Episode 190: Chris sits down with Barbara Allen to dive into the topic of high sensitivity. What is it? How do you know if you are a highly sensitive person? How can we turn it into a strength?
Barbara Allen is based in the U.K. She founded Growing Unlimited Therapeutic Consultancy (2002) and the National Centre for High Sensitivity (2010). In 2013, she retired as a qualified integrative therapist, group worker and supervisor after working in the therapeutic field for 20 years in order to widen the scope of her work with highly sensitive people.
Barbara has received training on high sensitivity directly from Dr Elaine Aron in the USA and has written and presents continuing professional development workshops (CPD) for professionals on the trait of sensory processing sensitivity, this training was quality checked by the National
Counselling Society. Barbara is a speaker on the topic of highly sensitive people and sensitive living. She facilitates the empowerment of individual HSPs at all levels as a mentor 1-1 and at groups and workshops nationally and internationally, creating personal development workshops for HSPs in Europe and USA. You can visit her website at www.growingunlimited.co.uk for more information.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 190 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/190.
Seven Health is currently taking on new clients, and there is a handful of reasons that clients commonly come and see us. Hypothalamic amenorrhea is one of them, and that’s the fancy name for not getting a period. This is often the result of undereating and over-exercising for what the body needs, irrespective of your actual weight. It’s almost always coupled with body dissatisfaction and a fear of gaining weight.
We also work with clients along the disordered eating and eating disorder spectrum. Sometimes clients wouldn’t think to use the term disordered eating to describe themselves, but they see that they’re overly restrictive with their eating. They fear certain foods, whether that be breads or processed foods or carbs. They feel compelled to exercise excessively, and/or they find themselves binging or feeling out of control around food.
We help clients with dieting and moving on from dieting. These clients have had years or decades of dieting and realized that it’s just not working, but they’re struggling to figure out how to do food without dieting. What should they eat? How do they listen to their body? What will become of their weight? They’re confused and overwhelmed and potentially scared.
Body dissatisfaction and negative body image is another reason. Many of our clients experience feelings of body shame and hatred, and they find themselves fixated on weight or determined to be a particular size and frustrated by what they see in the mirror. This can then lead to avoiding social events or opting out of photographs or putting off appointments as a result of this negative body image and negative body thoughts.
In all of these areas, we are able to help, and we do so through a mix of understanding physiology and psychology, so understanding how to support the physical body and how it works, but also being compassionate and understanding the whys behind clients’ behavior and figuring out how to change this.
If any of these areas are things that you want help with, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help. I’ll also include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. Let me start by the show, as I’ve been doing recently, with our book giveaway. We’re now giving away a book from our Resources page with every new episode of the podcast. This week’s winner is Diane C. Diane, thank you for your review, and we will be in contact to send you a book of your choosing.
Reviews help increase the visibility of the podcast and enable us to reach and help more people, and they also give you a chance to win a book. All you need to do is leave a review on iTunes, take a screenshot of it, and then email it to info@seven-health.com, and you’ll then be permanently entered into the drawing.
Today’s show, I am sitting down with Barbara Allen. Barbara founded Growing Unlimited Therapeutic Consultancy in 2002 and the National Centre for High Sensitivity in 2010. In 2013, she retired as a qualified integrative therapist, group worker, and supervisor after working in the therapeutic field for 20 years in order to widen the scope of her work with highly sensitive people.
Barbara has received training on high sensitivity directly from Dr. Elaine Aron in the U.S. and has written and presents continuing professional development workshops for professionals on the trait of sensory processing sensitivity, and this training was quality checked by the National Counseling Society.
Barbara is a speaker on the topic of highly sensitive people and sensitive living. She facilitates the empowerment of individual HSPs at all levels as a mentor, one on one, and at groups and workshops, both nationally and internationally, creating personal development workshops for HSPs in Europe and the USA.
Barbara Allen is based in the UK, and you can visit her website at www.growingunlimited.co.uk.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been increasingly aware of and interested in the topic of high sensitivity or sensory processing sensitivity. You can call it a number of different things. This is a genetic trait that impacts on how people experience and perceive the world.
There’s several reasons for my growing interest in this area. One of them is to do with how frequently I’m seeing this in my practice. At a population level, it’s estimated that 15-20% of the population have this trait, but the clients that I see, it’s more like 70%. So there seems to be a connection between having this trait and living in a world that doesn’t fully understand it that can then be part of the reason why disordered eating or eating disorders manifest.
Another reason why this is important is because when people hear the word “sensitive,” they may instantly assume “shy.” This isn’t necessarily the case, and for many people who are living with high sensitivity, it doesn’t present with how they would assume, so it can be missed. This is actually something we spend a decent amount of time chatting about on the call, because you can be an extrovert or you can be someone who is high novelty-seeking, but also be highly sensitive. It doesn’t break down or doesn’t present in the way that most people would assume most of the time.
Finally, it is a trait that my son Ramsay most probably has. So, selfishly, I wanted to speak to someone who is an expert on the topic and know how I can be better as a parent.
The world expert on this topic is Dr. Elaine Aron, and she has many people that she recommends to speak about this topic, and Barbara is one of them. As I covered in her bio, she has decades of experience working in the field of high sensitivity, so I was thrilled to have a chance to speak to her.
We chat about the traits and characteristics of high sensitivity. We cover introversion and extroversion and high sensation seeking. We go through many different scenarios and recommendations – things like for children with high sensitivity, for couples where one of the partners is highly sensitive, in the workplace, as a parent.
This is an episode with a real solitary focus. We cover pretty much nothing but high sensitivity. But given the fact that 15-20% of the general population have this trait and more like 70% of the population I see have this trait, there’s a good chance that this either relates to you as the listener or many people in your life.
Just a note on the sound quality: for the first half of this podcast, there was the most monumental storm going outside at my end, and my office in the garden has a metal roof, so some of this noise with the rain is picked up when I’m speaking. I’ve cleaned up the audio as best I can, but when you’re listening – most probably if you’re doing this with headphones, you’re going to hear it most easily – you will hear the pitter-patter of rain in the background when I’m speaking, probably for about the first half of the podcast. Hopefully this doesn’t have you running to the bathroom because of the background noise.
But that is it for this intro. At the end of the interview, I will be back again for a couple of recommendations. But for now, let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Barbara Allen.
Hey, Barbara. Thanks for joining me on the show today.
Barbara Allen: Hello. I’m very pleased to be here. Thanks for asking.
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Chris Sandel: I’m really thrilled to have you on the podcast. I think most of our time together today will be spent focusing on high sensitivity. It’s a topic I’ve touched on briefly on the podcast before. I’ve had a couple of guests where we’ve chatted about it, but not where that was their specialty, so I haven’t spent any length of time really digging into the finer details of the topic that I’m hoping we can do today.
I guess as just a starting place, do you want to introduce yourself and give a bit of background on who you are and what training you’ve done?
Barbara Allen: Yes. I started out in the people field in 1991. I did a 3-year training as a therapist. One of the things I noticed was that a lot of my clients behaved in a certain way. I spent 10 years working in an addiction service, and I noticed that there were some clients who particularly behaved in a certain way, had certain needs for treatment that were different to the rest. At the time I didn’t really know why, but I just knew that they were similar.
When I saw Elaine Aron’s book, it suddenly clicked for me that these were highly sensitive clients, and that’s how I came into the field, really. It was during that initial part of my career.
Now, 10 years later, I then went into private practice and I began to specialize with highly sensitive people, and after that it developed from there. This is where the National Centre for High Sensitivity came in. After a while, I realized there was a need for more information and links and ways for people to get in touch with information or therapists or other people, teachers and so on, who might understand high sensitivity. So I developed that service.
Until last year, I was a director there for the National Centre. A very small affair, very fledgling, really, in a way, but it came out of a need. At the time that I started it in 2010, there were no other people working with high sensitivity in the UK. So I developed it for that. But now, of course, there are a lot more people in the field. I’ve trained quite a few people, so there’s no longer really any need for me to be involved in that now. I’m mainly concentrating on putting on events for highly sensitive people, mentoring, training professionals, and so on.
Chris Sandel: You mentioned about working with addiction. What were some of the other clients or some of the other focuses you had earlier on?
Barbara Allen: In the first 10 years, I worked with addiction. That included alcohol addiction, drug addiction, and gambling. I did that for 10 years, and it was during that time that I discovered what high sensitivity was and recognized some similarities in clients. After that I went to private practice, which was more general practice, but very quickly became specialized in highly sensitive people.
Chris Sandel: With the book, do you remember how you stumbled across Elaine’s book?
Barbara Allen: I came across it in a bookshop. I was looking in the personal development section and I just saw the title there, The Highly Sensitive Person, and I thought, “That looks quite interesting.” I pulled it out and I flipped through, and there was something in there that just made me think – it talked about people being more responsive emotionally in this particular case, and I thought, “Oh, I have some clients who are quite emotionally responsive.”
