Tag: Highly Sensitive

Today we have a listener-suggestion podcast episode. Just super fun. Ashley had reached out to me via email and she told me that she, for her own personal benefit and treatment, has found the research on the highly sensitive person to be super helpful helping her understand herself. She’s found that not every therapist has been open to hearing about that. And she wondered, how does being a highly sensitive person factor in to a treatment approach for OCD? In short, I agree with what Ashley is saying. It should matter. And coming up, we’ll see why…

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right in to today’s episode.

I wanted to let you all know that this is your absolutely last chance to sign up for the Freedom from Mental Compulsions Challenge, happening on August the 5th at noon central time. So go to hopeforanxietyandocd.com/challenge We’re going to be talking about ICBT and how this can help with mental compulsions.

I am giving away a few prizes, coffee gift cards, and coaching time with Carrie, so we can’t wait to see you there. We’re in the midst of shifting websites, so I’m not sure which one we’re going to be on by the time this episode comes out. Hopefully long term we will be on carriebock.com. We’ll have all of my counseling and podcasting info housed in the same spot, which will be really helpful.

Before we talk about how being a highly sensitive person can impact OCD treatment, let’s first talk about what does that mean, something you maybe never heard that term before. There is a test, a self-test for you at hsperson.com. This is Elaine Aron’s website, and she’s the one who has done a research on being a highly sensitive person, back since 1991, she’s written several books, The Highly Sensitive Person being her signature most popular book, and then she’s written materials about having a highly sensitive child, which would be very interesting to read as well.

Some of the questions from the self test, “Are you easily overwhelmed by such things as bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabrics, or sirens nearby? Do you make a point of avoiding violent movies and TV shows? Do you need to withdraw during busy days into bed or a darkened room or some other place where you can have privacy and relief from a situation?” Do you make it a high priority to arrange your life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations? Those are just a few sample questions. There are several more on the website for you to look at, but the main thing to understand is that highly sensitive people are really taking in all of this environmental stimuli that’s around them, and they’re getting a read on the situation, taking in information before acting or responding a little bit slower to process information because they’re getting so much in because they’re just sensitive to everything that’s going on. The lights, the sounds, the people, the emotions of the people, just all of these different things are factored in.

One in five people, so about 20%, are highly sensitive. It’s not the same thing as introversion, although the majority of them are introverts. About 70 percent of HSPs, that’s a shortened for a highly sensitive person, are introverts. It may be confused with shyness at times. It’s not the same thing as being shy, but a lot of times, especially if it happens in children, and this happened with me, they’ll say, “Oh, she’s shy.” It’s never a good connotation when somebody says that, so please don’t do that to your children, and I will not do that to mine. At least in my case, it was never said positively. It was always a negative. This is not a medical or psychological diagnosis like OCD. It’s more of an understanding of your own temperament and how you process sensory information.

I want to share with you how being a highly sensitive person has impacted my life a little bit and steps that I take to mitigate it. There’s a certain big box store, which shall not be named, but you can probably figure out which one it is when I describe it, that I prefer not to go in. I have gone in there plenty of times and bought things, but it’s not my preference because you go in there and not only is it all the fluorescent lighting, which they’ve made quote sensory-friendly hours now where you can go early in the morning and the lights are more dim, and I’m sure that does help people, but it’s not just the lighting for me.

It’s the massive quantities of stuff that’s in this store. There’s aisles and aisles of stuff. You have to go in there and find what you need, which is not always easy, unless you know where the stuff is in the store. There’s lots of stuff, and then there’s even stuff in the middle of the aisles, where you’re trying to go through. Then on the end of the aisles, like the end caps, if you’ve ever worked in retail, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s stuff even hanging from the end caps. There’s just stuff everywhere. And it’s a lot to take in, and it’s a lot to go, “Oh, there’s all this stuff, but where’s my stuff that I need? How can I get in here and get my stuff and not 80 other things?” Because that’s the whole strategy, right? That’s the whole strategy of having stuff everywhere, is they want you to look at it and buy it. It’s too much for me. Most days I just don’t want to do it. That’s one situation where being highly sensitive has affected me.

Daylight bulbs are really huge in our household. We have moved, and there isjust been so many little things that you want to shift and to move or change out. And one of those for us has been daylight bulbs. We got into our house, and we’re like, Ugh, it’s all this, like, orangey, fluorescent lighting.

Can’t take it. Went to the store, bought some daylight bulbs, and honestly, we’re still switching some of them out. We have some recessed lighting that we’re not happy with, and I’m not even sure we have to figure out how to change some of those pieces out, but Steve and I are both on board with the daylight bulbs.

We just do not like, in our home, in our peaceful space, we do not like the other type of lighting that there is out there. Another way being a highly sensitive person, one thing I’ve learned to mitigate with that is I can’t always be around constant noise. Some people just have, they have the radio on all the time or the TV on all the time, or they’re constantly getting something into them.

