TPP 214a: Alane Freund How to Support & Parent a Highly Sensitive Child
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
41 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 8 hours ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is high sensitivity and how does it differ from sensory processing disorder?
Hey, it's Debbie. Today I'm sharing a Playback Friday episode. Unless you're a longtime listener, you likely haven't heard this one yet. And even if you have, I bet you'll get something completely different from it this time around. 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 and 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 and 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, Elaine. 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 200 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 20% 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 sensitive. 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 30 years and In the mental health industry for more than 30 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 horse woman. 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.
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, 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 and a number of books on the topic that have sold over 2 million copies internationally. And I wanted to say for your podcast, her new book just came out this month and it's called The Highly Sensitive Parent.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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