You're not "too sensitive"...

The other day, I was talking with a client and he kept self-deprecatingly referring to himself as "too sensitive" and "fragile," as though those were the most offensive of character flaws.

I was like, first of all, you're not fragile. Let's stop using that word. Fragile suggests you can and probably will break if anything remotely negative happens. Fragile sounds like something that will shatter if dropped. Fragile is almost always used pejoratively when used to describe adult humans.

You will not shatter. You are sensitive, sure, but it is not a sin to feel a lot of feelings.

If we reframe it: sensitivity is a gift. It allows you to experience the world in such a way that you feel everything and don't allow anything to pass by without it making an impression on you. It attunes you to the pain and suffering of others in a way that many others are not attuned. It allows you a depth of emotion through which music and art and literature and poetry may be more easily transmitted.

Sensitive can also mean soft, gentle, yielding. Think moon energy. Yin energy. The best among us are often the most "sensitive."

Being sensitive is itself not a problem and besides, cannot be changed whether you see it as a strength or a weakness, so we might as well figure out how to make it a strength.

Your work to maximize the benefits of your sensitivity is in managing the feelings such that you don't take everything personally and end up being hurt all the time. Or making everybody else protect you. That's not fair, and ends up in weird interpersonal dynamics. Your work is finding ways to fortify yourself and build resilience without hiding or denying your sensitivity.

It's a tricky balance, I know. I myself might have once been referred to as "sensitive" in a snarky way by the people in my relationships. I got my feelings hurt a LOT by things that were not personal and should not have had anything to do with me. I made other people responsible for my feelings more often than was fair.

Like everything else, learning to do it differently is a practice. Now I'd say I'm like, medium sensitive. I still feel hurt sometimes by shit that isn't actually about me, but mostly I'm able to see when/where it's really reasonable to be hurt and can move through it without expecting someone else to be accountable for my hurt. I can shake it off and keep it moving most of the time. My hurt feelings usually don't last long.

But I value that sensitivity and have no interest in growing out of it or training myself not to feel as much. Words and music can move me to tears without warning. I get goosebumps when clients tell me their stories, regularly. I have an intense inner world. You might not know it, so here you go! I'm informing you.

And I'm likewise informing you that being sensitive is not a problem. If you have been routinely told in your life that you are "too sensitive" (or you have told yourself that, because maybe you're a man who keeps it to yourself and shows your "sensitivity" through rage or abusive behavior)...I am here to challenge that perception.

Let's say you are sensitive and it is a gift AND a responsibility. You have to learn to manage the power it gives you. You have to make sure you don't take everything personally and punish people for your feelings, which by the way, are not facts. (REMEMBER?!)

But you're not fragile. You will not break. You will merely be available for bruising if you allow it, but the thing is: you don't have to allow it. The work is in learning to yield, to pause, and to push back on the things that come your way that you need not absorb or accept.

Learning to turn your sensitivity superpower away from self-absorption, self-deprecation, and self-loathing into outward expressions of empathy, creativity, and compassion instead.

You can do it! I have faith in you.