Author: Ritu Kaushal

Your Feelings Have Messages for You (So Stop Ignoring Them)

“But feelings can’t be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” ~Anne Frank

As a sensitive person, I have a complicated relationship with my feelings. They are the sensors I extend out into the world, to pull it in. They are the guides that help me decide what works or doesn’t work for me. But there are also times when my feelings rise with such force that I am left gasping for breath.

Then, I am tempted by the thought that not feeling so much would have definitely made things easier.

And yet, I don’t feel all my feelings. Parts of my emotional life feel numb. For a long time, like many people, expressing anger was extremely difficult for me.

We’re all like this, whether we think of ourselves as sensitive and emotional or logical and rational. Our emotional lives are a patchwork made up of beliefs we have internalized and things that we have seen modeled.

We are never taught how to relate to our emotions, and so, we must make our own way through.

Here are some things I have learned that might help you:

There is no such thing as a negative emotion.

We are trained to think of emotions as positive and negative. But in truth, every emotion serves an important function. What would we be without anger to protect our boundaries? Where would we be without fear that tells us that something is wrong? How can we let go of things if we never allow ourselves to feel sad?

We confuse a negative or destructive expression of a feeling with the feeling itself. Yes, unhealthy expressions can be harmful. But if we banish some feelings and don’t allow them to move through us, we get stuck in places that we belonged to a long time ago.

These are no longer our reality, but we go on living as if they are.

Giving up the belief that certain emotions are okay to feel and certain emotions are not okay is the first step to help us process our emotions.

But many of us don’t even know what is it that we are feeling. How are we supposed to channel something that we can’t even name?

Expanding our emotional vocabulary can tell us where we are in our emotional lives.

Think about what happened when you first started learning new words. You had access to a whole new universe. You had a way of naming your experience more precisely than you had before.

Cognitive psychologists are now finding that a more precise vocabulary (for example, having specific names for light blues and dark blues, as Russian speakers do) helps make people quicker at identifying subtle differences.

In a similar way, if we can name our emotions precisely, we can identify subtle nuances and hone into what exactly we are feeling. That can help us take the most effective emotional action.

Karla McLaren, the author of the wonderful The Language of Emotions talks eloquently about the different forms in which one single emotion can show up. Did you know that indifference can be a form of anger? So can coldness, resentment, and impatience.

In its mood state, anger can show up as sarcasm and arrogance. And of course, we know anger when it erupts in rage and violence. But bitterness is also an intense form of anger, albeit a hardened, calcified form.

Seeing that anger shows up in different degrees and forms can help us get straight to the heart of the problem.

McLaren tells us that the question anger poses is: What must be protected? What must be restored? If we are feeling resentful or cold, where have we given too much of ourselves away? What can we do to enforce limits that will make us feel protected?

If we do this, we catch anger before it morphs into an even stronger form and becomes harder to deal with. We also stay on course instead of getting lost and disoriented about the direction of our lives. For me, the belief that “Nice people don’t get angry” meant that I stayed in an exploitative work situation for several years.

As soon as anger came up for me, I dropped it. I would work harder, be better till someone noticed me. But what I didn’t realize was that the increasing fear and shakiness that I was feeling was a direct result of rejecting my anger.

How can you not feel scared and insecure when you have opened yourself up to harm?

The fear had risen because I had banished the protective energies of anger. I was, indeed, in undefended psychic territory.

So, fear, another so-called “negative” emotion comes bearing its own important messages.

My fear took the form of confusion and disorientation. Your fear might take some other form, depending on what the situation is.

In its diffuse form, McLaren tells us, fear can be experienced as our caution, uneasiness, or instinct. You might feel disconcerted, doubtful, or concerned that something is off. You might feel jumpy, nervous, or suspicious.

At the root is the same feeling. It’s showing up in different ways, and asking you to probe for answers.

Is the fear natural? Is it tied to something that is happening around you? What can you do about it?

But what if you get stuck in one feeling? What if you have repetitive fearful thoughts that don’t track back to real dangers? Then, it’s likely that your feeling response is locked in place.

This often happens when we have experienced trauma in the past. We remain hyper-vigilant long after the traumatic event is over. If this is the case, we need professional help to release the traumatic material.

But in the normal course of our days, feelings naturally ebb and flow. They direct our attention to what is happening in our lives. They urge us to take action.

