When extra intelligence, intensity and sensitivity cross over, they make quite the package...and it can be extremely challenging! Exploring what this looks like, and how to work positively with these traits. for ever-increasing fulfilment and joy.
Illnesses stop us in our tracks and call time on the old ways of being that no longer fit who we are. Often, they are an invitation to look deep into the corners of our life and do some real work…the kind of work that brings us into love and acceptance of who we really are, beyond the stories and expectations that get overlayered by our crazy and demanding lives. Often, there is an opportunity to be found in our own disarray and, once we find it there, it doesn’t stop giving…not ever, for the rest of our lives.
Getting to know yourself is, in my opinon, the single most important thing you ever get to do in your life...and its often a golden key to all those other unfathomables that may be "going on", such as persistent health issues. Above all, depathologising the way you were made is an essential step to discovering the sense of wholeness and peace in your life that may have so far eluded you.
Coming to understand yourself is the single most important thing you get to do in your life! When it comes to healing a chronic condition, some of the tools you can use to understand your personality type can reveal explicit treatment approaches, lifestyle and even useful attitude modifications that might otherwise elude you, because they spotlight things about YOU that might not apply to the next person.
Being an HSP isn't a flaw but an evolutionary advantage, as has been amply demonstrated by science and history. We were always meant to be the natural outliers of the community, by design, so that we could be the first to notice important things that others miss, picking up envornmental cues and alerting others to any danger that we sensed coming our way. But what happens when our alarms start to go off all the time and when or how do we get a respite? How does this relate to the modern age phenomenon of chronic pain, fatigue and systemic meltdown?
It's been a while since I wrote about Myers Briggs personality types though the method remains one of the most consistently useful tools I have ever used to come to deeply understand myself. Yesterday, I happened upon a particular foible of each personality type called a “grip stress" state, something I had never come across … Continue reading INFJ “Grip Stress” sheds light on lasting trauma and chronic pain
Highly Sensitive People spend whole lifetimes feeling like we live on the fringe of all fringes, dancing someone else’s dance (carefully), feeling odd when we compare ourselves with what are supposedly “normal” reactions to everyday situations, when we feel unable to join in because things get too much for us such as when life is too noisy, busy or triggering to be borne by our finely tuned wiring and when we just can’t manage the loneliness of being, apparently, the only one who notices things that, to us, are obvious…So, from now on, let all that be for a higher reason; embrace its potential, not its weirdness or other people's misfits ideas about it. This trait has been proven to be an evolutionary potential in every one of the many species where it has been found to exist (in just 20% of the population in every case) and it is also shown not to be a pathology, so let's stop acting like it is. Now is the time to dare to be, unapologetically, ourselves...or walk off to where we feel better and are listened to and truly valued for our gifts, even be alone for a while to recover and grow ourselves, rather than this endless rub and rejection.
We are going through some significant transitions right now, and many of us in our personal lives too; so what do these transitional phases have to tell us; what are they about at the personal and broadest level....and how are these all linked together. Speaking as one who feels them quite profoundly in my body, these are my thoughts...
At the risk of this sounding like an over generalisation, it seems to me that neurotypical people mostly take in their impressions of the world through their heads and their fingertips whereas, as someone with Asperger’s (and I have read about this trait a lot in Aspie accounts), I seem to take in my impressions … Continue reading Impressionable: a breakthrough in working with super-sensitivity
Asperger's can be challenging for any woman; and parenting a child with more typical needs than your own can place those challenges right under a microscope...but you both stand to gain such a lot, in the long run, as I am now discovering. Examining some classic Aspie traits in the light of motherhood...
Living whole 