The Gift of Feeling Deeply

Why do highly sensitive people feel everything so deeply, and why are they so often made to feel like they are too much?

I grew up hearing that I was too sensitive, too emotional, and that I took things too deeply. In this conversation, I explore how those messages can shape the way we see ourselves and why sensitivity is so often mistaken for weakness.

We look at what emotional sensitivity really is, why deep feelers often feel misunderstood or unseen, and how to honour your sensitivity without letting it overwhelm you.

Transcript

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Welcome to Dear Soul Rising, a sanctuary for remembering, rising, and reconnecting with the deeper wisdom within you. This is the space for the deeper conversations, the ones many of us didn't grow up having. I'm your host, Naomi Carr. Some people feel everything. The suffering in a room before anyone says a word. The sadness beneath someone's anger. The weight of the world on a hard day. If that is you, you've probably been told more than once that you're too sensitive, that you feel too much, that you take things too deeply. Maybe some part of you believed them, or maybe even when it hurt, some part of you always knew they were wrong. Today I want to talk about why they were, because what you've been told was a flaw may be the most powerful thing about you. For as long as I can remember, there was a narrative in my family, carried mostly by my mother, that I was too sensitive, that I felt too much, that it took everything too deeply. It followed me through my childhood and into my adulthood. It was said the way you point out a flaw, something about me that needed to be toned down. And I want to be honest, it played on repeat in my head. When something like that comes from a parent or from anyone whose love you need it, the words nag at you as if to convince you they're true. There were times it made me feel like there was something defective in me. But even as it stung, I never actually believed it was true. Somewhere deep down I always knew my sensitivity was a gift. I stayed sensitive. I stayed exactly who I was. I never hardened myself to make other people more comfortable. Because I could feel what my sensitivity gave me. I feel everything. If there's suffering in a room, I feel it. If someone is sad, I feel it. I've always been tuned to what people need, to what's really going on beneath what they're showing the world. When someone is reactive, I don't rush to judge them. I find myself wondering what happened to them, what's the wound underneath that? I've always just seen the world that way, and I've always cared about people on a level that's hard to put into words. Even as a young child, I remember this love in my heart that felt like it could burst. This energy I had to get out of me. And when I became a mother, I wanted more children, but my body only allowed me to. And for a long time I asked why? Why give me all of this love and only let me mother too? It took me years to understand that love was never only meant for my own children. It was meant to go back to the world. And maybe you know this feeling too. The sense that you carry more love than you have places to put it, that you care so deeply and still find yourself in rooms where you don't even feel seen. I lived that inside my own family for years, so full of love and still somehow on the outside of it. And I used to wonder if love was just something that was going to be denied to me. Over time I came to understand why my mother couldn't understand that in me. My mother has always been emotionally absent for most of her life. Not because she was heartless, because somewhere along the way disconnecting became how she survived. And I was her opposite. I was wide open where she was closed. I felt everything where she had learned to feel as little as possible. I learned to sort through my emotions, where she would put you on the naughty stool and press pause when she couldn't deal with her own. So this was never about a good person and a bad person. We were just different. And what I know now without any doubt is that the very thing I was told was too much is the thing that lets me do the work I do. Because I know what it feels like, all of it, to be in the hard times and want to give up, and to give back up anyway. The sensitivity was never the flaw. It was always the gift. We've been taught that being sensitive is a weakness, that it makes you fragile or dramatic or hard to be around. But that's just not what it is. Sensitivity isn't fragility, it's perception. You take in more than the people around you. You're reading the room on a whole other level. Some people carry a kind of heightened awareness, a higher consciousness, if you want to call it that. And I want to be careful here, because that doesn't make you better than anyone. It's not about being above people. It just means you're tuned to frequencies. A lot of the world moves too fast to catch. So here's the first thing I really want you to hear. You were never too much. You just feel what other people miss. And once you see that for the gift it is, you stop apologizing for the very thing that makes you who you are. So here's the question that kind of answers itself. Why did so many people treat it like a problem? And here's what I have come to see. It was