Friday, March 27, 2015

HSP Tools: Guided Imagery and Meditation

I recently wrote about HSPs and their struggles with developing self-compassion here. For HSPs that have  gone through a traumatic experience, this struggle is even harder. Trauma, by its very definition, is overwhelming and to deal with it, we might have run away into our minds and away from our bodies.

Our bodies might feel like the source of the pain. They might feel like the connecting thread to a  past that we might prefer to forget. And so, we unconsciously turn to our minds, seeking refuge in a different place. But we end up getting lost because it is our senses that connect us to the present.

On some level, we might unconsciously choose this trade off. Being disconnected and dissociated from our bodies might feel easier than facing the threat of re-experiencing traumatic memories.

So, being grounded can become an even greater challenge for HSPs suffering from trauma than it is for HSPs with more normal experiences.

So, what do we do? If we are suffering from the after-shocks of trauma, we need professional help. We need a therapist who can help us release the locked trauma in a safe way. Trying to do this on our own, without any help, would be discounting the level of injuries we have sustained.

It is okay to need help. It is okay to ask for it.

We don't want to open up wounds that we don't have the resources to deal with. What a sensitive therapist would do is use talk therapy along with bodywork and several other tools like guided meditations and imagery. 

If you are an HSP who hasn't suffered trauma, you can also use tools such as guided meditations on your own. Too often, we might see our sensitivity as only a burden.

We may never see that we are not just more sensitive to the bad stuff, we are also more sensitive to the good stuff. This can serve us well and become an advantage.


We can use our sensitivity and imagination to create more nurturing experiences. Using a suitable audio guide like this one by Belleruth Naparstek, we can start to form a better relationship with our bodies.

In a meditation such as this, we might be asked to imagine the pleasant vibrations of energy surrounding our bodies. We might be told to imagine being surrounded by a protective cushion of air or swimming in an endless sea with friendly dolphins all around us.

Essentially, what we are being asked to do is to actively use our imagination to create a safe space and access the good feelings that our senses can provide.

We feel the warm cocoon surrounding our bodies. We relax a little. We feel the dancing waves around us. The water feels good. We relax even more.

We have created something imaginary. But the effect on our bodies is real. We feel nurtured and secure. We feel a connection to our body and to the present.

Of course, this process is not always dream-like. It can unfreeze emotions and cause them to flow. This catharsis lessens our burdens.

Without the structure and guidance that the guided meditation provides, we may never have wanted to feel our sadness. But that would have just meant that our sadness would remain locked inside us.

By going through this process, we release what lies buried underneath. We have taken some more steps forward. We have used our sensitivity and imagination for our good instead of letting negative imagination drown us.

We now have another tool in our tool-box. We can pick it up and use it whenever we need it. 

Friday, March 20, 2015

On Honoring Our Own Style


There have been times in my life where I have urged myself to “Jump,” “Just jump,” and then fallen back ashamed because I just couldn’t do it. Something was holding me back. What, I couldn’t quite figure out. And so, I stayed suspended in that moment of trying to jump and not jumping, berating myself for not having the nerve to do it.

In the past few years, I have done many things that I thought were “too hard” for me. I have traveled on my own. I have shifted countries. I have broken through a shell and reached out to that me who lay sleeping, and who was lost in the persona.

I have done this not by jumping all of a sudden. But finding what gives me courage and strengthening myself, so when the jump came, it no longer felt like a jump. It felt like something that I could either handle or learn to handle.

As I look back, I see that looking outside for answers slowed me down. Listening to too many different opinions slowed me down. I wasn’t sure of myself, so when I heard someone saying something with a great deal of certainty, I believed them.

But with experience, I see that people who are very certain about the way things work are often wrong. They project a confidence that even they, sometimes, only have for show. We might start feeling that they have all the answers. But they often don’t.

As an HSP, you might value someone’s style of decision-making just because of the confidence it gives them. Yes, they might be wrong in the end. But being so sure seems to make their life easier along the way. They also seem to fit better into a culture where just displaying confidence -- a surety about a certain position -- is looked at favorably.

But doubts and the information that they bring can be invaluable in making a decision. They tell us about the lay of the land for us. We are tuned in to subtleties, and just letting ourselves sift through our perceptions one by one, and either prove or disprove them gives us valuable information.

It makes us more flexible, if we give ourselves time to move slowly yet surely through this process. It increases the odds of our making the right decision.

That’s something to remember when we are besieged by attention-grabbing voices. They might be loud. They might be very sure of themselves. But are they always right?

If you look at the people around you, you might find that you are as capable of making a good decision as anybody else. Your style is different, and honoring that style instead of copying someone else’s might just be the key in this situation.

What if you were to move with your style, and not against it?
 

