Beachside Counseling is now Therapy for Highly Sensitive People

As a therapist who is also a highly sensitive person, I am passionate about helping highly sensitive people learn to love themselves. In this blog post, I share my own personal experience of being misunderstood by a therapist and how it led me to open Therapy for Highly Sensitive People, a therapy space created to help HSPs cope with common life challenges. HSPs often have a hard time finding a therapist who knows what it means to be highly sensitive and working with a therapist who’s unskilled in high sensitivity can exacerbate the shame and brokenness HSPs already tend to feel. I’m a highly sensitive therapist and I’m on a mission to help fellow HSPs better understand their brain and nervous system so they too can begin to embrace the gifts of their sensitivities and learn to love their tender souls.

My Own Experience With A Therapist Who Didn’t “Get It”

I remember the first time I saw the phrase “highly sensitive person” long before I was a therapist. I was in a bookstore in Boston meandering through the aisles and was somehow drawn to a book called The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine Aron. In reading the back cover, phrases like “too sensitive” and “overstimulated” popped out at me. The more I flipped through the book, the more understood I felt.

Discovering the concept of highly sensitive people was life-changing for me. As I read more about being an HSP, I started to learn how my brain and nervous system were wired. I began to understand why I would have “big feelings” when I was triggered, why certain environments overwhelmed me, and why I could naturally attune to the emotional states of others. I stopped feeling so broken, defective, and flawed.

I was so excited to show the therapist I was working with Dr. Aron’s book about HSPs. I went into that session feeling like I had finally found the answer to the question I’d been struggling with for years… “What’s wrong with me?”. When I handed the book to her, she took a moment to read the cover… and then she laughed. I sat there for a moment waiting for her to see how special this moment was… and it didn’t come. I don’t remember anything else from that session, except that I quickly took the book back, quietly slipped it into my purse, and never mentioned being a highly sensitive person to her again for the rest of the time we worked together.

I want to note that that therapist was a fantastic clinician and she helped me in so many different ways. But, she also didn’t understand what it meant to be a highly sensitive person and was unable to offer me the support, validation, and coping tools that my high sensitivity needed. And that was the start of my journey to creating Therapy for Highly Sensitive People.

Feeling misunderstood, shamed, and pathologized by unknowing therapists is a story I hear time and time again from fellow HSPs. It’s a common struggle for HSPs to find a therapist who really understands what it means to be highly sensitive. Therapists who don’t know about high sensitivity can actually do more harm than good and can make HSPs feel worse about their sensitivity. HSPs deserve to work with therapists who understand them.

And that is why Beachside Counseling has become Therapy for Highly Sensitive People.

At Therapy for Highly Sensitive People, we still focus on all of the unique specialties we did at Beachside Counseling: grief & loss, major life changes, relationship challenges, and therapy for fellow therapists. However, now we focus on those specialties through the unique lens of high sensitivity.

Therapy for Highly Sensitive People is a therapy practice created specifically for highly sensitive people who are struggling with grief, major life changes, relationship challenges, and other common life struggles that can be exacerbated by high sensitivity. It is a place where HSPs will find acceptance, validation, and compassion for their sensitive nature, and as I wrote above, where they can begin to embrace the gifts of their sensitivities and learn to love their tender souls. If you’re an HSP who’s struggling to find a therapist who understands you, welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.