Why Taking Up Space Feels So Uncomfortable for HSPs & How to Make Room for Yourself Without Guilt

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover why highly sensitive people can so easily push their own needs aside and how to start making room for yourself without the guilt that often comes with it. In this episode, you’ll discover why so many highly sensitive people feel guilty asking for what they need or what they want.

What makes taking up space feel uncomfortable even when your needs are completely reasonable? And how to start honoring yourself with greater self-trust, freedom, and ease. This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.

Imagine it’s Saturday and the week has been busy and you finally have a few hours to yourself. And part of you wants to spend the afternoon doing something you genuinely enjoy, maybe reading or maybe gardening or maybe taking a long walk or just doing absolutely nothing. And then almost immediately, another voice appears.

“But shouldn’t I be doing something more productive? What about everyone else? Maybe I should help them with something, or maybe I should do this later.” And before long, your desire has quietly slipped into the background. Many highly sensitive people know this kind of moment very well. Or maybe you’ve been wanting to join a club or a team or take a class for a while, and no one else maybe in your family is interested in it, but you are.

And so you hesitate because of this. You think about how you won’t be there for others if you’re away enjoying yourself taking this class or something. And maybe there will be some disappointment or even some disapproval from other members of your family, and so you don’t take the leap. An example of that from my life recently just a few months ago, I started doing dragon boat racing, which I’m really enjoying.

But that’s– I’m the only one interested. My partner doesn’t want to do that. And so now I’m taking two and sometimes three nights a week right after work where we would normally be meditating together and then eating and then walking the dog and that kind of thing. And I sometimes feel a little guilty “Oh my gosh, I’m doing this just for myself.

Isn’t that selfish?” And it can feel that way, especially if you’re highly sensitive. Or for example, there are a few away races in another town where I have to go far away, spend the night, spend some money, and be away for shopping day and all those other kinds of responsibilities. The guilt starts to come in and then you start thinking, you start hesitating.

“Should I really do that? Should I just forget about this idea and stay home?” So this is a kind of situation that comes up a lot for highly sensitive people. Why? Because we care It is often surprisingly subtle. You don’t necessarily decide that your needs don’t matter. Instead, what happens is your attention starts to shift, and you start considering everyone else instead of yourself.

You start anticipating their reactions. You’ve been down this road before. I know different things I’ve wanted to do and then saw the disappointment or disapproval on my partner’s face or something that he said and make me just go, “Oh, I don’t wanna risk that again.” You start imagining disappointments, or you start negotiating with yourself.

And so your want or your need is still there, but somehow it becomes less important, and you start pushing it down. It starts to be like something that’s optional instead of something that’s important to take care of yourself. And because this happens so quickly, you may not even notice that it’s happening What’s fascinating is that this pattern is usually trying to help you out.

Part of your system may have learned long ago that keeping other people comfortable helped to create safety for yourself. Maybe it reduced conflict, or maybe it reduced criticism, or maybe it protected a kind of connection maybe it helped you feel accepted. And the strategy made a lot of sense because when you don’t make waves, then there is no conflict.

There is nothing for anyone to be upset about, and there is connection in that way. But the problem is that the strategy doesn’t always distinguish between genuine danger and ordinary discomfort. So even simple acts of self-honoring can start to feel risky. And so even though it’s a strategy to stay, quote unquote, “safe” and to avoid conflict and criticism and keep connection and all of that, what it can end up doing is isolating you.

It can end up making it so that you don’t have a life, so that you can’t enjoy or follow your passions or your interests in life, and that can feel smothering. Your life can start to get smaller over time. You can stop asking for certain things. I remember when I came to I don’t know, I was in my 20s or even 30s, and I can even find it now in my 50s, that there was a kind of wonder of “What do I even really like?”

I’m I grew up not even having a favorite music or not even knowing what I, what kind of hobbies I would like. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I didn’t wanna risk actually exploring or taking, becoming vulnerable in front of others, and so I just, I toed the line. I did what was expected.