Thursday, March 19, 2015

HSPs and Decision Making

Everything comes with its darkness and its light. The same thing that gives us our gifts also gives us our challenges. As HSPs, we notice subtle details, and our life is enriched by them. As HSPs, we notice subtle details and get so lost in them that we lose sight of the context.

Maybe one thing we could do when making big decisions is first cut through the details, and clarify what our basic position or requirement is. When we know that, the details can help us paint a more complete picture later on. But not getting the heart of the matter keeps us suspended, keeps us confused. It keeps us procrastinating on actually making a decision, on throwing our hats over the fence.

And maybe one thing we can do when making small, little decisions is to stop questioning the validity of our choices. Our experience of the world is different. So, our needs are different. So, what we decide to do with our money, time, and other resources is probably different too.

These small, niggling decisions ultimately add up to the quality of our everyday lives. Like you, many times, I delay making affirmative choices when I feel that others might question their validity. For example, is it okay to spend my money a certain way when other people think that's wasteful?

It might be that you want to join a more expensive gym that others in your social circle. You can afford to do that. To you, it means avoiding a noisy, overcrowded environment. It means controlling the amount of stimulation you let it. It means having an amount of space that you are comfortable with.

Ultimately, it means that you are more likely to use the facility because you have taken your needs and preferences into account.

But often, we stop ourselves from making decisions like this. We discount what we need even when we can realistically satisfy that need. We do this just because it doesn't look like what other people need. So, we are stuck at the question: Is it okay for me to even need this?  

We have to, with little steps, start understanding that, in the end, everything is a matter of opinion. To decide how to use our time and money in a way that works for us is giving voice to our needs. It's also giving voice to our values.

It's treating ourselves as if we matter. It's counting ourselves as important. We might struggle to do this, and fall over and over again. But we have to acknowledge that if the way we respond to the world is different, what we need from the world might be different as well.

There's no point trying to get everyone's permission. We have to give ourselves our own permissions.

Your needs are valid. Just like everyone else, you are a unique, distinctive person. What you want speaks of the deeper needs of your soul. You soul might need quiet. It might need music. It might want to get away. It might want to find its community.

When making your decisions, look at what you need. Don't look at other people who are nothing like you. How would your decisions change? What would they look like?  

Friday, March 13, 2015

D is for Denial

I have been thinking and reading a lot about emotions. I have been taking off a bit of my "nice" mantle, and seeing how nice serves as a smoke-screen. It blocks me from the real work of handling my own emotions. Distracted by outside demands, I can  avoid the hard work of taking responsibility for my own self.

Nice also creates a filter between me and reality. It helps lull me into a shaky "everything is nice, all people are good" world that sedates some of my anxiety. If you are someone who denies things - thoughts, feelings, behaviors - you might also be suffering from the side effect of denial -- a free-floating anxiety that is created out of the refusal to look at reality.

It is probably not your fault -- the exact place where your denial stems from. Your denial is probably a relic, an adaptation from an older time, a time when it fulfilled a protective role. Maybe, you can trace it back to a traumatic time in your life, sometimes as far back as childhood. In that time, your psyche protected you from overwhelming information that might have threatened your very survival.

If that's the case, you need to accept that this is where your denial comes from and try to extend yourself the love that you might be giving to others. That might be a very difficult first step, and it's okay to go slow.

Once we have reached that place, then there is the next hard step. I have been reading about it, and I am not sure how it all works out in the end. But what this step is, is essentially taking responsibility that there are many ways in which we keep this denial alive in our lives, and poking small holes in this system we have kept thriving, however unconsciously. 

If your denial is a result of trauma, then you will probably need help here. You might need some sort of a mid-wife to help give birth to a new self - a counselor, a psychologist, an energy healer, a bodyworker.

It's okie to not know all the answers. Only true warriors can ask for help.

They know that what worked at one point is now choking the life out of them. For our true selves to flourish, we need to take all those weeds out. We need new behaviors, and we need to see that the denial that might have helped us survive at one point is now something that we, out of some not clearly articulated need, keep alive.

It's hurting us now. We need to do something about it.  

Something Gavin De Becker says in his wonderful book on survival signals The Gift of Fear stood out to me. It expresses so articulately why being in denial no longer helps us. While denial might have bought us time in the past, today, it works against us. 

He says "Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level, and it causes a constant low-grade anxiety. Millions of people suffer that anxiety, and denial keeps them from taking action that could reduce the risks (and the worry)."

If you are a "nice" person like me, you might be scared of getting in touch with all the feelings that you want to deny. Like you, I don't want to look at my anger, my fear and all my other uncomfortable feelings either. They are painful. They ask me to get so real that all illusions fall away, and sometimes, I have survived on my illusions.

But like De Becker tells us, when we deny our buried feelings, they don't just go away. They are constantly bobbing up. Our anger, for example, might be telling us that we are not doing a good job of preserving our sense of self. We are letting too many dangerous things in.
        
