Good Morning Heartache

Continuing to accept that I am a highly sensitive person

I am a highly sensitive person. Some people may call me an empath. I always have been. I easily feel the emotions of others and can put myself in their shoes. I was frequently told as a child that I was too sensitive and too emotional. I have also heard these adjectives as an adult. In one of my earlier blogs, I discussed the idea of radically accepting my tendency to feel emotions deeply.

When I drafted this blog, I did not know psychologists have studied and named empaths like me as “highly sensitive persons” (HSPs) or that our brains work differently. According to the research of Dr. Elaine N. Aron, highly sensitive people are more affected by their environments because their brains process and reflect on information more deeply than the average person. My mother introduced me to Dr. Aron’s work earlier this year when she recommended I watch her documentary, Sensitive: The Untold Story. Watching the movie helped me to feel seen.

Dr. Aron’s website shares resources to assess whether you too are highly sensitive. The formal name for this neutral genetic trait is Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS). Approximately 20% of the population have SPS. Dr. Aron describes it as a survival strategy that people and other animals use to process information or stimuli “in a highly organized, big picture way, which includes awareness of nuances and subtleties that others may not notice.” The volume of information that HSPs process can expose them to overstimulation.

People with SPS have the following four things in common:

• Depth of Processing

  • Reflect more than others about the state of the world, the meaning of life, and their line of work

  • Slow at making decisions but often make good decisions

  • Have good ideas

  • Personal insight with a sense of long-term consequences and are unusually conscientious

• Overstimulation

  • Experience overstimulation and burnout from the volume of information they process and effectively process and integrate stimuli in a gentle environment

  • Appear to not be able to handle as much as others because they shutdown and need more sleep or downtime to take care of themselves in response

• Emotional Responsiveness and Empathy

  • More easily and appropriately moved to tears of joy, gratitude, or relief and equally moved to laughter

  • React more to and feel others’ emotions than others

  • Distressed by violent TV shows or movies; unfairness, bullying, social injustice, or other disturbing events

• Sensory Sensitivity

  • Observe small changes other miss, such as someone looking tired, room décor, small flowers, or animals

  • Sound of a ticking clock, dripping water, and subtle tastes and smells

  • Notice what needs to be changed to make others more comfortable

This month, I began dialectical behavior therapy or DBT. DBT is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that is designed to help people with complex mental health conditions manage intense emotions and/or behavioral issues. It can be effective in treating trauma, self-harm, anxiety, depression, substance use, and eating disorders.

My intensive outpatient therapist recommended a DBT skills group when I graduated from IOP. The program begins with four to six weeks of individual therapy, which introduces me to basic DBT skills and will later transition to a group therapy modality where I can integrate those new skills. The first session introduced me to the idea of biosocial theory. This is the idea that we adapt or adopt behavioral patterns to regulate emotions in response to biological and environmental factors. Genetics may predispose some people to emotional vulnerability and emotional dysregulation. This can include HSPs like me.

People also can develop behavioral patterns in response to chronic environmental invalidation. Chronic environmental invalidation can be:

• Systemic invalidation (e.g., racism or sexism)

• Traumatic invalidation (e.g., childhood, domestic violence, traumatic experiences, racial trauma, and generational trauma)

• Relational invalidation (e.g., parental abuse, or the well-meaning parent who tells you to just stop crying or you shouldn’t feel a certain way)

DBT helps people to understand these genetic and environmental factors, and to implement skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness to address the behavioral patterns they develop in response. DBT is an effective treatment for HSPs as their sensitivity is also shaped by environmental factors such as parental response to emotional expression, the availability of emotional support during their formative years, and their cultural background. HSPs can respond to these factors with coping mechanisms such as avoidance or people-pleasing to avoid rejection and conflict.

The past couple of weeks were pretty intense at work. I spent last weekend enjoying the hustle and bustle of New York City. I’ve previously shared how the city energizes and inspires me. This visit was no different. Normally, I spend my visits exploring whatever the city has to offer. This time, I spent time exploring The Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures, the top two floors of the Museum of Modern Art, a vintage record store, and The Cursed Child. It was a weekend filled with creative rest, but it was also exhausting.

I realize now that between long work hours, my attempts to increase movement for my mental health, and a busy weekend in the city, I was overstimulated. Exhaustion and overstimulation can lead to increased sensitivity to emotions. In other words, my ongoing grief was in hyperdrive this week.

It is a common refrain that there is no timeline for grief. Yet, I found myself questioning my emotions when my sadness crept in. I felt sad for no particular reason at all. At least, I didn’t think I had a reason until one of my work friends reflected my work hours back to me. It was a reminder that while I have been prioritizing my DBT PLEASE skills by getting 7-8 hours of sleep, eating healthy, taking my anxiety and depression meds, and getting daily movement, emotional exhaustion can also allow unpleasant emotions to surface.

I spent the end of the week getting curious about these unpleasant emotions. I recognized that even though I professed that I was radically accepting my emotional tendencies, my inner perfectionist is attempting to fix my emotions by adopting my newly learned CBT and DBT skills perfectly when really I need to continue sitting in my sadness. Indeed, I can’t perfect my way out of feeling these emotions.

Certainly, the sadness will creep up from time to time, especially when I am not meeting my needs. This is not a bad thing. Sadness is there to tell me something. This week, it was telling me there was a lot of unprocessed emotions lingering under the surface. I’ve been in a rush to push the sadness away.

It’s uncomfortable to feel so deeply. Of course it is. I was told most of my life that I feel too much. That I am too much. It’s led me to shrink myself, fold into myself, and hide what I’m really thinking or feeling. I just want to get over the sadness and deep emotions because I’ve allowed others’ perceptions to influence or change my behaviors.

One of the beautiful things about aging is the wisdom we develop to no longer care about the opinions of others. This week, I learned in DBT that there is more room for me to practice radical acceptance around my emotions and grief. This looks like accepting lost relationships, imperfect relationships, career aspirations, family diagnoses, and personal experiences for what they are so that I can grieve them and let them go. It’s okay if this process is long and the resulting emotions are intense.

I am not too much, my grief is not too much, and neither is my depression. It’s okay to keep channeling my inner Billie Holiday, sit with my sadness, and ask my heartache to sit down. I’m sure it will have plenty to tell me, including how to care for myself in the moment.

This weekend that looked like emotional rest. I spent it in nature with my husband, children, dog, and sometimes just myself. I hiked, looked at the rolling Shenandoah mountains, journaled, read, and just stared at a roaring fire. We can also emotionally rest by grounding ourselves with activities like meditation, creative arts, walks in nature, and yoga. This week, I intend to schedule more time for emotional rest.

In case if you missed them, here are resources I linked to in this week’s blog:

• The Highly Sensitive Person (Dr. Elaine N. Aron’s Website)

• The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine N. Aron

• Sensitive: The Untold Story

• The Highly Sensitive Person Self-Assessment

• The Highly Sensitive Person FAQs

• How Biosocial Theory of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Helps Treat Highly Sensitive People (HSP) (Kairos Wellness Collective)

• What is DBT? (The DBT Center of Greater Washington)

• What the Heck Is the Biosocial Theory (Behavioral Psych Studio)

• Good Morning Heartache (Billie Holiday)

I also linked to the following prior blogs:

• Giving Myself Permission to Rest (Nov. 24, 2024)

• Embracing Radical Acceptance (Dec. 15, 2024)

• Just for Fun (Feb. 11, 2025)

• Releasing the Shame I Associate with Rest (Mar. 2, 2025)