Highly Sensitive Personality: Embracing the Gifts

11/17/2025

🌿 Holiday Self-Care for the Highly Sensitive 🌿

The holidays can bring moments of connection and joy — but for highly sensitive personalities, they can also feel overstimulating and emotionally draining.

As a therapist who supports highly sensitive individuals, I encourage you to approach this season with intentional gentleness and mindful boundaries:

✨ Plan for pause — Schedule quiet moments between gatherings. Your nervous system needs time to recharge.
✨ Soothe your senses — Dim lighting, calming scents, soft textures, or nature can help regulate your body.
✨ Honor emotional limits — It’s okay to step away from noise, crowds, or emotionally charged conversations ( yes!! Even in the middle of a gathering!).
✨ Stay grounded — Use breathing exercises, journaling, or a mindful walk to reconnect with your center.
✨ Protect your peace — You don’t have to say “yes” to everything. Setting limits is not selfish — it’s self-care.

Remember: sensitivity is not a weakness; it’s an attunement to the world that simply needs mindful tending.
Give yourself permission to move through the holidays at your own pace. 🕯️

11/12/2025

Very excited to share a refreshed and updated website with more comprehensive resources and additional offerings! There will also be a space to find anything that I post or share in emails!

Very proud of this… as my fellow HSP’s know… change is something we are quite slow with and this was no exception but once I trusted my “creativity” it came together.

I am a licensed psychotherapist (MD/license #11878) who specializes in grief and loss. I partner with bereaved people to help them discover how to live who ...

02/22/2022

Decoding the "why" of their seemingly outsized reactions.

10/13/2021

The struggle is real!
I wish I would have known about this during my kids toddler years- may have saved a lot of stress at getting dressed time.
Paying it forward as parents describe these struggles- and more - related to clothing, being “dirty” or many of the other “annoyances” kids express that seem so small but are completely valid for an HSC☺️

Highly sensitive children & socks are often not best friends. Whether the socks feel itchy or the seam is uncomfortable, socks are a problem.

08/18/2021

My son started his “first “ day of high school today…. So many feelings about this milestone.
Technically, this is the first day of his sophomore year but with the many interruptions of Covid, it’s his first day in a new school with new kids and a new experience.
His last school experience was 8th grade, which, as for everyone, ended unexpectedly and abruptly by Covid.
So much about him and our world has changed since March 2020.
When I looked at my son this past week.. last night at bedtime when I gave my “methodical first day of school talk”(his words ☺️), I look at my little boy( the one I see when I look into his soul) who is now a young man- and think of all that has changed for him in the past 18 months.
His world has changed- spending his freshman year at home and navigating a historical educational year, going out into a new community and playing soccer with boys he had never met- playing baseball for the first time with new peers and constantly having to adapt because of Covid and all the ups and downs that have come with that reality.
While I grieve all the ways Covid has grown my kids up and taken rights of passages and milestone moments from them, I also see a young man whose once uncertainty about himself and his abilities turn into confidence and accomplishments that have allowed him to see for himself that he is as capable as I have always told him he is.
Of course, those affirmations coming from your mom don’t count because “your my mom and your supposed to say that!”
I feel so much for what all of our kids have had to sacrifice, adapt to and miss out on these past 18 months. I feel so much for what the landscape must look like today as they walk back into schools with masks, hand sanitizer stations, assigned seats for contact tracing and whatever other evidence there is that we are still living in a pandemic.
I feel for the uncertainty many may feel after mostly social media relationships and a year of no worries about the awkward in person moments of fitting in or wearing the right thing.
As I looked at my son on the way to school- him taking deep breaths and feeling vulnerable enough to say I am scared- I see the little boy in him alerting him to be on the look out but i also see the young man he has become since 2020 and the way he holds his younger scared self without judgement .
I know this has been an incredibly difficult season of parenting for many and as I look at him, I feel so much gratitude for the ways life has balanced his missed moments with confidence, a great group of friends and the extra time I got with him to support him as he prepared for this day.
Personally, I am entering a new season of parenting - watching him grow and spread his wings knowing that soon he will be on his path to his adult life and simultaneously his sister leaving for college.
There are so many ways that “empty nest” takes shape and I am learning this in real time.
So as my sweet children grow and spread their wings, I am taking inspiration from them and doing the same- growing from a mom of small kids who could be supported with a bed time story or time on my lap to a mom who meets them where they are at. And as they explore and challenge themselves to be courageous and vulnerable, I will continue to do the same as I integrate this identity of a mom with young adult children.
To all the parents out there feeling all of your own stuff, as well as witnessing your kids experience a time we could have never imagined- I hold you in my heart!
We’ve got our babies Momma’s and Daddy’s 💖

