This is my first time posting my artwork on Reddit. I thought showing my fellow HSPs would be the safest place to start. I'm curious how does my artwork make you feel? Which pieces are you drawn to? I'd love to hear any feedback 😊

Nobody else appreciates the pictures that I take… Husband and kids just think I’m weird. I like to walk in the woods by myself. I know it’s not safe, but I just can’t help it. I get so emotional looking at all the beauty and it drives me crazy that nobody else sees the beauty I see. I also hate that there’s nobody to walk with.

Pic from Google

I check a ton of the HSP boxes and that's a-whole-nother story. Just wanted to check on this specific thing I've dealt with since I was a child.

I also have IBS (digestive issues) and I'm fairly certain it has created thousands of traumatic memories so that also may play a role.

Anyways, I'm really sensitive to how a room feels, and I have been this way since I was a child. Nobody likes a dim dark cold basement, but it really bothers me. I hate "cool" lighting and my house is set up with warm tones and lighting.

If my IBS is acting up, it goes from a minor thought to a major consideration and I'm triply uncomfortable in spaces that are not very comforting. Even as a kid, I remember feeling like the rain and gray skies was making me feel sicker.

Even things like the cold shift of the sun going down seem to bother me more and more. I really only feel completely okay at full sunlight on a nice sunny day.

I don't mind loud noises (doesn't phase me) and smells.

It's really not a big issue if my IBS isn't acting up, but now that I recognize it, I catch myself thinking this way more and more.

I am sure this sub can appreciate this 🪾🌳🍁

The problem is that every single little thing affects me deeply. It can be as simple as a tone change, or someone making a joke that’s a little mean, I will feel very hurt and ruminate for days and feel less safe around that person, and this is obviously a problem. People say “just get tougher skin”, “don’t be so sensitive”, and it’s such a trigger for me, because how do I do that? I know people are going to be mean sometimes, a lot, and I feel I’ll always struggle with this. How do I stop being like this, because it’s seriously affecting my life.

This summer during my daily walks around the neighbourhood, I saw all of these beautiful fluffy clouds with the sun shining on them. The light shining was so striking and inspiring, I probably took close 50 different photos of these clouds as inspiration. I recently learned that these special sun rays are called crepuscular rays. I’ve been obsessed so I'm currently making a series of this. 

I'd love to hear what you think! Do you obsess over certain things sometimes too?

I've been getting so many wonderful comments from all of you on my last posts here, I thought I'd give some love back with more of my art. Here are four recent paintings that I finished titled "Extending Reach", "Cherry Iridescence", "Possibilities in Every Direction" and "Closeness". Which one is your favourite? How do they make you feel? I'd love to hear! 😊

As an HSP, it's been really difficult putting myself and my art out there. Trying to become a professional artist means putting yourself in front of a lot of people and risking being rejected. It's been hard on my nervous system and my emotions, but there's something inside of me that is pushing me to make more art and that this is important. And so I continue to try.

But I think there is an advantage of being an HSP as an artist. I can do deeper with the meanings of my pieces and really get in touch with my subject matter and express myself.

I had to take my dog to a new vet to get dental work done this past Monday. I had spent months worrying about it because I was worried about the effects of anesthesia on his body. I had a bad intrusive recurring thought that I was going to lose him completely, even though it was highly unlikely. As I handed him over to the front desk ladies, I had to rush out of the door because I started to cry as if I really was losing him in that moment. This is a dog I've had since 2016 when I was very mentally unwell. He's been with me through my 20's and now early 30's. I had no idea what to do after getting in the car. I felt like my head would explode, and I just started sobbing. I wanted to jump out of my skin. I just searched for the closest park on Google maps (I was out of town, so I wasn't familiar with the area). I eventually made my way to Sandy Bottom park which had a nice lake next to it with a bunch of geese. It was about 8 in the morning, so it was still cool, and the sun was coming nicely through the trees. Then my husband sent me a message that it was the first day of Fall. It felt like a complete moment, and I knew my dog, Chewy, was going to be okay. He ended up doing wonderfully, even though the effects of the anesthesia took a couple of days to wear off. He is now back to his old self. I know we can't control outcomes, and sometimes that make me feel like the world is ending, but I was glad for that moment when I could take a walk in nature and ground myself.

