TPP 214: How to Support & Parent a Highly Sensitive Child
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
42 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 5 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is high sensitivity and why does it matter for parents?
These are our highly sensitive children. As long as we create an environment, structure, time for transitions for them. They can be those wise, creative, and Gifted, yes, not in the IQ sense necessarily, but gifted children who will help us save our world.
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. If your child seems to be extra impacted by things, whether it's light, noise, pain, or even other people's emotions, he or she might be highly sensitive. High sensitivity is a genetic trait that affects up to 20% of the population and is often misunderstood and mistaken for other differences in disorders. What makes it difficult is that when unrecognized and unsupported, highly sensitive children and adults tend to exhibit high levels of anxiety, nervousness, perfectionism, overwhelm, and emotional outbursts due to their finely tuned nervous systems.
But this sensitivity can also be a rich and valuable way to experience the world. My guest today is Elaine Friend, a licensed family therapist, an international consultant on high sensitivity, and a highly sensitive person herself. In this episode, Elaine explains to us what high sensitivity is, how it shows up in children, teens, and adults, and gives her insights on how parents can help their highly sensitive kids flourish. And now here is my conversation with Elaine. Hello, Aline, welcome to the podcast.
Hello, I'm so pleased to be here.
Well, I'm excited about this conversation as we were just talking before I hit record. This is a new topic. More than two hundred episodes in, and I always get very excited when I can bring yet another new topic to the show. So Can you just before we get into the meat of our conversation, just take a few minutes to introduce yourself, kind of who you are in the world, and if you can tie in with that your personal why for doing this work, that would be awesome.
Sure, I'd love to. So I'm Elaine Friend and I'm out in California and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist there and Mostly in my therapy practice I focus on working with families and Highly sensitive people. And especially I'm interested in that twenty percent of the population, especially the children. Who have the trait of high sensitivity. And I know we'll dig a lot more into that. I'm highly sensitive. I have a highly sensitive young adult child. I'm married to a highly sensitive person. My parents are highly sens anyway, you get the picture. We're a sensitive family. I grew up my whole life being told I was just too sensitive. Come on, get over it. Fuck up. Why are you always crying? Why do you have such strong reactions to everything?
And You know, I think That's probably one of the reasons that I became a therapist. I also got into Al Anon and I've been in Al Anon for more than thirty years and in the mental health industry for more than thirty years. So I got a lot of tools for living my life. But it wasn't until almost a decade ago that my friend at the barn, I'm a horsewoman, I love horses and have several and practice equine assisted psychotherapy here in California. But my friend at the barn Another therapist came up to me and said, Elaine, you're highly sensitive. And I think your equine assisted therapy work would be so fantastic for highly sensitive people. The reason being they love nature and they love animals and We had talked a lot about my practice and my equine assisted therapy and
But I thought, why are you telling me I'm highly sensitive? I've been hearing that my whole life. I really don't need to hear it from you. I thought we were friends. And she said She said, Well, have you ever read the book? And I said, No. She said, Well, why don't you look it up? Well, it turns out that my friend who was telling me I was highly sensitive was Elaine Aaron and she's literally the author. of the term highly sensitive person in a number of books. on the topic that have sold over two million copies internationally.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is high sensitivity and why does it matter for parents?
0:00–8:50
2
Who is Elaine Friend and what is her personal connection to high sensitivity?
8:50–20:05
3
How does Elaine define a Highly Sensitive Person and differentiate it from sensory processing disorder?
20:05–31:20
4
What are the four DOES characteristics that identify a highly sensitive child?
31:20–42:16
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
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TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids