If you are part of the up to 20% of the population that will find this photo uncomfortable, you will see past the smile, the makeup, the jewellery, and the photo filters and your nervous system will pick up on an “off” energy. You will feel overwhelmed, irritable, or drained for no specific reason on a conscious level. Depending on your default stress response, you may become extra confrontational, lashing out or may withdraw by zoning out or escaping into work, food, superficial relating, or some addiction that serves to distract you and numb out your emotions.
If this photo triggered you, you may be classified as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). A HSP is someone genetically born with, or has evolved through childhood experiences, to have a high measure of sensory processing sensitivity where they cognitively process physical, social, and emotional stimuli at a deeper level because their central nervous system has increased sensitivity.
Sensing more and feeling deeper can be both distracting and draining for the untrained HSP. This is especially the case if you are a HSP male who has been typically conditioned in your childhood to suppress your emotional intelligence in order to avoid learned feelings of shame associated with being a hypersensitive male and learned feelings of helplessness and guilt around not being able to fix the situation or to have caused it with reactionary responses. Due to suppressing that part of yourself, you as a HSP man may suffer from the triggers and the overwhelm but do not have an awareness for the cause. For example, you may see this photo and dismiss it initially, but an hour later, you may feel irritated, distracted, or drained, and then confused as to why.
HSP men especially face unique challenges at work and in their relationships due to emotional and sensory overwhelm. As one, the typical go to strategy of avoidance seemingly helps you perform and succeed professionally especially in the earlier stages of your career, but once you evolve to more leadership based positions, your once effective strategy fails you. Leadership means people and people equal lots of emotions. Many HSP men find themselves reaching a glass ceiling professionally for this reason. Intimate relationships are also very taxing for HSP men. As relationships advance and intimacy is strengthened, the HSP man becomes increasingly overwhelmed with his own emotions as well as his partner’s. Avoidance mechanisms begin to trigger feelings of abandonment and rejection, and the HSP man may find himself accumulating more feelings of guilt and shame. Again, he feels he has reached a glass ceiling, this time in his intimate relationships too.
If this is you, know that you as a HSP man have the potential to be of the greatest leaders, romantic partners, and fathers especially due to your sensitivity, perceptiveness, intuition, gentleness, empathy, and more. Building awareness, understanding, and acceptance of your unique traits, removing and changing negative self beliefs about your nature, and learning to regulate your nervous system and balance your energy will allow you to break through to higher levels in all aspects of your life.
If this article resonated with you, contact me to find out how Rapid Transformational Therapy can help you uncover the root causes of the emotional triggers, get rid of feelings of guilt, shame, and learned helplessness, and instil healthy coping strategies that help you manage emotional and sensory overwhelm in ways that allow you to be fully present and to succeed and thrive at work and in your relationships ?