07/05/2021

THIS right here!!
I LOVE this, identify with this and find myself having “stern” ( but loving) reminders of this during what is going to be the most authentic joyful “second half” of my Earthly journey!

@ Brené Brown has released her 10th anniversary edition “The Gifts of Imperfection” - one of the only books of hers that did not feel applicable to my life!
However, as she describes, this is a book about mid-life and ripping off armor and stepping into your truest self unapologetically! Whew… what a freeing thought and feeling!

If you can read this book and share with friends/family … anyone who can join in the pull to more of being the you that is screaming to come out… even better!!

The podcast that Brené and her sisters are doing on Spotify is the cherry on top to supplement the book and feel like you are connecting with solid women who GET IT!

Here is to always growing, “becoming” and living fully 💕

It can be scary and the more you trust that inner YOU.. the excitement is often accompanied by curiosity and badass anticipation of what’s next👊🏼

''I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:

I’m not screwing around. It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go.

Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy of love and belonging, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever.

Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through you. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.''

Brené Brown

Artist - Cecile Desserle
Be sure to go like her page.

💕💕💕

If you have not yet liked Breathe it in, please do.

01/19/2021

Take care of yourselves, your energy and your sweet sensitive souls this week

Empaths feel everything more intensely..

01/04/2021

I know that January tends to be long and anticlimactic after the twinkling holiday lights, baking and the energy Christmas and the holidays often bring.
I have been feeling that this January, especially, may come with an extra layer of heaviness and feel a little longer than most with no renewed start to a routine we have all been accustomed too in years and decades past.
Even if our kids aren’t overtly showing or expressing their awareness of this shift, they are likely feeling it at a level they may not be able to express.
Remember- our HSC’s... especially the little ones , feel big emotions that they often can’t articulate. They may manifest as extreme emotional responses to simple changes or disappointments, they may seek extra closeness and some may even have tantrums... often a sign that they are feeling “too much” or “big feelings” that they don’t know what to do with.
As parents, we are their containers and as much self care as we can give ourselves will allow us to support our children during the micro losses that is their “normal.”

Motherhood is easy. Said no one ever. We all have weeks that feel they will never end and the demand on us is incessant. Motherhood is hard.

12/14/2020

2020 has changed the face of grief in so many ways... it has introduced grief to people in a different way than their original belief system about what grief is, it has added layers to individual grief and it has caused many to grieve in so many ways that are counterintuitive at times of loss.

So many are grieving alone, so many are missing that grief community that is so invaluable to having our losses witnessed and validated, it has created micro losses and ambiguous loss in ways we did not even see coming at the start of this pandemic.

My heart aches for every grieving individual for so many reasons and the shame so many feel as they rank their grief as not counting or feeling selfish because “there are so many who have it worse.”

If I can remind you of one thing... there is no hierarchy with grief. Every loss... every experience of grief is real for the individual experiencing it.

The best we can offer each other during this time is the gift of compassion... self compassion and compassion for others. Witnessing without judging and holding space without trying to fix.

Be gentle with yourselves... especially as we navigate the holidays with losses of loved ones, abscence of traditions, continued ambiguous loss that leaves many feeling as though something is missing even if everything appears “ok.”

The first year of grief is complicated, filled with firsts. 2020 is complicated, filled with a different kind of firsts. The intersection of these things is . . . complicated.