How Sensitive Women Can Navigate Emotional Pain Without Losing Themselves

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Hello, my beautiful friend and welcome to the podcast. Today we are talking about how sensitive women can navigate emotional pain without losing themselves. One of the things that I think is so important to understand when you are. A sensitive person when you’re a sensitive human is that we feel things deeply.

We feel things deeply, and we are afraid. But what we’re afraid of most often is that if we let ourselves go all the way with the feeling, if we let ourselves feel it, that we’ll fall apart and. It’s sort of this experience of if I actually feel this emotion, if I open the door, I won’t be able to close it.

Like it will be a flood that I won’t be able to navigate. And I just first of all, need you to know that this is something that you have learned, not something that you. Do because you’re somehow deficient. You have learned to manage your emotions in a way that you can survive them. So we’ve been taught to numb our emotions and get rid of them, which we do through scrolling, which we do through drinking, which we do through watching tv, what we do through doing drugs, right?

That’s happening. Um, but we also. Have learned to intellectualize what we’re feeling. So when we have a feeling that is painful, that is difficult, we will try to logically figure it out. And as a side effect of that, we tend to overthink our emotions. And when I really look at this, for somebody that is highly sensitive, somebody that has a sensitive nervous system, somebody that is neurodivergent, it’s.

It’s really just a matter of emotional overwhelm and not really having the capacity for the emotions that are going on, right? We don’t have the capacity. I look at it as. As if you’re looking at a bucket that you are filling with water and the bucket is perpetually overflowing, to me, that is somebody that has a sensitive nervous system, that is a highly sensitive person that is neuro divergent, whose emotions keep flooding and overload.

Overflowing, and I really believe that this is a capacity issue and not a fragility issue. You are not fragile. It’s not that you’re breaking, it’s just that the emotion is overflowing and we can’t contain it. So where we need to start, what we need to look at is. What emotional pain is and what emotional pain isn’t, right?

Emotional pain, in my eyes is, or in my mind, is that the emotion just overflows and then it has nowhere to go. And so we’re either numbing out, we’re trying to intellectualize it, we are, um, potentially really reacting to it. So it’s not. Dangerous emotional pain isn’t dangerous. But what I will say is that being alone inside emotional pain is dangerous, and that is something that we need to address.

And the truth is that most women weren’t taught how to be with emotion without turning it. In on themselves. Okay? So if that’s something that you experience, I want you to know that that is just a gap in what the world has taught you. Nobody’s taught you how to handle this. No one’s told you how to manage that, and we really want to break.

The idea that something is wrong with you, and it’s why I sometimes really pull away from leaning into labels because I don’t personally believe that whether or not you are HSP, you consider yourself to be an empath. You’re neuro divergent, or you just have been told your whole life, you’re too sensitive.

This label isn’t necessary, and. Where we wanna really look here is that feeling emotional pain is not even the problem, okay? It’s not the problem that we wanna solve, and we wanna know that intensity is not. You know, pathology, it’s not meaning that there is something definitely wrong here, that there’s something broken in your brain.

Sensitivity is also not an inability to cope. That’s not what it is. What it is is that our society, the society that we live in, we are taught that we are supposed to fix emotions, and we are taught that we are supposed to explain them away. You know, when you notice, um. A little kid crying. What do people say to them?

Don’t cry when somebody is upset about something that has happened to them. It’s like, don’t be sad, don’t be angry. Don’t get mad. Get even any version of that sort of explanation when it comes to feeling. We are taught that we are supposed to fix them. And get rid of them. And we also were taught that we should make them mean something about us.

So where I see this really show up is when we are talking about shame, when we’re talking about guilt, but where it really tends to rear its ugly head is when we’re talking about emotions like jealousy. Like jealousy means that you’re a terrible person and. That is problematic. The other piece of this that’s problematic is that we get taught that we’re supposed to manage other people’s comfort instead of our own safety.

