How Emotions Work for Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
Here’s a conversation I had with Frida Kabo from the Sensitive Success Summit about how emotions work for Highly Sensitive Persons.
How I Became a Feelings Translator
Transcript
Frida: Why do you think it's important to come together like this and celebrate sensitivity?
Joanne: Well, I think especially being in the Silicon Valley. In a country that often does not treat minorities very kindly, a lot of the giftings that sensitive folks bring get missed. And in this part of the world where it's a big part of the culture for people to be very big, very strong, very loud, and anyone who doesn't quite fit that mold is often labeled and judged much more severely. Even though a lot of the strengths that they bring actually help things from blowing up.
It's my huge hope to help a lot of the people who reach out to me, to not just figure out how to get by in like the workplaces, but actually lead with those strengths. For example, knowing how to read the room well and speak to some of the cultural elements that often are disregarded. A lot of people who are like women or persons of color, where a lot of richness comes from making room for people's individual differences, but often get missed.
Frida: Love that. Yeah. So important. And now tell us a bit more about your journey and how you came to be an expert in emotions.
Joanne: Well, so in a nutshell, I grew up as the firstborn daughter of an immigrant family, 1. 5 generations. Technically I was born here, but I lived in Korea for a good chunk of my elementary school years.
And... I grew up in a family that didn't quite know how to do feelings and often resorted to leaving me be and kind of struggle through my own feelings by myself. It just so happens that in my temperament, I was very good at figuring things out, and so, like, I found a lot of comfort in doing things like school or whatnot because that's kind of what I knew how to do.
Even though I was really struggling on the inside, I used things like math to find some way to ground, and I think also because of that, my own needs got missed. A lot of times, because people assume that I was a very easy kid, a very quiet kid, like, they don't need to worry about me. I kind of went down that path for a good long while, after graduating college, I eventually became a pastor for a little bit.
Until like I had put so many things onto my own plate trying to be super responsible and conscientious and all the things that sensitive folks are valued for until I just couldn't take it anymore. I just had a huge meltdown, kind of shut down, had a lot of anger that I didn't really know how to deal with.
Also growing up in a church context where people also don't know always how to do or work with their feelings. And so, I got started on my own personal therapy journey and, eventually one day after having done a lot of healing, I decided, you know, maybe this is something that I can do myself, like being in the other chair. Over the course of working with a hundred, you know, hundreds of people in very similar processes. I'm like, I think there's a pattern to how feelings work. So let me experiment a little bit with, you know, matching up this feeling with this need and presenting it to my clients.
And they're like, that totally resonates. I think a lot of them found that emotions aren't so random and chaotic as they're often described, but that there is an inherent logic. And so I use myself as a guinea pig, and I also had my clients as the secondary guinea pigs until I kind of locked down on a particular system on how to translate feelings into ways that are much more bite sized, they're much easier to understand.
A huge piece about big feelings is that because people assume that they're chaotic, that adds more gasoline to the fire. When we go the opposite direction and saying like, no, they actually have their own logic, they have their own grammar system. I think that kind of took a lot of the heat out for people.
That's one of the main things that I do in my own therapy practice. I'm building, a school for feelings because one of the main things I hear from people in session is like, why didn't I learn this in school? I'm like, I don't know why, so let me just build one to fill in that gap and it's been a pretty cool experience being able to map out the world of feelings.
What are Emotions?
Frida: Amazing. Yeah, it's and it's also so, so interesting and inspiring to see how our own journey leads us to, to helping others and to really collect that experience, but also the tools to create and help other people as well. But how would you define emotions?
Joanne: I would say that emotions are the alarm system.
We all have, let's say we have these big tanks within us. Each tank, representing a legitimate need that we have: need for comfort, need for connection, need for: agency, freedom, etc. Our feelings are the alarm that's attached to this tank that tells us whether the tank is empty or full.
When the tank is full or getting filled, it signals with positive emotions that things are getting better. On the other hand, if the tank is either empty or is running low, then we actually get the negative emotions as signals. They're just kind of a neutral signaling system that tells us less so about the feeling, but more so about the state of the tank.
