“An intuitive empath is someone who not only senses energy but also absorbs it from others and the environment. Their body takes on the angst of the world. It can be very draining.

“I’ve been an intuitive empath since childhood which prompted my exploration of this phenomena. I couldn’t go to shopping malls or crowded places because I’d get overwhelmed by the energy.”

Dr. Orloff also notes, “Creative people are extremely sensitive. Neurologically, they are very finely tuned and open to all kinds of energies from the outside, so it’s important they protect themselves and not be overwhelmed.”

From post Emotional Freedom by Judith Orloff – about her book, in which she details ways to help relieve the effects of sensitivity and “free yourself from negative emotions.”

Here is part of a testimonial letter addressed to Virginia Bonta Brown, M.S., O.T.R., Co-founder and President of BioElectric Shield.

“Upon receiving the shield I read the flyer that came along with it and as it specified that most people do not experience much of a response instantly, so I put it on anyway, not expecting to feel a response and to my surprise I felt it instantly.

“There was an instant calmness that I had not experienced in a long time. I felt protected and felt like I had come home to me. Over the years I have become quite an emotional person, being quite sensitive both to devices and to negative and abusive people…”

Continued in Energy Sensitive, Highly Intuitive Australian Woman Experiences Life Again!

highly sensitive people, highly sensitive and stressed, sensitivity and stress, energy sensitivity, relieving sensitivity, protection for sensitivity

Winona Ryder starred in the film based on Susanna Kaysen’s novel Girl, Interrupted, and thinks Kaysen “captures a mood we’ve all experienced. It’s like a reflective time we’ve all had in our lives, whether to kill ourselves, whether to be miserable or move on. You go through spells where you feel that maybe you’re too sensitive for this world. I certainly felt that.”

“There was a time when I was 19 when I really, really, really thought I was going crazy,” she has said about her own brief stay at a psychiatric clinic. “I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression. I had had panic attacks from the age of 12 – probably from the pressure of working and then going through adolescence onscreen.”

She left to get a year of intensive therapy, and recalls, “I was wallowing and I eventually got sick of it – I got sick of being sick. I was coming out of my own serious depression and I didn’t know what to label it, just as Susanna doesn’t know what to label hers. There was nothing really wrong with Susanna. They called her a ‘borderline personality’ because they couldn’t diagnose her.”

[From article: Interviews with Stephen Fry, Winona Ryder and Stan Collymore on fame, fortune and depression]

Highly sensitive children – holding back

Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. has said she has seen “too many” highly sensitive children and adults “whose depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem prevent them from expressing whatever talents they have.” [From her newsletter article The Highly Sensitive Child (and Adults, Too): Is Sensitivity the Same as Being Gifted?]

Aron considers being an HSP “means, necessarily, that you are more easily overstimulated, stressed out, overwhelmed.” She says there is a common tendency to call high sensitivity “fearfulness” and cites a New York Times Magazine describing “animals that hold back” as “shy and fearful” rather than “sensitive and observant.” [From her newsletter article Reflections on Research]

Labeling and mislabeling

Diagnosis by others [particularly professionals], or simply how we explain our reactions and moods to ourselves, can have a profound effect on how those experiences impact our lives, for better or worse.

A common label many of us have put on our complex emotional experiences is “crazy” – as Winona Ryder admitted in another interview: “It’s just a feeling of ‘Am I crazy? Am I too sensitive to be in this world?’ A feeling that the world is just too complicated for me right now, and I don’t feel like I belong here.”

But, she added, “it passes, and fortunately today I feel blessed for all the good things in my life.” [From Autumn in New York : Interview With Winona Ryder]

Taking care of yourself

Ryder is interviewed in the new (Oct. 2009) issue of Interview magazine, as summarized by The Week magazine, which notes that after her widely publicized 2001 arrest for shoplifting, Ryder stopped taking major film roles.

“It wasn’t like a breakdown, but I had to just stop and take care of myself. I was struggling,” she says. “I never went out. I was just terrified and exhausted. I approached work very seriously, and it just got to be too much for me. I just felt like I really wanted to hold on to who I was and try to have as much a normal life as I could.”

The Week adds, “Today Ryder, 38, focuses on smaller, more independent films, writes almost daily, and avoids places where the paparazzi gather.”
[Why Winona Ryder dropped out, The Week theweek.com October 15, 2009]

Misdiagnosis

In their article: Misdiagnosis of the Gifted, Lynne Azpeitia, M.A. and Mary Rocamora note, “Since the gifted function with relatively high levels of intensity and sensitivity, when they seek therapy they are frequently misdiagnosed because therapists receive no specialized training in the identification and treatment of persons who have advanced and complex patterns of development.”

In her song “I’m Sensitive,” Jewel sings:
“Oh please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way…
I have this theory, that if we’re told we’re bad
Then that’s the only idea we’ll ever have…”
[From her debut album Pieces of You]

~~
Related books
The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D.
Misdiagnosis And Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults by J. Webb et al.

Some related Talent Development Resources pages:
Articles: anxiety / fear / courage
Anxiety relief products and programs
Mental health
mental health : teen/young adult

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high sensitivity personality, highly sensitive people, highly sensitive books, highly sensitive people books, sensitive and stressed, Winona Ryder

Excerpts from new book “Emotional Freedom” by Judith Orloff, MD

In my book, I emphasize the importance of learning how to stay centered in a stressful, highly emotionally charged world.

