How to Stop Taking Criticism Personally (Even If It Is Personal) So You Can Reduce Overwhelm as a Highly Sensitive Person

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to stop taking criticism personally, even when it is personal, so you can stay grounded instead of unraveling.

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 telling yourself, don’t take it personally, backfires when the judgment is real, the hidden cost of pretending you’re not hurt and what to do instead. And how to build internal space between the moment you’re criticized and the spiral that usually follows. 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.

You finally sent the email. You spent over an hour rewriting it to get the tone just right, making sure it was thoughtful, clear, respectful, and then your cowork coworker replies. Next time, these just get to the point. That’s it. One line, but it hits like a slap. Your heart races. You reread your message three times, wondering if you were too wordy.

You start crafting a response in your head and then deleting it, and you try to shake it off like it’s not a big deal. They’re probably just stressed, but hours later you’re still looping. Feeling exposed, questioning yourself and wondering why one sentence can feel like such a punch to the gut. Many HSPs try to talk themselves out of feeling hurt by saying things like, don’t take it personally.

It’s not a big deal, but when someone really is judging you, when their tone, timing, and words are clearly loaded, trying to be above it doesn’t work. It actually just creates internal confusion and emotional self abandonment. You can’t BS your way to peace. This is called denial, so you have to be real, and that’s what this episode is about.

It also just doesn’t work to try to just get over it when you know that they weren’t trying to be mean, but it still hurts anyway. This kind of idea of just trying to get over it is it’s it’s a kind of spiritual bypassing you can say where you’re not actually holding the part of you that’s hurting.

It reminds me of the old Bob Newhart skit where he’s playing a therapist and telling his patients to just stop it. Just stop it. And if you’ve ever, if you’ve never seen it, just click on YouTube ’cause it’s a, it’s hilarious. We would never think of telling a child to just get over it or telling, if you’re a therapist telling a patient, just get over it.

That’s ridiculous. But this is what we tend to do to ourselves. Compassion means allowing the person’s hurt that’s hurting to not have to keep it together. They’re allowed to be vulnerable. They’re allowed to be human, and that’s what we need to allow ourselves to be as well. This is what happens if you ignore the hurt that you’re feeling, you will start to shut down.

You may feel angry or hurt, and you may not express that, but the feelings still persist inside. In fact, they grow when they’re not allowed to see the light of day. The other problem is you then can’t move on because you’re stuck in that, and it’s in a circular motion. So that moment lingers and it keeps replaying in your mind, and then the world starts to become smaller.

You no longer feel safe around that particular person. You may check them off your list. You may avoid them. You may pull back and you may start feeling less safe around people in general so that you start isolating more. And you may also start thinking that something’s wrong with you for being so sensitive.

After all, not everybody gets bothered by all this stuff, so there must be something wrong with me. And this also erodes that feeling of self-confidence. And then finally, you lose the chance to actually integrate what happened in a way that restores your clarity and power if you just push the pain aside.

It will fade over time. Give it enough time, it will fade away, but it doesn’t mean that it’s been dealt with and it hasn’t been integrated, and you haven’t actually grown as a result so that it’s just a sitting time bomb for next situation that will trigger it over time. This kind of denial of what’s really going on can erode your self trust and your trust in others.

And you can start to question your, even your own perceptions or your feelings your reality. It’s like gaslighting yourself. And you may still want connection, but you may start to think that it’s dangerous. And so over time you begin to withdraw, not just from one person, but from life in general. And this can leave you isolated and lonely, not because you don’t want closeness.

Because it stopped feeling safe for you. It’s like getting a splinter and pretending it’s not there. You can tell yourself it doesn’t hurt, but over time it may get infected and you may actually pull back from using that hand altogether. Not because you don’t want to, but because it aches every time you try.

That’s what unprocessed hurt does in relationships and in life. When you don’t look at it. It numbs your reach, it limits you. So here are a few common mistakes. One is pretending it doesn’t bother you. When it did easy to fall into that. We all like to pretend everything’s great, but as you, as we’ve just mentioned, it’s not very helpful in the end.

Another is rationalizing their behavior without processing your own emotional truth. It can be helpful to find understanding for where the other person is coming from. But if we do that in a way that denies our own experience or pushes down the hurt that we’re experiencing, then we actually are not processing what we need to be processing.

And then the other is replaying what happened, but never resolving it. It’s one, it’s, this is where just digging up the pain again and again without actually working through it. Is, can actually be more hurtful than letting it fade off in a way. So the thing is, you don’t have to be invincible to criticism and you don’t have to collapse with criticism either.

It’s not all or nothing. It’s not just one extreme or the other. Either you are perfect with criticism or you can’t handle any criticism. The triggered mind may think that way because when it’s triggered, it tends to think in black and white. But there is a way to honor your emotional truth and hold the other person’s humanity without losing yourself and finding this middle way has been where I have personally grown the most as a human being.

Over the past 20 years, I used to get triggered by my partner and I used to withdraw emotionally. It was a cycle and I did it frequently, and I could get down for days as a result of that until I learned how to find a kind of internal buffer, which helped me to process criticism better and experience it more objectively instead of taking it personally.

This starts with how you interpret what was said and it. Includes reclaiming the space between the stimulus, what they actually did or said, and the response what you, what your reactions are, how you handle it. If there’s no space between those two, you’re just gonna be, as soon as some criticism comes, you’re going to react and there’s gonna be no buffer there whatsoever.

But if you can build a little space in there, this is how you can create breathing room. This can help you even if a judgment is real, even if someone is seriously criticizing you. ’cause you can’t always control how criticism is going to come, when it’s going to come. You can’t control other people and you can’t always control how criticism will hit you in the moment either.

Sometimes it stings and your nervous system reacts before your mind can even catch up. Once you slow down and reflect on an experience with awareness, something powerful becomes clear. It’s not the words themselves that create lasting stress. It’s how you are interpreting them. If you believe that the comment means something is wrong with you, then it will spiral.

If you question that belief, you will regain power. You will find that healthy separation between you and the person who is criticizing you, and that allows you to stay balanced even though you’re highly sensitive. In that pause, you get to choose how much of it you actually carry. To help with this, I created a new worksheet called the Emotional Buffer Builder, and it shows you how to create internal space.

Between the trigger and the spiral, it uses my favorite tool for digesting stressful experiences called the work of Byron Katie. This little worksheet will walk you through how to process any stressful experience of criticism. So if you’ve ever felt like someone’s words pierced straight into you and it left you shaken for hours or even days.

But what you really want is a way to protect your peace without becoming cold or without becoming numb. That’s exactly why I created the Emotional Buffer Builder. It’s a micro practice to help you create a pause between what was said and how it lands so you can stay grounded and clear and calm even when someone is clearly judging you.

Just click on the first link in the show notes or visit true inner freedom.com/emotional-buffer. That’s true inner freedom dash.com/emotional-buffer. Enter your details and I’ll send you the emotional buffer builder.