Sensitive Is The New Strong

Do you remember who you were before the world told you who you were "supposed" to be? 

This is a conversation we were having in my Super Sensitives Facebook group this weekend. An it strikes me as such a profound question- particularly for sensitive souls. If you're like me, growing up sensitive you so often were told you were too dramatic, too emotional, and that you were overreacting to things. You were told you cry too much, and that you shouldn't be so upset by this or that thing. You were bombarded with negative feedback from the world that was telling you that you weren't being the way you were supposed to be. And as a sensitive, you absorbed that feedback to your core. 

You then started to feel that you were different... in a bad way. You felt flawed. And because it seemed the world was always reflecting back to you that your feelings and reactions were somehow incorrect, you began to distrust yourself. And you began to distrust your own feelings. Since you were being told that what you see and feel is not real- you wanted to disconnect from those feelings. Both because you felt you could no longer rely on them, and because they were often so big and scary. They were painful and you didn't know how to deal with them. 

So many highly sensitive people grow up distrusting and disconnecting from our gut and our intuition. We start to try to mold ourselves to who the world is telling us to be. We so deeply want to make other people happy and live up to their expectations. And so we become perfectionists, always striving to fit in and do the "right" thing. But is what we are doing "right" for us? When you disconnect from your truth, from your feelings, how can you truly know what is right anymore? This is how we become stuck living by other people's rules.
 

So I challenge you, sensitives, to start to question these beliefs you have grown up with and what you have been told. Look within. That is where the truth lies. Start to pick apart the layers of labels, judgements, criticisms, and all the things you have taken on as truth. They are lies. They are not yours. As you dig through them and see them as the false judgements they are you can start to discard them one by one. 

Because the reality is that Highly Sensitive people only make up 20% of the population. So that is 80% of people who are not like you. No wonder you felt different! But the point of this is not to demonize that other 80%. They are not bad people. It is not "us against them". Most of the time when people criticize you for your sensitivity it is because they do not understand it. And people are afraid of what they don't understand.

So even if you've been called weak more times than you can count, I want you to know that you are actually extremely brave. You are not weak. You have a super power and it is an incredible gift. Look at it this way- going through life with the volume turned all the way up is really, really hard. Not to mention absorbing the emotions of everyone around you, and feeling things at such a deeper level that most people cannot understand. And you get up every day and go out and live your life with this extra weight on your shoulders. This extra volume. This extra depth. And you get up and you go through out your day as a silent warrior. Misunderstood. Not completely seen for who you are or what you are carrying on a daily basis. You are extremely strong. You are incredibly brave. You see the pains of the world and that makes you want to fix them, to heal people, to create change on this earth. The world needs you, sensitive warrior. In a time when so many people are becoming more and more shut down and closed off I encourage you to continue to stand in your beautiful, vulnerable, and authentic truth. You are a deep feeler and that is beautiful and it is needed. 

Don't let the world define who you are. You get to make that choice. Only you. Start asking yourselves this: do you remember who you were before the world told you who you were supposed to be? Who is it that you WANT to be? What is your truth underneath all of those layers of what you've been told. Start getting in touch with that part of yourself. Start repairing your relationship with your feelings. That is where your true power lies. You were born with a divine gift. And don't let the world tell you anything different. 

XOXO