One of the things that particularly struck me with my addiction clients was that sometimes they would have what we would call a lapse, and when they had a lapse, often with the sensitive clients, it could be because a good thing has happened rather than because a not very good thing has happened. I was quite used to people maybe encountering a difficulty and having negative emotions, and then maybe drinking on it or using on it, but with the highly sensitive clients, they could actually become quite overwhelmed with good feelings or successful feelings.
This book from Elaine Aron really explained to me a lot more about how it’s the intensity of the emotion that is key, not necessarily the life event.
Chris Sandel: Obviously, you’ve talked about working with these individuals and the book answering a lot of questions or sparking something for you, but for you personally, do you identify as someone who’s a highly sensitive individual?
Barbara Allen: That’s the funny thing. It’s typical therapist experience, really. I was working and helping people for about a year and a half when it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I was highly sensitive myself. I think this is often the case; you gradually reframe your own experience in the light of the training and the learning that you do as a therapist, and you discover things about yourself along the way.
I became more aware of ways in which I’d compensated for my high sensitivity. At that time, it became clearer to me, at least, that I was probably highly sensitive myself – and now I’m absolutely sure that I am. [laughs]
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Chris Sandel: At this early stage, let’s define what the term ‘highly sensitive person’ means.
Barbara Allen: In the terms in which Dr. Elaine Aron would describe it, it describes sensory processing sensitivity. This is a genetic trait. It’s inherited by approximately 20% of the population, depending on which studies you look at.
It is basically about a difference in that part of the population; it’s about how we respond. We might be more responsive to the environment, to the situation, internally, externally, in our response to all that goes on. We’re more responsive to stimuli in all sorts of ways. It’s also called differential sensitivity. It’s related to environmental sensitivity, and the main thing scientists describe it as is vantage sensitivity. That means that for highly sensitive people, we have a very peculiar propensity to be able to make more from good situations than other people can.
Chris Sandel: Can you explain that more?
Barbara Allen: I’ll give you an example. They did a study – it was quite a while ago now, but they did a study with orphans who were fostered. I think they were Romanian orphans. They checked in with them after 54 months, and what they found is that the children who had been fostered with good foster parents who also had the trait of high sensitivity were still having improvements and benefitting from that good parenting, whereas the others had stopped having many changes at all. I think this is because we have the ability to make more of a good situation.
When we talk about differential susceptibility in the population, that means that whilst highly sensitive people can be more affected by bad things, they are also much more affected by good things. Vantage sensitivity is something that the rest of the population do not have, and it’s a particular advantage for us sensitive people because we can actually get a lot from a small thing.
For instance, you might have a client who’d had maybe not such a great upbringing, but for some reason you’re wondering why they did okay when the rest of their siblings didn’t. It could be because they were able to take advantage of a small input, perhaps from a kind aunt or another member of the family or someone at school. They were able to really make the most of that situation.
Chris Sandel: I haven’t heard that as an explanation before, and I’m wondering, is there also almost a J curve, where there can be a situation where if someone isn’t highly sensitive, they can do better from a situation that is more disadvantaged just because they don’t take it onboard in the same way, they’re able to see more positives than someone who is more highly sensitive? I’m just wondering if it can go in the opposite direction.
Barbara Allen: What can happen is that if you’re not a highly sensitive person, it may take a lot more to actually affect you than a sensitive person. You could be in a difficult situation and be less affected than a highly sensitive person would.
Chris Sandel: You used the term sensory processing sensitivity. Can that be interchangeably used with highly sensitive person? Is highly sensitive person more the lay term for that?
Barbara Allen: Yes, it is. It’s sensory processing sensitivity – not sensory processing disorder. That’s a completely different thing. But the sensory processing sensitivity is a common scientific term used for this trait.
It’s a neutral trait, so it’s neither good nor bad; it’s just something that you’re born with, and it can be very useful.
Chris Sandel: In terms of within the population, is there a difference between the genders? Is it more that it happens in men or more that it happens in women, or there’s no difference and it’s a 50/50 split?
Barbara Allen: It’s about the same. I would say about 50/50. We might, maybe in the Western world, not realize it, but there are actually as many sensitive men as there are sensitive women.
Chris Sandel: You said in terms of it being genetic – is there any impact in terms of parental attachment style or anything to do with more of the nurture side that can lead to someone being a highly sensitive person? Or if you’re not genetically predisposed, it’s just not going to happen even if there are changes depending on parenting style?
Barbara Allen: It’s something that’s genetic, so it’s something that you’re born with. I think sometimes there’s a bit of confusion between being born highly sensitive and becoming sensitized.
You could be born highly sensitive and you will be affected by what goes on around you, so if you were brought up by parents who perhaps are struggling to be good parents, you may suffer more as a result. Some people might become sensitized in that because of their survival instincts, they’ve had to learn to become more hyper-vigilant. They rely a lot more on their senses to know what’s going on. It is quite easy to confuse the two, I think.
Chris Sandel: There’s a lot of genetic testing in terms of going to 23andMe and the like, so is there an actual genetic test that can be done for this? Or it’s more like there’s a whole lot of different characteristics and there’s no one genetic test?
Barbara Allen: The more research that’s done, the more they’re finding that sensitivity is made up of a variety of different things. But one of the things that you can test for is someone having the short allele on the serotonin transporter gene. If somebody has that, they’re highly likely to display typical behavior and experiences of a highly sensitive person.
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Chris Sandel: I know when I asked you the definition or defining the term, you maybe touched on some of this, but what would be some of the traits that a highly sensitive individual would have?
Barbara Allen: One of the main things – in terms of evolution, there are very important traits that all living things have, things that help you to survive. One of the things that human beings and other animals have is this “pause to check” trait. That means that we see something and we will stop to consider before acting.
That would be different to someone who doesn’t have the trait, who may be more impulsive or tend to go for it, and if it’s wrong, they’ll go for it again rather than stop and think about it before acting. Elaine Aron refers to it as the pause to check.
You often see it in young children. If you take a young child to a party, for instance, it’s something that a lot of children will say, “Yes, great!” They’ll let go of your hand, run in, get all involved, whereas a highly sensitive child might be inclined to be very excited about going but then hide behind their mother for a while, while they watch what’s going on, and then they’ll join in.
It’s not related to being shy; it’s just about observation. This is one of the traits of being highly sensitive. In evolutionary terms and survival, that could actually make the difference between whether you survive or not.
Chris Sandel: It’s interesting you talk about this. I’ve read about this as well. I’ve got a two-year-old son – he’s nearly two and a half – and he definitely is displaying a lot of that pause to check. I would describe him as being very sensitive, very thoughtful, very considered.
We’ve got just the one child, and when we go and play with his cousins who are in Australia and he was hanging out with his cousins, his cousins are much more loud and running around, and there’s a lot more noise. He’s definitely the one who’s just watching more and isn’t into loud, screeching children. So it’s interesting.
I don’t know if this is something you can tell by someone being two or two and a half, or you really need to wait longer, but yeah, there is definitely a feeling that maybe that is his style.
Barbara Allen: Personally, I think you can probably tell from the moment a child is born because they respond – the startle reflex is stronger in highly sensitive people, and it doesn’t go away. Even in adults, you’ll probably find with highly sensitive people, people notice that they jump if there’s a sudden loud noise. They notice the tiny little things. Those reflexes are permanent features of the trait.
That trait, that pause to check, is a survival mechanism. There are four characteristics that underlie whether someone is highly sensitive, and someone who’s highly sensitive will have all four.
One of those, and probably the most important one, is the depth of processing. They tend to think deeply about a lot of things. That depth of processing enables them to process all their other senses at depth as well.
They can have a tendency to get over-aroused and overstimulated by noises – as you said with your son, the loud noises. They probably sound 10 times louder to him. That can include all of the senses, so bright lights may be rough.
A lot of sensitive people cut the labels out of their clothes because they find them annoying and scratchy. It’s one of the common things that always makes me laugh; if I meet someone new in a group of HSPs and they’re just coming in and they’re trying to find something in common, I usually make a joke about having to cut the labels out of my clothes and that’s why I was late. Then everybody laughs, and they begin to see that actually, so many highly sensitive people have sensory sensitivity that’s quite high.
Then, of course, there’s the emotional responsiveness – again, linked to the depth of processing. We as a whole tend to have more intense experiences of emotions. Not just our own, but we might respond to others’ emotions more strongly. That can be jolly useful in certain terms of empathic responses.
Then the sensory sensitivity is a general thing that most sensitive people will have. Those four things – depth of processing, over-arousal, emotional responsiveness, and sensory sensitivity – they are all neutral, they are all useful.
What can be difficult is if they’re not acknowledged or our experiences of those things and those traits are misinterpreted to us, I think, as we’re growing up. This is where family of origin can make a big difference to highly sensitive people.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, because as you say, when you go through that list, it’s all neutral. It’s then how that plays out. I imagine there’s probably many learned behaviors, or maybe even people think of them as traits, that are more traits because someone has had to live in a society that misunderstands how they react.
