The CalmWithDom Podcast
Hey I'm Dominik, an Emotional Intelligence Coach for highly sensitive women ready to break their cycles of overwhelm to cultivate stronger relationships (both with themselves and others).
On this show, we do deep dives into how to best understand and leverage your sensitivity to thrive with tools such as shadow work, emotional intelligence skills, and more. My approach is psychospiritual because I truly believe we work best with all the language we can.
We're letting go of overwhelm and stepping into an unshakeable love of self over here, so I'm glad you've joined us!
From my sensitive soul to yours, I hope this helps.
The CalmWithDom Podcast
'What Mental Illness Taught Me' Series Pt. 1: Regarding Yourself With Neutrality As An HSP
With love, I hope this helps🌷
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Hi guys, let's start the What My Mental Illness Taught Me series on the Calm with John Podcast. I'm really excited about this series. I've been wanting to do it forever. Welcome to the Calm with John Podcast where we harness our sensitivity to get grounded in our relationships with ourselves and with other people. My name is Dominic. Let's get into it. I'm super excited to talk about this topic because I am a highly sensitive woman who had navigated, struggled, and eventually overcame depression and anxiety for over well over 10 years of my life. I dealt with these mood disorders that, along with being a highly sensitive child, truly crippled me numerous times. I can't even count how many times it has negatively impacted and affected me, my relationships with myself, with my family, with friends, with teachers. It is a very colorful uh combination. And since overcoming those disorders, eventually getting trained in emotional intelligence training and cognitive behavioral therapy coaching, my specific approach to coaching highly sensitive women is rooted in the things that I have learned through my experience navigating these very specific circumstances. Up chit chat, let's get into the one of the things that I learned that has set the foundation for my coaching practice today. And that is that my mental illnesses taught me how to regard myself with neutrality. I learned the very delicious term healthy detachment, overcoming my own depression and anxiety as a highly sensitive child and an adolescent. And this is simply because when you are dealing with something like depression, a very logical, rational, straightforward, and quite frankly, self-centered uh mood disorder, it is it's so logical that it is hard to undo the bad mental math that happens, uh, that takes place in a child's mind. Any child children are just surviving their environments at all times. As a highly sensitive child, it is particularly difficult to navigate survival when you when you're taking in so much more information than your non-highly sensitive counterparts, then your non-highly sensitive peers, uh, siblings, even parents that do not understand, who do not teach you how you operate, they don't understand how you operate. Um that's where all these negative connotations of being too sensitive uh come from, of course. As you know, if you're a highly sensitive woman listening to this now, you know all too well. What made this difficult was that all of the subtleties in my environments, right? The emotions of parents, of my siblings, of my uh peers, my classmates, of the teachers that I dealt with. If anybody was in a bad mood, if anybody was less than ecstatic, happy, content, normal, quote unquote, around me, I had every logical reason for why it had to do with me. And that's what depression does. Depression convinces you that you are the center of the universe, and it's very strange. If you if you have dealt with and experienced depression, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, it's gonna sound very strange because um definitely people talk about this, but I feel like it is still if it's an unfamiliar experience, you may this may sound foreign and new to you, but it absolutely puts you at the center of the universe. You are everybody as humans, it is human nature to think and exist in the I perspective and the eye narrative, operating in within depression, it it truly warps your reality, and it develops all of these cognitive distortions in your mind about what is actually happening in your reality because you are everyone's soul problem, you are everyone's burden, and it's just sound, rational, bad mental math. Uh, there is no space for people really having their own lives, especially as a child. You have to understand, as a child, a child's world is so small, and that's all the information they're working with. Children don't know that there are good days to come, right? Children don't know that the future is bright, they they don't know these things if they're not equipped with the tools to think about the world that way. They just see what's right in front of them and the experiences that they're having, right? The the the first cut it it hurts the most because they've never experienced it before and it is a shock to the system, right? Um, and that goes for emotional experiences as well. A lot of our emotional experiences are shocks to the system as children, and we're doing the best that we can to navigate, and we we do just suck at it. That's normal. What a highly sensitive child is going through is they are being uh drained energetically by these subtle shifts and changes in their environment, the things that are unspoken. A highly sensitive child is more is more heavily impacted by those things. All children are because they're sponges, and they're all just naturally very intuitive and understanding, and they do not communicate in English, they communicate in body language and emotions and sounds, and they're that's all they can really be aware of. A highly sensitive child doesn't have that high of a threshold before they're overcome with the overstimulation of it all. Add a couple of mood disorders in there, some mental illnesses, and it's a recipe for a warped reality, a potentially dangerous situation for the child. Every negative thing that happens in that child's environment is that child's fault. And one of our superpowers as highly sensitive people is that we are super flexible, super adaptable. We pick up the unspoken subtle shifts and changes in whatever room we occupy, right? Whatever dynamics that we are we're in, and we can transform and be what the room needs us to be. We can be who other people need us to be. We can shift and adapt to the needs of many different people to keep harmony in our social situations and circumstances. A child can do that just as easily, and they will they will hurt themselves doing so. We hurt ourselves doing so when we do not have a healthy relationship with our sensitivity, which brings me to what my mental