And I do listen to a lot of podcasts as my jam or whatever helps me relax or wind down or different things sometimes depending on the type of podcast to listen to. But if I have a really busy day or a day where I’m around a lot of people, this is a big one. If I am around a lot of people, I just have a need for silence.

I don’t want anybody to talk to me and I have to talk with people in my life. It’s, it’s no offense right now if I’m really quiet. I just had a really busy day. I just want to bitch. You can hang with me, but please don’t try to have a conversation with me right now because it’s just not gonna go well. I can get really irritable if I’m around people all day and I don’t have that time for silence or time to decompress for myself.

I think some of that is an introversion thing, but some of it is also a highly sensitive thing. If I go to a concert, and this can happen in movie theaters, not quite as much, not quite the same. If I was to see maybe a really intensely emotional movie in a movie theater, it might affect me a certain way, but as far as for concerts, So in Nashville, we have the Bridgestone Arena.

That’s where the hockey team plays. That’s where they have a lot of like big concert gatherings, things of that nature. There are smaller venues, obviously, in other places. But to go into the Bridgestone Arena, obviously, it’s huge. There’s going to be a ton of people there. But then as well, there’s also going to be a lot of noise.

It’s going to be super, super loud. I am going to want earplugs that I may or may not have forgotten. Lots of lights. So between the lights, the sounds, the people, when I leave that situation, it could be a concert that I really wanted to go to and I really love. Doesn’t matter. But if I leave that situation, the only way I can describe it to you is that I feel like my body is on vibrate.

And it takes me a long time to wind down from something like that. I just feel like I’m still in the concert when I’m not in the concert. Like my body is still trying to process that experience. The concerts can be a challenge for me. I talked about this in our episode on introversion, but one of my highly sensitive things, this one has to do with decision-making and contemplation.

If I’m going to a new restaurant, I will always look at the menu before I go. My husband and other people don’t get this. They probably think it’s really silly. But it’s funny because I remember my dad saying that when he first used to take my mom out to dinner that she would have a hard time choosing like something to eat and so maybe I just come by this completely honest, but I definitely want to see the menu because I want to look at all the options and really contemplate, “What do I actually want to eat?” This is better now because we have online menus and ordering and things like that, but heaven forbid they change the menu from what’s actually online and then I get there and I’m like, oh no, like the thing I wanted, it will be like, oh yeah, we don’t have that anymore or we’re out of that ingredient, so we can’t make that for you.

It’s, Oh no, back to square one, but thanks to the internet. It’s really easy, typically, to look at the menu before you go to the restaurant, and that’s a step that helps me out so much. I don’t know if that helps you out either, if you have a hard time deciding on what you want to eat. I don’t think it’s just a decision-making process.

I think it is the fact that a lot of times, especially go out to dinner with other people, you’re trying to look at the menu, and they’re trying to talk to you, and you’re trying to not be rude. They’ve decided what they want, you haven’t. It’s a whole thing. So I just prevent all of that the best I can. A big part of being highly sensitive is being super in tune to other people’s emotions and not just like picking up on other people’s emotions, but really feeling that and when you’re a kid and you don’t understand that you’re highly sensitive and you just feel everything really deeply, this feels like an absolute curse.

It does not feel like a good thing. You’re crying and somebody else isn’t, or you’re trying to hold something in maybe to not have a huge emotional reaction that you know is not going to go well. Being intuitive, picking up on the emotions of other people or feeling things very differently. As a kid, I never understood, or as a teenager, or even young adult, I didn’t understand probably until I was in my mid 20s how this was actually a positive thing for me and that this could be my superpower as a therapist.

It was hard to mitigate how do I separate my emotions of what I’m actually experiencing from other people’s emotions. and had to learn to be supportive of other people’s emotions without taking them on. And I wish I could tell you a cut-and-dry process to that, but I think it just happened over time.

I had to be comfortable with my emotional experience. I had to be comfortable with other people having their emotional experience. And then I could set up some healthy, just internal boundaries of allowing other people to have their emotional experience without taking it on, without creating responsibility for it.

Obviously, that’s a big thing. As a therapist, you’re there to come alongside somebody and support them through their process, not to just take bad feelings away or fix them somehow. And I will say that it can be challenging because society doesn’t always value being an HSP, especially if you’re a male.

That can be particularly tough. And I know that I’ve had males in therapy that are like, this is not a good thing. I have heard a statistic, although it’s been a while, that even though 20 percent of the population is HSP, about 75 percent of the individuals in therapy are HSPs. Which is why it’s really important for therapists to be understanding, even if they’re not a highly sensitive person, to be understanding how those traits are affecting a lot of their clients.

I love this quote from the highly sensitive person that sensitivity is anything but a flaw. Many HSPs are often unusually creative and productive workers, attentive and thoughtful partners, and intellectually gifted individuals, which is so beautiful. This can manifest beautifully in your life, whether that’s through creative outlets, whether that’s through being really attentive to your work, being able to connect.