Since emotions such as fear, anger, and frustration are energies, you can potentially “catch” them from people without realizing it.

If you tend to be an emotional sponge, it’s vital to know how to avoid taking on an individual’s negative emotions or the free-floating kind in crowds.

Another twist is that chronic anxiety, depression, or stress can turn you into an emotional sponge by wearing down your defenses. Suddenly, you become hyper-attuned to others, especially those with similar pain.

That’s how empathy works; we zero in on hot-button issues that are unresolved in ourselves. From an energetic standpoint, negative emotions can originate from several sources. What you’re feeling may be your own; it may be someone else’s; or it may be a combination.

I’ll explain how to tell the difference and strategically bolster positive emotions so you don’t shoulder negativity that doesn’t belong to you.

This wasn’t something I always knew how to do. Growing up, my girlfriends couldn’t wait to hit the shopping malls and go to parties, the bigger the better–but I didn’t share their excitement.

I always felt overwhelmed, exhausted around large groups of people, though I was clueless why. “What’s the matter with you?” friends would say, shooting me the weirdest looks. All I knew was that crowded places and I just didn’t mix.

I’d go there feeling just fine but leave nervous, depressed, or with some horrible new ache or pain. Unsuspectingly, I was a gigantic sponge, absorbing the emotions of people around me.

With my patients, I’ve also seen how absorbing other people’s emotions can trigger panic attacks, depression, food, sex and drug binges, and a plethora of physical symptoms that defy traditional medical diagnosis.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that more than two million Americans suffer from chronic fatigue. It’s likely that many of them are emotional sponges.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you’re on emotional overload.

With strategies to cope, you can have quicker retorts to stressful situations, feel safer, and your sensitivities can blossom.

From Dr. Judith Orloff’s new book Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself From Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life.

Also hear podcast interview with Judith Orloff.

Also see More articles by Judith Orloff.

Read more about supplements Dr. Orloff suggests to relieve anxiety at Anxiety Relief Solutions.

New research indicates that the brains of those suffering from anxiety and severe shyness in social situations consistently respond more strongly to stress, and show signs of being anxious even in situations that others find safe.

The UW Department of Psychiatry and HealthEmotions Research Institute has published a new study on brain activity, anxious behaviour, and stress hormones in adolescent rhesus monkeys, which have long been used as a model to understand anxious temperament in human children.

Continued in Once a shy monkey, always a shy monkey?

“It is also good every so often to go away and relax a little for when you come back to your work your judgment will be better, since to remain constantly at work causes you to deceive yourself.”

Leonardo da Vinci

In her article What’s the rush?, Jenna Avery describes how constantly striving and being urgent about our lives and careers can have such negative impacts on emotional health, especially for highly sensitive people, who “don’t like to work under stress and pressure,” she writes.

“It makes us nervous and lessens the quality of our performance. As people with particularly high standards and conscientiousness, the conflict between wanting to do well and feeling unable to do so builds into an intense and painful internal struggle. It’s no wonder we sometimes explode, and more often burn out.”

She challenges sensitive souls “to step outside this rushaholism and become leaders in honoring the deeper intuitive messages that guide our lives.”

For more perspectives on stress, and approaches to slowing down and being mindfully centered, see my article Gifted and Stressed, and the pages Meditation and Stress resources.
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sensitivity and stress, freeing yourself from pressure, stress reliefresources

A result, she continues, can be that “The dreaded worries and symptoms kick in.” Among the ways she suggests to make the ”waking up” environment more pleasant is to use music or chimes instead of an alarm; using a light dimmer; having a robe and slippers at hand, and dealing with your low blood sugar after not eating for so many hours.

Those sort of stressors can probably trigger real stress more easily for those of us who are highly sensitive. Noticing responses like morning anxiety can be a call for better self-care.

Deanne Repich is founder of the National Institute of Anxiety and Stress. See more of her articles listed on the page: article authors.
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Deanne Repich, healing anxiety, high sensitivity personality, sensitivity and stress

In her article Growing Up Gifted Is Not Easy, Elaine Aron, PhD [left] talks about this dark aspect of sensitivity.

“Early in my research on sensitivity — while I was studying its relationship to introversion and the four Jungian functions of sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuition — I discovered several studies reporting that intuitive types are the most likely to have suicidal thoughts when they are depressed,” she writes.

“This makes great sense–intuitive types tend to take things to their full conclusion, often without knowing the steps of reasoning that got them there. HSPs are often intuitive types (or else introverts, who tend to do the same thing–to me, Jung never fully clarified the difference between introversion and intuition).

“Hence when they begin to think about themselves or the state of their relationships or the state of the world, or all three at once, they can often come to very dark conclusions.”

Reasons for HSPs to go on

But being sensitive can also help us engage with the pleasures and beauties of life, as Dr. Aron notes: “Family, friends, falling in love, service, beauty, nature, spiritual insights, laughter, satisfying work, curiosity about how humanity will handle the next few decades, dark as they may seem, and the awareness of the wrenching blow dealt to those left behind when one of us falls into the darkness–these are pretty good reasons to live.”

> related article: Creativity and Depression – by Douglas Eby

> related section: Depression and Creativity

Elaine Aron, depression, highly sensitive
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Elaine Aron, high sensitivity personality, intuition, depression and sensitivity