You need to know that your sensitivity is not a flaw.
I know, it can feel like it. It can feel like your sensitivity makes you vulnerable.
And there are definitely people who will try to take advantage of how sensitive you are.
But that doesn’t mean your sensitivity is a flaw, or even necessarily a weakness.
Let’s be real: there are people who will try to take advantage of ANY quality we happen to have a lot of.
And ANY quality that hooks into who we are and what we’re all about, including but not limited to our sensitivity, is potentially exploitable.
So many trauma survivors walk around feeling like a raw nerve— and we so often feel ashamed of that.
It doesn’t help that we have an entire culture around us glorifying “toughness” and portraying emotional non-reactivity as the essence of heroism.
Let me tell you, real heroes are plenty sensitive and plenty emotional.
I happen to think the way our culture glorifies emotional non-reactivity is kind of an exercise in wish fulfillment: we humans desperately wish we weren’t so sensitive or emotional, so we invent heroes who are defined by their ability to “suck it up.”
The reality is, the world desperately NEEDS people who are sensitive and empathic.
We don’t WANT an entire culture created by people who are out of touch with their feelings and intuition. That world would be a cold, hard place.
CPTSD tries really hard to convince us we’re “damaged goods.”
So many of us really, truly believe there is something fundamentally “wrong” with us— beyond the post traumatic injuries we’ve sustained and the CPTSD patterns we involuntarily run.
An injury is not the same as a “flaw” or a “weakness.”
The strongest, toughest athletes in the world get injured.
The best designed bridges and buildings on the planet get damaged by earthquakes and storms.
It is likely you, like me, are more sensitive than most. Things hit us harder. We have harder time compartmentalizing and moving on than many (which is why many survivors develop the psychological defense of dissociation— it seems to do the heavy lifting of compartmentalization for us, though relying on it in this way eventually creates more problems than it solves).
That doesn’t mean we’re “immature,” “weak,” or any of the other dozen things Trauma Brain tries to call us.
It definitely doesn’t mean our job is to somehow banish our sensitivity.
We very much NEED our sensitivity.
We also need to develop tools and philosophies that support us in managing that sensitivity so it doesn’t overwhelm us.
Your sensitivity is not a flaw.
It’s one of the best things about you.
People like us are going to change the world in ways people not in touch with their sensitivity cannot.
I truly believe that.
Use Your Damn Skills 