never really about you. It was about them. Think about who actually calls someone too sensitive. It's usually not another person who feels deeply. It's usually someone who, somewhere along the way, learned to shut their own feelings off. Somebody who had to go numb to get through. And then they meet someone like you, wide open, feeling everything. And it makes them uncomfortable. So they call it too much because you're feeling the very thing they've spent their whole life trying not to. And this is the part I really want you to sit with. When someone calls you too sensitive, they're usually showing you the limit of what they can hold. And that doesn't make them uncaring. It doesn't even mean every hard piece of feedback is wrong. But their discomfort was never meant to become the final word on who you are. And once that clicks, you stop handing your sense of self to people who were never able to really see you anyway. And I know this can bring up a harder question. Because if you feel this deeply, you probably wondered at some point, why me? Why was I born into this family and surrounded by people when almost no one around me feels the world the way I feel it? Why am I the one who's surrounded by my own opposite? And honestly, it goes both ways. As foreign as they feel to us, we feel just as foreign to them. I see it even with my husband. His deepest care goes towards animals. Mine is pulled toward humanity and its healing. Neither of us is wrong. We're just built around different things. But still, when you're the deep feeler, it can be a lonely place to sit. You're the one showing up. You're the one loving heart, caring deeply, ready to hold everyone, and you look around and the people near you don't have the same capacity to hold you back. So it starts to feel like you don't belong. Like where's my support? Why doesn't anyone get me? Why can't they see what I see? I've asked these questions too, and here's what I've come to believe. You aren't placed there by mistake. You were placed there to strengthen the very gift you carry. Because a sensitivity that only ever lived around softness would never have to grow strong. It's being the deep feeler in a room full of people who can't feel that teaches you to hold on to yourself. And sometimes it feels like punishment. But it's not. It's how the gift gets forged. So if your sensitivity was never really the problem, then the work isn't about protecting yourself from it anymore. It's about learning to actually live from it. And part of that is taking care of it, because feeling this much does cost you something. If you feel everything, you have to be mindful of what you let close to you. That's what boundaries are really for. Setting a boundary doesn't make you less sensitive. It's how you keep your sensitivity from wearing you out. And then there's trust. When you feel something underneath the surface, believe it. Don't talk yourself out of it the way you were trained to. But trust and discernment work together. A feeling is information. It's not always the whole story. So you can honor what you feel and ask, is this mine or did I pick it up from the room? Am I responding to what's happening now or to something it reminds me of? That's not doubting your gift. That's how you learn to work with it instead of being carried away by it. And then you let it out. All that feeling, all that love you carry around. It was never meant to stay stuck inside you. It was meant to go somewhere into your work, into how you love the people around you, into showing up for someone who really needs to be felt. Because that's the whole thing. The sensitivity you were told to hide. That's exactly what this world is starving for. People who feel enough to notice and actually care and who stay. You were never meant to shrink yourself to carry this gift. You were meant to let it out, into every room you walk into, into the people you love, and back into yourself. And I want to leave you with this soul musin to carry with you. The gift of feeling everything is your own kind of magic. What is misunderstood as too much can be transformed into the tenderness that makes room for another to grow, to love from a place of understanding and grace becomes a nectar for another soul by Naomi Kar. And as this conversation comes to a close, I want to leave you with these questions to carry with you today. Where in your life did you first learn that feeling deeply was a problem? And whose voice was it that taught you that? And maybe even deeper. What has your sensitivity allowed you to see or understand or offer the people around you that the world would be missing without it? What would change if you stopped treating your sensitivity as something to manage and started living from it as your gift? And before you go, if this episode spoke to something in you, I want to offer you a place to keep going. I created a free bundle called A Guided Return to Unconditional Self-Love, a guided workbook and audio practice to help you begin doing this work more deeply. You'll find it in the show notes. And if this resonated with you, follow the show so you don't miss the next conversation. Because I truly believe that when we begin healing ourselves, we create more compassion, more understanding, and ultimately a better world for everyone. With so much love, I'll see you in the next episode, dear soul.