When you’re highly-sensitive, being aware of emotions is a bigger benefit than what you’re generally led to believe. You understand others’ emotions better, dedicate yourself to someone you care for more willingly and crave for deep and meaningful relationships.
Being highly-sensitive helps you have more substantial conversations, enjoy feelings of happiness with even greater intensity, and help others through their sadness with a higher understanding.
But even as you are able to experience emotions better, you suffer them even worse too. Seeing a hungry dog on a street or suffering the loss of a loved one can feel like your chest is being sucked from the inside. And when you are a victim of a heartbreak, the disbelief is immense.
Being highlly-sensitive can make emotions seem overwhelming.
Problems with being highly sensitive
Having the capacity to feel the full extent of an emotion allows very little management over stress, witnessing violence, pain, and the urge to cry. Highly-sensitive people carry their heart on their sleeve and are prone to suffer stronger grief over a situation or a person they had deemed as meaningful.
Because of that, they might be considered cry-babies or dramatic, taking situations in which others would handle with a cool-headed demeanor, they go to any extent to solve it and make things better wherever they can. This can result in perceiving people with high-sensitivity to be overbearing when really all they want is for the situation to turn out better for those involved.
When suffering a heartbreak, highly-sensitive people feel like a wave has crashed over them, with a brief moment of disbelief before the shock of having this relationship so much invested in turns to shreds. And being of the type who crave love and affection, finding themselves unable to receive that from the one person they thought they would always get it from, just as they would in return and in abundance, makes it seem like all trust between them has been shattered and they will desperately try to fix it.
Just like you cannot avoid emotions, a highly-sensitive person cannot avoid theirs. In the end, their emotions are felt ten-fold and must learn to protect themselves in some way, even if it means keeping themselves from others for a while.
A little alone time is best to begin understanding the onslaught of emotions you can feel.
Ways to protect your high-sensitivity
When you are hurt, as a highly-sensitive person you have to do everything possible not to let your emotions overwhelm you. The feeling of grief is great, and you feel like you need to find a desperate solution to the pain, but first, you must understand that now is the time to calm your emotions and settle down your mind.
Keep away from whatever the root of your grief is, and let yourself comprehend how you feel. This is when your mind is going to rash conclusions, ruminating over what happened, looking for the cause, the mistakes that led to the pain.
Stop it, don’t look for the problem again and let yourself feel the emotions.
When you do, ask yourself what really happened? What made you feel this way? What did the person do and what did you do in response? Analyze the blame or the mistakes and don’t let it torment you in such a way that you could inflict any harm on yourself.
Instead, see what you can gain from the pain. What did you learn from it? How can you prevent this in the future, if you had a hand in the blame? Was it really just the other person unwilling to show care, or something completely external? What did the person do to help with the situation?
Think over your feelings and this way you can find answers for them.
Understanding that emotions are not guilty
The blame is never completely your own. A problem is not only caused by one person. It can be a series of mistakes, yes, but sometimes these mistakes are lessons rather than punishments.
Being highly-sensitive allows you to take these sufferings and integrate them into your already better understanding of emotions. Your expectations within a future situation may change, and the guilt you felt over the situation is a normal reaction to it. You’re now aware that pain happens, and it is what we do with it that can make you a better and happier emotional being.