Highly Sensitive Person: The Path of Childhood Trauma & Spiritual Hunger - Inner Work Library 11/500

it's very rare that you'll meet a highly sensitive person who hasn't survived some form of childhood trauma and doesn't have at least some degree of spiritual hunger this video is going to be my exploration of both these elements of the typical HSP highly sensitive person and a Step Beyond that identification my core intention with this video is to allow you to see yourself through these two lenses and also rapidly abandon that as a limiting identity construct which may be unfortunately keeping you trapped in a lower level of self-identification which Teeters towards self-victimization ultimately I want

you to be sensitive and empowered very rarely will you meet someone who has that high degree of internal sensitivity who hasn't already done their YouTube research and hasn't already watched at least a few videos where they confirm that yes indeed they do feel things significantly deeper than the majority of their friends and family if you're relating to these ideas then you've already done this before I don't need to go through the traits a quick Rapid Fire recap of feeling things deeply and having social burnout and being very attuned to people's passive aggressive kind of subconscious

conflict dynamic little glances and social environments and noises and sounds and fabrics this is all wonderful information but it's fundamentally a symptomatic outcropping in my opinion as something which was at least a little bit traumatic during childhood every highly sensitive person that I have had the pleasure to work with as they've gone through their empowerment process has needed to go through a predictable series of steps regarding boundary assertion the ability to say no and the ability to hold those boundaries and say nowhere appropriate and go into their own kind of internal world have an ability

to be a Hermit when it's possible and find out where their sensible limitations are in terms of social interactions being just one example but there comes an even more important point a more important elevation of someone's personality as someone who's highly sensitive which is really just a trait it's neither positive nor negative of course we could explore in many directions and there's many videos which do that wonderfully that's not what I want to do today the reason I'm making this video as a response to this question or this statement about my thoughts on highly sensitive

people so my thoughts on highly sensitive people is the childhood trauma and spiritual hunger are the double helix threads which unite every highly sensitive person that I've ever met and ever worked with to one degree or another the typical survival strategy for any highly sensitive person is to identify as something which is different this is very healing and this is wonderful it's super cathartic and very calming and very grounding to have something like a degree of community with strangers on the internet and comment sections who share their stories about being a highly sensitive person and

that might even be happening in the comments section of this video but at certain point it no longer becomes enough just to have a human identity as a highly sensitive person who's maybe experienced some degree of dissociation or derealization and over-stimulated environments what I mean by this is that the spiritual thirst or the self-actualizing impulse very rarely stays dormant the typical spiritual empath or someone who's leaning more towards that mystical spiritual way of relating to energy and souls and all of the new age or more mystical branches of Christianity or Islam or Hinduism all of

those more mystical elements of what it means to have faith they come to the Forefront very predictably on someone who's experienced a lot of [ __ ] in their childhood never really fit in as an adolescent and as an adult is trying to make sense of their internally heightened up experience of reality and try and figure out what to do with it ultimately the path of Revelation is not the path of Salvation And what I mean by this is that you can't stay trapped in either identity system for too long it's healthy and it's truly

empowering to recognize that you've been through experiences which weren't normal and that you're not normal in the sense of other people being normal but at a certain point you then become self-exclusatory and when the tragic traps are highly sensitive people run into is not figuring out how to truly hold on to that sensitivity to be able to connect with people much deeper to be able to see Beauty in the trees and listen to the water on the lake or the sense of euphoria and actually have a bit tougher skin when it's appropriate to be a

little bit rougher to be a little bit more rooted and if I change my energy right now to just show up in reality with the sense of solidity and purposefulness which comes from the boundary work and the saying of the no this is a lot that I'm bringing up in space for a very short conversation but I want it to be to the point the ultimate Point there's many many areas of this topic that I could go into but the ultimate point of every highly sensitive person I've worked with is the ability to retain their

sensitivity while also being firm and rigid and reliable where appropriate in the day-to-day mundane social interactions which they find themselves in sure don't go and work in the office that makes you feel like you want to throw up don't go and spend time with the family members or the friends that make you want to feel like you're being bombarded constantly with way too much energy but also don't let that be a limitation on your ability to expand into more conventional social environments it can be learned and this is something which I don't see very much

at all in the discourse around the highly sensitive person it becomes almost like a prescription or the signing of your fate that you will always remain this sensitive and therefore you should find a way to live outside of mainstream society which is cool I get it I don't want to be in the mainstream nine to five hustle and bustle kind of waste of life because I'm a creative person situation at the same time it's appropriate to assess in what way are you avoiding adult mature responsibility because your high sensitivity is being used as an excuse