That I need to make sure that you are comfortable with how I am rather than being safe with how I am and dealing with what I need to deal with here. And emotional pain will just become overwhelming when it’s mixed with all of these things. And then you have self-judgment telling yourself that, how you’re doing it, how you’re feeling, the way you’re explaining it.

The first of all, it shouldn’t be happening this way. And second of all that it, um. It, it, it’s something to do with you, right? That something’s gone wrong with you, that it shouldn’t be happening this way. And also, what’s wrong with me? I can’t handle this. Emotional pain also becomes overwhelming when it’s mixed with urgency.

I have to get over this right away. This shouldn’t take this long. It shouldn’t take me this long to get over it. And then lastly, emotional pain becomes overwhelming when it’s mixed with meaning making. And what I mean by that is it means that I. Have something wrong with me or that I can’t handle this situation or that marriage isn’t meant for me, or I can’t go for that big career, or I’m behind, or I’m failing.

And we just really wanna start with really understanding that that is not the problem. The problem isn’t you. The problem is how you’ve been taught to deal with emotions and how other people have been taught to experience emotion. All right now. There is some patterns that happen to sensitive women, things that we do instead of learning how to.

Grow capacity that can keep us really stuck. That can cause a lot of problems. So one of the patterns we do is we overthink emotions. So we think that we’re sad, and then we think about all the reasons that we’re sad, and we come up with a lot of evidence for why we should be sad. We’ll do that with anger too.

We know something will happen, somebody will make us angry, and then we will start. Finding all the ways why we’re all so angry at this person, and, and we line up the evidence and it’s important to know that this is normal and this is how your brain reacts and this is how your brain is supposed to react.

It is. Always gonna operate with a negative bias. It’s always gonna have a survival instinct. It’s going to be trying to help you survive. But we really don’t want our survival brain in charge when we’re dealing with emotions. So. This is the thing that we want to learn how to shift. Um, other patterns that I see is, is trying to process pain immediately.

So something happens and it’s very painful and very difficult, and we try to process it in the moment instead of just understanding that. There’s a little bit of time that needs to pass. There’s regulation that needs to go on. Before we do that, another pattern that I definitely see is seeking reassurance, seeking validation, seeking relief.

So we’re feeling this emotional pain and we wanna tell everybody. We want everyone to know, we want to talk about it ad nauseum. Um, we wanna go to chat, GPT and put it in there and have chat. GPT give us the answer of what we’re supposed to do and how we’re supposed to handle it and how we’re supposed to feel.

But the truth of the matter is that it’s not helping at all. Right. Another pattern that I see is numbing through productivity, numbing through caretaking, numbing through scrolling, numbing through food, numbing through distraction. Noticing how some of you will completely pull out of your life when you’re feeling a lot of intensive emotion, and then also.

Others of you will actually get hard to work and you will be hyper productive. You’ll know this is happening to you because you’ll be telling everybody how you’re so busy. And then lastly, the thing that I find and that I see that is a pattern is that we turn pain into a self-improvement project. So we make it our mission to get rid of the pain.

Like, how do I fix me so that I don’t have to feel this painful emotion? And. All of these things on their own are a problem and they’re not a problem. Um, they’re a problem because of what they create. They don’t create emotional confidence. They don’t create more emotional capacity. They don’t give you more emotional bandwidth, but they’re not a problem in that.

It doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong with you. You haven’t somehow taken a huge wrong turn or you’re stuck there forever. What they are is they’re protective strategies. They’re things that show up as survival instinct, um, kicks in. There are survival strategies. They’re protective strategies. They’re not character flaws, and they worked once.

But now what’s happening for many of you is they’re costing you energy and presence and self-trust. And these are things we really wanna look at. Where we wanna go is we wanna shift from managing your emotional pain into relating to emotional pain. And so. How we do this is we go from managing pain, which is like, how do I make the pain go away to relating to the pain in that, how do I stay with myself while this is here and.