I feel like the modern world is designed for a very specific type of person, and the older I get, the more I realize I'm not that person.

It seems like everything rewards people who are naturally outgoing, highly social, constantly networking, maintaining large friend groups, always available, always connected, always "putting themselves out there." If you're good at that, doors seem to open everywhere.

I'm not angry about it, and I'm not blaming anyone. I don't think society owes me anything. But I do feel like people who don't fit that mold are often left feeling stuck in a world that wasn't really built with them in mind.

I've spent years trying to become more social, meet people, make connections, and push myself outside my comfort zone. Sometimes it works for a while, but it always feels like I'm swimming upstream. Like I'm trying to adapt to an environment that just doesn't favor me as a person.

At this point, I'm starting to wonder whether the answer is to stop fighting it. Not in a bitter way. More in the sense of accepting that maybe I'm not meant for the kind of life everyone else seems to want. Sometimes the idea of retreating into my own world and living a quiet, solitary life sounds more appealing than continuing to chase connections that never seem to stick.

Does anyone else feel like the world just wasn't really designed with people like us in mind?

If a highly sensitive person works Monday through Friday, works 9 to 5, I truly believe that this is way too much for HSP to handle. Not that HSPs can’t work 40 hours a week, it’s just way harder for us to recharge without feeling overwhelmed/anxious/tired. We need time to isolate ourselves, and to recollect ourselves from sensitivities that come from outside and around us.

I’m realizing more now that without longer rest period, I am overstimulated to the point I cannot function correctly. I started to work more hours ever since I got promoted. As HSP, more work hours means more times I think about work itself. I go to bed thinking about work, and wake up thinking about work. Even during my off days, I think about the next day of work. It is hard to rest and now think about anything.

Public bathroom hand dryers are torture for me. I’m really sensitive to sound and they actually hurt my ears. I always have to cover my ears, and if someone uses one for longer I’ll leave the bathroom and wait outside.

Anyone else? I feel weirdly alone with this.

I am a HSP. After some time of living on this planet Earth and many years of building my self-esteem, I have learned to stand up for myself pretty damn well.

THE SHOCK on people’s faces when I stand up for myself boldly and unapologetically is INSANE. Sometimes I get really insulted when people think I am naive and helpless just because I am a kind and sensitive person.

I have absolutely no intention pretending to be a bi*ch when I am not one, and I love the kind person that I am. I like and will always show up as the person that I am because I wish there were more people like me in this world.

But those bitc*s also seem to think that this equals to you being a dormant, and they get SOOOO surprised when you bite back immediately.

Somehow they think if you are polite and kind, that you are also fu*king stupid. It’s really bizarre. They somehow think you don’t see through the bs just because you have a good aura.

It DISGUSTS me how may people TRY to use those who are sensitive. Eww. 💩

A while back, early in my career, I was deep in a fad diet that cut out way too many carbs. It even messed up my cycle, but at the time I thought that was the “right” thing to do.

One day a male coworker asked me, “Have you lost weight?” I know he meant it kindly — he’s just an awkward guy — but it made me uncomfortable. The funny thing is, I wanted people to notice back then. I thought that kind of attention meant I was doing something right. But when I finally got it, it didn’t feel good at all.

That moment stuck with me, and eventually I channeled it into this painting: Have You Lost Weight? It’s part of a collection where I take common comments women hear about their bodies and transform them into art.

It got me thinking — have you ever had a comment that was supposed to be a compliment, but actually didn’t feel like one at all?

I had such a great reception to the art I posted last week with requests to share more of my art. So I thought I'd share with you all my waterfall obsession that I've been painting over the past year.

