Being told you're "too sensitive" can be a major red flag for emotional invalidation, gaslighting, or controlling behavior in a relationship, signaling a partner dismisses your feelings rather than addressing their actions. However, genuine oversensitivity (often linked to high sensitivity or trauma) can also strain relationships if uncontrolled, but the label itself is the primary red flag, indicating someone isn't meeting your emotional needs or respecting your experience.
Sensitivity is a necessary human trait, but being overly sensitive and letting it dictate your emotions is a choice. Developing a healthy relationship with sensitivity will help you tactfully navigate all of your relationships in life and help you to stop taking everything so personally.
While being 'highly sensitive' is not a diagnosis, there are proper diagnosis that encompass some forms of emotional oversensitivity. These include: Borderline personality disorder – often related to childhood sexual abuse, BPD sees you having strong, uncontrollable emotional responses in relationships.
Research shows thathigh sensitivity is likely an innate trait and not a consequence of trauma, although the effect of difficult life experiences may be amplified by high sensitivity.
Sometimes referred to as sensory-processing sensitivity, this trait is completely normal and healthy, and actually comes with a lot of advantages. Although research shows that being highly sensitive is not simply the same as ``being emotional,'' there is an emotional dimension to the trait.
Being an HSP can turn everyday moments into profoundly rich experiences. However, because highly sensitive people process emotions and stimuli more deeply, they can also be more vulnerable to anxiety, depression and other mental health issues.
1. Past traumas: Traumatic events can have a lasting impact on how you process emotions and respond to your environment. Trauma can condition the brain to be on high alert, leading to increased sensitivity to potential threats or negative feedback.
Here are a few ways to support a highly sensitive person and build a stronger, healthier relationship:
Highly sensitive person traits may include:
People with avoidant personality disorder are very sensitive to anything critical, disapproving, or mocking because they constantly think about being criticized or rejected by others.
Research also shows that a lack of parental warmth growing up may cause a child to develop high sensitivity and carry this trait into adulthood. The same goes for negative early childhood experiences. 3 If you experienced trauma as a child, you may be more likely to become an HSP as an adult.
Some ways to be less sensitive are as follows:
And it's important to know that being a highly sensitive person isn't considered a mental health disorder — and that there's no official way to diagnose someone as HSP and there's no official highly sensitive person test (though there's this quiz from the doctor who coined the term “highly sensitive person.”)
Four key signs your relationship is failing include a breakdown in communication (avoiding talks or constant fighting), a significant lack of emotional and physical intimacy, growing resentment and negativity where small things become unbearable, and a future outlook where you stop planning together or feel relief at the thought of being alone, according to experts like those at Psychology Today and the Gottman Institute.
According to Dr. Elaine Aron's research, HSP are more sensitive or responsive to stimuli. Therefore, they seem more sensitive to caffeine, beautiful music, violence in the media, and even physical pain (1).
But it does provide some rough guidelines as to how soon may be too soon to make long-term commitments and how long may be too long to stick with a relationship. Each of the three numbers—three, six, and nine—stands for the month that a different common stage of a relationship tends to end.
6. HSPs feel everything more deeply than others, which can make them seem over-emotional to others who don't understand their nature. HSPs have a heightened sensitivity to many things in life. They can be easily overwhelmed by loud noises, strong odors, or large crowds.
Highly sensitive personality (HSP) or sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is a hereditary personality trait that is associated with a genetic component leading to deep processing and response to external stimuli [1,2].
The 3 Different Types of Sensitivity
The relationship between highly sensitive people and anger is a much-misunderstood topic. Due to traits of their personality, heightened empathy or childhood conditioning, many highly sensitive people have repressed anger, and do not know how to deal with their emotions healthily.
Stop taking things so personally.
Add in the fact that HSPs tend to be people-pleasers. They spend their lives feeling like outsiders, so feeling needed provides its own nourishment, even if to the HSPs' detriment. “Stop taking things so personally” comes across as both a judgment and a mandate. “It doesn't bother me.
Common traits of highly sensitive people (HSPs)
High sensitivity can certainly create challenges for people, most notably being easily overstimulated and overwhelmed. HSPs are more deeply tuned into the various stimuli in our environments, and it can be draining to be exposed to so many attentional demands.
Being highly sensitive means you are more likely to feel and experience things more deeply than the average person. If channeled appropriately, it is a personality trait that can lead to a deep, fulfilling life. Don't let being highly sensitive be kryptonite in your life. Embrace your gift.
HSPs are anxiety prone because they process thoughts and feelings deeply. Because of how deeply they experience the world, they're more easily and quickly overstimulated.
While highly sensitive children may share some traits with those with sensory processing disorder, autism, ADHD, giftedness, or anxiety, each child's experience is distinct and cannot be defined solely by one experience or label.