Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity: How to manage intense emotions as a highly sensitive person - learn more about yourself with this life-changing self help book (Teach Yourself)

As you remember these experiences, notice how you feel on a visceral level. A cognitive recounting will not suffice, unless it is connected strongly to a bodily feeling, because your memories were stored in your body on a cellular level. The challenge is to find the accurate sense of feeling but not necessarily a storyline. Truly grieving involves

Remember that true intimacy is only achieved when you can allow the other person to be exactly as they are. The more your mind is preoccupied with how things should be, the more tension you will feel, and the more distance you create between you.

We pay the high price of our own emotional freedom when we allow ourselves to be stranded by others’ temperaments and actions.

While the image of the event may not return visually, as it often would if you had post traumatic stress disorder, your emotional flashback may show up in other ways such as negative self-talk, a knot in your stomach, tightness in the chest, or a flood of fear, shame and powerlessness.

They may feel compelled to point out the truth, or feel unable to play ‘the game’.

When you turn away from feeling bad emotions, you turn away from feeling good emotions too. You may become an observer of life, watching it go by without being ‘in’ it. Some people may even experience memory loss, as they do not remember much of their life – even looking at old pictures of themselves can seem surreal. Life’s pain may seem dampened,

Uncovering what lies underneath your past can seem threatening, but false tranquillity upheld by a facade of ‘okay-ness’ is fragile and short-lived. In the end, self-deception is toxic; unmourned pains and unspoken words can only lie dormant for so long.

You may suddenly feel drastically different, have certain intrusive thoughts, or act in a certain way. When you have a ‘mood flip’, as if you suddenly switch from being a rational adult into a tantrum-throwing child, you are re-living the trauma at the level of that of a child. As a result, you may lash out at your partner, have inexplicable rage,

If as a child you were unable to internalize a deep sense of love and security, you might now carry a persistent feeling of being not good enough – that you are somehow disgusting, ugly, stupid or flawed. This may involve internal thoughts such as, ‘Nothing I do is good enough’, ‘There is something fundamentally wrong with me’, or even ‘I am bad an