What Grief Feels Like to a Highly Sensitive Person
When someone close to you dies, grief can work in mysterious and painful ways. It can make you feel sad, angry, or lost. It can make you feel sensitive, vulnerable, timid, or fragile. People change as a result of their grief. Today I want to focus on what grief feels like to a highly sensitive person.
The highly sensitive person is a term brought to mainstream attention by Elaine Aron, Ph.D. Dr. Aron helped to define a highly sensitive person as someone who experiences acute physical, mental, or emotional responses to stimuli. Highly sensitive people can easily become overwhelmed with noisy or crowded places. Their inner worlds are quite complex because of the mass amounts of stimuli they process.
If grief can impact anyone’s sensitivity, what does it do to someone who is already highly sensitive?
Although I can’t make a general claim for all highly sensitve people, I can share a bit about my own grief journey- from a perspective as someone who is highly sensitive. I am highly sensitive and I’ve experienced a lot of loss in my life. I have lost all of my grandparents, biological father, stepfather, at least a dozen friends (to either suicide or cancer), and several pets that were true companions.
What follows are some of my own observations about how grief has impacted my sensitivity, as well as input from highly sensitive people I have provided grief support to. My hope is that you will gain a better understanding of your own grief process if you identify as highly sensitive. Knowledge is power and knowing more about how grief and being highly sensitive work together helps for healing and moving forward with life.
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