What shifts for you in your life if you accept that your feelings are gonna process a little more slowly than what you would like?
Hold that question for a moment. Notice how your gut responds a fraction of a second before your mind finds a wordy answer.
What follows is a hodgepodge, pulled together for highly sensitive people and trauma survivors who keep seeking. Seeking peace. Seeking groundedness. Seeking a good life after a childhood full of chaos.
These ideas overlap and intertwine. Healing, in this sense, means evolving. We gather tools, mindsets, and resilience to handle a life that gets tricky. Our psychology is an art form, and each of us gets to become more artful as we age.
As you read each one, check in with your gut first. Your mind can weigh in after.
1. Your Worth Has Not Changed Since the Day You Were Born
Your worth is unchanging, no different than the day you were born. A brand new baby who can't even walk yet doesn't have to earn or prove a single thing, and every one of us who isn't a sociopath knows this to be true about any baby, including the baby you once were. Mistakes don't diminish your worth, and neither do the holes you've fallen into while living as a human being. What would shift if you allowed this belief to be true?
2. Trauma Survivors Can Give Betrayal Back to the Betrayer
Whoever betrayed you, wherever in your history it happened, the betrayal belongs to the betrayer. Part of healing betrayal trauma is learning to carry what is yours and set down what never was, handing the guilt, shame, anxiety, and worthlessness back to the giver. Many trauma survivors insist, "It has to be me, I'm the common denominator," and that common something may simply be a family system that taught you to endure disrespect and disregard. Now you get to learn self-regard, self-respect, and how to repel energy vampires instead of drawing energy vampires close.
3. Feelings Process Like Food
Highly sensitive people expect a lot from a single thought. The right thought, the wise thought, the perfectly reasoned thought, is supposed to make a feeling evaporate on the spot.
If only. Processing feelings is like processing food.
Think about a big Thanksgiving meal. Everyone at the table knows that food has to process. Nobody expects the body to be finished with dinner the second the mouth stops chewing, the moment the fork stops traveling up to the lips. Nobody gets mad at the belly for taking longer than a few minutes.
Fried food makes the point even clearer. A box of Popeye's or a big old fried seafood platter can be pure comfort food, delicious and full of memories. It can also mean feeling pretty crappy for about the next three days. Somewhere between day three and day four, eating well in the meantime, you start feeling like yourself again. Digestion did its work, on its own clock.
Now look at how we treat our feelings. We think one wise thought and expect the feeling to vanish. When it doesn't, the critical voice wakes up. What's wrong with me? Why can't I make this shift the way I expect to? A natural, healthy process gets labeled as failure, and that sense of failure lands right on top of the original feeling.
Now there are two things to digest.
Imagine treating your stomach that way. Imagine standing in the kitchen, furious at your belly for still working on Thanksgiving dinner an hour later. It sounds absurd. Yet that is the exact expectation so many highly sensitive people carry about grief, anger, fear, and hurt.
Emotional digestion takes time. A few things can support it, much the way water or peppermint tea can settle a heavy stomach:
Journaling, so the feeling has somewhere to go
Rest, water, and gentle movement for the body holding the feeling
Patience while the feeling moves through
Mostly, though, we wait. Waiting is the hardest part.
There's a trap hiding in the waiting. Nobody nursing an upset stomach orders a second fried platter to speed things along. We don't want to put more crap into the body while the body is processing crap. Yet so many of us pile ten billion more thoughts onto a feeling, hoping the answer will finally appear. Overthinking a feeling is the emotional version of a second plate. More thinking means more to digest.
Acceptance works on the same slow schedule. Hearing a new idea once rarely makes it stick. We integrate it again and again, until the subconscious absorbs it and it becomes part of who we are. Your inner child may have grown up hearing get over it, stop crying, move on. That little one needs to hear the slower truth many, many times.
Try these lines on as your own:
My feelings get all the time required to process.
A slow feeling is a healthy feeling.
I can wait without adding more to digest.
How would your days change if slow processing felt normal? Slower than you expected is natural. It's healthy. It's right.
4. Thoughts and Behaviors Change Faster Than Feelings
Stand on one foot right now and you've changed a behavior instantly, and if you think of a shark in a tutu floating through the sky singing opera, you've changed a thought just as fast. Feelings are the slow corner of the thoughts, behaviors, and feelings triangle. Change the two fast corners, and your mood follows on its own timeline.
5. Overthinking Is a Muscle Highly Sensitive People Can Retrain
Highly sensitive people are a tribe of overthinkers. We observe with nuance, and the more we observe, the more thoughts we have about everything we observe. For many trauma survivors, overthinking started in childhood. A kid living with a cold or violent parent, a parent who screams up close or punches holes in walls, has nowhere safe to put those thoughts and feelings. Freezing and retreating into the head becomes the only move available. Overthink, overthink, overthink. Years later, those overthinking muscles are Schwarzenegger level.
Muscles can be retrained. Managing how much you think and how much you absorb is an emotional boundary, built slowly as your nervous system learns that hypervigilance isn't required to stay safe. Start with curious questions. Which situations invite me to absorb too much? When have I absorbed less, and what made that possible?
6. Stop Kicking the Can of Peace Down the Road
Presence must be learned if peace is to be felt. A hypervigilant body scans and scans and scans, hoping and praying, watching for the next danger. What we look for, we find, and every moment starts to feel dangerous.