I really look at it from the standpoint of how do I make this go away comes from a place of I need to tolerate this emotion and how do I have more tolerance and how can I get rid of it before my tolerance runs out? Whereas, how do I stay with myself while this is here is I have capacity for this emotion.

It’s not sending me into a stress response. I’m not going into fight, flight, or freeze. I know the emotion is here. I know what to do with it, and I can sit with it and process it until it moves its way through. Where we really need to look and what I notice for so many people, but emotionally sensitive women in particular, is that we don’t need to solve it to move it.

Okay? We don’t need to solve the pain for it to move emotions. Will move. They are meant to move. They move through us like waves. There are vibrations in our body and in order for them to move, they can move when they’re met with safety, they can move when they’re met with true neutrality and they can move when they’re met with permission.

So you don’t really need to understand and emotion to be present with it, and you don’t need to fix the situation. Either. Some of the things that you know, I really teach that I wanna offer to you here on this podcast is that we can pause the urgency. We don’t need to decide something right now. We don’t need to be in a rush.

Nothing has gone wrong. This is just a feeling, no feeling will last forever. Not even this one. The other thing we wanna do is we wanna start being able to separate the sensation of the emotion from the story. So really taking the feeling part of the equation and understanding how does this feeling show up in my body?

What does fear feel like? What does frustration feel like? What does grief feel like? What does rejection feel like versus going into the story of what. I’m telling myself about this, this is where we need to start developing some separation so that you understand that the feeling is not the story. They are two separate things.

And then the last thing we wanna do is we wanna offer internal companionship. And what that means is that we sit with ourselves and let ourselves know I’m here with you. Instead of, we need to get over this. We wanna start being able to talk to ourselves in a way where we are the leader, where we are the mentor, where we are the person that sits with ourselves while we’re feeling in to the emotion, when we’re experiencing the emotion in our body.

Not in the mind, not in the thoughts, not in the story. So I want you to kind of look at, I wanna show you what. Staying with an emotion actually looks like, and what staying in emotion doesn’t look like. So when we’re staying with an emotion, it’s quiet, it’s subtle, it’s boring, it’s nondramatic. Emotions will soften when they’re not being resisted and when they’re not being analyzed, when we’re not trying to mold them and push them and shape them, and instead we just go, okay, this is what this feels like in my body.

Nothing has gone wrong. I’m safe. I’m okay. What we want to be able to do is we want to be able to get to a place where we can slow down when our body wants us to speed up, right? So when we grow the capacity for the emotion, when we start understanding and processing and dealing with the emotions, and not being in a rush, making it boring, making it quiet, making it systematic, the emotions.

We’ll just move. And I really do look at it as a wave that goes in and out. So if you’ve ever stood on a beach where there’s the ocean and you notice how the waves come up and they lap up and they hit to the very edge, and then they recede, that’s what emotions are like. That’s how we experience them. So if we can stay with the pain without spiraling, when we can actually just experience the emotion without.

Having it completely take over because we’re not resisting it because we’re not getting into the story of it because we know how to put it in a body. What happens is we’re just not required to act. We’re not required to explain. We’re not required to fix, and we are able to just be. When we’re feeling an emotion, it doesn’t mean that we’re agreeing with the feeling, and it doesn’t mean that we’re resigned to the feeling.

It just means that the feeling is being experienced. And what we start to see, what we start to notice is that the capacity grows. When people ask me how do I grow emotional capacity, I’m like, this is a very simple process, but. The, the explanation of why and how it works is sometimes difficult to articulate, but at the end of the day, capacity grows through presence, not force.

So we’re not making ourselves be able to experience more fear. We’re going through fear. I’m noticing it and sitting with ourselves. And, and it may be for only like one second longer, two seconds longer. Um, what. I kind of use as an analogy and, and something that I think sometimes can work for people is and get them to a breakthrough is, I I water ski, right?

I slalom ski. I’ve done it for years and years and it’s a sport I truly love, but it’s a very, very difficult sport to get out of the water. So doing a deep water start on one ski behind a motorboat, it requires. Skill, but it also requires the will. Okay? It requires the will to get up. You have to get point past a point where the tension breaks and you can stand up on the water and it happens in a millisecond.

