On “Am I Too Sensitive in My Relationships?”
At Kindman & Co., we work primarily with couples, partners, and intimate relationships and/or individual clients who want to improve the quality of their relationships and get to feel more secure and authentic in their relationship dynamics. We also work with a lot of highly sensitive people (HSPs) and many of our therapists identify as highly sensitive as well. One question we hear a lot is “Am I too sensitive in my relationship?” Full disclosure, as a real sensy person myself and identifying as an HSP, I feel sad when I hear this question. We’ve often been told we’re too sensitive which leads to feeling ashamed, lots of self-judgment, and relationship insecurities. My hope is that this article will help you better understand the strengths and challenges of being sensitive in your relationships and provide some tips for how to manage the difficult moments when you’re feeling alllll the feels.
am i too sensitive in my relationship?
Let’s start with this biggie. The short answer is: no! You’re not too sensitive in your relationship, instead you’re exactly the right amount of sensitive. You are who you are—You are just as sensitive as you need to be, and this is often a significant asset to navigating relationships.
Sensitivity helps you be observant and in tune with your environment; you pick up on small details many people miss. This helps you notice when your partner or loved one is in distress, when conflict may be brewing that needs to be addressed, and also helps you to be connected and have the deeper conversations that build intimacy. Your sensitivity also likely means you have a great capacity for empathy and can feel into what the other person is feeling/experiencing. These are all significant strengths for partnership and loving relationships! I feel angry knowing that you grappling with this question likely reflects that you’ve had many experiences where you’ve been made to doubt your sensitivity and emotionality or have been told that your sensitivity is pushing people away.
how we learn that we’re too sensitive in relationships
The idea that someone is too sensitive or that their feelings push others away is a narrative we’re conditioned to believe from the society and culture we live in. American culture prioritizes cognitive functions—intellect, analysis, judgment and teaches us to separate from our embodiment and emotions. We’re taught to question our emotions as momentary and fleeting experiences that don’t provide any actual value or essential information. We’re meant to override our emotions and devalue the physical sensations and cues our body gives us about how well something is working for us. In fact, hyper productivity culture asks us to abandon a lot of ourselves in order to keep our heads down and just keep trucking along to produce more and make more money for ourselves or our employers. After all, we can’t sustain ourselves under late-stage capitalism without a healthy income, right?!
Of course we need money to ensure we have food, a roof over our heads, medical care, enjoyment of our lives, and more! I’m not at all suggesting we abandon our work or other prioritizes that help make our lives sustainable, just that we sensy types start to question some of what we’ve learned that asks us to ignore the vital information our sensitivity provides.
“For sensitive types, our spongeyness and depth of processing equates to feeling all of the feels—a broad spectrum of the varying shades of emotions—which leads to a rich and meaningful life.”
If you’re anything like me, you’ve also learned that you’re too sensitive in some of your formative childhood experiences and previous relationship dynamics. Maybe you were told by your family or previous partners that you shouldn’t cry or show your emotions? Or it’s not okay to let people outside the family know that something is wrong? Instead you needed to have a strong work ethic or appear emotionally “stronger,” so that challenging experiences wouldn’t impact you as much? For me, I’ve always been one of the people in the room thinking to myself, “Ummm, hello!?! Something feels off here. Is anyone going to acknowledge the weirdness of what’s happening in this dynamic?” Of course this is not at all related to why I became a therapist! ;)
As relational therapists, our team challenges these dominant cultural narratives and deeply believes that sensitivity and emotions help us increase our authenticity to have more vulnerability in our relationships which fosters deeper, true connections.
your sensitivity is a strength!
I said it earlier, but feel that this really needs its own section to get the attention it deserves. Your sensitivity is a strength, especially in relationships! Being a Highly Sensitive Person means you tend to deeply process your experience and environment. This often looks like taking your time to thoughtfully consider decisions and review your options rather than rapidly making decisions from a more impulsive place. According to Elaine Aron, the pioneer of HSP research, depth of processing also means noticing subtleties that many others do not and that you are naturally inclined to be curious and “look beyond [sic] cultural expectations to see how things ‘really are.’” Meaning that you tend to take in information through sensory input that others might miss and use this insight to inform your perspective in relationships with others and the world around you.
Highly sensitive folks tend to be more in tune with what’s happening for them internally as well as externally in their environment. There is scientific evidence that sensitive people experience more activation in their brain when observing other people experiencing emotions, suggesting that sensy folks have greater capacity to be impacted by others’ emotions and to truly feel what they perceive others to be feeling. We commonly label this experience (which I like to think of as being emotionally “spongey”) as empathy. Empathy is an essential skill for meaningful relationship-building. It promotes intimacy, deepens the quality of our connections and ushers us into the most social parts of ourselves—our shared humanity.
Sensitive people’s significant capacity for empathy and emotions, our spongeyness, means we that we feel, a lot. In therapy (and in life,) I encounter so many people who have learned to be cut off from many of their emotions as a strategy for staying safe. Cutting off, numbing, or shutting down emotions is not something we get to pick and choose. Those who’ve developed this coping strategy may protect themselves from feeling pain, loss, distress, heartache, etc., but this also means rarely feeling joy, contentment, pride, and authentic connection.