And I think that’s a common stress pattern for highly sensitive people. So as a result, your life can get smaller. You can stop asking for things, and you can stop pursuing your own interests. You can stop expressing your preferences, and you can stop considering possibilities that would inconvenience someone else.

You stop imagining what you really want because every time you do, a little discomfort appears because they may not like it. They may have some reaction against it. And so eventually it can feel easier to abandon your own desires than to tolerate the discomfort of somebody being not 100% happy The challenge is that your needs and your wants and your preferences don’t disappear.

Your dreams don’t disappear. They simply get pushed further and further into the background. It’s like a kind of suppression in a way. And people often tell me, as I just have mentioned, that they don’t even know what they want anymore. It can be a very common experience. And often that’s not because their desires are gone, but because they’ve spent years practicing not listening to them One of the biggest shifts that can happen when you begin to question something that sits behind all of this is that u- unconsciously, as highly sensitive people, we tend to treat space as though it’s limited.

And so if you start to question this, something starts to expand, something starts to change, as though every need that we have comes at someone else’s expense, as though every preference that we have creates some kind of burden on other people. Due to our sensitivity, we notice when people are not 100% happy, and we like to keep them in that 100% happy place because that’s where we see it as our safe place.

If they’re 100% happy with us, then there’s not gonna be any problem. If they have a little bit of dissonance or dislike or disapproval, then we start to feel like we aren’t so safe. And so the result is our worlds just keep getting smaller and smaller. We start thinking that anything that we bring to the table, whether it’s a preference or a boundary or a need or a desire, it’s somehow taking something away from the other person, or it’s inconveniencing them.

And if you can look at it, our pr- our attention is on the other person. We’re thinking about how this affects them. We’re not thinking about how it affects us. And so our system can start acting as if it’s a negotiation between me or them, my needs or their needs, my comfort or their comfort. It starts thinking about it as if it’s a zero-sum game.

There’s only one winner. And if you’re naturally caring and empathetic, then it’s easy to naturally choose the other person because it’s safer, it’s more caring, and again, we keep shutting ourselves out

What if taking up space is not the same thing as taking something away from someone else? What if expressing a preference doesn’t automatically create a burden for them? What if having a need doesn’t automatically make you selfish? What if making room for yourself isn’t an act against other people at all?

For many highly sensitive people, the goal isn’t learning how to care less. The goal is learning how to stop excluding themselves from the circle of people they care about. Because when you continually make room for everyone except yourself, eventually there’s ver- very little room left for you. And that isn’t generosity.

That is actually disappearance. And so the goal isn’t to become the most important person in the room. The goal is simply to stop being the least important one in the room Imagine what life would feel like if your needs didn’t immediately go on trial, if every preference didn’t require a debate, if wanting something didn’t automatically trigger guilt.

Imagine being able to notice what you want and simply let that information matter, not more than everyone else’s needs, but not less than either. Imagine making decisions that included you. Imagine expressing preferences without spending hours wondering whether you were being selfish. Imagine allowing yourself to take up a little more space inside your own life.

Many highly sensitive people spend years trying to figure out how to care for others more effectively. What if part of the next chapter is learning how to include yourself in that care? If you’re tired of continually putting your own needs and preferences and desires at the bottom of the list, and you don’t want to keep leaving yourself out of decisions that affect your own life, but what you really want is to make room for yourself without feeling selfish or guilty or like you’re taking something away from someone else, then I created something to help with exactly that.

It’s called The Taking Up Space Guide. It’s a short guided reflection PDF you can use whenever you notice yourself hesitating around a need or a preference or a boundary or a desire. It helps you explore what’s happening underneath that hesitation and reconnect with what feels true for you Just go to the show notes and click on the first link you find, or go to trueinnerfreedom.com/taking-up-space-guide

and I’ll send it right over.