But if we shove it down, anger can't do its job. We are vaguely aware that something is wrong. But we haven't let ourselves feel our feelings and think our thoughts. And so, we are stuck in in a confused state.

If you were to start slowly scratching the surface of your denial, what would your feelings tell you? What information can they give you that might cause some short-term pain, but help you in the long run?

Friday, March 6, 2015

HSPs: The Relationship Between Anger and Guilt


Understanding our emotional lives is important for all of us. But, handling our feelings is something we are never taught. Whatever we learn is usually through a process of trial and error. We also learn to label emotions as "good" and "bad" depending on the reactions we get when we express them. If, as a child, our anger was never acknowledged or looked at, then we might have a loaded relationship with it.

We might stuff it away, this unacceptable feeling, this uncomfortable game-changer. We have seen how exploding with anger can harm people, and so we exercise the only other option we feel is available to us. We push anger down. 

Whenever it comes up, we reject it, so it stops bothering us at all. But as our anger gets muted, at least in conscious awareness, our boundaries start collapsing. We forget that this energy that we are so scared of destroying ourselves with is also something that actually helps protect us.

When we don't have access to anger, our sense of self gets blurred. We are not as aware of where we end, what belongs to us, what has been thrust into our lives by other people's demands. Without our anger, we are left unarmed.

What starts with avoiding a painful experience then takes on a life of its own. With no clear boundaries between ourselves and the other, we can start taking on too much responsibility for other people. We can start feeling guilty for things that we are not responsible for.

Then, in a circular dance, our feelings of guilt mean that we lose our connection with our anger to an even greater degree. Lost in guilt for not doing enough or not being enough, we lose touch with what our anger might have told us. We have been through enough. We need to change. We need to re-build the holes in our boundary wall.

If you feel guilty a lot of the time, what would getting in touch with your anger do for you? Why is it that you don't want anger in your life? Does it make you uncomfortable? Do you think that the only other thing you can do with it, apart from shutting it off, is venting it? What about thinking of some other alternatives?

What if you were to start beating a pillow? Would you get from a feeling of numbness to one of anger or fear? What if you said out loud all the things that you want to complain about? You don't do the venting with someone else, you do it all on your own just to get it out of your system.

How would feeling that anger help you? Would it show you places in your psyche that feel violated? Will you listen to its messages and use its energy by thinking about and setting new boundaries?

How could those boundaries help you? How could they help you do more of what you are supposed to do in this world?

Thursday, March 5, 2015

What Anger Looks Like

Anger is an emotion that hisses and burns. It curls inside, wrapping itself around our hearts, crushing them. It burns our insides with its vitriolic fumes.

Anger also rises like a magnificent wave, and offers protection when we most need it. It helps us right our wrongs and address injustices.


It helps us claim our space and gives us the strength to stay on course.

It comes in many guises. We only identify it when we rupture, but it's also the sentry that stands guard to our souls. Only this far, and not beyond, it says. It keeps everything harmful outside.

We have to learn to use it, so it doesn't destroy us or others. We have to listen to its messages. We have to ask it questions, so that it can give us answers. What line has been crossed? What part of us needs to be defended?

In her lovely book about the meaning of feelings, The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren tells us that anger needs to be listened to and channeled, and not vented or repressed. In this wonderful post on increasing our emotional vocabulary, she tells us about what anger looks like. Just like all other emotions, anger comes in different shapes and sizes.

Sometimes, we can't recognize that what we are feeling is indeed anger because nothing we've been taught points that out. Resentment is anger. Irritation is anger. Contempt is anger. So is frustration, impatience and indifference. These are all different intensities and degrees in which anger shows us its primal face.

We don't often call these states anger, and so we don't use the information that lies encoded inside. When we are resentful, we might just seethe inside, and not really be consciously aware that we need to enforce anger's protective mechanisms.

When I am resentful, it's often because I have given too much of my self away. What needs to be done is to realize that this has happened, and to start building a fence-line around my behavior. This will help me restore a boundary, and ensure that I don't start straying into dangerous territory again.

When you start recognizing your anger -- understanding that coldness, exasperation and indignation -- are all forms of anger, you can start asking the questions that McLaren urges us to ask: What must be protected? What must be restored?

When exactly do you need to change to untangle the twistedness you feel inside? How can anger help you protect both your own boundaries and also serve others?

Once we start asking these questions, we can start course correcting. But first, we need to get familiar with the map that McLaren offers us. We need to learn what different places in our emotional lives are called. We need to expand our understanding of the routes to awareness.

When we can catch our different feelings and be able to start identifying them correctly, we will also be able to start becoming more comfortable with our inner worlds, the last frontier that we are often most afraid of.