Additionally, embracing your emotions and your emotional responsiveness makes you a strong community member. Sensitivity means you also sense when something is off or unjust. You feel others pain, grief, and trauma—some of the consequences of living under oppression and injustice. You can learn to harness your empathy as a strength for social activism—you can help others learn to value their own emotions and empathy as core strengths for increased connection and community, which begins to move us towards justice.
For sensitive types, our spongeyness and depth of processing equates to feeling all of the feels—a broad spectrum of the varying shades of emotions—which leads to a rich and meaningful life. You get to deeply experience the pure delight of the fresh scent of a flower, the ecstatic pleasure of a deep-seated belly laugh, the hope & peace of a genuine moment of calm, and the curiosity & fascination that comes with a new experience you’ve yet to feel. Congratulations, you’re coloring with all of the colors in the crayon box! Have I convinced you that your sensitivity is your superpower yet?
challenges of being sensitive in relationships
One of the frequent challenges I find myself navigating a lot and hear about from other sensitive folks, is the experience of feeling unseen or misunderstood. As I mentioned before, most of us HSPs have heard throughout our lives that we’re too sensitive or too emotional. Not only is this painful to hear, but it indirectly communicates both that there’s something wrong with me and that the other person clearly doesn’t understand how I’m feeling. As humans, when we feel repeatedly unseen or misunderstood, we’re likely to interpret that we don’t belong. A sense of true belonging is crucial to feeling safe and secure in our relationships and the groups that we participate in. It’s also essential for feeling content and fulfilled in our lives. When we question our belonging, we respond with hypervigilance, engage in self-doubt/criticism, feel ashamed, withdraw from loved ones, and tend to live day-to-day in a heightened state of stress (our survival or stress response).
Another common challenge is feeling significantly overwhelmed or overstimulated. While being emotionally spongey is often a great strength in relationships, it can have its drawbacks too. Having deep empathy means really feeling into others challenging emotions, which can be intrusive or even burdensome at times. Pain is an unavoidable aspect of humanness. As HSPs, we carry a lot of other people’s pain around with us, in addition to the pain we navigate in challenging moments of our own lives. This is a lot! It contributes to significant overwhelm, burn out, stress, and exhaustion. Regularly feeling overwhelmed depletes our energy reserves and can leave us with little stamina and capacity to care for ourselves. In our close relationships, we may feel underresourced to show up the way we’d hope to, especially in moments of conflict or relational stress.
There are many different factors that may contribute to feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and overstimulated. You can check out Sensitive Refuge’s list of “11 ‘Little Things’ that Overwhelm Highly Sensitive People” for a more encompassing list of common factors/experiences that often leave us feeling this way. In addition to how our emotional receptivity and empathy can lead to overwhelm, the other factor that I most frequently hear about is sensory overload. Because we are deeply perceptive people, we take in a significant amount of stiumli at every turn. Whether it’s walking down the street in an urban area and feeling overstimulated by sights, sounds, smells, movements, etc. or being in a crowded room, it is hard to filter the amount of sensory input our minds and bodies take in. This too can result in prolonged stress on our nervous system and move us into a survival/threat response. Check out number 10 in article from Sensitive Refuge that I mentioned earlier for more information about this phenomenon, which Raneisha Price terms the “‘locomotion of self’—also known as the never-ending cycle of overwhelm.”
Lastly, on occasion, it’s just plain exhausting and messy to feel soooo much. For me, this means I can be more reactive with my partner than I’d like to be, especially if I’m perceiving that I’m being attacked or judged. It also means feeling angry or resentful in moments when the world feels too heavy to hold and I just want to put it down. I catch myself wanting to yell, “it’s not fair!”and frankly, sometimes I will yell that or something like it, just to get it out. It can also mean feeling purely worn down and exhausted and finding myself left with nothing to do but rest. There’s a lot of complexity and richness in the experience of being a sensitive person, sometimes incredibly nourshing and others, deeply challenging and depleting.
tips for managing your sensitivity in relationships
Below are a few strategies I hope you’ll experiment with. These are tools that have personally helped me and I share with many of my fellow sensy friends and clients. These tips are a starting place to help you cultivate supports for better managing the challenging moments as well as authentically embracing the delicious moments of being a supremely, sensitive, human being.
1) Embrace Your Sensitivity
There’s no use in continuing to feel shame or self judgment about being sensitive. The world’s got enough to say about this, you don’t need to keep adding to it! I know it’s hard to feel as much as you do sometimes and can leave you feeling alone or like you don’t belong. In my experience though, the more you lament that you’re sensitive and try to change this about yourself, the more energy you deplete and the more stressed you feel. Embracing your sensitivity helps you have compassion for yourself and connect to the strengths and limitations of this trait while also honoring that you may need more rest or nourishment to keep on going. Which brings me to…
2) Rest & Rejuvenate
Yes, we’re told that our value is in how much we produce and we’re made to feel lazy when we want/need to rest and relax. Feeling and processing more than many others requires energy and resources. This is just a fact. And as much as capitalism would like you to believe that you have infinite energy, you don’t. In order to break any cycles of overwhelm or burnout that you may be in, you have to deeply rest and restore yourself. And to be clear, resting does NOT mean watching TV and berating yourself in your head about being lazy and that you should be doing something more productive right now. True rest requires compassion and the grace to acknowledge it as an essential human need and a gift you’re choosing to intentionally give yourself. For a little help with this, check out Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto to help get you all riled up about choosing to then slow down and rest.
