Healing as a Highly Sensitive Person

Maybe the refrigerator makes a feeling or a noise you can hear. So do the lights.

You can walk into a room and sense an argument has happened in it, although no one is there.

You struggle with overwhelm.

You have been told you are a Highly Sensitive Person or HSP.

In the past, people were told that being a Highly Sensitive Person was something you had to manage for the rest of your life

If you didn't know that you could greatly reduce Highly Sensitive challenges and that you are not doomed to live with them forever, you're not alone.

In the mid '90s a book came out about Highly Sensitive People (HSP) that said it was a fixed trait and "here is how you manage it". Around the same time, nervous system healing -  a necessary part to healing HSP issues - was starting to form as a body of work but it was lesser known. While nervous system work stayed in the margins, the HSP book became a word-of-mouth bestseller. It went on to be translated into 32 languages.

It was from that book I, myself, came to believe that I could never heal my highly sensitive person struggles, I could only manage them.

The HSP Internet Communities and internet information on this topic didn't truly unfold until closer to 2010, but if you had already read the HSP book, learned from a teacher or friend, or came to the conclusion based on that available data that you were in a fixed state for the rest of your life you might not revisit that original teaching.

I didn't.

To add to the challenges, nervous system work was mostly clinical for years, living in academic psychology papers and trauma therapists offices. It wasn't until 2014 that a book about the body keeping score became a phenomena in self-help books but even that didn't hit everyday media until 2018 when Instagram and TikTok creators started talking about the nervous system. That's when terms like "nervous system regulation," "dysregulation," "window of tolerance," and "co-regulation" entered casual conversation.

And then, in 2020, with lockdowns, the discussion about nervous system healing locked in.
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Nervous System Healing Is Only One Part of the Solution

The question, what's triggering the nervous system in the first place?