The Real Cure for Feeling Misunderstood as an HSP (Hint: It’s Not Just Finding “Your People”)

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why finding people who get you isn’t the full solution to feeling misunderstood as an HSP.

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 feeling misunderstood runs deeper than just not fitting in. The surprising role, shame plays in keeping you stuck, and the simple shift that helps you stop handing your self worth over to other people. 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, what can we do when we feel misunderstood or different from others?

This can happen easily. As a highly sensitive person, we make up only 20% of the world’s population, and while that’s still a significant number, it’s still a minority and a lot of people. I think that being sensitive is a weakness or that there’s something wrong with you or that you need to do something to fix that.

And so it’s easy to feel misunderstood and then to take that personally, especially as a highly sensitive person, because we do, we are sensitive to those kinds of judgements. So the first attempt to. Deal with this feeling of misunderstanding and to feel better about ourselves. And it can be very helpful actually, is to be around other people who also are similar.

In other words, be around other highly sensitive people. And this is of great value. If you’re in a group of people who are all highly sensitive, you can see that you’re not abnormal. There’s something okay with the way you are, and this can be very healing. But this is not the whole healing. It’s a part of it.

Because what we’re actually doing is now still being dependent on an outside group for our feeling of having a good identity for being for being like a person who is worthy in a way. So this points to what is actually at the root of this feeling of being misunderstood, and why is this stressful?

For me, it has to do with shame. And shame means I want to be accepted. And if you don’t accept me, then I feel bad. I feel ashamed, I feel like an outsider, or that there’s something wrong with me. And I think this is a social. Part of being in a social environment and there’s, this happens frequently.

There’s always a sorting, there’s a pecking order. There’s all kinds of things happening, and there’s outsiders and insiders and anyone who’s in a minority of any kind is going to feel a little bit on the outside and they may start to go into shame, which is where you’re starting to take that on for yourself and start thinking there really is something wrong with yourself.

The problem is the reference point is on the outside, and we grew up this way. It’s normal society ha is a powerful influence for human beings and we’re social animals. And so the problem is we just take it too far and we can end up using that external point of reference too much when it’s no longer serving us.

And yes, changing the point of reference, being in a group of all highly sensitive people will change the whole group and will help with that feeling of not being understood. And it’ll make you feel like you fit in more and will allow you to feel better about yourself. But what happens when you can’t be in that group or you’re in another group?

Maybe some of that will transfer and come with you. But you may start getting, falling into the same pattern again if you’re in a group of other people who maybe are not highly sensitive people and you’re getting that feeling of judgment coming from them. So the problem is really about having an outside reference for who you are.

Now, we do this naturally, as I said, we’re social animals. And we start with our parents. We start with needing everything from our parents, being dependent on our parents. And so we look to them for approval from a very young age. And that continues with us and it gets transferred out into society and other people besides our parents.

But we have a natural tendency to put. How people see us in a group or in a social setting, or even in any relationship as almost more important than how we see ourselves. And often I think this happens as kids, we we almost are trained not to pay attention to ourselves. We can be labeled as selfish or it can be labeled as something that is off or needs to be corrected.

And and we’re trained to go along to concede, to fit in. And while that’s part of being a social animal, and in one way, it’s nothing wrong with that on an interior level, if we get too identified with the society or with the group, we can end up feeling extra hurt by rejection or misunderstanding by those people.

The good thing is as we mature, if we actually look for it, we can find an identity inside of us that is independent of social approval. This takes stillness and it takes going against the trend where everybody’s looking for social approval, and if you’re looking for an internal sense of identity.

It takes some time. It takes some stillness. As I say, ironically, if you can find something inside of you that is really more who you are than just what other people reflect back to you, ironically, people often find this to be very attractive, and they may actually like to be around you because you’re so yourself, even though you’re different than them.

But regardless of their. Perception. Maybe they still don’t like you because you’re different. If you can find this feeling of who you are as independent from what people think you are, then it can develop a feeling of security in yourself. You can be who you are regardless of whether other people understand it or not.

And so this is a challenge for highly sensitive people because we are so attuned to everybody. We’re tuned in, we’re aware of everything in our environment, including social interactions, and we’re very tuned into this. So for us to find this stillness, it requires being, spending some time alone, doing some inner work, looking inward, and finding that as a new point of reference compared to.

The normal outside reference, the good news as a highly sensitive person is that we are interested in depth, and so depth is found so beautifully on the inside, and when we turn our attention that way, it begins to reveal itself and it becomes a contender with the outside approval that comes from everywhere else, or doesn’t come from everywhere else.

So it takes strength to refer to ourselves, and it’s something that takes takes time. It’s something that we have to culture in a way, and it requires asking ourselves what we think, so often we ask what’s the right way? Or what do they think? What would they do? Would they approve?

We’re thinking about what do they think? That’s the reference out outside. But the real question is what do I think? What do I see? What do I observe? What am I experiencing? If I can stay with my own experience, if I can become more aware of what my own experience is, and then stay with that and become more solid in that’s how this.

Begins to grow and then what other people think becomes less and less important. Two things help with this in my experience. One is meditation. And this is a long-term help. It’s not something that just instantly changes it, but it can go quicker too. But my experience is that it begins to open up the inner world and it begins to give the.

The reference of something beautiful on the inside. There’s something there, there’s something abstract, which is not connected to society or what people think, and it comes from within. So this can give a kind of competence that allows you to be different even when others are disapproving. A more short term effect, short term help I could say is the work of Byron Katie, which helps us find ourselves again in any specific situation and can often change our perspective of how that how that situation really looks.

And what is our inner experience. The work always points me back to myself. It asks me, what do you think? It asks me, is that true for you? What’s your experience? And it asks me to look in ways that I may not have thought to look. So it opens up resources and ideas that I may not have seen otherwise.

So however you do it, there are many ways, but coming back in towards yourself, finding your own genuine experiences, landing there. Can be such a help when you’re in a minority situation when other people are thinking there’s something off. Or as we highly sensitive, people often get, oh, you’re too sensitive.

So the feeling I’m left with today is that I exist independently and this is a sweet feeling that I am and I am. Okay. Regardless. What others see, this beginning of independence is the beginning of freedom and the beginning of being in touch with all the gifts that I actually have to give. In this episode, we looked at why feeling misunderstood runs deeper than just not fitting in, because it’s not just being around people who get you or like you.

It’s being independent of even the need to be liked, that gives freedom. We also looked at the surprising role shame plays in keeping you feeling stuck. And I think this is something that all people in minorities face is the feeling of shame. I’m not quite the same as everyone and I’m less than, or I’m less less a part of the mainstream.

And so recognizing this and doing work around shame can be extremely freeing. I. And finally we looked at the simple shift that helps you stop handing your worth over to other people. And that is a shift towards looking inward, asking yourself, what do I think? What’s my experience? If you’re basing your life on your own direct experience, you’re on solid ground.

If you’re basing your life on what other people think, it’s not so solid. So thanks for listening. It’s great to explore this with you. And as always, this podcast comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.