The Secret to Handling Criticism as a Highly Sensitive Person Without Overwhelm or Stress

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to work with criticism so that it doesn’t get you.

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 criticism hurts so much for highly sensitive people, how to do the inner work necessary to become resilient to criticism and what life can look like when the fear of criticism is reduced. 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.

Here’s a tiny situation that got me repeatedly in the early days of my marriage. I would unknowingly leave a cup door open and my partner would say something like this, why do you always leave doors open? Or other times he would say, but he wouldn’t say anything. He would just sigh, just be like.

And in either case it felt like a criticism and I would react emotionally. Have you ever had a similar experience at work or at home as highly sensitive people? Criticism tends to get to us more than it gets to others. Why is that? First of all, as highly sensitive people, we value harmony, and so criticism can feel like a failure to maintain harmony.

Not to mention that it feels dis, non harmonious in and of itself. So this is something that we tend to avoid, and then when it happens, we can feel overwhelmed. Secondly, it can also feel like a failure to do things that if we don’t do things well, we like to do things well, and we often judge ourselves if we fall short.

If I pride myself on doing things well, which is common for highly sensitive people, then it like having something pointed out to me that where I didn’t do a good job, I left the cupboard door open it, it really crashes that down and messes with my identity of being somebody who does do things well or at least tries to do things well.

It can even go into feeling like it’s not fair. I try so hard. I do so much more than you even know, and you’re picking on the one thing that I didn’t do. And so a lot of energy can come out of this next as highly sensitive people. We care about what other, what others think we tend to, and when they’re not happy, it’s easy again for us to feel like we’ve failed or that there’s something.

Just not right. It’s not what we were ideally shooting for, and that can get to us as well emotionally also for everyone. I think for just about everyone in the world, criticism can be painful, but for highly sensitive people, we feel emotions more strongly than other people. This is part of our wiring and it’s a good thing.

It helps us avoid pain and it makes us alert and skilled at avoiding it. But when it comes through anyway, then it can feel, we can actually feel that pain more strongly than others and almost amp it up in a way because of our sensitivity. And so it feels like an even bigger thing when criticism comes through.

And then finally, as highly sensitive people, we process our experiences deeply. We tend to unpack the potential hidden meanings. In something. And so when criticism comes, we tend to look at what does that really meaning? My partner doesn’t really like me, or I’ll never be good enough, or things like that.

So how do you do the inner work necessary to become more resilient to criticism, to do this kind of inner work? The first important thing to do is to create a very safe space for yourself. A space where you’re not trying to fix yourself. But you’re showing up just there to be there to hold the emotional part of you that got triggered and to work with it on its level to find new understanding.

If you come with any kind of desire to fix yourself or improve yourself or get over it in some way, you’re going to add a lot of pressure and create a lot of unsafety inside of yourself. This emotional part of you that got triggered. It just got triggered, and so if you try to just negate its experience, push it away, try to change it too quickly, what happens is it will just shrink and close down and will be uncooperative to do this work with you.

It’s also essential to take a specific situation and hold it when you’re working with criticism. This is like holding the world in miniature. Which makes it much easier to work with and ends up making it much more meaningful. When you work with a real situation, any situations or any insights you discover will be connected to your real experience.

And this is essential if there’s gonna be any kind of transformation. Otherwise you’re just, you would just be doing some kind of intellectual exercise. This is emotional work. This is deep work, and it requires holding some situation that is real so that you’re dealing with real situation, dealing with real emotions.

You know what you’re talking about. The next step is to identify who as the offender in that moment where the criticism came. And this is usually easy. It’s just the person that gave you the criticism. But it’s important to really focus on them and not take a shortcut and start judging yourself right off the bat, because that may also be part of what’s going on.

But what started it was criticism came from somewhere else, and what were they thinking? What were they doing? To me? That’s where we’d like to start when doing this kind of inner work. So for me, it would be my partner. And the moment, why do you always leave doors open? Then you look at your emotional interpretations of what they did, and so this is what did they do to you?

And you may find as you sit with it, like what he said. My partner said why do you always leave doors open? That’s just the statement of fact, but what is my interpretation of what that means? It may be things like, he thinks I’m irresponsible or he’s really upset with me. Or he doesn’t cut me any slack or he’s trying to control me, or he expects me to do it perfectly.

So once you’ve identified the emotional interpretation, and you may make a list of them and then just choose one of them, then what I use is the work of Byron Katie, which is four questions and turnarounds, which you can use to explore within yourself. Questioning one of the thoughts that you identified in that stressful situation.

So you pick one emotional interpretation and question it, he expects me to do it perfectly. Is that really true? Are you sure? And giving yourself time to find the answers deep within on that emotional level itself, not just the quick emo intellectual answers. But the ones that come from seeing, from experiencing, from feeling, those are the ones that are gonna touch you.

And so you can go through this process. I won’t go through it in detail, but you can ask the other questions like, how do you react to what happens when you believe the thought he expects me to do it perfectly. Notice the defense coming in, notice the, all that coming up, the physical sensations. And then who would you be in the same situation?

If you didn’t believe that, in my case, he expects me to do it perfectly. And he’s saying, why do you always leave doors open? Suddenly there’s a little more room in hearing what my partner’s saying. There’s a little more space. And that’s what happens when you what? When you see this, you can see that the thought.

