In several recent issues of this newsletter I have asked this question:
As a sensitive person what concerns and issues do you want help with resolving?
Thank you to the hundreds of people who have responded! Here is what one person said:
Oh Lord, this is where I need the help. I have all of the characteristics of Emotional Sensitivity—to the extreme.
I would like to know how to deal with my extreme emotional sensitivity. My mother always says, "don’t cry, it doesn’t do any good; I could be crying all of the time…." I have been unemployed since August (due mostly to my sensitivity of one particular person’s comments and actions and things she did behind my back…I would complain to the interim CEO and ended up being terminated.)
I easily attach to people—especially men—and have a hard time letting go.
I hate loud people (my sister-in-law drives me crazy) and being in chaotic places…yet cannot keep my own home from being chaotic.
I hate being so overly sensitive and I take everything to heart...and it remains there for a very, very, very long time.
I am easily hurt, I suffer from depression—sometimes based on something someone has said or done to me.
I am very prone to stimulus overload—loud noises, large noisy crowds, exhaust me.
I often feel like a total failure and disappointment to everyone—including myself.
I feel like an outsider—always on the outside looking in; I feel like I don’t belong.
I want to be happy and I want to love myself—however I don’t know where to find those things within me.
I have been told I have psychic abilities and that I am a Light Worker – I’m extremely intuitive and am accurate on the things I feel—but sometimes I feel as if I’ve lost that intuitiveness. I’ve been asking God and the Angels for assistance for quite some time but feel as though I’m not being heard…or at least I’m not hearing them.
Each of these statements would make an excellent EFT set-up. The next step would be to think of particular, specific experiences in your life, especially as a child, when something happened that made you feel and think this way bout yourself. Tap for all the different aspects of this experience until you no longer have the same response to that particular experience.
EFT is a wonderful tool for sensitive people. It can focus right in on the experiences that have hurt us so deeply, and dissolve both the pain and the beliefs we came to have about ourselves as a result. The more specific we can be with EFT, the more likely it is that we will have good results.
Painful Experience:
A powerful memory that lies frozen in the past.
Most of us don’t have any problem coming up with painful memories! But we tend to blame ourselves for what happens to us. We think, "I am too sensitive! There must be something wrong with me. I should be able to just let this roll off my back!"
As a highly sensitive person myself, I have done my best over the years to reframe this quality as a gift. It IS a gift. The world needs what we have to offer!
My books (see the link below) are all about how to use EFT to heal the wounds of your sensitive nature so that you are empowered to use your gifts in service of yourself, your family, your community and the world itself.
Here is an excerpt from my book, the 8 Master Keys to Healing What Hurts:
If you are feeling overwhelmed by what is going on in your life and how you feel about it, and you can’t even begin to think of where to start with EFT, these powerful and evocative questions will help you to be specific:
What broke your heart?
When did something die in you, or get blocked, or shut down?
Write out or tape yourself talking about your experiences. Then take each of the sentences of your story or journal entry that carries a charge for you, and turn it into a tapping sequence.
Go deeper.
What did I lose as a result?
A painful experience can make us feel that we have lost our sense of connection, belonging, safety, peace, joy, integrity, wholeness.
Tap for this deep loss. Add words to the second part of the EFT set-up that express your honoring of yourself for how hard this has been, and that you understand, and even forgive yourself. You have always been doing the best you could. Add some "I choose" phrases. What inner state of being would you like to choose instead of how you had been feeling?
Here are some mores evocative questions that will help you get closer to the key experiences in your life that are asking for healing:
What does this current event or feeling remind me of?
If I could live life over again, what person or event would I prefer to skip?
When was the last time I cried, and why?
Who/what makes me angry, and why?
What is my biggest sadness or regret?
What is missing to make my life better?
Three fears I would rather not have:
What do I wish I had never done?
Your answers to these questions will help you to find specific experiences and aspects to tap for.
Ashe’s Story:
I feel like a small child frozen in fear.
Ashe took one of my earlier group coaching series on healing the hurts that come from having a sensitive nature, and she had bravely volunteered to be a tapping demonstration subject. Since her tapping sessions over the weeks seemed quite profound and useful to her, I asked later if she would write a little about her background, and how the class had affected her. Her answer demonstrates the power of what happens to us as children, and how it shapes our adult behavior.
I am so grateful for her willingness to share this, and as always, honored when someone offers their story. These tales of pain and transformation become a guiding light for the healing of all of us.
I don’t want to be like my mother and I am so much like her it’s not funny.
I feel like a small child frozen in fear. My mother was a teacher who always played the teacher. Whatever I wanted to do she always said I was too young. To any of my child wisdom she would say in a derogative tone, "What would you know? You’re only a child,” even though I was proved right time and time again. I’ve cleared heaps around her with EFT, but nothing seems to touch this fear of doing what I am drawn to and love doing, and my fear of "standing alone."
I started numbing my feelings
That violent crazy side of her has terrified me and what it boils down to is I’m terrified of both doing and being, because I don’t want to be like her. That started when I was very little. So I started being like my dad which was controlling, numbing the feelings …effectively not-being. Appearing calm on the outside at all costs…because otherwise she’d "get you" energetically once she started, and then you’d end up being wrong and punished and the "whipping post" for her to vent on.
It required a huge amount of control not to respond, because I was so sensitive and felt all that so much. Until very recently I always got scared around overdoing things and being tired, because I would lose my patience (read shutting down, steely tolerance and jaw-locking self-control). When I was little, reacting meant being shamed big time.
This whole thing obviously touched off something in her that scared her too, because she couldn’t deal with my reaction. Whenever I was angry she told me I was tired. The result was that by the time I was a teenager I got glandular fever and ended up permanently tired…until I started clearing my anger.
An incident with her when I was much smaller (age 2 to 3) came up where she "lost it " and it was so terrifying that I disappeared. It was as if all there was, was her raging terror. I can see from my perspective now, that this was a frozen moment of raging fear that has been passed down the generations in my family for who knows how long. I am the first to acknowledge it, let alone deal with it. My grandmother got Alzheimer’s rather than deal with her version of it.
Yesterday I felt very edgy, and without knowing why, I started picking on my husband and getting really angry with him. I was watching it too. At that point I started to notice how scared and unreasonable I was being, and I started to pay even more attention.
I asked for grace to open my heart
It was as if a cold bony hand was gripping the inside of my stomach. I realized that having this fear and anger feeling inside herself was exactly what had made my mother pick on me and tell me all the horrible things that were wrong with me. So again, all I could do in that moment was surrender it and ask for grace to open my heart to myself and her.
I noticed some time back that I could only use my energy in defiance. That wasn’t how I wanted to do things any more, but I had no way of being with ease. All my inner knots are unraveling nicely now as fast as I can process, and your course and EFT have helped immensely. Things just popped out so easily. It was really such a great help to work from a different perspective. I felt very safe with you.
So this is about where I’m up to and a bit dazed by the whole thing, but open to a new way of being and doing things that I know is already there waiting for me to be ready and open to it.
Healing and Re-empowering a Sensitive Person:
- Painful experiences are felt more deeply by a sensitive person, especially as a child.
- Painful experiences lead to beliefs about who we are and what is possible for us in life.
- It may not be possible or safe to express the powerful anger, sadness and fear and shame that we feel during and after these painful experiences.
- Those feelings get “stuffed” or swallowed.
- The stuffed feelings show up later in our lives as physical and emotional pain and illness.
- The people in our families who mistreated us did so because this is how they had been treated, and these were the beliefs and feelings they themselves took on.
- The tendency to replicate these beliefs and feelings and illnesses gets passed on down through the generations of a family.
- The fear of confronting the powerful feelings stops us from beginning a healing journey.
- Our personal healing can heal the whole family history.
EFT is an effective healing tool!
With my love and blessings –
Rue
