Maybe you are also living a life that is somehow simply happening to you. You think this is normal, this is what you have to go through, and that you are the one who has to accommodate yourself because this is simply the life you have to live. Everyone else seems to manage the same things just fine, so why wouldn’t you?
I am writing this retrospective from the most comfortable stage of my life so far. After a lot of struggle and pain, I can genuinely say that I am living my best life now.
I am not going to give you one simple formula that will miraculously do the same for you. I want to give you context: to show you how high sensitivity was present in me long before I had a name for it, what I did differently after I finally discovered it, and what helped me along the way. Maybe parts of my story can offer inspiration for you, and perhaps for your children too.
What Was Expected of a Child
When I was a child, I went to kindergarten and then started school. Typical stuff. The whole society was doing that.
Looking back now through the lens of high sensitivity, I don’t believe my three-year-old system was ready for that much separation and stimulation: leaving my mother and familiar home and spending half day and then a day away from them, surrounded by other small children and rules that felt completely unnatural to me.
And I cried. I cried almost every morning because I did not want to go. I was pushed to become more mature and independent, while what I was experiencing often felt much closer to survival. On top of managing the situation itself, I was also expected to become what was being asked of me. And I tried so hard.
From kindergarten, I remember mostly crying every morning that I didn’t want to go and one time scratching my knee outside. Only bad stuff, right?
What I can say for sure is that these difficult experiences stayed with me very strongly. Whatever good things hopefully happened there did not remain in my memory with the same force.
When I became a schoolgirl, I also started the daily drills required of a rhythmic gymnast under Russian rules. I cannot speak for every child who went through this kind of training, but I know what those conditions did to me as a highly sensitive one.
The physical demands were enormous and the mental load extreme. There was constant pressure to keep getting better, push harder and never being good enough. I was fighting for my life there for the next seven years. I was scared to death every single day, and in that condition I was delivering more than the maximum of what my body was capable of. There were girls around me going through the same training and seeming to handle it similarly on the outside. We cried a lot, but they did not seem nearly as afraid as I was. And our parents all seemed to accept that this was simply the right way for us to be trained.
Training happened daily after school. Being among so many people all day and then having to deliver the results everyone was expecting from me was… I still don’t know what word is good enough. Let’s call it exhausting, although even that feels too small.
There was very little time for me to actually rest alone, in peace and safety. Apart from the fact that I always went to bed early and ate well, no one taught me how to take care of my body and mind after all that pressure, or how to release everything I had been carrying through the day.
On the contrary, I was living in a toxic homes with two alcoholics and the dysfunctional marriage of my parents, under constant stress, where scanning the moods of others became my way of living. I was also scanning the mood of my trainer and trying to guess it based on the way she walked when she came to training.
I was completely dependent on the moods and behaviors of others, and I was doing everything I could to keep the peace. I was overfunctioning on so many levels, and all of that before I turned 13.
As a child, I did not think there was another way for me. I believed I simply had to perform at the highest level in school and gymnastics and be a good daughter. I did not know that I could choose a different way, or that I could disappoint an adult without something terrible necessarily happening because of it. I was performing so everyone was happy, while being what people around me would probably have called overly sensitive: crying a lot when I was unsuccessful or when someone behaved negatively towards me.
Later, during high school, some of the happiest parts of my teenage life could also be socially and emotionally exhausting.
I was happy enough to find two good girlfriends and later romantic relationships that became pillars of my happiness. I wanted to be there. I wanted to be with them, hear about their lives and share mine. But we were together every day at school, continued debating everyday teenage dramas over the phone after school, and I became tangled in the family bonds of my boyfriend too.
I absorbed their emotional lives like a sponge.
This was not something I wanted to escape from. These relationships made me happy. I simply did not understand how much emotional information I was taking in all the time.
I finished high school and went to study sociology. It was demanding, yet at that time and in the place where I lived, I did not find it particularly useful or practical for the life I wanted. So again, I pushed myself for five years to use most of my energy for something that did not make me happy, safe or calm.
And the demands were high. For example, making a single mistake on a test in one of our main subjects could mean repeating another year. Imagine the level of fear I felt as a highly sensitive person before every stupid test.
Everyone around me seemed to accept this level of pressure as normal, so what choice did I think I had?
Not to bore you with my autobiography before we get to the healing part, my first two jobs were not easy either.
The first one was so closely tied to my boyfriend’s family that I could hardly distinguish between the company’s financial problems and the personal ones. The second was a typical corporate job where I could do the impossible and still hit the glass ceiling.
And all of this was still happening among many people in the office, under artificial light, with air conditioning blowing my head off, having calls all day long regardless of the stage of my cycle, and treating all of it as a normal working day.
This may sound like complaining, but I am telling you all of this for a reason. I want to show you how my body reacted to all of it, and then how I changed the way I was living, during what was actually the most demanding stage of my life.
What Was Happening in My Body
Do you know where all the negativity, toxic environments, high demands and lack of rest showed up? You are right: not only in my mental setup, but mostly in my physical body.