And for many years I couldn’t do it. And then one day my brother gave me a new technique and I was able to get out of the water and I skied on one ski from that point. Forward for many, many years. And then a few years ago, um, we had rented a different kind of boat and we didn’t know how to drive it. And so when my, you know, we hit the gas, we hit it way too hard and it would rip the rope outta my hands and I wouldn’t be able to hang on.

And after that experience, I could no longer get up on one ski, didn’t matter what boat I was behind. And then I went and tried to get up on two skis and I couldn’t get up on two skis, which is wild because it’s so much easier. And what. Had been like said back to me as you’re letting go of the rope, and I was so frustrated by that comment.

It just felt so untrue. I was not letting go. The rope was being ripped from my hands. However, when I finally went to get up on two skis at first and I was like, you can hang on for one second longer. Just one second longer and it would get me out of the water. And wouldn’t you know that I could get up every time and then I went to get up on one ski and I could get up out of the water because I held it for one second longer.

So what I want you to know, and what I want to invite you to consider is that if you can sit within emo an emotion for one second longer and grow your capacity for it, and grow your ability to be within sensation without moving into the story. You are gonna notice exponential growth. You are gonna notice that you become more and more emotionally confident.

This is just the nature of what you’re doing. When you are able to do that, when you’re able to sit with yourself emotionally, when you are able to just simply process and allow emotion as it comes and not be in a rush to get rid of it, no matter how painful it may seem, what will happen is you’ll have less fear of bad days.

So you won’t be worried that the bad day’s coming and you’re not gonna be able to handle it when you do it. You have less emotional whiplash, so you’re not. Totally freaking out and then totally shutting down and yo-yoing between those two things, it will create more trust in your internal world. So a lot of people want to be self validating, but the way that we actually get to being able to self validate is.

Literally by learning how to navigate emotion in a way that works for us, your decisions will start coming from steadiness and not urgency. You won’t be panicked, you won’t feel like you’re in a rush. In fact, it will feel kind of boring and you won’t really know what’s happened. Um, I even have a client that recently, we’ve been coaching together for about two months now.

She came on a call today and said that. Something that had normally been very triggering for her, she felt nothing about. And she wanted to know if she should be worried. And my answer was no. You don’t wanna be worried. This is perfect. This is exactly what you want to have happen. It should be boring.

That is the point. That’s what we create When we do that, when we’re not afraid, we can make really clear decisions. And the last thing is, when, when we are able to do this, our sensitivity becomes a strength and not something to manage, not something to apologize for, and not something to be fearful of.

And what this allows you to do is it allows you to be the leader in your life. It allows you to step forward and really. Take charge of what you’re doing. It allows you to set really solid boundaries with everyone, with the people you love, with your work, wherever you need it. It grows yourself respect, and it also allows you to have more energy for things that you really.

Love that you’re really excited about. This is the really super cool part of this process is this is what it will create for you and it creates it for everyone. So listen, if emotional pain has felt like something you have to manage or outrun, I want to leave you with this question. What happens when I stay with myself instead of trying to make this stop?

And you don’t need to answer it, but I just want you to notice, I want you to notice the urge to fix it. I want you to notice the urge to explain. I want you to notice the urge to disappear or to push through and just really grow your capacity for that. And if this brought something up for you, confusion or relief or resistance, you’re not alone in that.

Everyone has a different experience of this conversation and we can have it over and over again. I am always interested in hearing what people are actually experiencing. Okay. Not the polished version, so you can always come find me on Instagram. It’s the Amanda Hess. I would love to hear from you, and what I will tell you is that this is the work.

This is what creates an experience of your life that feels satisfying, that feels peaceful, that feels fulfilling. So we’re just gonna keep exploring this together. All right, my friends, this is what I’ve got for you today. I hope you have the most incredible week, and I will see her next time. Bye for now.

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