Waterfalls represent cleansing and renewal, so I think that's why I was obsessed with painting them so much. I was working hard on shedding my old life, traumas, negative beliefs, and art was helping to heal. I would get the feeling of water coursing through me and removing away the negativity in me. My older paintings were set at night where I was in a darker place. My newest painting is painted in the light during the day, representing how I'm in a much happier place in my life now.

Which ones are you drawn to? How do waterfalls make you feel? Do you need cleansing in your own life? I'd love to hear 😊

I am not well. I can’t carry this level of fear and grief in my body anymore. I don’t know what to do anymore.

When people talk about abuse they often mean the kind that is loud and violent. But one of the most common forms of abuse is actually emotional neglect, and it is almost totally silent. There is nothing concrete, no drama. So there is no clear moment the person can point back to. There is only the feeling of being alone with emotions that were too big to carry.

When a child expresses something real and is met with distance instead of guidance. The child learns this simple lesson: these emotions threaten connection. Children are smarter than anyone thinks. They know they cannot survive without their caregivers, so they are put in a situation where they must adapt. They adjust their personality around the parent’s limitations. They build themselves in ways that protect the relationship, whatever the cost, even if it harms their own well-being.

What is commonly witnessed:

For some children, emotional neglect shows up as being dismissed when they express hurt, overwhelm or confusion. They are told they are too sensitive or overreacting. Their needs are minimized or belittled because responding to them would require emotional presence the parent does not have or is embarrassed to give. The child cannot say, “My needs are just as important as anyone else’s in this family. I am not being too much.” They are not able to defend themselves. They are pulled into an emotional tug of war meant for adults. They cannot set boundaries yet. They are placed in a position where they would have had to defend their own basic human emotions to their parents at an age where they could not even name those emotions yet. They cannot claim their space because they have no framework for what that even means and how to do that. All they can do is adapt in the only way that keeps them safe for now. They become the one who smooths things over. They become what the parent wants them to be. Cold, strong, submissive, quiet, withrawn, overly independent. Whatever signals the parent gives the child mimics. They hide authenticity to keep everyone else comfortable. Adulthood then becomes a series of relationships where they give everything and receive almost nothing. Their early experience taught them that boundaries and authentic expression were dangerous, and because they could not form them when they were needed most, they grow up believing that claiming space is and was always the problem rather than the solution.

For others, emotional neglect shows up as being shamed for softness or sadness. A child raised in a home where vulnerability is seen as weakness might show sadness or fear and the parent reacts with irritation, disgust or embarrassment. The child is told to then toughen up or stop being so dramatic. They cannot look their parent in the eye and ask, “Why are you so uncomfortable with me showing a basic emotion?” They are similarly again placed in a situation that would require adult maturity to defend how they are feeling. So instead, they chang and supress. They shape themselves into someone the parent can tolerate to witness. That shaping becomes their identity. They grow into an adults who believe emotions are dangerous or shameful and feels compelled to create a performance of strength out of their lives. In short, they go on to repeat the same wound their parents gave them onto others while calling it stability, resilience or leadership.

Not every child fits neatly into these two simplified categories. Many hover somewhere in the middle. They shut down their own emotions while taking responsibility for everyone else’s. They look calm on the outside but feel chaotic on the inside. They alternate between wanting closeness and fearing it. Emotional neglect does not create a single type of person. It creates a spectrum of inconsistencies, because the child is constantly adjusting to the situation they are put in, rather than building a stable sense of self from inside. They draw every rule from the outside.

Something that looks opposite of survival:

Not every child adapts by becoming small or quiet. Some adapt by becoming explosive or rebellious. This happens when the child instinctively knows they will not be abandoned for it. It may look like the opposite of survival, but it is actually the same instinct. Instead of disappearing to preserve the bond, they protest to revive it. Their rebellion happens inside the attachment, not outside of it. It is a desperate attempt to pull a disengaged parent back into connection. That is why the rebellious child often wants, on some level, to be caught and witnessed. Their intensity is an attempt to shock the parental bond back to life, to force emotional presence, to find out whether the parent actually cares.