Barbara Allen: I think a lot of people – they often think that sensitive people are actually quite shy, and it’s a huge mistake to think that. I think highly sensitive people, if they’re brought up with good parenting, tend to be less shy than most people.
What I’ve noticed is that if a highly sensitive person is not responded to in a positive way when they have a natural reaction for them, then this can start to change their behavior.
For instance, if you have the wrong color skin for your society and people tend to respond differently to you than to someone else, you can get an idea of what you have permission to do or who you have permission to be in that society. The same thing can happen if you have a sensitive response or a response that’s different to the majority. Sometimes it can be misinterpreted to you as something that’s unhelpful or not allowed.
That’s when highly sensitive people start to – I call it bending out of shape, changing who they are, hiding who they are, and maybe letting go of some of the positives of their sensitivity in favor of fitting in.
Chris Sandel: In terms of societies, are there cultures that are much more supportive of highly sensitive individuals or where that’s even maybe aspirational because of how they value certain behaviors or they value certain traits?
Barbara Allen: Yes. I’ve heard people say that, for instance, the Thai culture and Japanese and Chinese culture, they would see highly sensitive behavior as good behavior – the good child, for instance. A child who is sensitive might be more popular in those cultures. There are probably other cultures as well.
But I think one area in which being highly sensitive is not necessarily applauded is the Western culture, where there’s a very gung-ho, macho attitude to feelings in particular, and sensitivity and sensory sensitivity. The positive is being tough, and being sensitive is not necessarily seen as tough. Although I have to say most highly sensitive people are exceedingly tough. They’ve had to be. But they often don’t see themselves that way.
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Chris Sandel: In terms of maybe some other definitions that would be useful to flesh out – I don’t know if you have actual definitions you use for this, or we can work one out as we go – but in terms of introvert versus extrovert?
Barbara Allen: Elaine Aron has found during her research that about 70% of highly sensitive people are introverts. I’m an introverted highly sensitive person. I’m a friendly introvert, so people don’t really notice that I’m an introvert. But 30% are extroverts, and it’s a wonderful thing to be, to be extroverted, I think, particularly in the Western culture, because it means it’s easier for you to reach out and make connections.
But the difficulty can be that if you are an extroverted highly sensitive person, you could actually get quite overstimulated by your need to engage. You still need as much downtime for your nervous system – which can be very busy because of your depth of processing – you still need as much time as an introverted person does.
One of the interesting things that I found when I was beginning in private practice and starting to really go for it in terms of looking for high sensitivity was that people would come wondering if they had bipolar disorder. When I asked them to describe what they thought that they had, it would be these highs and lows and reaching out and being very busy out there, and then crashing.
I realized that actually, some of these highly sensitive people were extroverted and also high sensation-seeking, novelty-seeking, interested in new things. They were actually overstimulating themselves. The over-arousal part of their trait was too high, and therefore they were crashing, and then their natural extroversion was kicking in and making them want to go out and do more.
So they would go out and party and have lots of friends, and then they’d be in tears and in bed and off work because they’d worn themselves out too much. They would think there was something wrong with them because they were struggling to get out of bed when everyone else was back to work as normal. So they would begin to wonder if they had a serious mental illness.
But with a lot of people, I think that they were just simply the over-aroused extrovert high sensation-seeking piece. That’s what they were.
Chris Sandel: What is the difference between say an introvert and an extrovert? What are the characteristics they look at to say where you are on the spectrum or to even work out what the spectrum is? Do you know this, or are we getting into an area that isn’t a specialty for you?
Barbara Allen: I know a little bit, because this really does matter a lot if you’re working with a highly sensitive person. It does matter whether they’re an introvert or an extrovert because you need to make sure that you’re in agreement about what reasonable expectations are for socializing and so on.
An introvert tends to process a lot internally, and they also tend to nurture and revive their energy internally. With an extrovert, that person will quite like to process their thoughts externally, but also they will gain a lot of energy by mixing with others, getting feedback, interacting with others. So they energize in different ways. An introvert would find too much energizing through social interaction quite exhausting, but an extrovert would actually find it very energizing.
Chris Sandel: Then when you’ve got someone who is a highly sensitive individual who is then also an extrovert, does it feel like those things are at odds? Or not really as long as that person knows how to get that balance right?
Barbara Allen: That is the point. It’s about balance, and the balance for an extroverted sensitive person will be different to a non-HSP extrovert. They have different needs and they will look different in the same situation. So it’s very important to have a balance of self-care in terms of measuring what works for you in terms of your sensitivity rather than in terms of everyone.
Chris Sandel: One of the things that you made reference to is high sensation-seeking. Maybe define that, just because I imagine most people don’t know that term. I haven’t heard of it before.
Barbara Allen: High sensation-seeking is a trait that can appear in anyone in the population, whether you’re a sensitive person or not. Again, it’s a very useful trait. It’s novelty-seeking.
It’s the kind of person, for instance – a typical person with high sensation-seeking behavior, when they want to plan a holiday, they would tend to always plan somewhere they’ve never been before whereas someone who didn’t have that trait might be quite open to going back perhaps to somewhere they have been before. If they go to see a film at a cinema, it’s really important that it’s something new and exciting, whereas someone without that trait might be open to seeing the film again that they liked before.
So it’s someone who likes something that’s new and interesting, and it’s actually a requirement of their personality to have that ongoing opportunity. Again, if you’re also sensitive, that trait in itself could actually lead you to overstimulation and over-arousal because of the curiosity, the fear of missing out, the sense of adventure. It’s a wonderful trait to have, but it can be quite exhausting if you’re sensitive.
Chris Sandel: I think these two extra bits in terms of being highly sensitive and an extrovert or being highly sensitive and then high sensation-seeking are useful for people to know, because I’ve had a number of clients – I said this before we hit record – within the population that I work with, I would say about 70% will identify as being highly sensitive individuals.
I think a lot of why they end up with issues around food, whether that be disordered eating or an eating disorder, often is as a coping skill to deal with feeling unease around being highly sensitive and not being in an environment that works for that.
Barbara Allen: Yeah. Also, I think there’s something that does tend to go with the genetic trait of high sensitivity, and that is a sensitivity to blood sugar levels. A highly sensitive person could very easily become overwhelmed and need to suddenly feed themselves.
I’ve worked a lot with parents of highly sensitive children to make sure that the children have access to something good for them to eat at least every hour, so their sugar levels don’t drop, because they can become very easily affected. I think if that’s going on for you when you’re young, it’s not really surprising that it becomes part of the make-up – that drive, that need, that unexplained need sometimes, to eat something.
Chris Sandel: I actually see it the other way around a lot of the time, at least within the client population I have. I tend to see a lot more of the restriction end of the spectrum. For people where there is just so much noise and overwhelm, when they are able to stop eating, it’s almost like there’s a pause and there is a numbness, and it gives them a break. Obviously, that comes with a whole load of collateral damage that then ensues, but it’s a way that’ve been able to find where they’re able to not be so overwhelmed with everything.
Barbara Allen: Yeah. I think overwhelm, again, that comes into one of those four things that make up the trait: over-arousal, overwhelm, overstimulation. That can happen not just from what’s going on externally, but what’s processing and the needs going on inside, which can feel pretty constant, almost like a ruthless cycle that’s going on in the mind. Quieting the body then feels like it’s quieting the mind.
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Chris Sandel: Definitely. The reason why then adding in the extrovert piece and the high sensation-seeking piece has been useful is because for a lot of clients who read through the original list of the various traits for a highly sensitive person, it just doesn’t fit for them until they then add that extra layer on top where they’re like, “Okay, now this makes more sense.”
What I’ve had occur with a number of clients is as they get better, they realize they aren’t as introverted as they thought they were, and actually, the introversion has really come because of the eating disorder and how isolating that is and how much that puts up walls, and they don’t want to be interacting. Once that starts to improve, they realize, “Actually, I’m quite extroverted. I enjoy my time with people.” The sensitivity piece doesn’t change for them, but the introvert piece does start to change.
Barbara Allen: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. There are a lot of highly sensitive people out there who think they’re introverts because they’ve read information about introverts, and because they get overwhelmed and they need reflection time, they need deep processing time, they interpret that as a sign of introversion.
But actually, it’s not. It’s a sign of being sensitive and needing that downtime, needing to calm the nervous system, needing to process deeply what’s going on in your life. It’s not necessarily about not liking people.
I don’t know if you know, but I know a lot of people who are not highly sensitive but who are introverts who don’t actually match the introvert description, for instance, in the book called Quiet.
Chris Sandel: Susan Cain’s book.
Barbara Allen: Yes, that’s right. I think she’s talking about highly sensitive introverts there. I don’t think she’s talking about all introverts. My husband is an introvert, but he wouldn’t recognize himself in that book at all. I think that’s because he’s not highly sensitive. So there’s a difference in the behavior.
