Are You Being Too Sensitive?
Often, a client will come to coaching with a question along the lines of:
“I have <this situation> going on in my life at the moment. How can I be less sensitive about it?”
Typically, this is some kind of conflict or misunderstanding with someone, at work or in their personal life. The question shows me that this person is feeling an emotional or physiological impact, but that either they themselves, or somebody else, is questioning the legitimacy of their response.
There are two ways to go here…
The automatic one would be to have them describe the situation in more detail, break down the possible meaning of whatever occurred, and analyse the intentions of the people involved - basically, second-guessing whatever emotional or intuitive response they’re feeling. As a collective, we’re pretty good at this, given our culture of preference for “logic” over emotion. And of course, there are times in which this approach is appropriate, where we need to analyse data or we really could be missing an important perspective.
However, in interpersonal conflict or misunderstanding, this often doesn’t help. Rationalisation, explanation and analysis can give the illusion of resolving something, but the underlying feelings will remain, festering into resentment over time. Analysis can be a sophisticated way to avoid facing our actual feelings. There’s a limit to how much the mind can resolve issues that are based in the body.
So let’s look at another option.
How did you feel about that?
What I’d suggest here, is firstly just identifying our feelings. This can be harder than it sounds, because often when I ask someone for a feeling, they give me a thought. Say someone was describing a hostile comment from their partner. I’d ask:
“How did you feel about that?”
“Well… he is under a lot of stress at work, and he does tend to get snappy when that happens...”
“Ok. And how did you feel about it?”
“Well the thing is, that’s how things were in his family - they’re all fairly direct, whereas in mine everything was swept under the rug...”
“Ok.
How did you feel about it?”
“Umm… “
Now that I’ve seen how often we give a thought when we’re asked for a feeling, it’s something I can’t unsee.
Focussing on the core emotions can be a simple, powerful way to punch through and get at what’s really going on underneath the surface. There are various definitions of core emotions, but I find the following list helpful:
Fear
Anger
Sadness
Disgust
Joy
Excitement
As simple as it sounds, running through this list will always get us in touch with our feelings. We can intellectualise all day long, but “Are you feeling any anger?” is a yes/no question. From there, we should be able to get more granular:
“I felt really intimidated and unsafe”
“I felt insulted”
“I felt frustrated that I had to bring this up again, and disappointed that I always have to be the bad guy… “
Or whatever it is in the situation.
The next step in this process would be to consider - “What if I just accept that that’s what I feel?”
Rather than debate the endless possibilities of what somebody might or might not have meant, for whatever reason, how about we just - even as an experiment - accept the truth of how we’re feeling? This is not to say this is universal truth for everyone. We all have our own perspective. But how about I at least accept that this is mine?
Say somebody’s behaviour made me feel intimidated or unsafe. What if rather than debating the legitimacy of those feelings, I just accepted what my own system is telling me - that something made me feel unsafe. My alarm went off.
If I just believe that - “I felt unsafe” - then what do I need to do now?
What if we just trusted the signals our body is sending us, and acted accordingly?
Most of us, when we look back at situations, jobs or relationships that ended badly, will recognise there were warnings along the way, that we ignored, minimised or delegitimised. Ther’s no point beating ourselves up over that - that, unfortunately, is how we learn.
However, what if make a conscious effort to deal with any nagging worries or warning signs now - believe them, and take action appropriately?
Drop the “Why?”
A useful shortcut in doing this is simply dropping the Why?
Rather than:
Why does my boss undermine me?
My boss undermines me.
Rather than:
Why is that friend so passive-aggressive towards me?
That friend is passive-aggressive towards me.
Now what?
Once we do our system the honour of listening to it, and believing it, it might well have something important to tell us. It might give us valuable insight into how we need to deal with an individual, course correct a situation, or protect ourselves from potential harm.
Are we asking the right question?
My final point is that often, when we identify what we’re actually feeling, just from our own perspective, then believe what our system is saying, it often turns out that there’s a valid reason for our feelings. If we’re uneasy in a certain situation, chances are, there’s something to watch out for.
It’s easy to rationalise away our emotions and the cues coming from the body, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the electromagnetic energy field of the heart is about 5,000 times larger than that of the brain. It reaches out 3 feet in front and behind us, so we’re literally walking through the energy fields of the hearts of the people around us, all day every day.
The brain, powerful as it is, is not omniscient. It’s actually a net receiver of information - 80% of the information running through the body is moving from the body, to the brain, and not the other way around. The heart, the nervous system, and the body are constantly calibrating to the world around us, scanning for threats and picking up cues that we would do well to take seriously, or at the very least, to begin to listen to.
Therefore, before I answer someone that asks me “How can I be less sensitive in this situation?”, I’d want to learn a lot more about what’s actually happening. How is it making you feel? What does it mean to you? It could be that there is significant information coming through our senses, that we would do well to believe. When we have actually gone into this in-depth, we might need to ask: If I really believe the information my senses are giving me…
“Am I being sensitive enough?”
