“My father noted the days when I did not cry”: testimony of Jennifer, hypersensitive

Today, Thursday, January 13, is the World hypersensitivity day. For the occasion, we wanted to give the floor to a person concerned to lift the veil on this particularity which would concern 1 in 5 people !

At 27, Jennifer is hypersensitive. A word that you have surely heard before, seen in online quizzes or memes: if it is nowadays a little misused, Jennifer knows better than anyone what he means, she who has spent hundreds of hours at the stake to fully grasp the meaning of this particularity that characterizes her: “Hypersensitivity is higher than average emotional and sensory sensitivity. It manifests itself on an emotional level through hyperemotivity and hyperempathy – therefore the fact of absorbing the emotions of others, of not being able to take a step back from what the person is feeling; and at the sensory level, with an exacerbation of one or more senses.”

With his blog, a veritable gold mine of information for the hypersensitive, and his Instagram account full of very polished educational content, Jennifer has made her hypersensitivity the pillar of her identity. On the way to meet her!

Painful childhood: a denied and despised hypersensitivity

From Jennifer’s childhood, everything points to hypersensitivity: she’s an emotional little girl, who cries all the time, a characteristic complicated to assume in front of a little loving and distant father who refuses these demonstrations of sensitivity: “He wrote down in the calendar the days that I didn’t cry”, She confides.

Having the permanent feeling of to feel out of step with others, the shy child that she is struggling to find her place: “When I found a group of people, I never felt right with those people”She explains to us. This inner discomfort, the other comrades interpret it as a weakness which will cause him to be the victim of school bullying for years:

I have always been the scapegoat, throughout my schooling, in elementary, college and high school. I came with the ball in my stomach, I got kicked in my satchel in college, and in high school it was worse, we arrive on a higher degree of nastiness. We were creating groups about me on Facebook so that people would insult me.

In adolescence, the age when we forge an identity in contact with others, Jennifer acutely feels his inability to live together. A vicious circle is set in motion, the suffering calling for suffering: the young girl ends up using her body to externalize her pain and launch an SOS:

I had dark thoughts, I was thinking of suicide, I had scarifications, eating disorders, I have been anorexic.

This feeling of incompatibility with the outside world and with others not only results in a desire to extract oneself from this foreign body, but also to marry another personality : “I was so bad about myself that I didn’t accept myself, I didn’t like the person I was. I wanted to be different, to be like the others in fact: I went to a party, I talked too much, the next day I said to myself “it’s over, I stop talking, I do like the others”, and then at in the end it was coming back, because you can’t change yourself”.

Even though Jennifer doesn’t blame her entire dark period of her life on her hypersensitivity, she measures the amplifying effect that this character trait may have had on her relationship to herself and to the world : “There is an innate part in hypersensitivity that evolves according to the environment in which you build yourself”. In this particularly toxic context, the young woman experiences a descent into hell, to the point of developing repeated somatic illnesses.

Discovery of hypersensitivity: a click to appropriate your sensitivity

The discovery of her hypersensitivity pierces this bubble of suffering in which she was locked: It’s quite late, at 25, that Jennifer finally puts the words on a characteristic that has long made her live through hell. In full confinement, in 2020, the young woman confides, once again, to a friend how bad she feels in a job that does not suit her, and the latter slips her the link of an article on hypersensitivity. This is the revelation for Jennifer:

And there, all the questions that I have asked myself all my life, I realize that it has a name: it is hypersensitivity. It was a huge relief.

This is the start of a long quest, a quest for meaning to understand what is behind this concept that she does not know. Jennifer recounts how this path to sort through information found on the internet has been fraught with pitfalls: “When I started doing research, I realized that we were not well informed on the subject: we come across articles that say that it is a disease, a disorder, that there are symptoms. , a diagnosis… So we say to ourselves: “But wait, am I sick? Is it normal ?””. Jennifer immerses herself night and day in these investigations, gradually taming the outlines of a sensitivity that she had long despised.

If hypersensitive people are distinguished by their voracious curiosity and their thirst for knowledge, Jennifer is no exception: her frantic research allows her to rationalize your hypersensitivity, to understand the slightest roughness. Mastering the subject, theoretically, is take back power, control, over a peculiarity that it has suffered for years:

I got to know myself, I discovered strengths in me that I didn’t even think I had. I found qualities for myself: creativity, intuition, empathy.

For her, this new start is also a decision, a choice to look to the positive : “I decided to make myself happy then”, She explains with a big smile. Metamorphosed in 1 year, Jennifer has gained confidence in herself and her assets, at the same time as specializing in the subject of hypersensitivity, with a goal that goes beyond her simple case.

Supporting hypersensitive people: a life project

It was after discovering her hypersensitivity that Jennifer decided to launch a blog dedicated to the subject which asserts itself as a dual source, nourished by a dimension pedagogic but also introspective. His goal ? “Provide large-scale information on hypersensitivity and enhance the image of sensitivity in society”.

This blog, she gave him the name of “Supersensitivity”, To take the opposite view of all the negative definitions that we have been able to attach to the notion of hypersensitivity: disease, disorder, defect…“This is to show that we can really make a force of this hypersensitivity. It’s almost a super power!”Jennifer proudly adds.

Initially, the young woman conceives this blog as a private space, a tool for his personal therapy, a meeting point between his research and his work of introspection. But quickly, awareness imposes itself on her: “At the time, I would have loved to have had a blog with hypersensitivity information, testimonials, advice. And I said to myself, I might as well share it with others”.

It is through this blog, in its dimension of an open-hearted journal, that her mother discovers the reality of the suffering that her daughter experienced: “J ‘cried all the tears in my body while reading your article, I didn’t know you were so bad and I blame myself”Then confided to him his mother, who deplores the fact that one does not speak enough about hypersensitivity to the parents.

To help develop awareness around this subject, Jennifer offers on her blog sharp articles on hypersensitivity and personal development, nourished by his numerous readings, as much qualitative content that she declines on Instagram through highly impactful posts and infographics.

Jennifer recently turned a corner in her reconstruction : more than making the revaluation of the sensitivity a fight in the private framework, she decided to make a professional retraining towards coaching to make this process a life project.

After a whole journey of reconnecting to herself, taming her hypersensitivity, introspection, this professional orientation has become obvious:

Once I put my finger on my hypersensitivity, I thought to myself: there it is, I know who I am, now I’m going for it, whatever hypersensitivity will give me, I’ll take it. I’m going to take it and I’m going to use it to help others.

Helped in her own journey by coaching, today she wants to help other people to accept their hypersensitivity, to deconstruct themselves, to understand their reactions, to anticipate and apprehend them in order to live better on a daily basis. Self-acceptance and tolerance, this is the mantra of a budding coach who intends to allow hypersensitive people to succeed in harness their potential and become the best version of themselves.

At the question “If you could get rid of your hypersensitivity, would you?”, Categorical answer: “Never in life, never! I’m happy to be hypersensitive”. As for us, we wish him the best for the future!