I think sensitive extroverts are often the last ones to actually fully become who they really are because of the difficulty getting a definition of things that they’re experiencing.
Chris Sandel: I would also say sensitive extroverts, especially sensitive extroverts where there is the high sensation-seeking, there can be a lot of illnesses or perennial illnesses that come as part of that, where you feel like you’ve got chronic fatigue or you’re constantly going from one thing to the next, because you’re in a situation where there’s this pull to be always doing and out and seeing people, and then at the same time not understanding the level of downtime and self-care that really needs to be the yin to that yang.
Barbara Allen: Yes, absolutely. Also, the non-HSP message about what socializing is and how it should be done and for how long and where – I think that natural drive to interact leads extroverts to mix, which is of course natural. It’s what they should be doing. But actually, a sensitive extrovert also needs to choose the right kinds of ways for socializing and the right environments so that they don’t get into that overwhelm situation.
It’s quite a difficult balance, I think, for sensitive extroverts. I know quite a lot of sensitive extroverts, and they’re such wonderful people to know. Absolutely such a joy. It’s so sad if you see them absolutely exhausted because you think, “How did that happen?” [laughs]
00:42:35
Chris Sandel: The more I read about this, the more I’m like, this would be a really good thing for people to do at school, to understand how they fit in so that you can then figure out, how should I be spending my time? Not just on the things that I really enjoy doing, but also like, is there going to be a tipping point where if I do this for too long, I now fall into a place where this is actually pushing me away from where I want to be because it’s now affecting my physical health, my mental health, etc.
Barbara Allen: Yes. I think schools and workplaces owe it to highly sensitive people to be more amenable to their trait, because this is a trait someone is born with. They don’t have a choice about whether they have this trait, and they have some natural and normal needs that go with that trait. I mean, 20% of the population is a pretty big percentage for something like this.
Things like, for instance, in the workplace, being able to alter your environment where you’re working slightly to make it more accommodating for you as a sensitive person – it stands to reason it’s going to make you more productive, and yet it can be very difficult to sometimes get permission to even change the lighting slightly or to bring something into the office that just makes things a little more comfortable for you as a sensitive person.
Offices where everything is open and there’s no quiet space to work can be quite difficult for some sensitive people because they are more affected by the noise and the chaos that’s going on around them, and yet they can be so much more productive if they’re giving a little bit of space to be able to focus.
I think in schools in particular – this is where I would really like to see some changes. Schools can be very overstimulating environments, particularly for introverted HSPs, who make up the majority of HSPs. I’ve had so many parents phone and say, “Why is it my child has a meltdown as soon as they come out of the school gate? What is the matter with them?”
They are just so overwhelmed and over-aroused that they don’t know what to do with themselves. And yet they like school. They like their friends. They just don’t know what to do with themselves after 7 hours of constant stimulation, not being allowed to go somewhere quiet to relax because that’s “anti-social” and they’re not seen as mixing. It can make their life quite difficult.
In terms of health, it raises their cortisol levels so that they’ve got constantly raised cortisol levels, and this is where health can sometimes be affected. This is where anxiety issues can sometimes start. They’re actually predisposing their body to be in a constant state of anxiety and over-arousal.
Sometimes people think that HSPs are made rather than born, but I disagree. I think that if you take a highly sensitive child and you over-arouse them on a daily basis, their chemistry in the body changes, and it’s actually not very nice to do that to a child. But it can be very difficult to persuade schools sometimes to provide opportunities for children to spend time alone or in quietness.
00:46:25
Chris Sandel: In your private practice, when people are coming in, how much are you seeing parents bringing in their children versus adults who are coming to see you?
Barbara Allen: I’d say at the moment I get about two-thirds are adults bringing themselves, and the other third are parents contacting me because they’re concerned about their child. It’s usually about a child threatening not to go to school or refusing to go to school altogether, and parents who really don’t know what to do next because they feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They want to cooperate with the school, who have a legal obligation to make sure that the child is in school, and yet the school doesn’t always have enough information to recognize that the needs of the child are not really being met. It’s not like it’s that hard, actually, to meet the needs of a highly sensitive child, but by the time the parents contact me, sadly that child has often been overstimulated, over-aroused, sometimes for years before they even get to see me. That can be very hard.
Usually what happens when they bring them in is I usually talk to the parents and the child just plays by themselves somewhere, and I can see them listening. In the end, they will start to join in the conversation. I’ll ask them, “If there was one thing that you could change at school, what would it be?” Quite often they’ll just say, “If people would be kind to each other and if people would just stop shouting.”
I think to myself, I think that would be nice in all schools, to have a calmer, quieter, kinder environment. Why is it that sensitive children are suffering so much?
I then encourage the parents to take a report from me into the school that lists a few things that the school could do that will make life easier for that particular child, but hopefully that they could learn to provide something for other children. Because of course, if there’s 20% of highly sensitive children in the population, then 20% in the school are probably finding it all a bit much, but they may all be displaying that distress in different ways.
The more introverted that child is, as well as highly sensitive, then probably the faster they will become overwhelmed with the constant social climate that they’re required to operate in.
Chris Sandel: There’s a number of questions I want to ask as a follow-up to that. One is, what age are these kids typically getting to you? Is it already happening in primary school, or is it later on that it’s got to the point where it’s reached that place of “something needs to be done”?
Barbara Allen: I would say I’ve mostly seen boys between the age of 5 and 8, and girls between the age of 8 and 12 at most common.
Chris Sandel: The girls being older, is that because people are more okay with girls being quieter or something? Is there something cultural around that?
Barbara Allen: I think to some extent, girls are more allowed to do nurturing behaviors. I think the boys in particular, being highly sensitive and male in the Western world – it’s almost like two opposites. They’re trying to toughen up and they can’t, and they’re still very affected by what’s going on around them. It’s normal for highly sensitive people to be moved to tears quickly, so for a boy in particular, their sign of distress is more obvious to teachers because they think boys shouldn’t be crying this much.
Or, it’s quite common that if the boys are extroverted, I get a lot of justice activist type of behavior described to me, which is that “So-and-so was bullying so-and-so, so I went over and slapped him and said ‘Stop doing that, it’s unkind.’” [laughs] So the child has got into trouble because either they’re bursting into tears because it’s unkind, or they’re trying to sort it out and being told off. They can’t stop feeling that something is not right, and they’re trying to do something about it.
This is the trouble when you feel emotions more intensely. Often as you grow up, you interpret that strong feeling as like a flag that tells you you’re supposed to do something, and it can be very frustrating if you can’t do something, and very upsetting, I think.
There are all sorts of stories that parents bring about what teachers point out as what they think is odd behavior, but actually is perfectly normal behavior in children.
Chris Sandel: What are the recommendations that you’re writing on that piece of paper that they’re taking to the school?
Barbara Allen: It can vary a little bit depending on the child I’m concerned about, but in general what highly sensitive child need is calm and caring caregivers and teachers. The authority figures need to be calm and kind.
The other thing is that they do need to have, at least every hour, the opportunity to go into a quieter place just for 5 minutes, just so they can let their nervous system calm down from all the overstimulating noises and situations that they’ve been involved with.
They also need to see justice done. I think above all else, they really do have a sense of caring and empathy about other children, so if they see things going on that aren’t okay, they really need proper attention to any bullying situations that are going on, whether they’re involved in them or whether they’re just witnessing them.
A school’s bullying policy can be very useful, but it’s no good if it’s just in writing. It actually needs to be something that is carried out by all members of staff. It’s not okay to sort something out once and then just leave it because if a child is witnessing that kind of thing, even if it’s not happening to them, it can actually emotionally burden them a great deal. So bullying is quite an important thing.
Also, especially with the younger children – I would say up to when they leave primary school – they probably need to be able to access snacks, maybe something with protein, on a more regular basis. Often in schools, there aren’t snacks in the break time. There’s only something to eat at lunchtime. This can leave them with low blood sugar, and it can be quite difficult for them to concentrate.
Chris Sandel: In terms of one of the other bits you said there in terms of they like to see fairness in the world, does it skew in terms of the population of where people who are highly sensitive end up working? Is it within this field, there tends to be a lot more of them because that’s really a strength within that industry?
Barbara Allen: Yes, I think industries and careers where you’re required to think deeply and carefully about what you’re doing, jobs that require a certain amount of empathic intelligence, to be able to be of service and to take care of others is something that comes naturally to most sensitive people. Because they process things so deeply, they’re able to be aware of what other people need at the same time as their own needs.
They tend to have – a lot of people talk about mirror neurons nowadays, firing off, so you’ll see a lot of activity like that in brain scans associated with highly sensitive people. They just have this ability. They’re drawn to occupations such as mine – therapist, teaching – although that can be quite overstimulating for teachers. Doctors, health workers, social workers. And maybe managing other people and getting the best out of them. They do tend to make very good managers.
