The Shadow Side Of Your Sensitivity: Choosing Integrity Over Comfort

It's within our relationships that we're confronted with the not so fun parts of our sensitivity, which is honestly a gift in disguise. From my personal and professional experience coaching HSPs like yourself, I figured it was absolutely worth dedicating an episode or two on this very topic.

With love, I hope this helps🌷

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Mentioned In Episode:

Podcast Ep. 👉🏼 What You MUST Know About Receiving Criticism As A Highly Sensitive Woman

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Sensitivity’s Shadow
• 2:20 The List Of Shadow Patterns
• 3:55 Impact Of Owning Your Needs
• 6:45 Manipulation Versus True Boundaries
• 11:53 Accountability Over Excuses
• 15:08 Apologies, Repair, And Overcorrection
• 17:58 Confrontation, Change, And Growth
• 21:03 Community Accountability That Sticks
• 23:33 Harnessing Empathy And Deep Processing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Comment On podcast. If you are not new here, if you are new here, hi, I'm Dominic, and today we were talking about something really important. It took me such a long time to get around to making this episode because it's so juicy. And ultimately, if I wait to say everything that I want to say about this topic, this episode might never come out. So instead, I'm going to tell you some key issues that we face when dealing with the shadow side of our sensitivity as highly sensitive people, as highly sensitive women. I know I'm not going to talk about everything because this will easily be a two-hour podcast and my voice will not make it. So we will be coming back to this topic. Don't you worry. There will be blog posts that are cohesive and in depth with examples and a bunch of strategies. I'll probably be making resources available to you guys to help with different shadow aspects of our sensitivity, but we need to talk about it in general. That there are shadow aspects. I'll just read out the list real quick for you right now so that you're aware of where I'm going with this. This is what I've experienced and this is what I witnessed. Some of the shadow aspects to your sensitivity may look like emotional manipulation, confrontation, avoidance, mind reading as a distortion versus a spiritual gift, discomfort with change in general. So we're not talking about each bullet point in this episode. I just need you to be aware. And if it resonates with you, if it made you a little uncomfortable, or you were like, oh, absolutely. I know that. That's my life. Or I've experienced that, I've been on the other side of that with other highly sensitive people in my life. We're on the same page. But first, hello and welcome, or welcome back to the Calm But Dom podcast, where we harness our sensitivities to overcome our energy leaks and strengthen our relationships with ourselves and other people and your coach Dom. Let's get into it. I've seen this time and time again, so I need to let you know as you embark in this journey, as you embrace your sensitivity, you're going to find that you make a genuine impact in your environment in unexpected ways. You may be no stranger to people approaching you and letting you know how you've affected them, how you've impacted them, how your input serves and does not. So heavy on the unexpected ways. There's gonna be evidence of your impact that you may not be ready for. For example, as you get grounded in your sensitivity, you will start to vocalize your needs. And in vocalizing your needs more often and getting more comfortable saying no to things you don't want to do by being unapologetic and taking up space in your environment and self-advocating as you should, you might find that your presence or lack thereof leaves a bigger impact on the people around you. Naturally, the impact is going to be bigger. This is a good thing. You are not responsible for the emotions of others. And whether or not you rub people the wrong way or the right way is quite frankly none of your business. But what is your business are the decisions you make, your actions, and your intentions. If you are not careful, you can manipulate the actions of other people against their will, under the guise that you are, quote unquote, too sensitive, to be held accountable or quote unquote too sensitive, to honor the needs and desires of others. This is big. In the last podcast episode, I talked about how difficult it can be for highly sensitive people to receive criticism, along with guidance to help you get better at receiving criticism, as well as how to manage negative or destructive criticism. Uh, that episode will pop up somewhere on the screen. And of course, will always be linked in the show notes. So don't worry if you're listening to the audio. It is well researched that we get better at handling high levels of stimulation, meaning stimulating emotions, stimulating environments, seasons of life, challenges, etc., when we're regularly exposed to said things. Now, meeting your needs may look like saying no to going out or attending an event, but this becomes manipulative when you influence others to not attend said events, if that's something they actually want to do. That's spending someone's will to your benefit and their detriment. And I think that's key. If they gain from honoring your wishes and boundaries, that's beautiful, that's harmonious, it's a good thing. But if they lose something and the price isn't worth it for them, they're operating at a loss. And it may foster resentment in your dynamics. Honestly, you may be hearing this and thinking, that's not me, that's not something I deal with. Personally, I believe that highly sensitive people are we're really good at considering the needs and emotions of other people. I think our place of weakness, which is not just our own, I think this is normal, I think it's human, it can be more comfortable saying no to the people we're more comfortable with, i.e. your loved ones. These more personal relationships are the ones that we want to cultivate to honor our sensitivity. It's not the same thing as manipulating other people for the sake of our sensitivity. There's a different energy there, it's definitely more selfish, and it's not harmonious. I've seen highly sensitive people get stuck in self-victimization in these kinds of dynamics. And I have worked through these situations with coaching clients of mine. You tend to be willing to dish out your two cents with people you care about the most, who you're attached to, etc. Your boundaries are as meaningful as your integrity, and your boundaries aren't rules for other people in your life to follow. I speak a lot on highly sensitive women having to be accountable to their needs for this reason, right? Your boundaries are your actions, the decisions that you are gonna make if ABC takes place, if this thing happens, whatever it is, whatever the conditions are, this is how you will respond. This is