Love and Loving Well as Highly Sensitive People (HSPs)
Love and Loving Well as Highly Sensitive People (HSPs)
Falling in love, loving our lives, loving ourselves. Highly sensitive people (HSPs), not surprisingly, are made for love and for struggling with love. What primes us for the highs and lows of love?
Our empathy, our energetic attunement to everything and everyone around us, and our passion and caring for the world—the very characteristics that make us highly sensitive enhance our HSP experiences with love.
Valentine’s Day conjures up images of romantic and friendly love, but as HSPs know, love is so much more. As a highly sensitive person, regardless of your relationship status, you can grow the love in your life.
Ways to Love Well as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)
1. Sensitive people need to externalize their thoughts and feelings, especially about love.
Keep a running list in your journal of all the times you experience love. Include everything, from the “big” ones (love for your partner or child) and the smaller, everyday moments of love. Be as specific as you can—describe what you love about that special place you go in your imagination or that perfect meal you had. Increasing our self-awareness helps us recognize the vast extent of love we can experience in our lives, particularly when we expand our definition of love beyond the categories of Valentine’s cards.
2. Notice what love feels like in your body.
Then pay attention to when you might be having these physical sensations outside of the usual relational contexts. These sensations are clues that you’re feeling love. Maybe you’ll experience love when you sit down with your favorite book, smell that scent that reminds you of childhood, or accomplish a task that you’ve long struggled to achieve. Give yourself permission to enjoy activities that you love on a regular basis.
3. Boundaries are essential.
Our sensitivity can leave us vulnerable to giving and caring too much, at our own expense. Healthy love relationships make space for us to set limits, protect our own energy, and make choices that may upset others.
4. Love is a behavior.
Figure out what ways you prefer to express and to receive love. What strengthens your loving connections? Discover what helps the people and creatures in your life feel lovingly connected to you. Choose to act lovingly.
5. Grieve for lost love.
Whether you’ve said goodbye to a relationship, a beloved phase of your life, or a once-meaningful activity, or you are struggling with chronic losses, you need to grieve your loss. Only when we’ve processed our grief can we begin to move forward to future love.
6. Love yourself and your sensitivity.
Make a commitment to understanding the Singularly Sensitive ways that your experiences as an HSP influence how you give and receive love. As you integrate all the strengths and challenges that come from your unique personality, you will learn to love in ways that support your sensitivity and help you grow.
Love is a Gift for Highly Sensitive People to Share with Themselves and Other HSPs
Highly sensitive people deserve to love fully in their own special ways. Learning to love well is a present to yourself as an HSP. And modeling that love helps other HSPs learn that way of loving. I hope you’ll give yourself and your world that gift of loving well.
