Our Emotions: Visitors with a Message - Part 1

“I think you might be a highly sensitive person,” my therapist told me. I had just finished telling her about an experience I had when I was about four years old attending a funeral for an elderly member of our church. I described how I was sobbing, using up all the tissues in my small Kleenex pack my mom always kept in her purse. My mom leaned over, gently and compassionately questioning my grief for someone I never knew. “It makes me sad seeing everyone else sad,” I said. I went on to discuss how I feel emotions intensely in my body, sometimes in a piercing way that leaves me nearly gutted. 

This memory surprised me, because, up until this point, I had thought of myself as rather unemotional, especially compared to those around me. What I was starting to discover, though, was that I adopted numbness very early on to protect me from this beautifully painful and painfully beautiful world around me. So early, that I had even forgotten that version of myself existed. I have often been praised for being “level-headed,” especially in highly stressful and chaotic situations. But you wouldn’t see calm and peace inside of me in those situations; you would just see emptiness. 

This has been one of my greatest moments of personal growth when I realized I was switching in and out of “feeling.” It might sound nice, and there are some benefits. I’ve learned, though, “switching off” comes with a big price, especially when I don’t realize I have flipped the switch. 

Through these insights I started to gain about my emotions, my therapist’s description of my inner world both made sense and felt relieving. A Highly Sensitive Person, or HSP, is a term used to refer to someone who has increased sensitivity to both external and internal stimuli, such as light and noise but also emotions and witnessed pain. I envision this concept existing on a Spectrum with all humans falling somewhere between no sensitivity and extreme sensitivity. 

In time, I have started to realize how extremely valuable emotions are to the human experience. Emotions are the bridge between the outer world and our inner world, translating the outside world into the language of our body. Shooting electricity down my arms, a warm bloom of light across my chest, a dull, deep ache in my abdomen, a painful lump in my throat. Instead of interpreting these body sensations as threats, I now see these emotions in my body as a messenger carrying an important letter. 

The lack of information in our world about emotions is deeply tragic. I believe the injustice, greed, and violence in our world is directly linked to emotional illiteracy. In my next post, I will discuss what we need to know about emotions, focusing on how and why developing a close working relationship with our emotions can save our lives. 

With love and lots of emotions,

Kier