I've had to do this work in myself I've remembered many social situations where I kind of deplete my social charge and I just need to be left alone sometimes for multiple days in a row and into London just the other week and met with two incredible men and I'm still recovering energetically from being in that City a week later sure am I being being way too soft being way too sensitive but for me I know my healthy boundaries I'm not going to let my sensitivity keep me from going to have a wonderful experience with great

friends in an admittedly very stimulating environment but I also know when to be in a stimulating environment when it would help me to build that muscle a little bit more it's something like assertiveness training and it's also a key element to pay attention to when it comes to not going towards the spiritual bypass something that I talk about on this channel seemingly every other week the spiritual bypass of the highly sensitive person is to get too wrapped up into the egoic spiritual identity that they are something like a highly attuned highly evolved empath who is

here to serve the world in their unique way and their sensitivity as a gift yes it's a gift but the number of highly sensitive people who have that identity structure that they are gifted but fail to externalize that gift in a professional capacity is truly a tragedy if you recognize that you have the highly sensitive skill set why not professionalize into something which benefits from that skill set for myself personally I earn my way in the world through one-to-one contact with people going through great internal emotional imaginal psychic unconscious conflicts which require a really high

degree of sensitivity because I need to listen to the words which aren't said I need to see the pictures which aren't shown and hold all of these energies for many months at a time for several different people at once that requires a skill set of high sensitivity but what a shame that there's so many thousands of people maybe someone watching this video right now who has recognized that they have a tuning that would give them an advantage in a certain professional skill set like working one-to-one with people or very commonly as well the Creative Vision

to have the ability to see the world and engage with the world or maybe engage with the movements in your body in a way which other people don't have access to and not find a way to make that your full-time occupation I don't think it's a wise choice if you truly want to honor and what you see as being an identity which is valuable the empath identity which makes you feel like you know you're something quite different and quite special we can talk about it honestly and openly that's how you feel when you've accepted that

you are a highly sensitive person because otherwise the alternative is to take that in the negative view which is then I'm a highly sensitive person what was me and I'm gonna be under the boot of the world every single day of my life sometimes it can feel like that if you've already gone to the positive inflation the trick for not getting too grandiose and not doing just uh pump the hot air into your head and then actually lose the ability to do something marvelous with your skill set it's worth considering Charter trauma is a tragic

background but many people who do the childhood trauma genuine inner work healing work for multiple years in addition to having new useful seasonal identifications with their wounds this is the same as someone who has something like attention deficit disorder or a diagnosis of clinical depression and how often do we hear stories where people take a diagnosis like that and then through their willpower and community support and finding the right resources they heal who made the diagnosis usually it's one doctor or maybe two doctors in a very short time frame with a 15-minute appointment and hears

the pills off you go little Johnny you're this way for life consider that same framing for the highly sensitive person I'm not trying to disvalidate anybody's experience of what they perceive to be their identity but if your identity is limited to a label like HSP literally three letters and you want to build an entire reality around that diagnosis without professionalizing it to its highest level of potential he might be missing something so ultimately my thoughts on the highly sensitive person I think it's a trait I don't think it's a destiny that can be either fully

positive or fully negative as often a hell of a lot of Darkness a hell of a lot of family conflict in the background of every highly sensitive person and what I want to see is more of a genuine adult effort to maximize those rare resources that you have as a highly sensitive person to do something wonderful in the world not to run away from the world not to be unwilling and stay in the shadow as kind of worried about the world maybe it's no simplification but that's still tragically the common trend for most sensitive empathic

people what if you could extend that what if you could plant your seeds in the garden of the world I'm going to stay with the metaphor not the best language but what if you could plant those sensitive seeds and sensitively and patiently let them grow and let you know let it be something let it come into the world rather than keeping it to yourself it is possible I think I'll leave it there that's actually I don't need to say any more on the topic it's come through I've witnessed firsthand for myself that as someone is

very sensitive to be able to professionalize both creatively and also in a therapeutic capacity that ability to experience deeply I don't think I could have done any better with the cards I would doubt I was dealt ultimately it's up to you to decide which Avenue you're going to express yourself in typically it's going to be something related to creativity or one-to-one therapeutic kind of healing energy that's the general Trend because of course how could it be anything else when it's childhood trauma and spiritual hunger you combine the two together and isn't that just the mystical

creative person but don't let it be something that you do only on the weekends or only for a few hours in the evening or only with a few friends why not make your life why not amplify that skill set which you've been given through trauma maybe and that's [ __ ] tragic but it's not going to be changed but you can change the way that you relate to yourself and relate to others with that very special gift and that's hopefully the inspirational message that I'll leave this on next video in the series I'm actually going

to do it over here I normally go the other way throw it over there and it's going to be pretty useful because well every topic hopefully is useful I'll see you over there