Venting and repressing feelings are not the only choices we have.

But what action should we take? Isn’t that the trickiest part of dealing with feelings?

One of the reasons that I didn’t allow myself to feel anger in my work situation was because I was not sure what I could do with it. Expressing it felt dangerous, because I had stored up so much emotion. Repressing it felt like the only other thing to do.

Many of us get stuck in this tricky space.

We keep hearing that the only way out is through the feeling, but doing that doesn’t seem viable without expressing it and hurting someone or harming something in the process.

One of the ways that I am learning to work with my feelings is to first consciously experience the feeling myself. One way to safely release anger, for example, is to beat pillows for ten minutes or so. That lessens the intensity of the rising emotion.

Another practice that McLaren suggests is called “conscious complaining.” You sit all by yourself and complain loudly about all the things that are going wrong in your life. Again, we are attempting to use up some of the energy of the feeling, and move it out of our systems.

For fear, we can put on some music and imitate the shaky energy of the feeling, and lessen the burden that it is putting on us physically.

Remember that emotions, by their very definition, are energies that move us to take some action. So, a physical release is important.

Something is rising, and we are letting it move us. We are now just choosing that movement consciously.

Once we have released some of the energy of the emotion, we can then think of what action we can take to address the issue that it has brought up. For example, if we are angry, how can we restore the boundary?

One important realization I had about anger was after reading Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Anger. In it, she tells us that venting anger is often ineffective. We are trying to convert someone else to our point of view. If they don’t agree to what we are saying, we often get stuck in the space of trying to get them to agree.

Believing that we need agreement is what keeps us stuck. We are, in effect, maintaining the status quo.

If it’s something important to us, a limit we are choosing to place, then we don’t need permission. What we need is the clarity and courage to enforce this limit and to deal with the anxiety that rocking the boat often brings.

This emotional process has been a learning curve for me. It is not easy and I often falter. But whenever I can experience my feelings and move through them, I feel a sense of ease.

I guess it’s because I am not invalidating my experiences. I am owning them, letting them speak their truth.

What about you? What will opening to all your own feelings do for you?

People talking image via Shutterstock

August 18, 2015
How Sensitivity Can Be a Gift (And How to Give it to the World)

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” ~Alan Watts

Are you good at noticing subtle details? Are you able to learn without really being aware that you are learning? Do you notice other people’s moods? Do these moods affect you?

Are you sensitive to pain? Are you equally sensitive to beauty?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you, like me, are a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Chances are, you are constantly trying to make sense of how being sensitive fits into a world where a certain amount of insensitivity is seen as the key to getting ahead.

Chances are, you have both deeply valued your sensitivity and pushed away from it. While it makes up the core of who you are, it also makes life complicated.

Like you, I have struggled with being sensitive. First, it was because I had absorbed the cultural definition of sensitivity as weakness. And then when I did start understanding what being an HSP meant, starting from reading Elaine Aron’s classic The Highly Sensitive Person, I struggled to integrate this knowledge in my life.

Today, while I still find my sensitivity tricky, I have started seeing it differently. Now, when I think about sensitivity, the picture that comes to mind is of a thoroughbred horse.

This horse has a lot of nervous energy. It also has many gifts.

When I can direct this horse properly, it has the capability to perform at the highest standards. But if I misunderstand it, the horse’s energy is scattered, out of control. It can’t even get out of the gate.

So, how do we guide and direct this horse? How do we gallop out into the world instead of shying away from it? How do we bring our sensitive gifts to life?

Let’s look for some answers.

As sensitive people, we first need to ask: What holds me up?

At some point in your life, you might have absorbed the words that most HSPs hear: “You are too sensitive,” “You feel too much.” You might have believed these negative injunctions and gone through life in the absence of people who could see your gifts and champion them.

If you are still looking for those people, now is the time to go on a quest for them. While it may take time to find a friend or adviser, the process of exploring can itself be rewarding.

As an HSP, I have greatly benefited from being a part of online HSP groups. They help me see that I am not the only one having my experiences. I have also found people walking ahead on the path, and seeing them lead their lives shows me the way for leading mine.

We all need this—to be seen and validated for who we are. And when we find our believing mirrors, whether HSPs or non-HSPs, we can have the containers that shelter us from the storms of over-stimulation and anxiety.