So that we might have a chance to actually fill it if it is running low. Some people, depending on their experience or their own coping styles, have certain tanks where there's a lid on it. Where even if there's like an inpouring to fill that tank, like they're not actually taking it in.
I've worked with a lot of people who have a hard time receiving compliments or acknowledging that there's something good about them. And then some people, they have tanks for various reasons where there's a huge hole on the bottom. Even if there is infilling, it doesn't quite keep it. The main thing with emotions is to pay attention to the signal instead of like getting scared it's turned on. Once we kind of neutralize the moral charge of different feelings, it really helps us to check in with the state of how our tanks are doing.
Frida: Yeah, so important not going to the story of the feeling or the see it as a clue or as an important signal. Definitely. Yeah, so you talk about The Big 5. Can you tell us more about that?
The Big 5 Feelings
Joanne: Yeah, I like breaking, like, lots of complicated things down into easily recognizable systems. And so the Big 5 Feelings are MAD, SAD, GLAD, SCARED, NUMB.
Easy to remember, because it's easier to say, versus, resentment or melancholy. Those are all mouthfuls, and sometimes people are like, I don't even know what that word means.
So, MAD, SAD, GLAD, SCARED, NUMB. Obviously, there are a lot more feelings than these five, but off the bat, when a feeling comes up, if we first check in with any of these five as a process of elimination. It helps really, soothe how we're feeling right off the bat, because again, one of the main reasons why we might get more riled up is because we feel we can't figure out what we're feeling, or we feel like we shouldn't have these feelings.
We acknowledge that we have a feeling, and then we check in with the five. If it is one of the five that we're feeling, then we respond to those emotions according to how they generally tend to operate. For example, mad or anger often can be an emotion about agency or will or power. Like, I have a particular agenda in mind and something's in the way. Frustration would be the natural expression of it.
Or if I need to make sure that things are done at a certain time and it's not happening, then impatience is another kind of anger. There are different next steps for when different emotions come up, so being familiar with each of the five really comes in handy.
It might not be any of these five, and that's totally fine, but at least we've taken these five off the list, so we can move on to whatever the next feeling is. It might be things like shame, which in itself is a pretty big emotion. If I had six fingers, I would have said big six. This is what I got.
Morally Charged Emotions
Frida: Yeah, that makes sense. What can we do with emotions that we don't want to feel?
Joanne: First it's to recognize that there are good reasons why we might have labeled certain emotions as good or bad. So, for example, in our families growing up, certain emotions might have been labeled as a scary emotion, like anger, especially for women, or especially for those who are younger.
Whereas, let's say, if it's, you know, some other family member of a different gender, it might have, might be seen as an automatically good trait. So, recognizing that there's a moral charge attached to each emotion that's really a reflection of our environment. Not actually a reflection of us as individuals, that's really important to distinguish because especially big feelers and sensitive folks tend to absorb a lot of things from their environment, including way too much responsibility.
We might be more prone to feeling extra guilty, not because we've actually done something wrong, per se. But because the other emotion, namely anger that says no, the other person actually messed up and they're responsible to repair this thing. We're socially trained not to take on that stance. When we have a feeling that we don't want to feel, it's good to recognize that part of that might be a residue of us being in a very specific social environment.
Then if in that moment, it's not quite safe to express that emotion, then it's totally okay to not be in it. If it's a dangerous situation that you're in, first order of action is to make sure that you're safe. And if it means, for the time being, to keep your head down, fine. But I hope that's a short term arrangement, not a long term solution.
Because, you know, the nice thing about emotions is that they don't have a particular time stamp. They just kind of show up whenever. But what that also means is that we can buy ourselves time by having them wait. It's just that once we delay them, we really need to come back to them at some point to actually process them out.
Otherwise, our bodies are carrying a lot of that charge. And that'll later on create some more problems like insomnia or digestion issues and things like that. So, I've created a 10 page PDF guide called the Big Feelers First Aid Kit. To help people figure out what to do when a feeling shows up in, let's say, the wrong place, like in the middle of work, or when you're on a date, or when you're driving and it's just not the right time to be in the feelings, there is kind of another option of a placeholder.