Chris Sandel: You talked about giving a letter so parents can take it to school, and I just wonder more broadly, when you’re working with either the children or with the adults, how much of it is about “you need to change the environment or you need to change these habits so that it’s different” versus more of the reframing within their mind or the way that they talk to themselves as being part of the solution?
Barbara Allen: It’s a bit of both, really. When it comes to young children, the main input you need is with the parents, so that the parents are creating environments that work for the child. But the child also needs enough information so that they understand their trait in a positive way, so it’s that reframing and helping the parents to respond to the child as having a neutral trait rather than something that they need to encourage them to change, and then working with it, seeing the advantages.
The same could be done for schools, seeing the advantages of having sensitive children in the class, especially if they’re happy.
00:56:55
Chris Sandel: Maybe we can go through a couple of different situations or scenarios – and some of these you may have touched on already, but we can flesh it out a little more. If you are a parent who has a young child who is highly sensitive, what is some advice you would give? Or what would be something that they may be having to do differently because of that sensitivity?
Barbara Allen: One of the things that has come up over the years is parents feeling that they ought to give their child lots of after-school activities for social reasons. Sometimes the child has had 7 hours in the school environment, then they come home and they have to go to Scouts or they have to go here and there, playing this team and that team. It’s actually to recognize that maybe a sensitive child might need a little bit more alone time or quiet time alone, and that in itself is not a bad thing.
It would be quite common for parents to say, “Is it all right that when he comes home, he goes to his room and plays on the computer for an hour?” They’re worried that someone will say, “You shouldn’t let the child do that; that’s too long on the computer.” But actually, it might be a way in which the child is trying to quiet their nervous system. They’re focusing on one thing, quietly, away from everything else, and it’s helping them to relax.
Sometimes we find other things, like buying a trampoline if they’ve got a high sensation-seeking, extroverted child. [laughs] They say, “We’re not going to overstimulate you by putting you in yet another activity with a whole team of people, but what we’ll do is buy you a trampoline so you can jump up and down and fling your body around.” It’s quite helpful in terms of reconnecting them with their body and getting the blood flowing and helping them to relax.
The other thing is preparing for sleep at night, because once a child has gotten quite anxious, it can be a little bit difficult to get them off to sleep. Because they think about things very deeply, they’ll sometimes be left with thoughts about the day.
I always encourage parents – I mean, parents can do this with any child, but I think in particular with sensitive children, say, “What was great about today? What was not so great about today?”, so they’ve got a chance to talk about it and get it out to someone who cares. And then not to judge their response; simply to say, “That was hard” or “That was really good, that was great, that was really nice,” so that they’re left with something positive in their mind before they go to sleep.
And then being careful – being very, very careful about even cartoons and things that the highly sensitive child might watch that could potentially upset them or leave them worrying. There are some films, I think, and cartoons which are a little bit too violent or cruel and not really as funny as people think they are, and they can sometimes leave sensitive children quite worried about the characters in the cartoons and things.
So just be aware that the age limit for certain films might need to be raised. [laughs] What is okay for a six-year-old child who’s not highly sensitive, you might need to wait another couple of years before you let them see a PG or so on, because they’ll be more affected by anything scary or sad. Particularly something that’s sad.
It’s very common for sensitive children to worry from quite a young age about loss. They’ll contemplate death from quite a young age. It’s quite normal; I don’t mean it in a morbid way, but they do think about life and the universe from quite a young age. So they will ask questions about dying and death, and it’s really important that people handle that not by dismissing it, but by handling it very kindly and showing a curious attitude in understanding, “I wonder what’s on your mind about that,” so they can be reassured.
They will process anything deeply, whether it’s good or bad. This is in the nature of sensory processing sensitivity, so you might as well make the effort at the beginning, and it will save you a few nightmare nights with a highly sensitive child.
Chris Sandel: As you’re talking there about the child, I’m thinking of the child then having siblings. Is some of the work that you’re doing, if you’re working with a parent and their child, talking about how that then works with the other members of the household?
Barbara Allen: Yes. It’s really important to take into account the other siblings, especially if they’re not highly sensitive, because they don’t always realize that boundaries are very important around sensitive children.
I don’t know, an older brother that doesn’t feel he needs to ask before going into a room or something like that, not giving the younger one the chance to get away from a noisy toddler – that can all be overstimulating and lead to difficulties either between the siblings or in getting to sleep or in just responses in general.
Again, being aware of how it’s potentially overstimulating to have noisy siblings, but also, if it’s handled correctly, those siblings can be really, really supportive if they understand the trait of high sensitivity. They’ll find that the highly sensitive child is such a great sibling to have because they really can be super caring and funny and bright and great to have around. They just need not to be overstimulated, really.
01:02:55
Chris Sandel: What about as you move into teenage years? Is there anything in addition that you would add there, that’s different because they’re sensitive?
Barbara Allen: I think it depends on the personality of the highly sensitive child, whether they’re introvert or whether they’re extrovert. Due to hormones, I think to some extent highly sensitive teenagers cope better than they do when they get into their twenties with being overstimulated. I don’t know how that works; I’m not a scientist, so I can’t tell you how that works. But I do think it’s the case that they do seem to be able to put up with a little bit more noise and socializing than they can later on.
But it’s really important, I think, to recognize that whatever does go on, most teenagers feel things very intensely. You can magnify that 100 times for a highly sensitive person. It really matters.
You might find that the extroverted teenager becomes quite obsessed with their peer group, with friendship groups, and things like that, or the introverted teenager may become quite anxious with being overly conscientious at school or anxious about not really fitting in and not understanding why they’re not so extrovert, or becoming obsessed with introverted type behaviors – games and things like that that most people can’t understand, “Why are you still doing that?” It may be that that’s a way they deal with their overstimulation.
But I think as teenagers, teenagers are out there comparing themselves. This is a time, sometimes, when teenagers can become highly anxious or depressed because they’re comparing themselves with the non-HSP extroverted nature of society, and they’re feeling very different, often, and not necessarily feeling that they can reveal their vulnerability. It’s a time when people are learning to become men, learning to become women, and unless they have the support there, it can be quite a traumatic time, really.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think just being a teenager generally, even without this, is such a fraught and difficult time, and trying to navigate the world and understand how you fit into that and who you are and just feeling alone in terms of different changes and all of that. It is just a really, really difficult time. There’s this extra layer on top if you’re in a society that isn’t supportive of that, or if you’re in a household that isn’t supportive of that. I can imagine how much more difficult that would be.
Barbara Allen: Yeah. It’s obvious to me, I think because I worked for 10 years in addiction, but because of the sensitive nervous system that sensitive people have, it’s actually more responsive to all sorts of drugs. This includes prescribed drugs as well as other types of drugs.
So it’s important to remember, in an age when teenagers begin to experiment with alcohol and so on, that their nervous system will respond more strongly to anything that they have. This includes, if you take a depressed teenager who’s highly sensitive to the doctor, it’s highly likely that they’ll find they’re a bit overwhelmed if they’re given any medication.
It’s one of those things, I think, that sensitive people learn over time. Less is more. [laughs] Unfortunately, again, unless someone explains the sensitive nervous system to you when you’re younger, you have no idea that what is okay for one person to drink is completely the opposite for you. Even drinking too much Coca-Cola, with all the caffeine that’s in it, can actually create the same – it’s like taking a line of coke.
I think for some teenagers, they can sometimes end up with unexpected effects from things that other teenagers recover very quickly from, and that they find completely overwhelms them.
Chris Sandel: As you were talking about that, I was thinking about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book called Talking to Strangers. It has a whole chapter on alcohol and how alcohol affects the brain, and really talking a lot about blackout drunk – which I really didn’t understand much of before, but blackout drunk doesn’t mean that you’re passed out; it just means you’ve reached a blood alcohol level where your mind stops forming memories. You can be having a perfectly normal conversation with someone, or what feels like a normal conversation with someone, where you’re like, “I think they’re drunk,” but you have no idea that they’re now at this point where they’re stopping forming memories.
And then to add another layer on that, they looked at the stats around alcohol consumption – and this was in the U.S., if I’m remembering correctly – but in the last 30 years, the amount that women drink compared to men has basically gone up and up so it’s roughly similar.
You then take someone who is, on average, smaller, metabolizes alcohol differently, who would typically be more intoxicated with less alcohol, now drinking the same amount, and then you add that in to being a teenager with highly sensitive processing – it’s not going to be great.
Barbara Allen: It’s not going to be great. It’s important for professionals to understand what sensory processing sensitivity is. I was lucky enough to read Elaine Aron’s book a long time ago, when I was still working in the addiction field, but I’d already noticed that some of my clients – who I then found out later were highly sensitive – it was part of our job to make a note of how much alcohol they were drinking, for instance.
In theory, they should not have been having any problems, but clearly they were. I didn’t know what to put it down to until later, when I read the book, and then I realized that these were highly sensitive people. So even guidelines that we’re given about how much is safe to drink can be different for a highly sensitive person. It’s really important to take that into account.
