. What evokes emotion in you?
The start of a new school year makes me sob. It reminds me that the years go quickly and my children are another year older. What events make you think far deeper than you should?
I don’t like the feel of long sleeved thick jumpers on my arms. I hate the feel of sand on my wet feet, and particularly dislike when the sand dries and I can’t wipe it easily off my feet. It took me years to consciously realise these things and think about why. What makes you physically uncomfortable?
I don’t like horror films. Even all grown up I still sometimes conjure up the image of a Japanese girl crawling across the ceiling in the dead of night on my way to the bathroom. The images make me move that little bit quicker back to bed in the darkness.
Awareness Comes From Unexpected Places
It took Gretchen Ruben’s book ‘The Happiness Project’ to make me realise that I just don’t enjoy horror movies and accept that this is the way it is. It may seem blindingly obvious to everyone but it took reading Ruben’s book
What have you been doing because you feel that you should even though you actually don’t enjoy it?
The same book jolted me awake to realise that to feel comfortable in your own skin acceptance is key and I started giving myself permission to ‘be Amanda’. It was enlightening.
Be Amanda.
Be you.
Acceptance is Liberating
I know now I am a highly sensitive person. I know now why I behave the way I do. It’s clear to me now that it’s highly unlikely I will change my reactions and emotions in various circumstances. I know now that that is okay. I know now that I understand myself better now I am in my 40s than at any time in my past. It’s a liberating feeling.
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