In the long run, it's still good for people to give those feelings room to actually be processed out.
How the Enneagram helps Big Feelers
Frida: Wonderful. And so as you say, we are very affected by things around us. How do we know that it is our own feeling and not someone else's feeling?
Joanne: Ooh, that's a great question. Well, let me say two parts of it. One is, anything that's reflective of our own individual personality patterns. This is the kind of thing where the Enneagram can come in handy. The Enneagram talks about reflexive habits of thinking, feeling, and doing. For example, someone of my particular type, we have our go-to emotional habits.
As someone who's type four, it's much easier for me to give way too much space to negative feelings, and it's really difficult for me to sit with a positive feeling. Because I know that that's my personality framework. I can deliberately try to dial back the negative emotions I tend to be obsessed with.
Then on purpose, give more room to the feelings that I don't have a lot of practice with. So knowing my own personality pattern helps distinguish what's my stuff versus someone else's, because these just happened to go with my pattern. When it comes to like recognizing what's another person's stuff, it's good to at least entertain the idea that however we're feeling isn't only a reflection of ourselves as individuals that we are likely to take on other people's stuff.
Even that thought, creating space that other people have their crap that they're dumping around on other people, it's good to make that room to give ourselves permission to not automatically take responsibility for what other people might be doing. Of the Big Five, recognizing which are our top two emotions that we all too readily gravitate towards.
For me, one of my top two was SADNESS, and then there's the bottom two, emotions that take actual effort to sit with, so for me it would be JOY. Finding out what other people around us, what their emotional habits might be, might also be super helpful. If I, who tends to lean towards sadness, and underly recognizes my own GOODNESS, happen to be interacting with someone who tends to blame other people very easily, then naturally I'm more likely to take on their stuff, unless I've also learned how to recognize my own goodness and practice things like ANGER.
Our own self-awareness and our awareness of other people go hand-in-hand. So it doesn't really matter which one you start with. Sometimes knowing yourself better helps you better understand other people. Sometimes better understanding other people helps us better understand ourselves. But as more time passes, it becomes clearer and clearer whose stuff is whose.
Anger and guilt, those two emotions, I think they're cousins, or flip sides at the same coin, where the emotions themselves aren't inherently good or bad, but it's good to check whether the feeling matches the situation. Anger generally says you have done something negative to negatively affect this outcome, so you are responsible to fix it.
Guilt says I have done something to negatively affect this outcome, so I'm responsible to fix it. That's how the feeling operates, but you check in with a situation like a friend comes over to my home, they knock over my lamp, and I feel guilty. Something's not quite matching up. And so when our anger or guilt shows up and it doesn't match the actual situation, chances are it's part of our emotional habit and it's really good to repair some of those woundings from blur boundaries or family origin issues.
Frida: Yeah, so important. And you talk about massaging painful knots and grow beyond emotional reactive patterns. Tell us a bit more about that.
Joanne: Yeah, so the sensitive trait is a trait. It's not like a diagnosis or anything. It's actually built into our nervous systems.
Generally, even for non sensitive folks, there's like a window of stress that is optimal. We obviously cannot constantly be experiencing too much stress because then our bodies shut down, but we also can't experience too little stress because otherwise we get bored. Trying to find that window and staying within that window as much as possible is ideal, because it is kind of like our daily rhythms of being awake or sleeping.
We can't just be asleep, but we can't just be awake either. We kind of need this flow back and forth. It's just so, that for those who are sensitive, that window is smaller. A sensitive person is more readily, shooting towards the too much or too little stress territory. I think they kind of skip over the middle ground, but this can also happen for a non-sensitive person, but who has a lot of trauma, so that window is kind of closed up.
Brainspotting
Joanne: Things like brain spotting, which is tapping into our body's natural ability to heal itself. Brain spotting helps people find out what areas where they constantly get triggered. Instead of reliving those experiences over and over again, it actually helps to resolve those issues. The metaphor that I like using is, let's say, you know, someone experiences a scary situation.