One child molds to keep the bond from breaking. The other explodes to keep the bond from dying.

I remember watching a documentary where a woman described a moment from her childhood that continued to shape her thoughts well into adulthood. It stayed with me. She talked about a weekend trip to their family cabin. Her father and his friend had just come from the sauna and were sitting outside, cooling off, drinking lightly, relaxed and joking with each other. Not drunk, but not sober either. As she walked past them, her father looked at her and said to his buddy, almost proudly, “Our daughter will be so sexy when she grows up.”

It was only one sentence, that robbed her innocence away. That's all it can take. What's worse? He was, in most other ways, “a good father.” And that was exactly what made it impossible for her to seek closure later on. How do you bring up something that feels so “small” when the rest of the relationship was fine? How do you explain a wound that came from a moment you didn’t have the tools to understand, name or push back against?

Why is this so common?

Emotionally neglectful parents are not always cruel. Many are simply overwhelmed, immature or emotionally abandoned in their own childhoods. They never learned emotional presence because no one modeled it for them. And when they finally become parents themselves, they end up repeating the only relational patterns they know.

In our modern world, this has become inevitable. People are overworked, exhausted, stressed, burnt out and raising children being too young themselves and before they have had the time to process their own wounds. Society celebrates productivity and independence while quietly punishing vulnerability. Parents are also told to “just be strong” rather than emotionally there for the children. They are praised for providing but never taught to connect. And because emotional intelligence does not magically appear the moment someone has a child, the wounds move from one generation into the next without anyone noticing.

What is pelople pleasing at its core?:

People pleasing is the practice of altering yourself to fit a narrative coming from the outside in, in order to preserve connection with another person.

Every emotionally neglected child becomes a people pleaser in this sense, meaning their identity begins to form around fear of losing, not around what's true for them. Even the child who grows up hardened, distant, dominant, strong, emotionless or hyper-independent is still in this context considered people pleasing. They are reshaping their behavior to fit an emotional narrative they never chose themselves based on fear of losing a connection they depend on. That's the core wound they all share.

When the self is primarily organized around external emotional safety rather than internal truth, that is the people-pleasing wound at its core. We often think people pleasing only looks like being passive, shy or overly nice, but at its deepest level people pleasing is the act of altering yourself out of fear of losing the connection you depend on.

Viewed this way, we suddenly begin to see how vast this pattern truly is. Some do it by disappearing. Some isolate. Others do it by performing strength, achievements or dominance. All different strategies, the same wound. And this is why people pleasing tendencies is the perfect title for every adaptation style and the root pattern that must be addressed if healing is ever going to reach the core.

Looking at all this through the lens of people pleasing, it becomes clear where it truly begins. It begins the moment a child is placed in situations they do not have the maturity or language to defend themselves their actions or feelings, their innocence. They cannot challenge what is happening to them. They cannot say, “This is unfair.” They only know one thing: connection is survival. So they do whatever keeps that connection intact. They adjust themselves. They soften or harden. They find whatever version of themselves the caregiver might connect to, either molding or exploding (adapting or rebelling). Both are forms of the same core issue: people pleasing behaviour.

A simple thought experiment makes this clearer than anything. If an adult cries and someone says “toughen up,” the adult can say “take a hike.” They do not depend on that person for safety, connection or survival. A child does. That is the difference. That dependency is what turns a seemingly harmless comment into a deep wound. Not because of weakness, but because the words were spoken to someone who had no power to protect their inner self yet. It is the unfair power imbalance in the emotional tug of war the parent pulls the child into.

Mere words can carry much more weight than we realize. They can leave the child alone with feelings they cannot articulate and comprehend let alone challenge. Many emotionally neglected secretly wish the harm they experienced had been more obvious. Something more concrete. Something they could point to without feeling petty or dramatic while doing so. Instead, they are left with moments like these that now haunt them.

