No More Mister Rice Guy

Until recently, I was curious why I saw my childhood so differently from my sisters. I’ve always known I was a highly sensitive person (HSP) but in 2019 I was diagnosed with Complex-PTSD. I know what you’re thinking. Who has survived childhood unscathed? But when you couple the two together, and it can be a crippling experience.

Complex trauma forms in childhood, possibly even in infancy, and happens over time. All children need to feel safe to thrive, but feeling safe can be even harder to achieve when you're highly sensitive. It can develop as a result of physical or sexual abuse in childhood; but it can also stem from emotional neglect, which can be more insidious and harder to understand and acknowledge.

As an adult, just as you thought like a child, you believe something is inherently wrong with you. When we don’t get what we need emotionally, we spend the majority of the time by ourselves, feel consistently alone and scared, then we come to believe that we’re unlovable and that the world is unsafe. The negative projections held by the highly sensitive child are internalized and carried over into adulthood.

The child who experiences this form of emotional neglect no doubt struggles with mental health. I was proactive early on in college, only to be misdiagnosed, labeled, and medicated. In my 30-40s, I was a walking pharmaceutical company with labels of Postpartum, Anxiety, Bipolar, and BPD stuck all over my body. As I aged and grew weary of what prescriptions were doing to my body, I turned to talk therapy. For someone with C-PTSD sharing guarded information about yourself is terrifying but finding the right person to share it with has been lifesaving. We focused on an internal dialogue with myself as a child, and I immediately saw the world differently. I consoled myself, I protected myself, and I told myself that I was a good girl. It sounds so simple, but believe me, there is a lot of grief that accompanies this interchange. I felt anger and sadness that this precious being was robbed of a carefree, happy childhood, but it was the first step in having compassion for myself.

My sensitivity has made me the person I am, and I love that person. Being an HSP is not something to be ashamed of, it is a gift. For me, it allows me to understand people from the inside out. But the world is different for an HSP. Our sensitivity, compassion, empathy, and the way we love is an amazing superpower. But just like any superpower, it comes with kryptonite. All that empathy means we get overwhelmed easily by suffering. We internalized other’s people’s energy as our own which can lead to mental exhaustion. In other words, someone else's pain and happiness become our pain and happiness. Every mean word and every unkind action chips away at our self-confidence and faith in the world around us.

It’s not easy being a sensitive person in this cruel world, and 2020 was a tough year. I didn’t understand how other people could be mean, rude, or offensive toward strangers. It's natural to want to reach out to these people and ease their pain. but empaths don't stop there. Instead, they take it on—suddenly they're the ones feeling drained or upset when they felt fine before. Watching and reading the news became simply unbearable.

You may not be able to travel back in time, but you can heal the past in the present. You can also learn to cherish and manage your sensitivities as opposed to pushing yourself to adapt to a world that feels assaultive at times. You can come to embrace your depth of feeling, your imagination, and all the unique gifts you alone have to offer yourself and this world. That highly sensitive infant and child still live inside of you, and you can come to care for them in the ways they’ve always needed and deserved. You are no longer in the situation and predicament you were back then; as your adult self, you can save your younger selves. So I remind myself daily to cover the world in the brightness of my compassion and kindness because when life gets dark, I can be my own flashlight.