It's like getting on a roller coaster, but being scared being on that roller coaster that the person's like, I can't do this anymore. So they get off the roller coaster or they stay stuck. The roller coaster is up on the tracks, and they haven't quite been able to make it back home. Understandably, because it's a scary place to be people don't want to go back there.
But if they don't actually get back on the rollercoaster, they're not going to be able to move on with the rest of their lives. Brainspotting helps people get back on the rollercoaster to fully ride it out till the end with the help of a brainspotting therapist. So that they don't have to do it alone.
Brainspotting is one of those things that sounds hokey, and it sounds really weird. It's better for you to experience it than to hear someone else talk about it. But I do believe that sensitive folks tend to accidentally do brainspotting, like on their own, without even knowing it. Because sensitive folks tend to get overwhelmed more readily.
I think what one of the hallmark traits of someone who is sensitive is that they're often like checked out and they're like staring off into space. Technically that is an example of brainspotting. We call it gazespotting, where the person is connected with whatever's going on the internal world.
They're trying to process because they're so backlogged while staring at a specific point. It's just the downside of brainspotting spontaneously alone is that the person doesn't even know that they've gone into the depths and they don't always know how to make it back out. Like a veteran who's reliving their traumatic experience. They don't quite know how to tell the difference between past and present.
Those who are sensitive tend to not be able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality because their inner world is so rich and so real seeming. But they can kind of get carried away by that. The brainspotting therapy session involves someone who's sitting at the boat on the surface of the water, as the sensitive person goes into the depths of the water to, you know, bring back treasure or to excavate anything that needs to be brought back up. Cause the deeper we go by ourselves, we'll get disoriented.
Emotions reveal our Individuality
Frida: Sounds fascinating and so, so useful. You also talk about how we can transform our biggest feelings into our greatest superpower. Tell us how!
Joanne: Yeah. I believe that our own feelings are evidence that we are unique individuals.
Because two people can be in the same movie theater watching the same movie, but depending on their temperament, they're going to have very different takeaways. One person watching a scene might start feeling really sad and another person might actually get really pissed off. And each of them are having a very meaningful individual experience that speak to either their needs or their values.
Let's say the person, it doesn't really matter what the scene is, but if the person who feels more sad, chances are either the pain point that they have or what they value is around connection. Because sadness is an emotion that comes up when there is this connection from something or someone very good. If there's a loss or there's a gap.
This person, if let's say that's their habit and they're prone to feeling sad, chances are there are some pain points around relationships or on purposeful living. If the person kind of judges themselves for having sad feelings without really understanding that their sadness indicates that this is something that really matters to them, then we're going to miss out on a whole lot living life. According to, let's say, what other people expect versus what they really want.
Let's say the person who got triggered and is pissed off watching the same movie. Chances are the things that really matter to them or where they're feeling sore is around things like justice or fairness or freedom or agency. That they feel so powerless so the anger kind of amps up their sense of power.
Recognizing that our emotions reveal who we are as individuals makes it so that we have an insider's look into what would help us feel most alive. Or what would help us create life and relationships that really fit us instead of building a life of how we think things should be. People who have their midlife or end of life identity crises, lots of big feelings that come up, but often people kind of disregarded as like, oh, they're just going through a phase.
Well, some people find out that because they've disregarded their feelings this whole time, they end up creating relationships or lives or careers that don't align with them until their body's like, I can't do this anymore. If we're all going to have these existential identity crisis anyway, my hope is to help people do that in smaller doses.
While calibrating their life and relationships to actually suit them as individuals. Those who are sensitive have a head start in that we have a deeper sense of knowing what really matters. It's just that not everyone has learned how to actually make room for that because we force ourselves to try to conform to a society that isn't well designed for us. Yeah, it's kind of a double edged sword for those who are sensitive.
The Emotional Vortex
Frida: Yeah, definitely love that. It's such a source of information when we when we listen to it and when we tune into it. So what is one thing that you wish that people took away from this conversation or one thing that they can start doing today?