3) Find Something That Grounds or Moves You
When you start to notice you’re pretty full with feelings, are overwhelmed, or just becoming more aware of what’s happening inside, it’s a great time to engage in a grounding or movement practice. Engaging in a practice like this is supportive because it helps you to both increase present moment awareness and also to get out of your head and into your body. Our bodies provide vital information about how and what we’re feeling, what we may be needing, and how connected we are in our relationships.
Personally, I prefer simple grounding exercises that you can do anywhere you are. For one example, you can check out this previous blog post on managing overwhelm for HSPs for an example of a visual grounding exercise using imagery of waves. I also like this simple exercise of describing what you see in your immediate surroundings: Take a few moments to look around you and (ideally) describe out loud to yourself the color and objects that you see. For example, “I see a pink couch, a black tall lamp, a green hanging plant, etc.” Do this for as long as you need until you start to feel more regulated and calm.
If grounding exercises feel too still or too difficult to focus on in the moment, I love movement! Try putting on your favorite dancey song (check out Caitlin Harrison’s recommendations for dancing songs for healing for inspo) and just dance it out! Like really. Don’t think too much, just dance and really give yourself over to it. You can also try going on a walk/run/bike ride, deep stretching or yoga, or even taking a few minutes to play with and pet your furry friends!
4) Share your sensitivity with your partner/loved ones
I know, I know. This one might feel like a vulnerable or risky thing to do, especially if you’ve been given a lot of unwanted feedback about being too sensitive. The reality is that you are wonderfully you and being sensitive is a part of you. Folks who love you and want to support you need to understand this part of you. The more that they do, the more trust and security you will feel in these relationships which fosters deeper connection and intimacy. Try taking baby steps to share a little more each time—you can talk about how you personally experience your sensitivity, share that you’re working on valuing sensitivity more as a strength and ask for their help in this, let them in on the ways and times you tend to feel overwhelmed by it, etc. The more your loved ones know about this, the more they can begin to appreciate it too as well as learn how to better support you.
5) Listen to Your Body
As I’ve mentioned, being an HSP is a complicated experience and can be resource depleting. But how do you know when you’re nearing burnout or approaching overwhelm? How do you know when you need more connection or some time away from other people? In my experience, we can ask ourselves these questions and contemplate the answers over and over and over again and never really get anywhere. Can I suggest an alternative? Your body knows. Period. That gnawing, sour pit in your stomach you get when someone wants to share more about their ongoing conflict with their parent with you and you’ve already felt a little too spongey this week? That’s your body telling you that you’re getting dangerously close to overwhelm and need to set a (gentle and kind) boundary. That heavy feeling in your face and aching behind your eyes that alerts you to a want to cry, that might be loneliness creeping in and signaling to you that you need to reach to a loved one for more nourishing connection. That warm and fuzzy sensation in your chest and a beaming smile moving across your face? That’s joy and contentment telling you you’re right where you need to be. Alright, enough examples, I think you’re getting it now, right?
Your body is wise. Even though you might not always understand it, it’s sending you cues. All you have to do is take a second to turn inwards and check it out. Ask yourself, What am I aware of in my body right now? What sensations do I notice? Any temperature changes or tension I’m holding anywhere? And, without thinking to much, is there anything my body wants to do right now? Then just give it a try.
I hope that this article has helped you deepen a little more into the multi-faceted experience of being sensitive. TLDR: Sometimes it sucks, and sometimes it’s awesome. All-in-all, your sensitivity can be such a significant strength in your relationships and to the world. I hope you’ll try out some of the suggestions above to help you harness the magic of your sensitivity and feel more empowered in moments that have previously felt too big or overwhelming. You got this, fellow sensie!
And of course, we all have those seasons of life where we don’t quite, well, got it. If that sounds like you right now, we’re here to help you reconnect to your sensitivity as a superpower. You don’t have to go it alone, you were never meant to.
Kaitlin Kindman, is a co-founder of Kindman & Co., is disabled, an activist, an HSP, and a feminist. Her purpose is to help her clients come to believe that they are not alone, they belong, AND they inspire—they have the power to bring about change. She works with her clients to feel more connected, so that they take actions that improve their relationships and the world.
Kaitlin is deeply committed to providing socially just and anti-oppressive therapy. She really loves working with couples to improve their relationships and deepen intimacy, with other therapists and healers, as well as entrepreneurs and other business owners. Kaitlin finds true enjoyment in cuddling with animals, a just-right temperature cup of tea, feeling the sun on her face, and dancing in supermarket aisles.
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