Understanding Our/Your Experience
Sensitivity, Self-awareness and the importance of emotional intelligence.
I am listening to my inner experience instead of the outside world. Who do you listen to?
I am sensitive, emotionally and sensory but how sensitive am I? I know there are very insensitive people in this world. But where do I end up on the spectrum?
Each individual human has the opportunity to learn to understand their unique life experience by tuning in to themselves and listening. This world we live in has been hell bent on us not accessing our true nature. Ignoring or dismissing very human emotions, actions and reactions.
I felt this deeply and assumed I was wrong for feeling the way I felt. Too sensitive for this world, I numbed my experience for over a decade as many people have done in their life, which only leads to disconnection and deepening self aversion. If you are like me, your denial of self leads to depression, anxiety, some panic and irrational fears. Until I couldn’t, literally crying on the floor not knowing how I ended up there.
I was not helping anyone live a better life by ignoring myself and my own needs. I was absolutely not the mother I wanted to be. I wanted to show them how to live, not how to struggle to live. How to learn who they are and know how to tune into their own truth. I cannot teach them a skill I do not have.
Before I stopped trying to fit the cultural ideal of a mother mold, I would wake up every day in fight or flight. I would deny my needs in the morning for slow and try to meet the imagined speed of the day. The need to do all things, for all people, all at once and keep everyone perfectly happy the entire time. No wonder I was a maniac. It is impossible. Especially impossible if you tend to become overwhelmed by too many things going at once and you have no idea why you are in sensory overload and can’t think straight.
So I started listening to myself and what I needed. For the first time in my life, the people around me had to get to know me and all my quirks and sensitivities instead of me getting to know theirs and working around them. I had already broken from bending too far in the wrong direction.
The process of showing up in all your realness is not an easy task. It takes courage and conviction because it involves a lot of misunderstanding from other people. It can also trigger questioning your own experience again which is a world of hell confusion and gaslighting your own self. This is why we need tools to reground within ourselves, tools for support, emotionally and physically and ample space for quiet and stillness. IE. Not the current social norms.
Tools of listening, grounding and space for slow.
Meditation and mindfulness are incredible tools that in practice, can give yourself the space you need, to listen, to confirm your own knowing. To listen to who you truly are and what your experience is, in your body, you remember who you can trust. You.
With daily practice and routine, it has been possible to slow my reactive wiring over time and to tune in during day to day life, to not lessen my sensitivity but to be aware of it and respect it. To be a good parent, I must be able to emotionally regulate my overwhelm as a mother. In order to emotionally regulate I needed to understand my own emotions and reactions. This is where the pause comes in during the day. What is my body saying to me? Why? What is happening around me? Awareness of the circumstances leading to the feeling that leads to the discomfort and anxiety.
With hours of meditation, therapy and writing through my thoughts, I became aware that I am indeed, wired differently than others. That is why life has seemed harder for me and why parenting has been so hard for me. I am a highly sensitive person (hsp)(more later in the article).
No matter if I am mindful or not, I notice everything whether or not I am conscious of it or not. I process life deeply, every part of it. If I am not mindful and pace my day, an event, person, or idea can run away with my ball that contains all of my peace. And I know now, for me, my understanding of existing and experience is not a team sport. So I take my ball back when I notice it is gone. Realign with my true nature. Place my energy back above my head in alignment through my body, through my root, grounded in the earth. Because I am nature and I am whole.
Ive been sketching this same figure in alignment. This is what is feels like to be in alignment with myself. This image is calm and steady which is the opposite of my previous artwork where it was either non existent or a combination of overworked and unfinished.
I am a work in progress and so is my art. We are in a stage of experimentation.
Moving forward in Understanding.
Slow and simple is best practice for me. I have even come to find that this slow is also better for my children. Seeing the benefits in real life of prioritizing my own nature has brought me the ability to accept and even have confidence in my own sensitivity.
I know that much of the time, my “next right move” is counter culture. It is usually to pause or sit or rest. To take time in between activities and not rush. This pause with my children is sacred when I get it right. By get it right, I mean the timing, before anyway gets too far gone into tantrum mode, including me. Cue overstimulation, overwhelm, over stressed and dissociation which completely block any rational thought or kind thought.
I wrote this poem in the middle of my worst days. I believe it illustrates the fight within myself every morning with the outside cultural ideals. I was fighting the need to rush and be all the things, acknowledging my need for slow. I was struggling with this fight in real time every day causing a frantic anxious brain ready to explode.
Slow Rush Waking slowly Hope is high The Rush comes Crashing into my stomach Dangerous waves Rushing waters Rushing pain. The tides turn Pulling in my limbs Shaking like an earthquake Unable to be seen My heart It aches All the while. Constant reaching. Constant longing. Until I just sit. Until I get slow. Let the waves crash Let the rain pour. Wash through and out Of my body please Not so slow. Please rush please. -Rae August 2021
Healing. Not just for me.
I am comforted reading through my poetry written in my worst days. It helps me realize how much progress Ive made in living my most authentic, sensitive, creative life. With support from those around me, I have found my own grounding. We are finding a better way forward for our whole family, not just me. That broad healing is something to be in awe of. Truly. The trickle down of healing is real. Once you start to dig deep to heal yourself, the effect will ripple out in ways you would never have thought and may never know.
With a large grain of salt, I am still very human, not a great writer and do not have this figured out and I might never. I am trying. I am listening. I am moving forward and growing.
But here is an image of what I used to seem like in the mornings to how I seem now. I am happy to report my feathers are smoothing.
Where do you end up on the scale of sensitivity?
There are plenty of online tests to help a person understand themselves better. Enneagram, Myers Briggs, Sparktype. But these are for your overall personality. What about sensitivity specifically. We are in luck! There is an online test to see just where you fall on the scale. Elaine Aron penned the term HSP or Hightly Sensitive Person in 1996 and provided us with incredible insight when there was none. You can take a test here to see where you are on the sensitivity scale. https://hsperson.com/test/highly-sensitive-test/
These are also very helpful websites for sensitive people if it fits you.
https://hsperson.com/
Books by Elaine Aron - The Highly Sensitive person and The Highly Sensitive Parent were most beneficial in helping me navigate.
And don’t forget the Facebook groups. You can find community with others just as sensitive as you. And we need support more than ever.
Emotional Intelligence and Social Understanding?
Emotional intelligence is a big gapping whole in our society. We can know our personality type in all the categories but can we understand the emotions and struggles that go along with them? Do we have the tools to communicate our emotions and needs? Our emotions are our greatest teachers and if we understand them, we can show up for ourselves and those around us.
This is part of the equation that added up to my problems with living. We as people have grown up in a culture that swept most messy things under the rug and it has left us with feeling disconnected from one others and defected within ourselves. After reading, Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, I feel even more compelled to be a warrior of emotions in my own life.
I know most people do not want to deal with the messy parts of life. They can get by with ignoring them and moving on to the next thing that fill the emptiness. But that empty feeling? It’s not empty. It’s full of unprocessed and unvalidated emotions. They are stuck in a bubble in your body unable to pop. We need to thin the lining of the bubble. Day by day, uncover the messy because it is through the mess and struggle, with the witness and support of another, that we grow. The mess of emotions is the WHOLE LIFE DEAL. If you want to live fully on this earth, meeting others with full humanity, we must understand our own emotions, reactions and experiences. This is how we live. This is how we heal. This is how we grow.
This is the journey of understanding my experience. Our experience.
With kindness,
Rae