Joanne: I would say, off the bat. If we live life assuming that our emotions are good instead of being nuisances. Even if we don't quite know what they're for, just assuming that they're good and useful helps take a lot of that edge off. I hope that people can actually learn how to work with their feelings so that our feelings can work for us.
Because if we don't, if we try to shove them aside, it's not like they're actually going away. They're still there. They're gonna still be there, so as long as we're alive. And so, instead of trying to work against them like they're our enemies, if we learn how to be aligned with them, life is much more simple.
Even if they're still the usual set of hardships in life. We're much more resilient and much more able to grow and thrive, even more so than people who've never suffered. Because our emotions say something about who we are as unique individuals.
I call this the Emotional Vortex. It's like one feeling setting off a chain reaction of like so many more feelings. Not because feelings themselves are BAD, but because we've shoved them down. Because they're informational, they're supposed to be received as messages. If you shove them down, they just pop back up with more friends.
We just get stuck in this vortex, this cycle where it just takes up so much time and energy and the amount of money it takes to try to heal from all this stuff through things like therapy. It's like, if we didn't get into the vortex in the first place, then we would have been so much more readily freed up and more empowered to do whatever we want with our lives.
In the same way that the emotional vortex, the huge time suck and energy suck it brings a lot of unnecessary heartache. Once we learn to tap into our feelings, we actually have a huge source of energy that really moves us forward. Then, let's say someone would try to build a life they think they should, but they're not like personally interested in it. They can do it for some time, but until they run out of willpower. And they give up and then they're back in the vortex.
Frida: Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good picture of it to make it so understandable and relatable. So thank you so much for being here and everyone check out the Big Feelers First Aid Kit. Is there anything else you would like to add?
Know your Enneagram
Joanne: Highly recommend that people know their Enneagram types because it makes it so much more clear as to what are invisible habits are. That, by itself will also save a lot of time and energy rather than shooting in the dark. I have a blog or a chart, that shows the emotional habits of each enneagram type.
You can think of like the sensitive trait as one lens and then our personality as another lens and what emotional habits we have and so that eventually it impacts how we actually experience and react.
Frida: And for those who don't know Enneagram, can you just describe what it is?
Joanne: Yeah, the Enneagram is a personality framework that in a nutshell says the nine different ways we experience and react to life.
So, you know, other personality frameworks like Myers Briggs or strength finders tells us what we tend to do. Okay. But the Enneagram tells us why we tend to do what we do. It's more deeply connected to our motivations, our core desires, our core fears, and so it really helps give us an insider's look into our specific habits. That often fly under the radar because we don't even know.
It's like breathing for us. Everyone else can see it, but we can't see it.
Frida: Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Thank you so, so much. Thank you for being here and sharing your wisdom and thank you for the important work that you do in the world. It's really needed. And yeah, tuning into our feelings and get to know them and don't judge them. So important. Thank you so much.
Joanne: Thank you.
The BIG Feelings First Aid Kit
Messy feelings spilling out at the
WRONG TIME,
WRONG PLACE,
WRONG WAY?
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Joanne Kim, Feelings Translator
Hi! I’m a therapist-turned feelings coach who helps Highly Sensitive Persons, Empaths, Enneagram 2s & 4s, etc. turn their BIGGEST feelings into their GREATEST superpower!
They are often the first (or only) person in their family to intuitively process and express feelings; consequently, they are often judged or criticized so that they learn to people please, placate, or perform until they hit a wall.
They’re super familiar with anxiety, guilt, and shame, partly because of an allergic reaction to anger (theirs and others').
Often the super responsible, empathic, and ethical person in their environments, they reach out to me after they're already burned out, resentful in their relationships, or sucked into their shame spiral.
The most common feedback I get from people when I share about how feelings work is,
"Why didn't anyone teach me this in school??"
Hence, I am building a school helping people work WITH their feelings so their feelings work FOR them.
Join me and Lauren LaSalle as we talk on her podcast, The Highly Sensitive Podcast, about how to do emotions along with tips for HSPs.