how you will feel about it. These are, if anything, rules and regulations and standards that you hold yourself to. It's not you controlling other people. That's not what boundaries are. And I think we forget that very easily. Personally speaking, I think that's why everyone's kind of tired and fatigued by the term boundaries. The work I do specifically with other highly sensitive people have to do with living a life that honors their needs first before relying on others to meet those needs for them. Because we do need the people in our lives to remind us of who we are. You need your sibling or your best friend or your parent or your cousin or your romantic partner to let you know when there is a double standard existing within the dynamic, or you've hurt them, or you're hurting yourself. So here's what you're gonna do to address shadows like emotional manipulation. You are going to practice shadow work with proper form. You're going to lean on your community for accountability, and you're going to harness your strengths when you're faced with said issues. Doing these three things are going to be how you get better at having conversations with your people, with the topic of your sensitivity being normalized in your life. It's not going to be something that always has to happen. You just need to get better at self-advocating with your sensitivity being your foundation. People in your life can forget that you are a highly sensitive person and what that even means. It's not something you have to point out all the time or uh kind of pull it out as an excuse because, again, one of the issues that HSPs can face is kind of using it as an excuse to dodge accountability. That's not what we want to do. It's about you getting comfortable with treating yourself as a highly sensitive person. You're the only person who is responsible for meeting your needs. I don't want to give the impression that that is what you're doing when your conversations sound like that. Now, I have an entire curriculum about doing shadow work with proper form. If you do want to get your hands on that curriculum, it'll be in the show notes. There is a right and a wrong way to doing shadow work. If you do it haphazardly and uh without self-compassion, you're gonna get yourself hurt. It's not going to translate well in your conversations with your loved ones either, because that's where victimization happens often. At least these are patterns that show up when I work with my coaching clients. So to avoid that, you wanna make sure that you are offering yourself compassion and not seeking it from your loved ones. And I know that's odd because that's what you would expect from your loved ones. But if you are not providing that for yourself, you are going to come from a place of resentment when you are not immediately met with that. Again, we're talking about you tending to your needs in the face of other people who have their own needs that need to be met in the same moment. Emotional manipulation can toss aside your loved ones' needs completely. And that's what we don't want to do, even accidentally, at least in according to according to me. So take this with a grain of salt and cross-reference this with your favorite trusted people in this field. It looks like explaining how going to the event or being spoken to in a certain way, or uh receiving the response you didn't like for whatever reason, explaining how it lands with you, what it usually does for you, because you having a boundary that exists means that there is a pattern to the over-stimulation you experience. It's something that you know well enough about yourself that you're able to communicate with your loved one. So just letting your person know how it lands with you. And because of that, this is what you do as a response to take care of yourself. Now, we are not perfect if you find yourself in a position where you may have already done the emotional manipulation because we are not saints, and that's like a whole other topic that I've been very open about online anyway. So we're not perfect. Uh, being highly sensitive does not mean that we are saints. Uh, we get it wrong, and so an apology has to come first. You've got to acknowledge when damage has been done, right? Uh, if someone sacrificed their needs for your sensitivity and it was unharmonious, you've got to address it and be the person to take responsibility for it happening less often, if at all. At least this is what it looks like in conversation. With yourself, you're going to have to sit with it and figure out where your response is coming from. And no matter what the answer is, you've got to be okay with it. You can change your reality, you can change how you respond to things. It takes time, but you are not your own executioner here. I do believe that there tends to be an overcorrection once we become aware of a problem that we have and we want to solve. So when a highly sensitive person discovers that they've been feeling alone in a crowded room of people that they love and learn that it's because they've never advocated for their needs and no one else has, this can mean a couple of things for you as a highly sensitive person. It can mean that either A, literally no one recognized your needs, or B, you were successful in disregarding every time a loved one tried to. Sometimes both are the case. Either way, it hurts a lot to be faced with that realization. If you've made the decision to start cultivating an environment where that doesn't happen anymore and you don't have people in your life that allow that to happen, but most importantly, that you are not allowing that to happen anymore. You may overcorrect. And so you have to be aware of the power of your no. You have to be aware of the power of your self-advocacy and balancing your personal needs with the needs and desires of other people, the people that you love. That being said, there is a fine line between self-care and manipulating others' actions. The biggest example of this unintentional emotional manipulation is giving ultimatums. I think that's pretty popular when we are at our limit, when we're so overly stimulated that we throw out ultimatums. If you do this, if you respond to me this way, I will stop A, B, C. Ultimatums sound like boundaries, and they are, but you've got to be careful about where are you placing power in the dynamic that you're in. That can get tricky. It sounds like you're taking responsibility for your own actions, right? The way that a boundary is supposed to do. But in our most intimate relationships, what you do does have an impact on them. And you cannot control people. You can't control how they react to you and your big emotions. So you're going to have to be honest with yourself about why you're throwing out ultimatums in the first place. What is it that you cannot stand? And this leads to one of the other shadow aspects of our sensitivity, which is that we are very uncomfortable with change. And we're very uncomfortable