It’s the same with being treated for depression or anxiety. If a doctor gives you something – a lot of highly sensitive people report, “I can’t take medication. It never has a good effect on me.” I realized over time that actually, some highly sensitive people, if they’re not feeling well, they do need to take medication, but often the low dose is still too high for them and they experience feelings of overdose, really, of certain medications – which makes them that minority of people whose symptoms get worse instead of better than they take anti-anxiety medication, for example.
So I think getting to know the trait of high sensitivity and understanding yourself – and all the other traits that you have – is really important. Self-awareness. I wish they’d talk more about it in schools, understanding your character, your personality traits. It would really help so much, I think, if sensitive people could be appreciated and understand themselves for who they are.
Chris Sandel: Totally. I had a guest on the podcast recently, Elyse Resch, and she has done a book around intuitive eating that’s aimed at teenagers. I read through it and I was like, there is so much in here that has got nothing to do with eating, but is all around self-awareness and learning traits and ways of thinking that are important not only as a teenager, but as an adult.
There is that reflection of I wish there was more of this that is taught, because school for me should be a lot more than just “here’s how you do math, here’s how you do science.” It should be about how we build someone into being a good human being who can function well in their society, and what are the skills that they need to be able to do that? The things you were talking about would definitely be on that list.
Barbara Allen: Yeah, absolutely. It’s so sad; when you think about it, highly sensitive people, because of their depth of processing, have the capacity for huge self-knowledge and understanding of others. So to actually get through the whole of school and have no idea about who you are is so sad. And those are the people who do have the intuition.
I think there’s a lot more that schools can do to help us understand ourselves, and in understanding ourselves, it also helps us to understand and respect differences. All the things that really matter in the world – understanding other people, appreciating them, liking people for who they are rather than who we think they are – these are all things I think we need to learn.
01:12:30
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I’m just thinking of another scenario: a couple that come to you – and I don’t know if you have couples that come to you or it’s just individual, but where one of the members of the couple is highly sensitive and the other is not. What are you talking about with that person? What’s the advice? How are you dealing with it?
Barbara Allen: It’s actually really fun working with couples like this, I’ve found. I’ve worked with quite a lot of them. I’ve found working with them in a mentoring way is actually better than therapy because essentially, most of the couples that I’ve met where one is HSP and one is not are actually quite a good match; they’ve found the right person, but they don’t understand the trait of high sensitivity.
Most of the job for me has been explaining one to the other: explaining what high sensitivity is and then explaining to the person who’s highly sensitive why their partner does not see the world that way or does not experience it, and actually making it normal to be different, to have different experiences, and to see the advantages of having that different pairing. It can be nice to have two HSPs together or two non-HSPs, but actually the pairing of HSP and non-HSP can be very rich.
But what you do need is to understand the things that someone can change and what they can’t, and then to decide if that’s okay for you.
I think there’s a lot of anxiety when couples come who have these differences in traits, but by the end of once or twice – it doesn’t actually take long, I don’t think. Once they have the tools and they have Elaine Aron’s books – she wrote the book HSPs in Love, which is such a useful book – I’ve found that in itself is very helpful to couples, because it provides an opportunity to talk about their differences, but to talk about the advantages of being with each other.
Chris Sandel: What are the problems that most of those couples are coming and seeing you about? What are the fights about, or what are the struggles?
Barbara Allen: Often there’s an exhausted highly sensitive person who’s trying to keep up with the activity requirements of the non-highly sensitive. There’s also the difference in communication. One example might be that if the non-highly sensitive person is angry, they wouldn’t be horrible or anything, but they would raise their voice, and to actually recognize that with a sensitive person, you don’t need to raise your voice. Raise an eyebrow. That’s probably as far as you need to go, because the sensitive person will notice the change in you without the overwhelm of a raised voice.
Also, then, the highly sensitive person learning to raise their volume, because a lot of what can happen is the sensitive person will say “I feel railroaded. I don’t feel listened to.” When you watch them in the room, having a conversation, and you invite them to talk about something, you can recognize that actually, the non-highly sensitive person cannot hear the sensitive person because they’re talking too quietly. They’re not being clear. There’s a different style of communication that’s required.
So some of it is about literally practicing how you communicate, I think. The other thing that comes up a lot is the amount of sleep that’s needed, and the quality of sleep. Sensitive people often are light sleepers. They tend to need a couple of hours’ more sleep at night.
If the sensitive person is the female and she’s also in the traditional relationship where she’s getting up at night to feed babies and things, often there will be a crisis after about between 6 months and a year of a new baby being born. Often it’s to do with the amount of sleep and this kind of comparison – “Other mothers are all managing. They don’t need all this extra sleep. What’s the matter with me?” and actually feeling quite bad, as if they’re failing somehow.
And yet when you realize that their nervous system needs more downtime – they do need very, very good quality sleep; HSPs need this all the time anyway, but when you actually have a family and you’ve got a couple there, often the partner has no idea that their partner actually really needs more sleep. Until they know that, they don’t know to offer more help or the opportunity for napping or to take a little one out for an hour or two to quieten the household. Anything that can help like that can make such a big difference.
Also, the other thing that can come up is recognizing values and things. Have you checked out with your partner – what matters more? Is earning a lot of money really, really important? How much time are you willing to expend on doing that? What does the other person need in terms of attention and time, conversation, depth conversation, in the relationship? Sensitive people love to have deep conversations.
When you choose a partner, have you chosen someone who could have those conversations with you? And if you haven’t, because they have other things that you love, how many friends have you got that you could have those conversations with so that you’re meeting that need for depth? Because your depth processing on its own will not be enough if you’ve got nobody to talk to.
Chris Sandel: As you’re talking about some of those things in terms of having maybe arguments and things getting louder and them not being able to talk and express themselves properly – have you come across the work of Stephen Porges in terms of Polyvagal theory?
Barbara Allen: I’ve heard of it, but I don’t have a lot of knowledge about it.
Chris Sandel: I will then shelf my next question around that. I just wanted to find out if there’d been any overlap or if there was anything you knew around that.
Barbara Allen: The main involvement I’ve had with that was parents bringing a child who had a sensitive polyvagal nerve and was passing out at school from overstimulation. The answer was to give them time out once an hour, 5 minutes of quiet time, to stop the fainting fits. That was the only thing I was aware of, where really their vagal nerve was coming in and actually giving them a break – but not in the way that everyone was happy with. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: They were getting ultimate shutdown. [laughs]
Barbara Allen: Absolutely, and then they would wake up and wonder what had happened. It was just overstimulation and overwhelm, really. I think there was a concern, “What’s going on psychologically or what’s going on physically?”, but actually it was literally just environmental. Environmental influences are one of the main thing that sensitive people have to deal with and manage every day.
Chris Sandel: You said in terms of the book on Highly Sensitive People in Love that there’s a lot of talking about the positives of that kind of a relationship. Do you want to mention some of those?
Barbara Allen: One of the things that people have often said to me when I’ve asked someone who is not the HSP, “What is it about this person that drew you?”, they say, “She knows me like no one else. She can understand what I say, sometimes without me even – she knows me even without me saying something.” That sensitivity to another person’s needs or moods or requirements is one of the major things, I think.
I hope it’s all right to talk about this, but in Elaine Aron’s book, Highly Sensitive People in Love, they did a bit of research for the book and found that highly sensitive men make the best lovers and highly sensitive women reported more orgasms. I think in the bedroom, it’s the attention to detail and being aware of the subtleties that helps to bring people together, even on a physical level.
Someone who pays attention to you fully, as sensitive people can do quite easily, is a very special part of a relationship – to feel understood and loved deeply, to have someone who may have emotions that are intense, but those emotions are sometimes aimed at and for you. That’s a wonderful thing to be part of. Someone who will remember the small things, the multiple details of your life, without you even being aware of it. That’s quite a person to be with, really.
01:22:05
Chris Sandel: I know you’ve probably touched on some of this as well, but for the highly sensitive person, the kinds of things that are useful from a self-care perspective – anything you haven’t mentioned up until this point?
Barbara Allen: I have mentioned sleep, getting enough sleep and having a nice bed to go to. Creating a proper sleep environment is really important.
In terms of self-care, the best self-care that you can do is to know your trait really well so that you can pick up on the cues that your body, your mind, your emotions, your nervous system are giving to you.
Eating well is very important. We’ve talked about how you can respond as a sensitive person more strongly to medication. You also have strong responses to the kind of nutrition that you take in, and the chemistry of your own body. So paying attention to what your body is telling you. As sensitive people, we have the possibility of generally being more healthy than most people because we can feel small changes that happen. If we pay attention and respond, that can be very good self-care.
The other thing I think I would highlight is being careful about choosing the kinds of people that you have in your close circle – choosing people who are positive, who hold values of kindness, fairness, truth. Those are the sorts of things that we need to be careful about, I think, so that those close to us – because we’re affected by our environment so much. That includes the environment of relationship.