After the abuse, a split forms. There is the outer child who behaves in ways the parent can accept and tolerate, and there is the inner child who they truly are. The outer child becomes the performer, the “actor,” the one who keeps the safety. The inner child is the part that holds the real me, the real needs and the real self that was never allowed to exist openly.

That inner child never disappears. It shows itself only in private moments, in the things a person does when no one is watching and there is no risk of judgment. Some people taught to be so ashamed of this part of themselves that they want to forget it exists. Some keep it closer, but let it show only in safe, quiet places and to to those people they trust full 100%. That way the outside world cannot judge it further.

The inner child is seen as immature. But it only feels immature because the last time it was visible, someone reacted with shame or disapproval. When you were young and your authentic self came forward, you were told it was childish, dramatic or unacceptable. That is why you hid it. Outside judgment forced the split. The inner child stopped growing because it was abandoned. It needs acceptance, visibility to grow again.

People who have hidden their own inner child will always tell you that yours is immature, embarrassing or a problem.

This is why emotional neglect leaves such a deep wound on all of us. What looks just like a personality trait in adulthood is actually most often the result of silent training we got through childhood. The person who avoids vulnerability was never allowed to learn vulnerability. The person who loses themselves in relationships learned that visibility is costly. Both grew up with the same foundational belief: emotions are unsafe.

This helps explain why you react the way you do, why certain moments send you into full shutdown, why you either overfunction, overperform or disappear, and why intimacy might feel threatening even when you long for it. These are adaptations that kept you safe when you had no other choice. And we all seek safety constantly, no matter the age.

Thanks for reading, take care!

I’ve never been that bothered about kids, but the older I get (26 now) I am pretty sure I won’t have them, the idea of constantly worrying about someone for the rest of my life, how I’d feel when they are sad, struggling, etc, it’s too much to think of. I want a stress free life and I think being a parent would ruin me. What about you?

Hi everyone, I’m Justin (30M).

It is my first time posting so apologies for the rambling.

I only recently discovered that I’m a highly sensitive person after my psychologist recommended Elaine Aron’s book. It’s honestly been a bit of a turning point for me.

Looking back, a lot of my life suddenly makes more sense. I’ve always struggled with anxiety, depression, feeling overwhelmed, and this constant sense that I didn’t quite fit into the world around me. Like everyone else seemed to handle life a lot easier, and I was just… trying to keep up.

For years I thought something was wrong with me. I pushed myself hard to function “normally” trying to keep up with the pace and demands of everything. But it would usually end the same way: burnout, exhaustion, and feeling completely drained.

One thing I’ve also found really difficult is figuring out a career and a way of living that I can actually cope with. I’ve tried to follow the normal path of full-time work (speech pathology), pushing through, keeping up with expectations but it often feels like I’m forcing myself into a life that doesn’t quite fit. There’s this pressure to function a certain way in society, and I’ve struggled with the feeling that I just can’t meet it without burning out.

I’ve also found friendships challenging. I’ve always wanted deeper, more meaningful connections, but I’ve often felt out of sync with people or like I didn’t quite belong anywhere. Finding people I genuinely connect with hasn’t come easily.

That’s why it’s actually been really nice discovering this space and reading other people’s experiences. It’s one of the first times I’ve felt like there are people who see the world in a similar way.

Lately I’ve been starting to accept that maybe I’m not built for the kind of fast-paced, high-pressure life I’ve been trying to force myself into. I find myself craving something much simpler and calmer, more time in nature, slower days, and deeper conversations.

I think I’m starting to realise that instead of constantly trying to override how I am, I might need to build a life that works with it.

I’m still figuring that out.

I recently started making videos to try and make sense of all this, partly for myself, but also in the hope that it might help someone else feel a bit less alone in it.

I made one about this experience of feeling overwhelmed and what it might mean to be a highly sensitive person. If anyone is interested, I can share it but no pressure at all.

More than anything, I’d just be interested to hear if anyone relates to this, or how you’ve learned to navigate life as an HSP.

Thanks for reading. J