5 Ways Highly Sensitive People Internalize Judgment — And What To Do About It

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to recognize the subtle ways you internalize judgment as a highly sensitive person, and how to shift those patterns with clarity, compassion, and calm.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm. Eliminate stress and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why a simple pause, sigh, or silence can feel like deep rejection for HSPs and what it really means. The sneaky ways you might turn feedback into self-criticism without realizing it, and one powerful mindset shift to stop chasing unspoken approval and start grounding yourself from within.

This is an addition of strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person. Have you ever walked away from a conversation replaying what you said and wondering if you sounded awkward or too much, or not enough for highly sensitive people?

Judgment doesn’t always come from outside, from other people. It often comes from within. In this episode, we’re exploring five ways HSPs tend to internalize judgment and how to gently shift each one. The first one I wanna look at is reading tone as truth. This is a big one because a lot of communication is through tone.

They say a huge percentage of what we understand from another person comes from their tone, but. We can become too literal. With that, we can end up using that to make ourselves more stressed than we need to be. So for example, you may hear somebody sigh or you may hear a pause, or you may hear a neutral tone.

Or worse yet, it frustrated. Or angry. Or condescending. Tone. These tones though, they do. They’re not fake. They are real. They’re there. We can often interpret those to mean there’s something wrong with us. In other words, we failed because somebody’s upset someone size and we assume that they’re pointing that at us.

This happened to me a lot with my partner. He was sometimes sigh. I used to think it was really like I had done something wrong. He was really upset. And what I found over time was that this is just how he expresses himself without pointing it that much. And even if it is pointed at me, it’s often how he’s seeing the situation, not necessarily that I did something wrong.

So one thing that can help to diffuse this. Stress around tone is to like pause for a moment and ask what am I making this mean about me? Somebody’s sigh. What am I making that mean about me? That I did something to disappoint them. In other words like that, I’m responsible for their stressful experience.

This is putting a lot on myself and. As I look at it closely, and this requires meditation and inward thinking, but when I look at it closely, I find that how people experience life, their frustrations, their anger, their disappointment, all of that is really in their own world and I can’t really influence it that much.

So when I take on the responsibility of being the one to keep them always happy, or to keep them from being disappointed. Then I can judge myself as a failure, and this is not really fair to myself. Another thing that can help is just to look at alternative meanings, like what’s another way of explaining this situation?

Why did they sigh? What was going on? Are they tired or were they distracted? Were they thinking about something else? Was it related to something we just said, or was it related to something they just remembered out of the blue? Just thinking about these possibilities can open up the idea that it’s not necessarily directly connected to what I did.

And even if it is directly connected, how is it that their interpretation of the situation is making them sigh more than what I actually did? So the next one I’d like to look at is the idea that. It’s easy to believe that silence equals disapproval. Somebody doesn’t respond, somebody doesn’t engage, and your brain fills in the worst.

Oh my God, they don’t like me, they’re upset with me. They they don’t want to be friends with me or in a relationship with me anymore. So this is just a interesting. Thing that we do with our minds filling in the worst. And it is really worth questioning, really worth looking at. You can look at the idea that they’re upset with me because of that silence and question.

It, I use the work of Byron Katie for this. You can just question it freeform. But the idea is that you may be making something up that may not actually be true. It may be true, but it may also not be true. And opening up to the possibility that it isn’t can soften the self-judgment that happens when you believe it.

The problem with believing is once I believe something and I’m holding onto it, then I hold it to be true and I act as if it is true. And so now the silence literally does mean that they are disapproving of me, and as a result. I’m gonna go through all the stress response of believing that. But if I can throw a little bit of doubt on that, ’cause I really don’t know, then I can have a hold it with a little bit of a question in mind and it’s not going to get me down as deeply as it would if I believed it fully.

So just that little bit of questioning can help a lot. The third area where we can internalize judgment is by turning critiques into character flaws. So what I mean by that is that somebody makes a small correction next time try this or do you mind? Or even the old it works for me if you do this or it doesn’t work for me when you do this, these are maybe people trying to be.

Gentle with us, but we still see it as a correction. And then as highly sensitive people, we tend to hold onto that and go deep with it, and we can end up believing at the core that there’s something actually wrong with me. I’m not good enough. I am a failure. There’s something wrong with me. So the key here is to separate this one moment.

This one piece of criticism, this one thing that you did or didn’t do from who you actually are. So yeah, maybe I burnt the toast, but it doesn’t mean that I’m a terrible person. It doesn’t mean that I’m a failure. It doesn’t mean I’m a terrible cook. We used to have in our household I boil over the milk ’cause we make yogurt at night and boil over the milk and it’d get on the stove and it’d just be a big mess.

And. I used to get upset with that and my partner would comment, oh, you did it again. And, that would just throw me into this. I am a failure. It was a terrible day. I’m no good. I can’t manage a simple task. So I. This is the mind exaggerating a situation and making it more than it actually is, and taking it on the ego level, taking it on, this is who I am, rather than, okay, yeah, I screwed up, or I did this, or here’s a, you’re giving me some suggestion that could actually improve my game.

And that could be actually very helpful. So you may want to take a critique that you’ve received from someone and try just, journaling for a moment and rewriting it as a more neutral observation. What are they actually trying to tell you? Can you get on board with it? Is it helpful? Is it just them venting?

Any of that can be very interesting to explore from a more objective point of view. The fourth area where we can internalize judgment is by seeking unspoken approval. And what I mean by that is that we often will, or I can speak for myself anyway, I will overextend, overexplain people please, just to avoid potential judgment.