So choosing friends carefully to make sure that you’re not the only one who listens to everyone’s problem and nobody listens to yours, for instance. Not surrounding yourself with people who are so loud that you feel hammered by the time that you get home. Choosing people that lift your soul and have your interests at heart. That can be very important.
The reason I mention it is because sensitive people are very good listeners. They want to be kind, they will make an effort, and for that reason, people are attracted to them. But sometimes the people that are attracted to them really need someone who gives them a lot of attention, and they’re not necessarily capable of giving as much thought and concern in return.
So just being sensible and wise, and taking enough alone time out to take care of your own needs, to think about and get to know what you really want. That’s something I would suggest.
And if for any reason – I think self-care should include from time to time going into therapy, not because you have any particular problem, but because that environment provides you with quality time being listened to, to help you to get to know your real self and what you want from life. That’s hard to do when you’re full of overstimulation from all the things that the world is telling you and all the people that are telling you and all your friends. It’s hard sometimes to differentiate what other people want from what you want. That can be quite an important part of self-care.
Chris Sandel: That’s some great advice. The one I would say in terms of the food side of things, I agree that someone who’s highly sensitive can be very intuitive and can feel more a lot with what’s coming into their body and how that affects it.
Just knowing the demographic that can listen to this podcast, I would say that that can very easily then flip into obsessiveness and orthorexia, where this is now no longer serving someone and is becoming more of a problem. So it’s like, how do you do that with balance and with moderation and where it doesn’t become something that there’s now a problem for you?
Barbara Allen: Yes, absolutely. In life, sensitive people often have bent themselves out of shape. Be careful; don’t compare yourself with other people. Get to know yourself as you really are. What’s really genuinely good for you? Follow that. We are a little bit different, and it’s important not to compare ourselves negatively, I think, as well.
01:26:55
Chris Sandel: In terms of you working with clients who are adults but have grown up in an environment where it hasn’t been so supportive to them as a highly sensitive individual and they’re in that process of recovery and repair – and that could be to undo patterns of behavior; it can be undoing thoughts – what does that process look like? What are you doing when you’re working with someone?
Barbara Allen: It’s a case of where the person wants to start, really. Sometimes people come with one specific thing that they want to change. But if I identify that they’re highly sensitive, the first part of the work I do is to give them some information about what high sensitivity is and encourage them to read around high sensitivity.
I think once someone recognizes the trait, it opens their mind then to some significant change. It can change their mind from thinking there’s something the matter with them to thinking there’s something right with them. And if there’s something right with you, then it gives you full permission, in a way, to start to pursue living life in a more authentic and natural way as a sensitive being.
The other thing is I help the client by starting to question assumptions that they might have been making that might not be accurate. For instance, they may feel that the fact that they get upset easily by certain things, they might see that as a failure, whereas I would maybe start to reframe things, looking at it that being affected and moved by things could be a strength because it’s flagging up that something’s not okay. And if it’s not okay, that gives us an opportunity to do something differently.
Gradually picking up on things that are presented more as problems and actually looking at the other side and seeing, what is this telling me about you as a person? What positives can we find in this way that you’re relating to the world and experiencing the world?
Chris Sandel: How freeing do most people find this when they discover this concept? Is it that most people are like, “Great, this is amazing. Now I know what this is, I have a vocabulary to describe it. This makes sense of why this thing happened in my life or why I reacted that way”? Is most of the time this received really well, or is there some anger at the situation?
Barbara Allen: I’ve always been surprised, actually. People say, “This has changed my whole life.” High sensitivity, if you understand what it is, if it’s who you are, it does completely reframe your whole way of looking at yourself.
But after you do the reframe, then you have what I call the grieving stage, and that is going back over and recognizing the losses that you had in terms of how you viewed yourself, how you viewed your strengths as weaknesses, the difficult situations that you went through of total overstimulation and overwhelm that you realize were okay, and it wasn’t your fault.
So there’s kind of an elation – it starts off as an elation and a recognition of the self, but there’s also a little bit of grieving, I think, to go through. And then there’s a celebration of having re-found your authentic self.
One of the things that most therapists find with sensitive people is the speed at which they work. This is because they continue the process. They don’t just come into therapy and wait for you to poke and prod around. They’re actually working on things. They’re pretty conscientious, and they do make great changes.
I think what they have to remember is that the process of therapy for a sensitive person – you can be just as easily moved and overwhelmed by your own process as you can from the live that you were hoping you would be sorting out. [laughs] So it’s quite important to take into account that it might be tiring at times.
But generally, I’ve found people do very well and they feel that big changes are happening. After that, it’s a case of just being careful not to go back into old habits of thinking, which can happen if you stay in the same kinds of environments that didn’t do so much of a favor for you before. But it’s an ongoing process, like everything for everyone, isn’t it?
Chris Sandel: You mentioned about someone that they’re easy to tears – could that be something that happened when they were a child or maybe even the teen years and then, for whatever reason, because it was so shunned upon, that just gets completely shut down? So then as an adult, there is none of that going on, and they’re like “I can’t remember the last time I cried,” until some therapy happens that then opens the floodgates, and then they get back to that ability?
Barbara Allen: Yes. I think it’s a process of getting back to yourself. That’s what therapy is with highly sensitive people, because essentially, there isn’t anything wrong with them. There never was. What’s happened is that some damage and some pressure has been put on that growing individual.
But I think they’re also highly adaptive. This is part of the intelligence of high sensitivity. You become very good at adapting, and it takes a little while to unlearn the habits of the past. This is where, depending on how bad it was as a child, you might need some therapy for a while to actually undo all the knots that you’ve gotten tied up into. That might include whether you have permission to cry or whether you’re even aware that you feel like crying.
01:33:45
Chris Sandel: I know you do workshops; when you’re doing workshops, is what is offered similar to what we’re chatting about today, where it’s more of an education and it’s helping people to understand what these concepts are? Or is it more the therapeutic end of the spectrum, and people are opening up and divulging and working through that in that space?
Barbara Allen: I provide a variety of things – anything from teaching professionals so they can recognize highly sensitive people that work with them in an understanding way to providing days – for instance, a day for highly sensitive women to come together and discuss what it is to be feminine and sensitive in the world, with today’s modern expectations of women, to another day where it might be, how does a highly sensitive person show their creativity? It could be a day where people come together to explore that a little bit.
So there are a lot of different ways in which I facilitate people getting together. They’re not therapy groups, but it’s always therapeutic, because of course, once you start to understand yourself better, it opens up important things for you. So it can be quite poignant, even on the information days.
Chris Sandel: On the information days, is it often that a lot of the audience is going to be non-highly sensitive people and they’re, as you say, practitioners trying to learn how to be better with their clients?
Barbara Allen: I’ve found that most of the people – I suppose it’s typical, really – most of the people who come to professional education days about high sensitivity, quite a lot of them are highly sensitive. But the ones who are not highly sensitive provide very interesting insights as well for the highly sensitive people. They’re very good at then articulating how the world looks different to them, so that can be really informative for sensitive people who are feeling a bit frustrated with trying to express themselves.
So yeah, I’ve worked with mixed groups. But sensitive practitioners tend to be attracted to learn more about the trait. That’s what I’ve noticed. And then they go back and speak to their teams about the trait. That’s just how it is. I don’t know if other people have found it different, but I do find the majority of people attending tend to be highly sensitive.
Chris Sandel: I’ve gone back and forth on this with myself for quite a while, and there’s definitely parts of it where I’m like, “Okay, that’s definitely me,” and then there’s parts of it where I’m like, “I don’t know if that really is me.” I imagine that with all of these things, there is a spectrum. My sense is if I am highly sensitive, I’m at the lower end of that, where it’s less of a trait and it’s probably mixed in with some introversion that makes it feel a little bit more highly sensitive.
Barbara Allen: Yeah, it could be that you’re compassionate and non-HSP. That’s possible. But that’s okay. The main thing is if people understand the trait, there’s a lot to learn in being able to help other people who have the trait, and there are a lot of sensitive people out there who could be helpful to others as well, but maybe don’t have the confidence because they haven’t really interpreted their abilities as positives.
01:37:35
Chris Sandel: The National Centre for High Sensitivity that you made reference to earlier on that you started in 2010 – how did that come about? What was the impetus where you’re like, “Right, I need to be the one doing this”?
Barbara Allen: What happened was I had quite a lot of highly sensitive clients, and they all thought they were the only person like this. I thought it would be good initially to create events where they could get together, so I started highly sensitive meetups for people.
Then after that, there was such a lot of questions, like “What books can I read?” and “How can you find therapists who understand this trait?” and things like that, and I realized that if there was a national centre, people could just go there, get the information, and then they could help themselves. So that’s how it started, really, simply based on all the questions that I used to get asked or emails that I received from people who had found me on the internet because they typed in “high sensitivity.”
