Highly Sensitive Persons

I specialize in helping highly sensitive and ambitious women in their twenties and thirties and adolescents find relief from anxiety, overthinking, and self-doubt. Through Highly Sensitive Person Therapy you can create more balance, build greater confidence, develop self-compassion, and experience inner-peace.

Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs) Therapy in New York

If you've ever been labeled “’too sensitive or shy” Highly Sensitive Person Therapy may be right for you.

Or maybe you've heard some of the following messages:

• "grow thicker skin"
• "lighten up"
• "stop overthinking"
• "toughen up"
• "let things go"
• "stop over-analyzing"
• "you're being dramatic or too emotional"
• "stop crying"
• "you're taking it too personally"
• "don't let it get to you so much:

These messages can lead you to doubt yourself and start believing something is truly wrong with you that needs fixing.

The truth is, there is nothing wrong with you! You may in fact be among the 15-20% of the population with the highly sensitive personality trait.

Therapy for Highly Sensitive Persons

How do I know if I am a highly sensitive person?

Highly Sensitive Persons make up about 15-20% of the population. If you're unsure if this is you, begin by taking this quiz https://hsperson.com/test/highly-sensitive-test/ and keep reading on to learn more.

Highly Sensitive People have a rich inner life and deep empathy for others. With this trait, you easily attune and absorb the feelings and energies of those around you.

As a highly sensitive person, you experience your emotions deeply, the good ones and the harder ones. It likely takes you longer to move through these strong feelings. With a rich inner life and keen awareness to your environment, you notice more details around you, spend more time considering social cues like people’s facial expressions, tones of voice, and moods. With a sensitive nervous system you likely become easily overstimulated and require more quiet and down time than others. You may find yourself easily startled and made uncomfortable by loud noises, strong smells, crowds, or bright lights. Perhaps the tags on your clothing and the seams on your socks feel unbearable. As a highly sensitive person, you most likely hate being the center of attention and the idea of surprises, even positive ones are unnerving.  It can be exhausting and overwhelming to feel so porous to the world, like a sponge to everything and everyone around you.

Being a highly sensitive person while living in our fast-paced and not so sensitive world can be challenging and at times exhausting.

With greater value placed on extroversion, instant gratification, and the pressure to respond to texts and emails immediately, a highly sensitive person is often left feeling over-stimulated, drained, and overwhelmed.

Through the support of a knowledgeable therapist, as a highly sensitive person you will benefit from the intentional practices of honoring your boundaries and embracing your unique and special strengths.

Strengths of a highly sensitive person include (but are not limited to the following):

• Deeply intuitive and perceptive^​
• Conscientious
• Compassionate and kind
• A great listener, often the friend and family member people turn to the most
• Empathetic and attuned to those around you
• Reflective and thoughtful, thinking before acting or making decisions
• Keen awareness of the subtleties in your environment
• Rich inner-life, often feel like an "old soul" from a young age
• Deeply moved by the arts, nature, and beauty

Having a sensitive nervous system is something you are born with and is completely normal. Being highly sensitivity is not a mental illness and is not something to overcome, but rather a gift to be celebrated!

What type of therapy is best for a highly sensitive person?

Highly Sensitive Persons benefit greatly from psychotherapy. In fact, research shows that highly sensitive persons will respond more than others to positive interventions such as psychotherapy. Therefore, highly sensitive person will often find they experience quicker progress in therapy than most. An Integrative approach to psychotherapy is especially helpful for highly sensitive persons. Relational therapy, along with psychoeducation (learning about your trait), self-compassion, and mind-body approaches are utilized to deepen our work and tend to your sensitive nervous system.

Through Therapy for Highly Sensitive Persons you can:

• Explore your sensitivity with curiosity and kindness. Through a compassionate and curious therapeutic approach, you’ll better understand your unique trait, the ways it impacts you, and how being highly sensitive has helped shape your life.
• Unpack messages you received about yourself and your sensitivity. Learn to process and heal from any painful experiences and wounding. Through meaningful self-exploration we’ll explore your past and shift any unhelpful inner narratives regarding your sensitivity.
• Build upon your unique strengths and simultaneously develop greater self-compassion toward all parts of yourself.
• Develop effective coping strategies to manage over-stimulation and stress. Learn to tend to your sensitive nervous system and experience greater calm and joy.
• Improve your emotional regulation skills. Learn to better manage and regulate intense feelings and mood fluctuations as they arise.

Therapy for Highly Sensitive Persons is a compassionate space that honors your sensitivity and unique lived experience. Liz will support you in understanding your sensitivity and embracing your whole self, sensitivity and all.

Liz Yarock Psychotherapy will help you recognize the extraordinary value inherent in sensitivity, embrace your strengths, and better cope with all of life's stressors.

As someone who personally understands and deeply respects high sensitivity, Liz recognizes the unique challenges that HSPs face and the strength it takes to explore one's sensitivity. She has extensive experience working with highly sensitive women and adolescents as they cope with life’s demands both large and small. Liz is passionate about the transformative power of therapy and helping foster meaningful insight, healing, and lasting growth.