I have a history of a skin condition considered incurable and chronic back pain since puberty.
My body was hurting a lot for most of my life. And the pain was so strong and so persistent that I simply couldn’t get used to living with it. Various doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors and an acupressurist gave me their advice about what to do and what to stop doing, while correcting my posture, breathing and sitting. I very diligently followed all their protocols and advice. I was doing with my body what I believed was supposed to help me. For 24 years.
I went through various stages of exercising, following routines and changing them. There were times when I was working hard in the gym, and then there were years when I was working out at home. I did HIIT for a while, and for years I practised yoga. I had private Pilates reformer lessons and tried to make myself like running. I heard that I needed proper stretching, unless I was told that a hypermobile body should not be stretching. I was massaging and pressing what hurt, using oils, needles, treatments and all kinds of tools. And as you can probably guess, nothing was actually helping me long term. I believed something was wrong with me that could be corrected by me, or perhaps bought in the form of a better mattress, pillow or chair, and then my neck would finally stop hurting.
My ichthyosis went very similarly. I had extremely dry skin over my whole body with a visible structure. I felt uncomfortable in my own skin for most of my life. All the doctors I saw over those years in two different countries only gave me various lotions to try, and I was prescribed special baths. I travelled to the seaside every year. All of this helped me manage the dryness, not get rid of it. For most of my life, I could not imagine taking a shower and then not putting cream on. Without it, the tightness of my skin was so intense that even movement felt uncomfortable.
When Safety Enters
I lived with my parents until I was 28, and then I moved to a different country with my current husband. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life, including for my health. The move meant much more than changing countries. It meant freedom and safety, leaving the environment I had lived in since my health problems first appeared, and beginning to live my own life and make my own choices, one by one. I was also making this change with the support of the person who later became my husband.
Looking at my own experience retrospectively, I believe this move had a direct effect on healing my skin.
It was not a miraculous one-day change. For the next two years after moving, I was still coming back for the sun-and-bath therapies. My ichthyosis was leaving me slowly, and there were various healing factors along the way. But in my new environment, I believe my skin no longer needed to protect and defend me in the same way. And today I live without needing any skin lotion. I can finally get out of the shower and simply get dressed.
Around thirty, I was introduced to the first specialist I actually felt safe with and was able to openly share my life story with. He was actually asking me how I felt, even though I had initially expected just another massage. We practised craniosacral biodynamics and various other therapy styles, and we shaped the therapy around my needs. I was also introduced to traditional Chinese medicine.
For the first time, I felt I had permission to stop fixing, performing and pushing and simply be. After an ongoing safe experience like this, I never wanted to go back to the way I had been treated before. I finally started to have more room to create my life the way I actually wanted to. This and the healing that followed were definitely possible thanks to the support of my husband. He is steady, loves me unconditionally, and gives me space and trust.
Finding High Sensitivity Through Motherhood
When I became a mother after a long story of fertility issues and medical trauma, taking care of my newborn daughter was very challenging. After navigating a nursing strike that started when she was three months old, I realised our routines weren’t working. With guidance from a lactation consultant, I started implementing contact parenting practices, moving away from swaddling and rocking towards baby-wearing and co-sleeping.
The closer I stayed to my child, the more everything started to fall into place naturally. We as parents went through a lot together to arrive at what became our contact and respectful approach to parenting.
Apart from many other changes in direction and challenging so many worldviews, parenting led me to realise that I am a highly sensitive person, through discovering that my daughter is one. If there is a scale, she is actually less sensitive than I am.
I was lucky enough to be directed to Elaine Aron’s books to find out more about my daughter, who was having difficulties when we started attending baby- and family-friendly group activities. And while reading the first book, I found myself there. It all made sense.
“I still remember one night vividly: my child had been crying for what felt like hours. I was exhausted, frustrated, and unsure of what to do. We were lying in bed, my husband standing nearby, when suddenly, I broke down. I started crying and screaming too, as if I was letting her own screams flow through me. In that moment, I realized how deeply I felt her emotions—and how much they intertwined with my own.”
My sensitive reactions towards almost everything; feeling my own moods and other people’s moods very deeply; crying a lot; sensitivity to touch, music and beautiful surroundings; overthinking the smallest details when something interests me or bothers me. Even the strong reactions of my body became more understandable when I looked at them through the lens of sensitivity.
As a mother who had to rebuild her life from scratch to be able to take care of her baby the way we both needed, I used what I was learning about high sensitivity as one of the main foundations for rebuilding our life. Motherhood was extremely demanding for me, yet at the same time it forced me, or perhaps allowed me, to strip away many ordinary life demands and create much more space for rest in my everyday life. Even though my daughter no longer sleeps during the day, I still keep afternoon yoga nidra time for myself.
The Changes
We live our life safely at home and do activities that we both enjoy. Rest is non-negotiable for me. Wind-down time after socialising, even for several days, is healing for both of us. I completely support my daughter when she is overstimulated, and I understand her deeply. I share with my husband all the knowledge and self-understanding I gain, so he is aware of my states and needs and can continue supporting me, and therefore our family.
