How IFS Helps Highly Sensitive People

If you’re a highly sensitive person, you may have spent years being told that you feel too much, care too much, or need to be less emotional. In this video, Dr. Cheryl explores sensitivity as a natural trait and shares how IFS therapy can help you reconnect with your authentic self, work with protective parts, and develop greater self-compassion.

Transcript

If you're a sensitive person, It's likely that you've received some pretty negative messages about your big emotions and sensitivity throughout your life. During my training to become a psychiatrist, I learned pretty quickly that being sensitive and empathic was not a quality that was highly regarded. And so it's something that I learned to suppress. I was taught that my big feelings were something to be compartmentalized or suppressed through logic and intellect. It's only years later that I realize how harmful and how inaccurate those messages really were. IFS therapy has helped me to reconnect with and reclaim my sensitivity to recognize it as the gift that it really is. The hardest part of being highly sensitive isn't the trait itself, It's the way that you're treated in a world by people who don't understand you. So as a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist, I've found IFS therapy to be incredibly helpful for highly sensitive people. In this video, I'll be sharing how to know if you're highly sensitive, Why sensitivity can make you more prone to burnout, Reasons why IFS therapy can be very helpful for you if you're highly sensitive. So Elaine Aron coined the term highly sensitive person or sensory processing sensitivity to refer to people who feel and process things more deeply. You may also be more aware of and responsive to your environment. So this can mean that you feel your emotions very intensely and that it can take you a longer time to process difficult or challenging events in your life. Being sensitive may also make you more prone to internalizing trauma from challenging life events, Especially the things that happened to you in your early childhood. You may also find that you're more empathic. That you care a lot about animals and other people, That you care a lot about the planet, And that things that don't seem to bother other people might bother you a lot. You may also find that being in really bright, Loud, Or busy environments can be overstimulating or too much. Now, High sensitivity is also a trait that's common amongst neurodivergent people, Especially autistics and ADHDers. So I've been an IFS therapist and also a client in IFS therapy for over six years now. And what I found was that as I released these traumatic burdens from my system, That I was becoming more connected with and present in my body. This is when I really started to recognize my neurodivergence and my sensitivity, Because the more trauma I released, The more sensitive I realized that I really was. And this is how I understand that sensitivity is really a trait. It's an aspect of who you are. So when you're taught to disconnect with it through the messaging that you get in your upbringing or through your training and education or through society itself, You're really disconnecting from your authentic nature. And so IFS therapy is really wonderful because it helps you to reclaim these authentic qualities that you disconnected with throughout your life. Now, If you're highly empathic, Sometimes the term for this is hyper empathy or other people might call it being an empath. This means that you feel other people's pain more deeply. And there's been research done on this too. A person named Tanya Singer has done clinical studies looking at brain scans of people who are experiencing empathy for someone who's in pain. And it shows that the pain circuitry in your brain actually lights up. Now, This is in contrast to compassion, Which is more of a feeling for rather than feeling with. So it doesn't light up the pain circuitry when you can be present with someone without feeling their pain. But that can be easier said than done, Right? If you're highly sensitive, It's not so easy. So it's really common for highly sensitive and empathic people to get into helping professions, To become healers and psychotherapists. But the problem is when you're being motivated a lot by empathy, By other people's pain, This can lead to burnout. And one of the reasons why this happens is because when you're young, You can develop a protective part who feels responsible for helping other people with their pain. Now, This is really natural when you're highly empathic, You feel distress when other people are in emotional or physical pain, And you want to help them, But it can lead to this sense of being overly responsible, Which can lead you to work long hours, It can make it difficult to set boundaries or to say no, And you can really take other people's pain home with you. So this is something I was criticized for medical training but also no one really knew how to help me. I was kind of just told that I cared too much and it was sort of presented to me as a kind of weakness. But IFS therapy has really helped me to understand how these different qualities came on as protective strategies. So now I'm going to share the three reasons why IFS therapy can be really helpful for you if you're a highly sensitive person. First, IFS helps you to change the way that you relate to your own pain. So if you're like me, You probably learned that your painful emotions are something to cope with or push away and suppress. But when your emotions are really big, That's basically impossible. And it leads to a lot of tension and conflict inside of you when you're constantly trying to push away your own pain. You're basically in a battle with yourself, Which you're going to lose every time. So instead, In IFS therapy, We learn to access our own self-energy. So that's who you are at the core of your being. And it has these really wonderful C qualities, Things like compassion, Curiosity, Creativity, Clarity, Connectedness, Calm, And confidence. And so you bring this compassion and curiosity to the parts of you that are in pain. So we call your most wounded and vulnerable inner child parts exiles because they've been kind of locked away or exiled in this proverbial inner basement. Carrying really painful burdens like shame, Fear, Loneliness, Isolation, Rejection. And then they have these different limiting beliefs associated with those painful feelings. Things like, I'm unworthy, No one will ever love me, The world is an unsafe place. So rather than pushing these parts away, As many types of talk therapy or different strategies will teach you to do, We move towards these vulnerable exiles with compassion and curiosity to witness the stories that they're carrying. And when they feel witnessed and connected to self, They're then free to unburden. These painful burdens that they've been carrying around. And so they don't have to feel that pain anymore. And you can then reclaim these qualities that they've been disconnected from. And one of those qualities can really be sensitivity. It's not just pain that gets exiled in our system. It can also be positive qualities that we were taught were too much or weren't safe to embody as children. So things like being highly sensitive, Maybe even being really joyful or excited. All of these qualities are things that can be exiled in your system due to trauma that IFS therapy can help us to reclaim. Second, IFS therapy helps you to come into relationship with your protectors. So I already mentioned that overly responsible caretaking part. Another common protector strategy is people pleasing. It's common for sensitive people to want to make everyone around them happy. But again, This can make it really hard to say no or to set boundaries, Which is another reason why sensitive people can be predisposed to experiencing burnout. So from that self-energy place of compassion and curiosity, We move towards these people-pleasing and overly responsible protectors. An inner critic is another common type of protector part. We get curious about them. And we come into relationship with them so that they don't feel alone, So that they don't feel the responsibility for managing our lives on their own and for managing these exiles pain. So this is why we consider IFS a relational model, Because it helps you to change the way that you relate to yourself, To come into relationship with your protective parts and your exiles from a place of compassion, So that you can access more self-compassion in your daily life. And you can learn to set healthy boundaries and say no without being so led by these people-pleasing and overly responsible protective parts. And the third reason why IFS therapy can be so helpful for sensitive people is that it's a very somatic form of therapy. So it's common for sensitive people to learn to go up into their heads. So this is a protective strategy, Something that can be reinforced in some types of talk therapy where you're learning to really analyze and problem-solve. So IFS therapy helps you go directly into the body and be present with those painful emotions and sensations in the body so that this pain can ultimately be released and you can be liberated to feel more like your true authentic self, To be more present in the moment, And to be more embodied and to experience more peace and harmony that we're all really searching for in this healing journey. So I hope learning about sensitivity and how IFS can be helpful for highly sensitive people has been helpful for you. What part of this video resonated the most for you? Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next video.