with confrontation. And usually when we are faced with confrontation, it is due in part to changes being made that we have to decide to get on board with and adapt or not. It's so easy to get comfortable in how you are impacted by the world, right? You know yourself better than anyone else. All we do is spew to whoever will listen to us how we work. Being in a situation where you're being called to adapt and change how you work. It's hard and it's usually in our most intimate relationships a call for growth. Growth can feel dangerous. Reminding yourself that you have a very low threshold for the stimulation that comes with confrontation and change will make it easier for you to have the self-compassion needed and required for you to approach your shadow work properly and fucking grow as a person because that's what you want. I'm really highlighting how often we forget this because we're just again used to how we operate, that we can feel very justified in our hurt, in our anger, in our in our reluctance to change, because this thing has been working for us for all our lives, essentially. But the things that have been working for us aren't necessarily the best thing for us. And most often, and what you will find through your shadow work process is the things that worked for you, the tools in your toolbox have served you in environments where you had to survive, and those two things aren't the same. Of course, this is intertwined with the second piece of advice on how to address your shadow side. You're going to have to lean on your community for accountability. It's not the most intuitive process because, again, how used to your responses and reactions to stimulation you are, how embedded they are in your foundation. You will become desensitized. That is the good news. But you're going to need community to keep you accountable to set changes, right? To make sure that the changes that you're going to go through, that you're putting yourself through, that the discomfort is worth it, that the reward is high. There's a reason why a lot of highly sensitive people are recovering people pleasers. It's a part of what you needed to survive growing up, being only a small percentage of the population who has this trait, who has these set of traits. What does leaning on your community look like? It looks like a couple of things. It looks like going to safe people about the situation and issue at hand, the thing that you're struggling with. It looks like cross-referencing what your loved ones have said and shared with you about your responses and how they feel about your responses to these tough dynamics. You're gonna cross-reference them and you can cross-reference them with yourself on your own. You can do that with a coach. I've definitely had coaching clients where I've asked them, well, what has so-and-so in your life said about you in during this time, or how do they experience you? It's not about overriding your own emotions and what you believe your truth is in whatever situation that's calling you to grow. It's about making sure that you have just more situational awareness. How your intentions and how you are received can be so different. And we, in our own, again, comfortability, dealing with ourselves and knowing ourselves, and kind of like uh cherishing that, we can become overprotective of it. Um, as though everyone else is wrong, right? Because they do not know you. The point isn't right or wrong in these situations, it's obtaining a more holistic view of what your environment looks like. Your environment does not consist only of you, and this is how we're gonna have better conversations. You can take that into journal entries with a therapist, coaching client. You're safe people. All of it is beneficial, and they are all going to sound differently, and that's a good thing. The last piece of advice, how you're going to harness your strengths when you're faced with issues in your relationships moving forward. It's going to look like how deeply you process this new information, this new information about yourself, about the people you love, about your dynamics, where they are versus where you want them to be. That's gonna look like leaning into your empathy, your ability to empathize. And with the over-arousal of going through such in-depth emotional processes, it's gonna look like you falling in love with shadow work, which I think is the best thing that any highly sensitive person can do. This is so different. I don't want to kind of glorify uh constantly working on yourself and like do all the self-help, personal development stuff. Like, this is different. This is real, it's authentic, it is the fabric of the quality of your relationships with yourself and with other people. This is what you're going to be more open to experiencing and exploring because there is no right and wrong and black and white. This is my truth, and I can deny anything else to exist in my rich world. It's this never-ending process, and you just get to fall in love with it. Um, I will leave this episode here. Again, we did not talk about all of the shadow aspects, mostly just talked about two main ones in this episode, which was emotional manipulation and using our sensitivity as an excuse to avoid accountability. Uh, I feel like those were great aspects to talk about. But the falling in love, the falling in love with this process is what working with me looks like. This is what we get into. This is what gets normalized and we can embody these changes, right? These approaches to your relationships, to your life, to your sensitivity. It is a deeply personal process. And the more comfortable you are with it, the less overwhelming it is. Again, the desensitization of getting grounded in your sensitivity. This is what it looks like. This is the work that it takes. You do not have to do this alone. And if you feel, you know, safe and comfortable to do that work with my guidance, whether one-on-one or with my self-paced resources, you can find the roadmap to self-grounding program that is going to be linked in the description below, as well as the application to work with me one-on-one. And you can find out all the details in those links. I will also be linking my free emotional intelligence workbook. This is a self-reflection workbook that gets you started and how to approach your shadow work. It's not too lengthy, it's about 10 to 12 prompts that'll get you started and just sharpening your emotional intelligence skills. So this process feels a little lighter and simple. Thank you so much for being here, joining me in this conversation. Please feel free to continue the conversation in the comment section if you're watching this on YouTube. You can also text me your thoughts privately, personally. I'd love to hear any questions, concerns, topics you want to talk about. If you text them to me, I will potentially share them in the next episode. But that is all. Thanks for being here, and I'll see you next week.