Apart from studying psychosomatics, I started going to a psychosomatic clinic and had two years of psychotherapy. Talk therapy helped me a lot. And it was healing not only for my mental state but also for the physical one.
I experienced a kind of pain that seemed to run through my entire back body, from my heels all the way to my forehead. While describing it to my therapist, I realised that this pain was trying to make me smaller, almost curled inward. Understanding that led me to another realisation: I was overusing my body. It simply did not have the capacity for the demands my life was placing on it.
After a period of intense talking in therapy, something interesting happened. I began to feel the need for silence, so we reserved part of the session simply for being quiet. This small practice later became important for me even outside therapy. It eventually helped me bring silence and solitude into my everyday life, things I now know I need deeply as a highly sensitive person.
I studied and read the sources and literature that helped me understand what I was living. I stopped forcing myself to do things that made no sense to me. I analysed my reactions. I was always digging for root causes.
Social interactions became something I approach deliberately. I need to choose where I go, how I approach a gathering, and how I will rest and recover afterwards. That can apply to something positive, such as meeting other mothers and children, or something much more demanding, such as spending time with my family of origin.
I still love traveling to beautiful new places with my husband and daughter, but I now know that traveling can cost me enormous amounts of energy. The way I travel has to respect my sensitivity, and I give myself much more space to settle in, adjust and recover before and after.
Once I learned that my high sensitivity allows me to experience things deeply when the conditions are right, I also started deliberately and consciously focusing my mind on healing, meditation and positive thinking. I don’t know about you, but my mind easily moves towards negative possibilities, really the worst catastrophic scenarios you can imagine. So I train my mind for the positive and safe stuff too.
My chronic back pain had already started fading during psychotherapy and after several years of motherhood in which I had much more rest from ordinary life and work demands. Then, during the last two years, after I stopped structured exercise, the chronic back pain disappeared from my everyday life.
“After all these years of exercising and using the body in various spaces, for fun, for healing, against pain, I’m in a period when I don’t exercise in any structured way at all. I also feel no pain.”
Looking Back From Here
I stopped doing things simply because society treated them as normal. My daughter is being homeschooled, to the surprise of many people. I started writing and expressing myself creatively while being misunderstood by others. I built boundaries. I pushed toxic people away. I found understanding communities offline and online. You name it. I finally got to know myself and started making decisions based on what is best for me and my family without ever compromising my high sensitivity.
And yes, somewhere along the way, my highly sensitive body stopped hurting and being sick.
I would never consciously choose, with my current knowledge about myself and the options I have today, much of what I was living through as a child and later as a young adult. I really admire myself and my body for surviving it. Some parts of my life were bad and very difficult, but most of it was okay and even nice. I am talking more about those everyday decisions that were made for me when I was young and that I continued making as an adult. Today, I simply would not put my highly sensitive system through many of those situations. There are various reasons, of course, but if I look at it specifically through the lens of high sensitivity, my nervous system was struggling hard and neither I nor the people around me understood what was happening.
What I see very clearly now is that my sensitive body thrives in a safe environment, whether that is a therapy room, my home, or a group of friends who approach parenting from a similar place of understanding. I am forever grateful that I am now aware enough to make decisions with a real understanding of myself in mind, and to embrace my sensitivity in those decisions. High sensitivity did not replace all the other ways I understand myself, but it gave me a lens through which many previously separate parts of my life finally made sense as parts of the same picture.
Thank you for sharing this story, Selene. The image of you as a child reading your trainer’s mood by the way she walked into the room, oof, I felt that. I used to do that too but I only realized I was doing this until later in life. You were already scanning the atmosphere at home, and then had to do the same at training. That is so much for one small body to carry, especially while being expected to perform, achieve and keep everyone happy. Even though my story is different I recognize a lot in what you write.
What moved me was how much space matters throughout your story. At first, there was barely any space to rest, feel or even discover what you needed. And then, slowly, you began creating it: moving away, finding a person who actually asked how you felt, allowing silence into therapy, protecting your rest, setting boundaries and choosing a life that fits you.
I especially loved what you wrote about motherhood, and in more of your work. How, even though it asked so much of you, it also helped you strip away the demands of ordinary life and build something different for you and your daughter. Safety was something you chose, and kept choosing, over and over again. As I also have learned, is key.
I feel this will be deeply helpful for anyone who has spent years wondering why ordinary life seems to cost them so much. Your story offers permission to ask: what if I need more space? What if my body has been carrying far more than anyone could see?
Thank you for letting us witness so much of you. 🩵
Selene -- what a long and painful, yet ultimately healing, journey you've had. Your story is so poignant and full of the difficulties so many of us HSPs face. I'm glad you've shared so intimately, but so sorry you've been through all this.
You demonstrate the side of being highly sensitive that cam redeem all the difficulties in our lives: we are resilient -- more so than other, less sensitive people -- and respond with a deep ability to change with energy and creativity when we leave an unhealthy environment for a healthy one.
Your daughter can learn from you, how marvelous for her!