And while we are working to find our champions, we also need to move inside and learn how to give ourselves what we need. When I moved from India to the United States two years back, I struggled with exactly this. In the absence of a support network, I did not know how to take care of myself.

How could I give myself love and attention? Wasn’t it what someone else gave to you?

Then, out of sheer necessity and through some trial and error, I started getting a glimpse of what nourishing ourselves means. I volunteered as a reading tutor, took photography classes, and embarked on my dream of being a writer.

In those moments when I felt connected to something bigger, I felt whole. There was nothing missing.

I started understanding that this was my area of growth, that this is what Elaine Aron means when she says that “part of maturing into wisdom is transferring more and more of your sense of security from the tangible to the intangible containers.”

So, think of all your safe harbors, all the containers in your life. Do you have enough of the intangible ones—work, faith in something bigger, a spiritual practice? Know that you can create an internal structure that holds you up, that sustains you emotionally even as people move away or life changes.

Once you have this inner stability, you can ask:

How do I participate in the world more?

As an HSP, being on the margins of the culture might have contributed to you feeling “less than.” Or you might have had a traumatic experience that you felt keenly, and you might not have found your way out of it.

Whatever the basis of low self-esteem, the truth is that without having a basic sense of self, we are adrift. Among other things, one of the reasons that I clung on to my ill-suited corporate job for years was the feeling that I would crumble into nothing without it. And I wasn’t very sure that I deserved something better.

In his wonderful Honoring the Self, Nathaniel Branden talks about this, and says, “The greatest barrier to achievement and success is not lack of talent or ability but rather, the fact that achievement and success, above a certain level, are outside our self concept, our image of who we are and what is appropriate to us.”

So, if we don’t believe that we deserve something better, we will often unconsciously put up barriers to getting it. The good news is that we can build our sense of self, brick by brick.

I strengthened my self-esteem by taking small risks, which grew into something bigger.

I left my low self-worth job for a better one. I freelanced on the side.

In effect, I worked hard and took concrete actions to earn my own respect.

Having once earned it though, it’s important that we keep acting to maintain our self-belief. For some time during my transition to the United States, my sense of self became shaky again. In the last several months, I have started remembering what I had learned—that action builds our sense of self.

I started to take risks again. One of them was coming out as an HSP through my writing.

My entire experience of life has been colored by my sensitivity, and yet I felt like it was something I needed to hide, fearful that people would label me. They still might. But I am a little more okay with sharing myself discerningly; reaching out in those spaces where I feel it can be helpful to others.

Whoever you are, wherever you stand, the task of building yourself up and finding your lost spaces is not going to be easy. But it is going to be worth it when you can stand in your center, and live from that place.

In the end, the fundamental question that we are all asking is:

How can I be more of myself?

As HSPS, we have the additional task of unlearning all that we have learned. We might have adapted in the wrong ways. Instead of learning to manage our feelings of overwhelm, we might have started avoiding the world altogether. Or we might have shrunk inside, hurt at being misunderstood.

But the world needs people like us—people who can empathize, who care, who can feel others’ pain. It is both our privilege as well as our challenge to learn how to do this effectively.

We need to take up more space, to show up as who we are. We need to unfurl.

It’s time to bring our sensitive gifts into this world.

Photo by Marta Nørgaard

July 31, 2014
Accepting Yourself as an Introvert and Loving Your Inner Tortoise

“We can’t underestimate the value of silence. We need to create ourselves, need to spend time alone. If you don’t, you risk not knowing yourself and not realizing your dreams.” ~Jewel

Tortoises are out of fashion. They are no longer the wise ones, taking one patient step after another, coming out victorious in the end. Today, they are the ones who can’t cross the road fast enough, the ones most likely to get hit by a car.

There is shame involved in being a tortoise.

And so I have spent a considerable chunk of my life trying to turn into an extroverted hare, coming up with rationalizations for why I am not, most definitely not, an introverted tortoise.

For one, I don’t move slowly. In fact, I love to dance. I am quick in perceiving and understanding what people say and mean. I am not slow-witted.

But these explanations don’t quite cover what it means to be a tortoise—how their rhythms are slow and deep, how they enjoy taking in the scenery instead of rushing past, how they need the shell that protects their most vulnerable, precious self.

As introverts, it’s easy for us to get alienated from our own nature because of the extrovert bias in the culture at large. So, how do we reconnect with and start celebrating ourselves? It starts with self-awareness and living our own truths.

