How I Turned Hypersensitivity Into a Strength

They called me too sensitive. I found strength in my truth

For as long as I can remember, my parents have accused me of being too sensitive.

I never knew what they actually meant, as they didn't give me an explanation. It felt as if there was something deeply wrong with me. I just couldn't make any sense of it.

Of course, I cried when I was six and cut my thumb while playing with a knife.

Who wouldn't?

Well, my father found the accident funny. But that's not the point here…

Image by Rishikesh Yogpeeth

I understood from my parents that they required me to be tough. Showing or talking about emotions was a no-go. Laughing was okay, though. Same for faking a smile when I felt terrible inside.

My emotions were only a part of the problem.

Somehow, I was able to pick up the vibes around me and spot inconsistencies from a mile away. When somebody just walked slightly differently, I saw it as larger than life. I wondered why other people could not see the obvious.

There were many other things that I sensed, but my parents didn't. It particularly became a problem for everything that felt off inside my family. So I stopped mentioning things, but had problems with keeping my facial expression straight.

And that's when I got accused of being too sensitive, yet another time…

The only way out was pushing my emotions and feelings away. My brain proved to be a wonderful tool for that. Whenever something stirred up in me, I tried to rationalise it.

I interpreted things that made no sense to me as undesired weakness. From my parents, I also learned that being emotional and soft was for cowards and losers. So, pushing this weakness away kinda became my second nature.

And it worked surprisingly well.

People could make fun of me in really bad ways, and I did not even blink an eye. Of course, it felt deeply unpleasant first. But then I decided to just let them keep talking as if their words just hit a wall that was around me.

Some people admired my thick skin and mistook it for self-esteem.

I was not proud of my wall, as it mostly made me feel empty inside.

My parents took quite some advantage of this wall. They knew I could take things, which kinda gave them carte blanche to load all their crap on my back.

My father could not handle his emotional pain or feelings of weakness. He needed to feel strong and invincible to feel stable. Beating and punishing me hard for the smallest things probably gave him a sense of superiority and allowed him to externalize his pain.

My mother used all the flaws she saw in me to feel deeply ashamed of the boy she brought to life. This, in turn, was an invitation for my father to punish me without having his own reason. He liked to punish, and any reason was welcome.

The problem with the wall was that it also did not let anything else in or out. In a way, I was disconnected from my environment. I felt I did not belong and was not worthy of love. And even before a lovely soul could reach that wall, I ran away just to make sure my base protection stays intact.

But there were cracks in the wall, they always have been there…

Sometimes words of underlying truths spilled out of my mouth. People wanted to know how I knew. I had no answer. But they turned out to be accurate. And the farther I was away from family, the more of such insights came through.

I wish the cracks had just slowly gotten bigger so that I could step out of the wall around me in a more pleasant way. But life gave me a different path for that.

There are two ways to tear down walls. You can shoot at them from the outside, or you can place explosives inside. Shooting from outside did not work, as I just ran away when I sensed that someone was coming too close to me.

However, suppressing my emotions for decades had built up quite some pressure inside. Life started becoming unbearable for me.

Up to some point, I functioned pretty well. But I did not really live or express myself. Hell, I didn't even know who I was. And nobody could tell me, as I felt no connection or deeper trust with anyone. I basically was all on my own for most of my life.

But then there was a soft voice again that made it through the cracks.

It told me to give up my job and travel for a year through South America.

This time, I didn't push it away, because I had nothing left to lose.

My life felt so damn empty. There was no point in continuing to live that way.

I desperately wanted to know what else life had to offer.

I got an answer. I followed this answer as if it were the ultimate truth.

And it was!

The journey turned out to be my initiation into life, tho I was already in my mid-thirties. In a way, I got to see on the outside what was hidden behind the walls on the inside.

Back then, I did not know what this all had to do with me, and that there was beauty inside me that I never learned to see. Seeing it on the outside first helped me to break down the walls with several mid-sized explosions, aka life crises.

The most important lesson from this journey was that I can trust the soft voice within me. No one can talk me out of my inner truth no more. She is the ultimate compass, though I still use my rational mind to fine-tune my decisions.

I had to go through quite some rough lessons years after returning from the journey. But no matter how hard life treated me, following my truth was a much more powerful approach than keeping up the walls around me.

And then I noticed how the last pieces of my walls were crumbling. Life seemed to have opened up for me. But it was I who opened up to experiencing life with body, mind, and soul.

I started to consciously FEEL the world around me again. And I felt connected with it, like an integral part of a large ecosystem.

This may all sound very romantic. But the changes I saw on the outside were very real. Strangers suddenly started greeting me on the way to the supermarket. Squirrels came onto my balcony, wanted nuts, and even ate out of my hand.

I kept on speaking my truth. When I see a stranger and feel that they are sad, I give them a warm smile, say hello, or start a small talk with them, which several times ended in deeper talks.

I noticed that people wanted to be seen, much like I wanted to when I was a child, and my parents refused to accept the real me.

Speaking my truth as someone sensitive to the more subtle things in life healed me.