Six Reasons why you’re Sensitive to boundaries as a Highly Sensitive Person
Developing healthy, personal boundaries can be a real struggle for highly sensitive people, this is due to our sensitivity to the feelings, needs and boundaries of others. Here’s why and how it impacts you:
Knowing how others feel
As a highly sensitive person (HSP), you have very sensitive mirror neurons and somatic empathy (See Cindy Engels work). This means that you can acutely feel the emotional and physical experience of others. You feel their pain and emotional responses deeply, as though it was your own. For this reason, it can be natural to want to accommodate someone else's needs, even if this is at the expense of your own. But this can be one of the reasons we struggle to maintain our own healthy boundaries, to accommodate others.
Highly Aware
As a HSP you are highly attuned to subtle shifts in mannerism, body language and mood in individuals. You become unconsciously attuned to someone else's state of being, and within this, it can be easy to lose yourself. Absorbing someone else's problems or becoming an energetic support for them, by holding space and listening. This intense level of awareness and concentration can make it feel draining to be around others.
Sensitive to the group dynamic
HSPs are very sensitive to the mood in the room and the group dynamic as they are very sensitive to their environment. It's easy for you to notice subtle shifts and changes in the social dynamic. HSPs can become the social glue in situations as they know when to step in and sooth situations that are becoming uneasy or uncomfortable as feelings go unsaid or boundaries are crossed with off hand comments which go unnoticed by others. However this may leave you in a hypervigilant state to maintain harmony in the group, so you can feel comfortable, safe and at ease too which again is tiring.
Pain of conflict
HSP’s fear the pain of conflict. The discomfort of experiencing even mild conflict with others can leave us struggling to set our own boundaries. We can therefore worry about how others are feeling, fearing we have upset them. Disharmony and negative emotions impact us deeply and often we will do anything to avoid experiencing this. So HSPs can often focus on the positive side of an experience or a person, as they would rather avoid confronting difficult topics or situations due to this.
Unverbalised requests
Again, highly sensitive people are very sensitive to the verbalized requests of others. To give an example, manipulative characters may unconsciously demand that you give them your energy, to give them a sense of control and domination. We may experience this as a HSP as a threatening behaviour and consent to giving them our energy to stay safe. We may give in to others without realising it as we are sensitive to their boundary demands or needs.
Caregiver who was unpredictable
Commonly for many highly sensitive people, but not all, we have experienced an unpredictable or threatening caregiver in some form which has led to our sensitivity around boundaries. In these situations, we had to learn to read people and the room to stay safe which has fed into this heightened sensitivity of others. For many of us, we need to return to these childhood wounds in an embodied therapeutic context to release the fear and shock connected to these experiences, to enable us to feel comfortable and safe so we can develop healthy personal boundaries. Trauma release therapies EFT and somatic experiencing can be good places to start.
Further Reading on boundaries for HSP’s
The importance of rewilding for highly sensitive women and what the first feminine has to teach us
How embodied awareness enables highly sensitive people establish healthy boundaries
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