I worked with the centre until 2019, but it got to a stage where it was a bit difficult to expand it any further. It was difficult to get funding for different things. So I realized then that probably it was time – it had gone as far as it could. The website is there; it’s got all the information. There are a few people in the background still updating the website. But I think it probably is enough in itself, and we’ve trained enough people now, I think, that there are enough people who know about high sensitivity to be able to help out there.
It’s become a lot more popular nowadays to know and understand about high sensitivity, I’m pleased to say.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, just in terms of how the internet has changed since 2010, I imagine the way you can get information out – you’re right, there’s a lot of people talking about it, or more people talking about it, which is great.
In terms of the Susan Cain Quiet book that you referenced earlier on, I really enjoyed that as a book and I found it really helpful. But the more I read around high sensitivity and people talking about that book, it feels like she missed the mark in terms of what is really an introvert and then what is someone who’s highly sensitive, and confounding those two things.
Barbara Allen: Yes, I think that may be what happened. I know she extensively interviewed Elaine Aron during her research for that book, so I think this is where the description fits high sensitivity so well. But it’s helped all sorts of people all over the world, so it’s a really great book from that point of view.
I wish there would be even more books about high sensitivity. There are quite a few out there now, and there are a lot of people working in the field. I think with the National Centre, the information that’s on the website there, that should contain information that’s accurate and matches the research that’s out there. That’s very important so that people can identify what sensory processing sensitivity is and differentiate it from other things so that it’s not confusing. So that was one of the things that I wanted to achieve with the website there.
Also, of course, there’s Elaine Aron’s website at www.hsperson.com where you can actually go into the horse’s mouth, as it were, and you can look up all the papers that she’s written, loads and loads of articles she’s written that are really helpful to highly sensitive people if they need to know more about the trait.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, I think I recommend her site a lot to do the test, which is a good starting place. As I said, for me it’s led me to be still a little unsure if it applies to me, but it gives people a bit of a sense of what this means, and if it comes up for them, then they can start to do more reading and exploring.
Barbara Allen: Yes. There’s lots of research ongoing now, in all different fields, that relate somehow to this trait. So I think over the next 10-20 years, we’re going to know and understand a lot more about the point of having this trait, really, and how it serves us. Certainly in evolutionary terms, it’s a very important trait. I think the more we understand about it, the more we can use it well.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. With the National Centre, were you doing any lobbying towards government, or was there anything even at local government levels or even at school levels where you were trying to make a difference in terms of how things were being run or done?
Barbara Allen: I did try to have some influence, but I think it started off so small, I hadn’t really gotten that far. But there is an organization at the moment that’s trying to fill that gap with employers, more at a policy level. It’s called Vantage. They named it after vantage sensitivity. So they’re picking up the baton, as it were, on a higher level – which is good. I really welcome that.
At the moment, I’m mainly concentrating more on providing events where highly sensitive people can come together and find strength in being together.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Barbara, this has been wonderful. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Is there anything I didn’t ask you or we didn’t cover that you really wanted to touch on?
Barbara Allen: I don’t think so. All I would do is encourage people, if they think they’re sensitive, to read about it and follow their authenticity. That’s what makes people happy in the end, I think, to be yourself and to recognize that sensitivity is a gift in some ways, not necessarily all difficult. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: If people want to find out more about you, where should they be heading? I’ll put these in the show notes as well.
Barbara Allen: You can find me on Growing Unlimited. My website is www.growingunlimited.co.uk. My name is Barbara Allen. If they type that into the internet – just type in “Barbara Allen” and “highly sensitive” and you’ll come across my stuff. That’s where I am.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. As I said, I’ll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today. This has been great to finally have a chance to really delve into this topic in such a great amount of detail.
Barbara Allen: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.
01:44:20
Chris Sandel: That is it for my interview with Barbara. If it resonated with you and made you think that this might be you, then I really highly recommend checking out the HSP test that we mentioned in the conversation. I’m going to link to it in the show notes, but if you simply google “HSP test,” it will be the first page that comes up. It’s the website www.hsperson.com.
There’s two recommendations that I want to make. I’ve been doing this recently at the end of the podcast, things that I’ve been getting into that I really enjoy.
I feel like I need to preface this – and probably will have to do this every time that I make these recommendations – that I have fairly dark taste in terms of documentaries and podcasts, so you’re not necessarily going to be into everything that I recommend. We will obviously also have different views of the world, so there’ll be things that I recommend that might not be a fancy to you because of how you see the world differently. But that is okay. I just want to flag up a couple things that I’ve enjoyed watching recently.
The first recommendation is a documentary called Hail Satan. This was something that I hadn’t heard about before watching; it just came across my screen when I was trying to find something on Netflix to watch. I’ve heard many podcasts about the moral panic around Satanism in the 1980s and early 1990s and assumed that this was what it was going to be about, but it turned out to be completely different.
It follows the rise and influence of the Satanic Temple in the U.S., which is a fairly recently set up religion. It really just looks at how this organization is using the laws around religious freedom to push for separation of church and state by basically saying, “If you’re going to put up a statute of the Ten Commandments on a government building, we also want you to put up our statue of Baphomet because this is part of our religion.”
While the name “the Satanic Temple” carries with it probably many negative connotations, it’s hard for me not to be in agreement with the seven tenets or their seven principles that they have:
“Principle 1. We strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.
“2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
“3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
“4. The freedom of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend; to willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forego one’s own will.
“5. Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world; one should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s belief.
“6. People are fallible; if one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
“7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.”
For me, these are tenets that I would hope to be able to live by. But anyway, I found this an incredibly interesting documentary, and I think it’s well worth a watch. It is called Hail Satan.
The second thing I want to recommend – and I find I’ve been doing a little bit more television-watching or watching a screen lately than reading – is the six-part documentary, again on Netflix, called Wild Wild Country. This has actually been on Netflix for a couple years, and it’s been on my watch list for a long time, but I just kept skipping over it, and then more recently I heard a reference on a podcast and finally decided to spend the time and check it out.
It really is incredible. It charts the life of the guru Bhagwan, who was later called Osho, mostly focusing on the 6 or 7 years in which he and his followers were living in the U.S., in Oregon. It’s a really insane story, looking at his followers moving to the U.S. and basically building their own town and living in this commune. It really is a fair description to say that they built their own town. It is enormous, what they were able to build and the amount of money that went into the whole thing – I mean, Osho had 70 or 90 Rolls-Royces.
Then it looks at how the government got involved to bring about the closedown of the commune for fear that it was going to turn into another Jonestown.
What I found so interesting as part of the documentary is the interviews with people on both sides of this – the townspeople who were worried when all the disciples of Osho showed up and took over the town and the people in government who were worried about what was going to happen, but then the followers of Osho and the people who lived in the commune and the people who were close to him, and how differently they saw it, and how they viewed what he was doing in the world.
It really highlighted the “us vs. them” mentality that we all have and how scared we can be of people that we deem others. In the end, it did turn sour and implode, but it’s interesting to consider whether that would’ve happened if pressure wasn’t placed on them.
The level of archive footage is also amazing. So much of the documentary is footage of what was going on in the commune during the time in terms of the building and then the living there, and then of Osho and of Sheela, who was the head of the organization.
I’m really fascinated by cults, mostly because they often attract highly intelligent and highly successful people to join. I’m just interested in why this happens and what they’re attracted to. Maybe followers of Osho would take offense to it being called a cult, but yeah, I find it a super interesting topic – and possibly also because I see this real overlap between the mind of someone who is in the depths of an eating disorder and someone who is brainwashed in a cult.
Anyway, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s called Wild Wild Country and is on Netflix.
That is it. As I mentioned at the top of the show, Seven Health is currently taking on clients. If you are struggling with dieting or disordered eating or recovery from an eating disorder or body image or any of the topics that we cover as part of this show, then please get in contact. You can go to www.seven-health.com/help.
Next week, Lu will be back with an episode, but I will catch you again in a couple of weeks. Take care.
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Hi Chris
I thought I was HSP and paid an online therapist a couple of years ago to help. In the forums I found something didn’t match and I didn’t feel a connection with other HSPs. I discovered a clinical psychologist in the Uk specialising in this. This eventually led to a diagnosis of Austin’s spectrum disorder, formerly Aspergers. Disordered eating is very common in women with ASD, (routine rules, following instructions) you are likely aware of this. A podcast on this would be appreciated. ASD in women is ( and men ) often presents very differently to the stereotypes. Cheers
Hey Jen,
Thanks for your comment and talking about your experience of thinking you were HSP and later receiving a diagnosis of ASD. I haven’t done much investigation into ASD and disordered eating. Are there specific researchers/books/therapists you have come across on this topic? Whether that is just ASD or actually connecting ASD and disordered eating? I’d love to have a guest on the podcast to discuss this topic so I’m open to exploring any recommendations you have.
Thanks,
Chris