illness taught me. Regarding myself with neutrality allowed me to step away from the I narrative, and that sounds very simple, it's just maturity, but this was holistic, this was a well-rounded experience where you're not just considering that other people have lives and people have things going on that have nothing to do with you, but it extends the option for other people's emotion, other people's emotional experiences, and how they experience you to have nothing to do with you, to not have to mean anything about you directly, and that's key. And unfortunately, as simple as it sounds, what I notice that a lot of the highly sensitive women that I work with at the very least, what they struggle with is really just being emotionally entangled in the unspoken communication of their dynamics, where every shift in body language, everything that is said and not said, has something to do with them and says something about their character and what healthy detachment allows for, it allows for so many things. I love it so much, it allows for healing to take place by providing space. I didn't I learned this from my own experience, uh, but it didn't, it took a bit for me to translate space this way. Space within my relationship with myself and relationship with other people, my relationship with other people. It started with physical space. I learned this, first learned this when I started having panic attacks. I was 14 years old. I was uh I would get these panic attacks while walking to school, fresh off the train, and just it hit me. And strangers having busy mornings on their way to work, on their way to appointments, going home, would stop and do their best to take care of me and get me to a hospital. And as a 14-year-old, it was the first time I would ever experience anything like a panic attack until I had several and I had panic disorder for a couple of years there in my adolescence. It was truly life-changing, and I'm so grateful to those uh nameless strangers who went out of their way to take care of me. Their immediate responses in their approach to helping me was to provide space. Whether it was that they made sure they were feet away from me before speaking to me, hands raised, checking in on me, hey, can you talk? Do you need help? Can I help you? Can can I approach you? I got a lot of that, and I've never ever, as a child, that was the first time I'd ever really been provided physical space like that. But also regarding the people around, right? If there was a crowd forming, back up, give her space, we need room. Before any attempt at helping happened, space was required for the healing to start. And it was very, very interesting that these strangers they often needed the space, they could not help me unless they had an adequate amount of physical space to approach me the way that they wanted to approach me so that I was okay. Those experiences taught me a lot. It's kind of something that translates across the board when we are operating in our relationships, and so it's a fundamental foundational piece to my coaching with other highly sensitive women. Do you provide yourself space? Are you providing the people that you are so emotionally entangled with space? Can they just exist outside of the of the dynamic that exists between you? Can you regard them as such human first? Can you do that so that you can do what you do best? Because as highly sensitive people, what we do best is observe and know what needs to happen. We know how to provide solutions. We will step up as the leaders of a group, of a movement if we need to. Am I forgiving myself for having these panic attacks? Because let me tell you, I I really beat myself up about even having them. Healing cannot happen if there is no space for it to happen. You need to allow it to breathe. You need to allow yourself to breathe. And it makes navigating relationships so much easier. It's why when I teach highly sensitive women what healthy detachment is, the first thing I say is it's it's active compassion, it's detaching with compassion. Not because you don't care, it's not apathetic, it is powered by the forgiveness and acceptance of the other person, and the other person can very well be you. That is what my mental illness taught me. It taught me how to regard myself with neutrality, and again, use the word neutrality if that's better. Um, because you don't have to go from loathing yourself, which is what some mental illnesses kind of condition you to start doing, you start relating to yourself so differently, the complete opposite way can be too big of a contrast, it can feel scary, unsafe, unfamiliar. But neutrality is where there's safety, there is space for options. Maybe I don't love myself today, maybe I don't love this person right now, but I can give them the respect and space of being a human being, the way that I would give myself the space to be a human being having a human experience, and we can go from there. I want to know, you can leave it in the comments underneath the video of this podcast episode, or you can text me. I have a link in my show notes, or you can text me directly, private, personalized message straight to me. Uh, you can also email me, you can DM me if you'd like. I want to know. Do you regard yourself with neutrality? When do you do it? What are the moments that it's easy for you to give yourself the healthy detachment that you need to just be you? Where do you practice neutrality in your other relationships? Do you offer and provide healthy detachment? There is something about truly taking this into a journal entry, something about sitting and with your cup of tea, your cup of coffee on your car ride to wherever you're going, really thinking about this. The acknowledgement of where you are practicing neutrality makes it real. It's grounding immediately. It immediately grounds you to your sensitivity, it immediately has you relating to your sensitivity differently. Also, reflecting on where you aren't. What relationship is it that this person, a majority of their of how they respond to you deeply affects you and you can't help it. Where where is that happening in your in your life? Is it in relation to another person? Is it a hobby? Is it that you have these unrealistic expectations of yourself in different areas of your life? Right? Is it multiple relationships? What do they have in common? How do you feel? Truly, truly reflect on this. I highly recommend writing about it. But if you just want to text me your thoughts, my text messages, my DMs, my emails, they are safe spaces for you to share your stories. I'd love to hear your stories because I share my stories with you openly and honestly and with that same trust. So thank you so much for listening to this off the cuff podcast episode. Let me know if you want to hear more and you like this series. I will see you next week. Thanks for being here.
