Therapy for Highly Sensitive People, Empaths, and Creatives
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Mary Oliver
Therapy to Feel Good Being You.
If you’ve found this page with a unicorn on it you may have things in common with this creature. You have magic inside. You may feel incredibly misunderstood. You may have been told you’re too sensitive. It may be hard to be around people, particularly after receiving messages that it is not ok to be you. You may overwhelmingly sense what others are feeling and thinking. You may be surviving in a family that invalidates your truths and gifts. Your exquisite sensitivity may be heightened due to the trauma or pain you’ve endured. The healing process can be so beautiful because through the course of finding relief, many highly sensitive people, empaths, and creatives come more alive and in touch with their own inner knowing, creativity, unique gifts, and deep inner purpose in the world.
Healing can eventually be like coming home to a warm loving place inside for all the parts of you. Somatic therapies work with what’s alive now in your system for healing rather than digging into the past in an intellectual way. Many find this approach to be especially helpful, particularly with a caring therapeutic relationship where your therapist really sees you, wants to understand, and celebrates your gifts.
Was your childhood painful?
Sometimes sensitive, empathic, or creative children are born into families with caregivers that do not “get” them and are not attuned to their emotional needs. The child is left feeling invalidated, misunderstood, and alone. Sometimes the sensitivity of the child creates parenting challenges that caregivers are not prepared to handle so they interact with the child in a way that causes harm, despite having good intentions. This may also happen with teachers in school systems. All children are inherently dependent on their early relationships for survival so this creates a very difficult situation - many end up disowning beautiful tender parts of themselves because there is no-one there to see them and understand.
This is especially heartbreaking for children with such exquisite sensitivity. It can lead to pain in relationships and other areas of life down the road. There may be wounding that gets in the way of being able to love and be loved. There may be blocks to manifesting one’s unique gifts in the world with confidence and intuitive knowing. Sometimes sensitive people may also be drawn to relationships that aren’t working for them but feel familiar to how they grew up. They may suffer with anxiety, depression, complex PTSD, or other issues.
Did your empathy protect you?
Sometimes sensitive, empathic, or creative children are born into homes with abuse of some kind - whether it is emotional, verbal, physical, or sexual. Perhaps caregivers are struggling with alcoholism, drug abuse, multigenerational trauma, or other issues. To survive a lack of emotional or physical safety, children may become highly sensitized to signs of threat in people’s body language, facial expressions, and voice tone. Their energetic sensitivities cause them to turn away from their own experience and focus on other people because this was necessary to survive circumstances that were too much to bear.
These sensitive children may become very empathic by intuitively learning to read the energy of people or the energy of a room to sense danger. They learn to sense whether someone is going to hurt them. They learn to sense whether their caregiver has been drinking or abusing substances. They may even hear a door close or footsteps coming down the hallway and be able to know what mood their family member is in. This priming of their empathy and sensitivity in order to predict the world around them can be like a 6th sense or a superpower. Many children also develop superpowers to disconnect from their bodies when abuse is happening so that they don’t feel terror, helplessness or pain, but this disembodiment also disconnects them from some of their greatest gifts inside.
You may notice this disconnection from self and outward focus as an empath or HSP can be both a gift and a source of suffering. One the one hand you have an amazing ability to tune into others. On the other hand you may find it very overwhelming to be around people because you pick up on everything they are feeling. Some really struggle to know their own inner truths and how they feel. There may be confusion of what emotions are yours and what emotions belong to other people - it might feel all meshed together. Relationships may not feel healthy or authentic at times. Caretaking, people pleasing, codependency, and submitting to the will of others can all stem from these kinds of gifts.
Many find that an important part of healing is about becoming more embodied through somatic work that heals early wounds and trauma responses left behind in the nervous system. This helps with sorting through which emotions belong to you and which do not. Many find that healing helps them find new peace inside and new ways they can use their sensitivity and talent in the world.
Creativity & Resilience
You may have been born into circumstances that were not safe in any number of ways - whether it was due to neglect, physical abuse, domestic violence, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, alcoholism, or addiction. Many children under these circumstances are not able to escape so they develop incredible capacities to escape into their own inner worlds - a place where creativity flows. Creativity and resilience go hand-in-hand. Sometimes it can be helpful to work with your creativity in the therapeutic process. Some really love working with art therapy for this reason - harnessing the power of creativity for healing.
Have you doubted your intuitive knowing?
As a highly sensitive person, empath, or creative you may have had experiences of invalidation. People may have been drawn to you that cope in ways that invalidate your experience. This language may actually be minimizing - you may have been downright gaslit in your relationships. What happens is that people who are not adept at coping with their own emotions will notice the emotionality of a highly sensitive person or empath or creative and use whatever means they have to shut those emotions down in order to make themselves feel more comfortable. They may even take advantage of you, impose their will on you, or engage you coercive or controlling dynamics. This can lead the HSP or empath to turn on themselves, begin to doubt how they feel, disconnect from their intuition, and turn away from their gifts. It can be very confusing inside if this happens. They may even disconnect from the world.
I love helping people find their way home to their intuition - to their embodied ability to feel into their unique truths and to follow them. Often times this happens after healing some of these deeper wounds, particularly if this invalidation started in childhood. Sometimes these experiences were very traumatic so we take great care in creating safety for this healing to happen. Wounding takes up space in a person’s system such that it is harder to feel intuition so once healing happens these gifts naturally start flowing more freely. We take care to name when it sounds like intuitive knowing is coming through and to notice the difference between that energy and the energy of old wounds.
My specialty in working with highly sensitive people, empaths, and creatives.
All therapists have a niche that comes once they start putting their unique gifts into the world. I always knew I wanted to work with trauma survivors but the universe did not just bring this population to my practice. Most of my clients tended to be highly sensitive, empathic, creative, or a mix of all of these. Sometimes they were healers of some kind. Sometimes they were also in recovery from substance abuse or addictions. Sometimes they were spiritual seekers.
For those who identify as creative, I know the healing power of the arts and also what many experience when using their gifts in a professional capacity. I’ve worked with actors, folks in various areas of production, makeup artists, hair stylists, musicians, vocalists, comedians, DJs, audio engineers, dancers, writers, poets, fine artists, video artists, performance artists, painters, crafters, designers, creative entrepreneurs, advertisers, thinkers, and photographers. I’ve also worked with people in other fields who longed to do something more creative but felt blocked.
I have tools for working through creative blocks on a deep level in the nervous system in addition to my specialties working with trauma, childhood trauma, sexual trauma, and relationships.
As an art therapist, I love working with visual and expressive ways of knowing. If needed and wanted, I integrate art therapy into methods working well for you, from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, to Somatic Experiencing, to Brainspotting, to IFS-informed parts work, to Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT).
Our work can happen individually or as a couple with Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), or Couples Art Therapy.
Now accepting individuals and couples in California for online therapy.
