How to listen to your inner voice - Part 1

Highly Sensitive People are blessed with amazing powers of intuition. So why do so many of us shut down our gift?

As Highly Sensitive People (HSPs), we often get a sense of just knowing something to be true. It could be a feeling about a person we’ve just met. Or a sudden hit about how a situation is going to turn out. Or an impulse to call somebody, or take some other form of action. It can come as a gentle nudge, or a whisper. We don’t know how we know. We just know. And if we ignore this feeling one too many times, then we can almost bet things will go wrong in some way.

This capacity for inner knowing is called intuition. It’s one of our greatest superpowers. It’s also the easiest to shut down.

In my coaching work lately, I’ve been struck by how many HSPs are aware that they have lost touch with their intuition — and they want to get it back. Many feel a sense of sadness: They know something is missing, but they can’t quite put their finger on what. They say things like: “I want to stop giving my power away. I want to trust my own knowing and not listen to everyone else’s opinions and judgments so much. I want to find my voice. How do I tune in?” 

It’s my job to help them find ways to reconnect.

We begin by taking some time to find out why they have closed their intuition down. Usually, it happened in childhood. It may have made sense to suppress our intuition when we were small and vulnerable. But to become empowered HSP adults, we must reclaim our gifts.

If you’re seeking to deepen your connection with your intuition, I would invite you to reflect on whether any of the following common patterns for HSPs apply to you:

I grew up managing others’ feelings: Many of us were raised in homes where our parents had their own stresses to deal with and were weighed down with their own traumas (of which they were often unaware). We were like sponges absorbing their negative moods. Because we were so good at tuning into their feelings and thoughts, and reading subtle facial expressions and body language cues, we became skilled at responding in ways that would maintain their approval. The reality of our family life was very different to the appearance we were expected to maintain. We didn’t learn to set healthy boundaries because we were too busy managing our parents’ emotional needs. That made it difficult to develop our individual identity. As children, this strategy made sense — we had to suppress our feelings and insights to survive. As adults, we don’t need to hide any more.

I was always walking on eggshells around my parents: Our mums and dads often never learned how to manage their anger or sadness — and projected their unexpressed pain and frustration onto us. Perhaps you learned to be a “good” girl or boy to minimize the chances of your parent criticizing you, judging you, or punishing you with passive-aggressive silences. You may have learned that it was unwise to challenge them or speak your truth, because the most important thing was to keep the peace. You knew that they loved you and had the best intentions underneath it all; but you can also recognize that they were unable to emotionally attune and comfort you in the way you needed. This experience can lead us to stuff down our own feelings and lose touch with our guidance. As adults, we can learn that it’s safe to own our power, and to accept the full spectrum of our feelings. Then our intuition comes back online.

I was expected to live life to please my parents: It’s very easy for parents to project their own expectations onto their children — unconsciously hoping to make up for their own missed opportunities or losses. As HSPs, we are so sensitive as to how we are perceived that we may well adopt our parents’ values and desires before we’ve had a chance to discover our own. If we are living a script written by somebody else, then our connection with our intuition will wither. It can feel scary to start trusting our inner voice — instead of defaulting to our parental programming — but our intuition is always there waiting for us to start living a more authentic life.

I was taught to be a people pleaser at school: As children, our greatest desire is to belong. For many HSPs, that meant fitting in at school by adopting a more superficial, people pleasing persona, when we would have preferred to own our maturity and depth. Our powers of intuition were rarely celebrated or validated in the classroom — on the contrary, we were often labelled “weird” if we let our sensitivity show. We concluded it would be better to be “normal” — and that meant pushing down our complexity and our inner knowing. As adults, we can choose again.

I would love to hear if any of these points resonate with you in the comments below.

Next week, in Part Two, I’ll be exploring some more practical tips on how we can learn to trust our intuition again.

See you then!

Dr Genevieve

PS: Here is an interview I recorded with BBC Ulster on the gifts and challenges of being an HSP, along with Michael Pluess, a researcher in the psychology department at Queen Mary University of London. Our section starts at 1 hour 33 minutes.

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