When you feel powerless over world events, remember: your inner work matters.
I’ve been thinking about something I read in Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, a memoir by Priyanka Mattoo. She’s a Kashmiri expatriate living in Los Angeles. She recalled this conversation with her therapist:
“Pain is passed down until someone has the bandwidth and resources to feel it,” she says, and I immediately have to lie down. I’m reeling under the weight of generations of forebears who didn’t have the time or tools to deal with the emotional impact of their incomprehensible challenges. The part of me that’s embarrassed by my emotions, and embarrassed to tell anyone in the family about them, is the part that needs it the most.
“You’re doing this for your kids,” she tells me. “This”—the sleepless nights, the inexplicable panic, the ever-present, debilitating fear of loss—“begins to end with you.”
She teaches me to sit with my horrible feelings, and I hate it. But eventually, I acknowledge the deep well of sadness that follows me around—it’s right next to me; it probably always will be—and I learn not to fall in.*
I love that line: “This begins to end with you.” The pain we carry may be terrible. We may not even be able to finish healing it during what remains of our life on the planet. But we can begin to end it, now. We do that not only for ourselves, but for others. , and we do it so we don’t spread it around or pass it on.
HSPs are resonators
Never was this inner work more important than now. You can see all around you right now what happens when people carry a lot of unresolved pain and fear. They become vulnerable to fearmongering, and they project their own fear onto others. There’s a lot of fear flying around in our world right now.
If you are a highly sensitive person, you can feel this all too keenly. You are variably susceptible. That means you are deeply affected by whatever is going on around you. Like an undamped piano string that rings when a similar tone is sounded near it, any unaddressed fear in you will resonate louder if you are surrounded by others’ fear.
If you wish this weren’t the case, you’re not alone. Accepting these facts about ourselves as HSPs is in some ways the hardest step. Once we do accept them, though, we can learn to ground ourselves in the face of pain. Then, once we are grounded, the pain can pass through us. It dissipates, rather than getting built up in our bodies and expressed in unwanted ways. That way, even if we still have old pain to heal, we don’t keep adding fresh pain to the pile.
In a way, HSPs can’t avoid the healing path. We can’t just ignore our pain: we feel it so intensely that it’s hard to bear. So we understandably become very focused on ways of getting relief. You can get relief temporarily with addictive behaviors that numb you and shut you down, but that produces its own kind of pain. In the end, you can’t go over, under, or around the fire. You have to go through it.
What does it mean to go through pain?
Why would any rational person choose to go through pain? To answer that question, it helps to grasp what is going on underneath. Many of us have a terrified inner part that is sure that sitting with the pain will burn you to a cinder. Fearing this, it will understandably fight tooth and nail to stop you from feeling the pain.
To a part like this, keeping you away from your pain is a matter of life and death. The strategies it uses are correspondingly powerful and effective. It can send distractions, put you to sleep, or manufacture drama. It can even make your internet go down at a key moment in a conversation— all in a well-meaning but misguided effort to protect you.
Does this mean you should force your way past these protective parts? No. That will retraumatize them. They will dig in their heels and trust you even less. That’s why, in the world of Inner Relationship Focusing, we say, “Go only fast as your slowest part.”
Imagine a beloved child of yours who loved to swim but had nearly drowned. You wouldn’t force her to go back into the water. You’d take it slowly. You’d encourage her to lead the way at her own pace— or to step back as needed.
It’s the same with young parts of you who may have felt in the past as if they were drowning—not in water, but in their own intense emotions. If you have struggled with fear, anxiety, or depression, you know what I’m talking about. Not having had support or skills to hold your feelings at a time when you were young and vulnerable, you become scared of them.
Inviting Spirit to hold you as you hold your suffering parts
How can you begin to cultivate the ability to feel your pain as it comes up? Certainly, HSPs need skills to regulate our sensitive nervous systems. But in my experience, that alone is not enough. We need to call on something bigger than ourselves.
This is deceptively simple. Ask Spirit, God, or whatever you call the greater force that animates the universe, to help you hold your suffering parts. Ask for help. You can say whatever feels right: “Help me. Help me hold this. Help me see what I need to see. Help me know the truth here.” Then wait and see what happens.
The essential nature of our reality is revealed through spiritual connection. Think of a scrim—the special fabric, used in theater productions, that appears solid when lit from the front. When you light a scrim from behind, though, it becomes transparent. Similarly, if you try to shine light on a painful situation by yourself, using your limited human capacity, it appears solid and fixed. You can see no recourse, which leaves you feeling even more overwhelmed and helpless.
But as soon as you invite Spirit to come into your awareness, light suffuses everything. You perceive that the reality you thought was fixed and solid is, in fact, not. A new world of possibilities opens up.
Remembering is the challenge
Inviting Spirit into your awareness seems simple, doesn’t it? For me, the hard part is remembering to do it. There’s a reason for this. When I’m immersed in pain, it feels like the only reality. I feel alone with it. At that moment, I’m living in a constricted world in which the possibility of help simply doesn’t exist. I’m like one of the tiny characters locked inside a snow globe.
I’ve found it helpful to leave myself mental (and sometimes physical) sticky notes to remind me that Spirit exists, and that I can ask for help with anything, any time. The very act of asking has the effect of illuminating the problem in a new way. It may even stop looking like a problem.
When I ask Spirit to shine light on my dilemmas, I affirm the truth that I am a spiritual being, here in a body, having a human experience. This changes everything for the better. I become calmer, more discerning of whether and when to act, and more effective when I do act.
Ralph Waldo Emerson describes this transformative process in a beautiful way:
There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word…. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty.**
On the worldly level, things look terribly messy right now. We can’t just ignore this completely (though I have days when I can hardly bear to open my phone.) We do need to pay some attention to events unfolding all around us.
However, if you are looking at the news and you notice yourself feeling stressed and scared, open to Spirit. We need to resonate with the right, the truth, and the beauty in the world as much as we can in order to keep our heads on straight and be a force for good. Don’t doubt for a moment that your inner work matters. It does, more than you can possibly know.
Photo by Vlad Vasnetsov on Unsplash
*Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2024), p. 233
**Spiritual Laws (from his Essays, First Series, 1841), by Ralph Waldo Emerson