That he expects me to do it perfectly is amping up my response. That’s what’s causing the stress response, the experience of overwhelm, the pain that you feel with criticism. It’s my interpretation. So as you begin to question it and start to see the effect of it, you start to get a little more distance on that and and that’s amazing.

The final part of doing the work of Byron Katie is to find turnarounds, which would be opposites, and then see if those could be as true or maybe even truer. For example, how am I expecting myself to do it perfectly? Whoa, okay. That may be as much a factor as my partner expecting me to do it perfectly.

Or how am I expecting my partner to do it perfectly? For me, that means I’m expecting my partner to, to deliver his feedback in a perfect way that is like so balanced that it causes no upset in me. I’m putting all the responsibility on him. I’m expecting him to do it perfectly. So these turnarounds get you thinking about other ways of looking at this situation, and they bring up balancing ideas.

Maybe he doesn’t expect me to do it perfectly. Is there an alternative explanation for him saying, why do you always leave doors open? Besides him expecting me to do it per perfectly, this is how if you’re asking these questions to yourself and looking for answers deeply within, and you’re on the emotional level of where you got triggered.

Then you’re gonna start finding new possibilities and it’s gonna start softening your experience. And the criticism’s gonna sound less and less like criticism and less like a weapon. And more and more wow, there’s a lot going on here. This is complex. It’s interesting. And things start to relax.

So as I did this work and new variations of this situation repeated themselves, years ago. What happened was I started catching myself earlier and earlier, so my partner would say, why do you leave the doors open? And I’d start I would end up getting caught, boom, okay, still got triggered, but I noticed it took a little bit longer or it, I’d see it get triggered and then remember this work that I did and it would unt trigger almost as quickly.

And it started happening sooner and sooner, and the gap became shorter and shorter. And I remember one day I remember exactly where I was standing, is in the kitchen obviously, and he gave the same criticism again. And I remember it was like it came towards me and it was like I just turned sideways and it just went over.

My shoulder went past me. I didn’t get caught in the criticism. Now this is for one specific situation, and it would be slightly different in different situations with each different person that gives criticism. There may be many variations, but I’ve experienced over time that I’ve become better and better at receiving criticism without getting triggered as I’ve done this work.

So I love doing this kind of work. It tends to make me more and more resilient every time I do it. And so I’ve learned over the years to see my partner and what’s going on for him, not just me. My partner’s particular about the way things are done, and it actually has nothing to do with me. And I’ve learned to translate statements like, you always leave doors open, or Why do you always leave doors open to something simpler that registers more kindly with me, which is.

He wants me to close the door. It’s oh, okay. I can handle that. I’m on board with that. And and even I’ve been able to ask for what I want to, for him to say things differently. And we’ve had some of those conversations and it’s been amazing. He’s been responsive, for example now he says things like.

Don’t forget to close the door. And for me, that just feels like an invitation. Like he’s on my team and thank you. And so over time I’ve learned to to even work with him so that I’m able to have a clearer kind of communication. But even if he never changed, never adopted a new conversation style or anything like that.

If I am aware of what’s going on and I am finding that little bit of space inside of myself, what happens is the criticism just doesn’t have the same triggering effect. It becomes information, it becomes something useful. Either information about where he’s at or something that I could improve. But it doesn’t feel like an attack.

So the feeling I’m left with today is that criticism itself is not what actually causes me pain. It’s how I interpret it in each situation. And so this gives me a buffer, something that is under my control. And if I can work with my interpretations, if I can look at how I hold criticism. Instead of picking up what someone else throws at me and then hurting myself with it, then I can avoid the triggering effect of criticism and still gain from whatever information that may be helpful that’s being given to me.

Even if somebody is actually angry at me or someone is actually trying to almost hurt me. If I am skilled at how I hold that interpretation and how I see what this is and what I do with it towards myself, I have breathing room and that makes all the difference when dealing with criticism. In this episode, we looked at why criticism hurts so much for highly sensitive people, and it’s because we’re sensitive and we care about other people and we feel emotions strongly.

And we looked at how to do the inner work necessary to become resilient to criticism. And that means finding a specific situation, identifying your emotional interpretations, and then questioning them so that you can find other alternative views of the situation that are not necessarily painful. And then finally, we looked at what life can look like when the fear of criticism is reduced.

And it looks like more openness. It looks like more willingness to engage and less of a fear of what other people are gonna say. A less of a need for doing things perfectly. This is the antidote to perfectionism. If you become more resilient at handling criticism, then you don’t have to do everything perfectly.

So this is a huge area that is wonderful to explore and a lot of times people get confused thinking that being highly sensitive means that you necessarily are going to be overly sensitive or triggered by criticism. We have a tendency in that direction, but. We also have the huge capability of becoming resilient to stress, and this goes for all kinds of stress, including criticism.

If criticism’s handled expertly, it is having a great bomb squad that even though there’s a bomb here, you can diffuse it and nobody’s gonna get hurt. This is the capability of being a highly sensitive person, and it does not. Mean that just because we’re highly sensitive, we’re gonna always be hamstrung by criticism.

So thank you for listening. It’s great to explore this topic with you. This program 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.