Many highly sensitive people carry a quiet belief: I get to feel peaceful once the world around me calms down. It sounds like one plus one equals two. The catch is that external life will always hold something unfair, something out of left field, something we never chose and do not appreciate. Waiting for perfect calm means every postponement kicks the can of your own peace a little further down the road. Claim some peace NOW, in this season, even in the hardest seasons. Shame will be a sneaky bastard here, insisting that peace should feel easy after a life spent training for the stress Olympics. Peace takes practice. Atrophied muscles can grow back.
7. Highly Sensitive People Need Room for Mistakes
You are earthside for the very first time, figuring out every single day as you go, so perfectionism that demands a mistake-free life is asking the impossible. Many of us nod along with "yeah, yeah, everybody makes mistakes" while quietly holding ourselves to a standard nobody could meet. No dysfunctional family does patience and compassion well, so most of us have to learn what self-patience sounds like in the head, looks like in behavior, and feels like inside. Your best changes day to day, and you're allowed patience and compassion on the days your best looks smaller.
8. Your Worth Belongs to Your One Precious Life
You are important. You matter! This is your one precious life, and your worth was never the property of a parent who treated you like a possession.
9. Your Peace Depends on How Much Life Force You Give Away
No one can stop a people pleaser from pouring life force into everyone else, and plenty of us give away most of it without blinking. The question is how much of your own energy you will allow yourself to invest in your own life. Watching a full-fledged adult behave like a twelve-year-old in the family system, simply because the other adults expect it, is watching peace get spent on an old role. Your peace grows when your energy has somewhere to go besides everyone else's needs.
10. Overthinking a Change Can Be Stalling
To change, you must change. When there's no new thought left to think about a decision, more overthinking is just stalling, and a loving kick in the ass may be the kindest move available.
11. Trauma Survivors Get to Be the Authority Figure
For trauma survivors raised in a narcissistic family system, or tangled up with master manipulators, claiming your own authority is how you stop feeling like an imposter adult. Birthdays keep coming after 18, yet without owning our yeses and our nos, our wins and our losses, we keep looking for approval like a small child looking up at a parent. Handing decisions to someone else feels safe because nobody can blame us if things go sideways. It also means hiding from living.
Highly sensitive people are reluctant leaders. We walk into a room and see what's missing, what could flow better, then hang back because leading hasn't always been welcomed. A real leader does the next right thing without polling the flock. If you are not the authority figure in your own life, who the hell is?
This is your one precious life. You are allowed to own it. Take the reins!
Light and love, y'all.
Episode Tags
- ADD 1
- Abuse 17
- Alcohol 3
- Anger 11
- Archetypes 1
- Bullying 6
- Childhood 38
- Codependency 11
- Covid 4
- Crystal Catalina 4
- Depression 15
- Detachment 2
- Disassociation 4
- Discomfort 1
- Emotions 75
- Existentialism 2
- Faith 1
- Family 28
- Fatigue 4
- Focus 3
- Gratitude 12
- Grief 14
- Guilt 2
- Healers 7
- Healing 52
- High Sensation 4
- Hope 1
- Hypervigilance 7
- Introverts 6
- Lonliness 10
- Love 3
- Manifesting 5
- Manipulation 20
- Masculinity 1
- Men 1
- Mindfulness 39
- Money 10
- Music 3
- Nutrition 2
- Overthinking 8
- PTSD 13
- Parenting 12
- People Pleasing 10
- Perfectionism 8
- Pets 4
- Relationships 23
- Resiliency 14
- Sadness 1
- Self Esteem 19
- Self Love 11
Episode Tags
- ADD 1
- Abuse 17
- Alcohol 3
- Anger 11
- Archetypes 1
- Bullying 6
- Childhood 38
- Codependency 11
- Covid 4
- Crystal Catalina 4
- Depression 15
- Detachment 2
- Disassociation 4
- Discomfort 1
- Emotions 75
- Existentialism 2
- Faith 1
- Family 28
- Fatigue 4
- Focus 3
- Gratitude 12
- Grief 14
- Guilt 2
- Healers 7
- Healing 52
- High Sensation 4
- Hope 1
- Hypervigilance 7
- Introverts 6
- Lonliness 10
- Love 3
- Manifesting 5
- Manipulation 20
- Masculinity 1
- Men 1
- Mindfulness 39
- Money 10
- Music 3
- Nutrition 2
- Overthinking 8
- PTSD 13
- Parenting 12
- People Pleasing 10
- Perfectionism 8
- Pets 4
- Relationships 23
- Resiliency 14
- Sadness 1
- Self Esteem 19
- Self Love 11
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For the Highly Sensitive Person who wants meditation without distraction. No intros, no explanations, no outros. Just you, Nikki, and meditation. This pack includes 6 separate tracks and over and hour of audio meditations in HD quality. Using mindfulness, we focus the mind and train your attention and awareness, to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. Meditation may help reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and pain, and enhance peace, perception, self-concept, well-being, and improve our overall mental-health.
*All files are 320k/MP3 format.
Coping Strategy for Stress and Flow (11:52)
Overcoming Bullying Meditation & Mantra (13:10)
Forest Meditation - An immersive nature experience (22:13)
Cultivating Safe Space Within (19:21)
The Space Between Meditation (10:16)
Binaural Beats Brain Wave Trance Experience (14:02)
*Bonus - Binaural Beats Brain Wave Trance Experience - Instrumental Version (14:02)