The Way We Manage Energy

As opposed to extroverts who turn to other people to recharge and renew themselves, too much interaction saps our energy. Introverts turn inward and need quiet spaces to recharge. This is why we turn to nature, to prayer, to solitary hobbies.

We already know this from our own experience. What we often struggle with is the validity of this preference for time alone. I’ve wrestled with this too, thinking that there is something wrong with me if I am not excited about going to a party or socializing at the end of a hectic day.

It’s only recently that I’ve begun to let go of this internal dialogue. By going deeper into my own creativity—writing more, doing photography—I’ve realized that what I am actually lonely for is a connection with myself. When I’m taking a photograph, for example, I feel present and whole.

Engaging in activities that make us happy helps us focus on all that is right with us, instead of wondering whether we are faulty.

As introverts, we need to start giving ourselves permission to go deeper into our own nature. If building legos, reading books, or watching birds gives us joy, that’s what we should be doing instead of going along with what other people think is fun.

It might be fun for them, but is it fun for us?

Another thing that I’ve learned is that although I need time alone, not all interactions affect my energy in the same way. While many social interactions leave me feeling depleted, there are some that have the opposite effect. In her wonderful book, The Introvert’s Way, Sophia Dembling discusses this with Cognitive scientist Jennifer Grimes.

Grimes says that the real issue is not how much energy we put in a situation, but whether we get an adequate return on this energy investment.

She says, “There are people who like to invest a lot of energy and get a lot back. Some people don’t want to invest a lot and don’t expect a lot back. The people who are deemed the extroverts in pop literature, the people who are social butterflies, what they get back on an interpersonal level is sufficient for them.”

As introverts, we need to be aware of this. While small talk is draining for us, meaningful conversations are energizing. They require us to expend energy, but they also give us energy back.

Haven’t we all talked for hours about something we are passionate about, and been at a loss about what to say when we are talking politely with an acquaintance?

The Rhythms of Social Conversation

As an introvert, social conversations can be a challenge for me. I didn’t realize earlier that one of the reasons for this is the difference in the rhythms of how introverts and extroverts communicate.

When we are asked a question, introverts usually pause to think about it before replying. We need this space to formulate our answers. This is different from extroverts, who formulate their answers while talking.

Because of this difference, when we are silent, extroverts can perceive this as meaning that we have nothing to say and rush in with their own thoughts. And while they are talking, we can’t think. This dynamic renders introverts mute.

For me, understanding this has been extremely important. Instead of getting frustrated that I didn’t get a chance to speak, I’ve started responding differently. By showing the other person that I am still thinking by providing visual cues (like furrowing my brows), I hold my ground better in a conversation.

I’ve also started letting myself interrupt the other person. And in the case of those people who are extreme talkers, I’ve understood that it’s okay to disengage and simply walk away. By doing these things, I’ve created more space and freedom in my interactions.

While understanding this basic difference between extroverts and introverts is important, we also need to be aware of the mistakes we can inadvertently make in social situations. One of these is being too quiet in a new group setting. Introverts don’t realize that it is the silent person in the group who gains more and more power as the conversation goes on.

Elaine Aron talks about this dynamic in her wonderful book The Highly Sensitive Person. She says that if we remain silent in a new group, other people can be left wondering if we are judging them, unhappy about being part of the group, or even thinking of leaving the group. As a defence mechanism, the group might reject us before we have a chance to reject them.

So, in a new group, it becomes extremely important for introverts to communicate what they are thinking, even if it is just to say that we are happy to listen and will speak up when we have something to say.

The Focus on all That’s Right with Us

As introverts, most of us have heard messages about all the things that are wrong with us. We are too intense, too solitary, not fun enough.

What’s wrong with thinking deeply? What’s wrong with solitude? What’s wrong with enjoying one-on-one conversations instead of a big party? And fun according to whom?

Once we give ourselves permission to ask these questions, we can also start seeing our own strengths more clearly. What the culture considers an aberration is what makes the best part of us.

Thinking deeply gives us new insights. It helps us see new relationships between things. The solitude we love is also the springboard for our creativity. It gives us the chance to imagine and re-imagine our world.

Aren’t these all amazing things?

As introverts, connecting with our essence is what will help us actualize our talents. Not acting like an extrovert. I am sure it’s great to be a hare, but not if you are a tortoise.

Photo by Lee Ruk

April 3, 2014