So I’m going overboard. I’m like overcompensating. Being extra nice, extra careful, extra conscientious in order to avoid judgment. And I, even though I really love approval and I look for approval, I’m actually, when I’ve thought about it closely, I’m more motivated by avoiding disapproval. And so for that reason, I tend to go overboard.

I tend to move towards perfectionism. Because I can’t tolerate if even one person has a little bit of criticism, which was the point we just looked at. So what we can do with this kind of looking, seeking for approval, is to look at the need that we believe we have. I need their approval. I need them to not disapprove of me.

And question it. Is that really true? Do I really need that to be okay? To be safe, to be right? Even separating myself from the other person is one of the big challenges for empathetic people and highly sensitive people are empathetic. So separating in a healthy way where yeah I know actually in this case I am right, but I am I’m not.

Worried that you don’t understand that. And it’s more like I’m right for myself and it makes sense for me and I’m gonna stand by that, but I’m not worried whether you are not agreeing. So it’s a quiet thing that has to happen. This is where I would point again to the work of Byron Katie because it’s a way to, in a very deep and.

Internal way separate. What is my business from, what is your business? And get really clear about my attachment to the needs that I have when I believe I need your approval. I am dependent on you. And if you’re approving, I’m happy. If you’re not approving, I’m not happy. And if I can separate that and question it and turn it around to.

I don’t need your approval, then there’s freedom there. So this is a huge area to explore. You have to do it in your own way with your own situations, but it can be very freeing. And finally, the fifth area where we as HSPs tend to internalize judgment is this idea of judging ourselves first to lessen the blow.

And what I mean by that is that. We will self criticize, self deprecate, put ourselves down as a kind of defense strategy. It’s a coping mechanism where we will you know, cower and lower ourself so that others may have mercy on us instead of taking it out on us. And this works to a certain degree.

There’s there’s not, we didn’t just make this up. There is value in that because people do respect humility, and if we are we can sometimes avoid the wrath of other people. But the problem is it becomes a kind of tactic. It becomes a kind of manipulation. And the worst part about it is that it can become habitual and we end up continuing to put ourselves down even when we shouldn’t be putting ourselves down.

So it becomes this pattern. And it may not be appropriate to the actual situation. It can prevent us from receiving compliments. It can prevent us from just acting in a confident way. And so the way to work with this is to look at what is the reality. Reality will hold you. The story in my mind is that I’m not safe.

I need to lower myself, otherwise someone else is gonna lower me for me. And I don’t want that. So is it really true? Am I really not safe? Can I just be a little bit more strong and will I be okay? ’cause there may be a lot of times when that is completely fine and nobody is going to attack you for it.

And on top of that, if you are if you are constantly criticizing yourself, then you hold back the gifts that you have to share with others. So the way to deal with this is to look at the reality of the situation. What is my actual ability here? And I’m not gonna try to pretend to be greater than my ability, but I’m also not gonna try to pretend to be less than my ability, either one of those is what I tend to think of as ego.

Ego is I’m pretending to be something different than what I am, and I may be pretending to be better than I am, or I may be pretending to be worse than I am. In both cases, it’s not really honest, it’s not really true. So let me just be what I actually am and then I will be able to relate with people.

I will be able to be confident when I should be confident, and I’ll be non-confident when I shouldn’t be confident, shouldn’t be non-confident. In other words, I’m gonna be appropriate to each situation because I’m in touch with the reality of it.

So judgment is something that can hurt. It hurts when we believe that it’s, there’s something wrong with us. If it comes from other people, we can feel hurt by that, but we can also feel hurt by judging ourselves, and we are often our own worst critics. So listen to that critic. Take notes what it’s actually saying, and this is how I actually question my thoughts.

I will listen to that inner critic and write down literally what it’s saying. Oh, you’re a failure. Oh, that was a terrible job. This means you should quit your job. Anything like that and then question it. Look at it. Be realistic about it. Imagine what it would be like if you didn’t have that thought.

And try on opposites. Try on turnarounds to see if you can find a balance that is more in touch with reality. In this episode, we looked at why a simple pause, or a sigh or a silence can feel like deep rejection for HSPs. We saw that the reason for that is that we can end up judging ourselves. We can end up taking that and making it mean something about us that may or may not be true.

And what we can really do to balance that is to look at what’s, what are the potential other explanations for a pause or a silence or a tone of voice that maybe don’t have so much to do with us. We also looked at the sneaky ways. You may turn feedback into self-criticism without even realizing it, and this can happen so quickly.

We just believe from some point some little thing that’s being pointed to us that the whole of us is bad. This relates to perfectionism, it relates to ego and to. Pretending to be better than we are or wishing that we were better than we are. And when we take feedback with that mindset, we can end up thinking that even a tiny bit of badness means that we are completely bad.

And the way to turn that around is to separate the criticism, separate the pointing out of some flaw as. Separate from who I actually am. And that’s great news when I actually am open to it. ’cause now I can use that feedback to improve and to grow. And we also looked at one powerful mindset shift to stop chasing unspoken approval and start grounding ourselves from within.

And that mindset shift is to look at. Our reality looked at who we actually are and stopped trying to be something that we aren’t. If we’re trying to be too much, we’re going to feel bad. When somebody finds a flaw for trying to be too little, then we’re gonna be unable to accept good praises and kudos that come when we’re not expecting them.

So play with this. There are lots of things you can do here, but it’s an interesting area to explore and I look forward to more explana explorations with you in the near future. In the meantime, have a great rest of your day.