Highly Sensitive People, or, as I like to call them, Highly Sensitive Individuals (HSIs) because HSPs manifest so many various qualities of the HSPness factor, are trained from a very early age to believe we are flawed in some deep, unfixable way.
It’s what pushes us over time to feel less and less capable. More and more resistant to the idea that our sensitivities are a good thing rather than something that weakens us. The constant push to change, to be more or less in the way we feel, act, and simply are, contributes to one idea. That if we could only undergo some miraculous change, we’d be free.
Loving Your (Im)perfect Body Means Loving You & Your HSPness
Changing our body shape, size, color, form, and even gender can be an appealing way to focus on what’s broken and requires fixing. And, while some of those changes can bring us the miracles we seek, others keep us snared in a trap of self-rejection…. A lack of self-esteem…. A fear of never being enough.
We need to start looking at things like:
- What perfection really means
- How the energy of “being broken” can pervade every part of our sense of identify
- How the energy of “needing to change” can keep us from loving where we are in life and who we are as we live that life.
I have dealt with body image issues for most of my life. As early as age four, I remember going to day camp and putting on my bathing suit along with lots of other girls in a small tent. It was like a locker room where there was no privacy because it was assumed no one would need it. Why would anyone that young feel the need for privacy, the need to hide her body?
Good question.
But I did. Already I had learned that there was shame attached to my body and its functions, its smells. All the qualities that made it mine and mine alone. I knew to hide my body even from myself. Over time I also learned that I needed to cover up the curves that developed as I grew.
I had a grandmother who remained, and older sister who has remained, barely 5’ and about 95 pounds her whole life. A mother the same height but a little heavier—and obsessed with her weight. Basically? I was doomed. An hourglass shape, no matter the size, was unacceptable. Being told I’d be beautiful “if I only lost 10 pounds” by parents convinced I’d “never find a man,” didn’t help.
This is an old story. Most of us have one or two, whether related to body image or other events that have formed us.
My point is not to whine or compare stories or go down the psychologically damaged rabbit hole. Instead, what I’d like to point out is how related trauma—in whatever form—is to being a Highly Sensitive Individual. An HSI whose Intuitive Logic does not jive with the logic of others in their environment.
How can you love yourself, in all your brilliant HSPness, when you feel you are at the mercy of your environment? If you can’t love yourself and your authentic Self in all its perfection, how can you move into finding your purpose? Finding people and experiences you love?
When you turn your anger, dismay, fear, deprivation, lack of joy in on yourself, that’s when the trouble starts. We choose certain issues, like our bodies or our brain power or another aspect of ourselves, and focus on them. Unfortunately, focusing on them only causes them to stay around or spiral back in an endless loop.
It’s not about loving our body for its imperfections for a couple of reasons.
- Our bodies are totally perfect in the first place.
- It’s not our bodies that need our love as much as the whole of us needs our love.
As a society we have taken physical presentation to the point where the idea of true perfection has been destroyed. It’s another case where perspective matters more than anything else. Is beauty really in the “eye of the beholder?” Because, if it is, we ourselves are the beholders.
When we view ourselves through the lens of acceptance and compassion, we are the beholders of beauty, the beholders of love, and the beholders of a loving future.
As I always say, IMHO (in my humble opinion), that’s all that matters.