That’s what I always tell people. If you are tuned into what somebody else is feeling, a lot of times it can help you connect with them in a really healthy way. Highly sensitive people are going to pick up on things maybe that other people don’t in the room. So in group work, this is helpful to say, hey, have you thought about how that wording comes across? Or because it seems rough to me, have you thought about, what about this person, can we include them? I know for myself if I walk into a social situation, and it’s been like this for a long time, probably because I was this person, but I can walk into a social situation and find that person sitting in the corner by themselves, not talking to anybody.

I can sense and read who in the room is anxious or edgy, and that is a gift in terms of ministry, in terms of being able to reach people. Now how does this affect OCD treatment? I couldn’t find a statistic on how many people diagnosed with OCD would also be considered highly sensitive, but I did find this comment in response to an article that someone had written about their experience, and I think it sums it up pretty well.

On the one hand, your mind is constantly processing everything around you in high detail, which can be exhausting. That’s the highly sensitive piece. On the other hand, your OCD tendencies can make you feel like you have to control everything around you, which can be totally exhausting. It’s a constant balancing act that can be difficult to manage.

Wow. That’s pretty intense there. How does this inform OCD treatment? OCD treatment tends to be pretty structured. There may be a therapist, let’s say they’re trying to follow ERP correctly, we would call that fidelity to the model. We’re trying to have fidelity to the model which has been researched and will, if we follow it the way that it’s written and supposed to be done, then our clients theoretically will get better.

That’s the goal and the idea. And so they may prompt a client to do an exposure that the sensitive person might feel is overwhelming or too much. They might need something broken down into smaller steps. So exposures are designed to be very gradual in nature. It’s important if you’re doing this type of therapy to make sure that you feel comfortable enough with your therapist to communicate when things feel overwhelming.

They’re not trying to give you a panic attack. That is not the point. Because you want to move through these hierarchies in a way that’s building confidence in tackling harder and harder things. But sometimes with ERP, there can be this mentality that’s a little bit like, hey, you’ve got to toughen up, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, just push through.

That can be damaging. I won’t say that with all therapists, but Just sometimes with that model, it can be like, Hey, this is hard, but you still got to do it. Especially working with very avoidant people. Obviously, you have to push people a little bit more and that makes sense. So finding that balance with the client and the therapist can be really hard because you don’t want to just be like, okay, whatever you want to do. After all, then that person is not going to get better.

So finding that middle ground. And I know I’ve had clients in the past drop out of EMDR therapy for similar reasons. Like, maybe they got overwhelmed, they didn’t feel comfortable enough to let me know they wanted to stop, or maybe they had residual effects after the fact, which can certainly happen. If things are really rough for you after your last session, if you feel like things are just not working or not going the way that you need or want them to, Your therapist needs to know that.

Like, we really appreciate the feedback because that helps us tailor things specifically to you. We’ve been trained in all of these therapy modalities, but the idea is really to tailor them in such a way that’s going to help you get better as that can be a challenge, right? Because people are so different.

So what may work for one person might not work for somebody else, and that’s okay. If you’re a highly sensitive person, just finding somebody that you feel comfortable with, that you feel that sense of empathy. Oh, they get it. They see where I’m coming from. Another thing that we can do in the beginning stages of OCD treatment is work on things like anxiety sensitivity.

Anxiety sensitivity is when you’re sensitive or afraid of the physiological sensations, the body sensations that accompany anxiety, like rapid heart rate, difficulty breathing, or dizziness. In session, your therapist may have you induce some of these distress states outside of a period of panic or high anxiety to help you get used to the body sensations and know that they’re not actually going to harm you. It’s not necessarily the body sensations themselves, it’s the feeling out of control of the body sensations when they come on sporadically. A lot of times it’s troubling for people. Ways to work on this, your therapist may have you turn in circles for dizziness, like run in place, or do jumping jacks to increase your heart rate, breathing through a coffee stir for dizziness.

These types of activities can be helpful because sometimes clients get triggered even during workouts, even though it’s normal during a workout to have some difficulty breathing or to have an elevated heart rate. You can learn, okay, I can be in this state, my body is not being damaged by it, it’s a normal reaction.

With OCD treatment, we’re working on retraining your threat detection system. So if you can feel those feelings in your body in a safe environment, like therapy, that would be the ideal. You can know and learn to tolerate them as uncomfortable as they may be. My hope is that this episode may help some of you understand yourself a little bit better and just know if God has created you as a highly sensitive person, there’s a reason that you are this way, and I pray that he shows you how that can be a superpower instead of a burden, because I know for me, for a long time, I just saw it as a burden.

And now I can see it as a superpower and I can do things in my life to take care of myself so that I am not overwhelmed all the time by sensory information. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you leave us a review on iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith in OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.