“What if you’re not an asshole, you’re just overwhelmed a lot?”

This is a question I recently asked one of my private coaching clients, who I’ve been helping understand that the vast majority of behaviors and personality traits she’s been beating herself up about for decades are actually the result of being an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person), and thus constantly getting overwhelmed and overstimulated.
A few months ago, this client came to me with a long list of things she wanted to change about herself, including “take everything less personally,” “be more laid-back,” and “stop being such an asshole to my partner.”
Her previous strategy for how to do this, which she’d been trying (unsuccessfully) to implement her whole adult life, was pretty much to just try harder.
Try harder to stop caring what people think, and worrying that people were secretly mad at her.
Try harder to be chill.
Try harder to stop being so critical and controlling, and try harder to stop lashing out.
Now, if you’ve ever tried to willpower your way out of deeply rooted patterns of behavior and identity, you probably already know from experience that it doesn’t really work.
This is one of the biggest tenets of my work as a body neutrality coach– that if it was possible to overcome body image issues by just trying harder, you would have done it by now.
The alternative to using willpower to try to change these kinds of patterns (and, frankly, the only effective option available to us) is to look at their root causes, understand that they always serve a deeper purpose, and identify how they’re trying to help or protect us.
When working with a client struggling with body image issues, this means figuring out exactly how their body anxiety, shame, and hatred are helping (or at least attempting to help) solve a problem, earn them something they want, avoid something they don’t want, or meet a deep emotional need.
That insight allows us to work backwards to figure out what’s required to strip our body image issues of power, and eventually make them obsolete.
This strategy is effective because it addresses the root cause of the pattern on the level it was created (ie: the deeper, subconscious, and emotional parts of us), rather than on the superficial and conscious levels we usually interact with it in. And while this kind of internal growth and healing work certainly requires a significant amount of effort, the changes that occur tend to feel organic and effortless.
For example, a person going through this process will most likely end up having very different thoughts and feelings in and about their body, but not because they tried to feel differently. They also might end up with very different habits around food, exercise, rest, pleasure, relationships, and self-expression, but again, not because they tried to change their habits.
It can be a frustrating truism that the kinds of changes people want most for themselves can’t actually happen as the result of hard work and effort, despite what our society teaches us. Instead, these kinds of changes tend to occur naturally when we set aside our conscious goals and self-judgment, and instead explore/dismantle the deeper root causes of patterns, habits, and traits that aren’t serving us.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been helping clients apply this exact strategy to issues that range far wider than just body image.
After all, there’s not much of a difference between feeling shame about your body shape/size, and feeling shame about your financial situation, or the way you show up in relationships. There’s not much of a difference between obsessively trying to control your food and weight, and obsessively trying to control your career, or other people’s behavior. And there’s not much of a difference between desperately wishing you looked different, and desperately wishing you felt different.
In the end, all of these patterns have deeper root causes, and they exist (on a subconscious, primal level) to try to help or protect you in some way– and in order to dismantle and overcome these patterns, you have to start with self-awareness, self-acceptance, and curiosity.

Going back to my HSP client, she had been wishing for decades that she was just a different kind of person, and her attempts to willpower her way into becoming that different kind of person kept her from ever deeply considering who she actually is, and what she actually needs to thrive.
As it turns out, her “natural state” is simply to be incredibly sensitive to stimulus. And when that sensitivity isn’t being properly honored and protected, she naturally gets overwhelmed.
Having never heard of HSP before however, my client (like many of us!) spent a lifetime thinking she “shouldn’t be” so sensitive, trying to effort her way into being “normal,” and ignoring her own authentic needs and boundaries… which meant she ended up getting overwhelmed a lot.
Once she gets overwhelmed, her deeply rooted patterns of self-protection cause her to spiral into anxiety, try to control everything, and criticize or start fights with her partner. Over time—as we so often do in these situations—my client eventually mistook these patterns for her identity.
After looking back at decades of subconscious attempts to process, prevent, and protect her sensitive system against overwhelm, she dubbed them negative personality traits, and felt her only option to be a “good person” was to try harder to eradicate these parts of herself.
Luckily, as my client has come to truly acknowledge and understand her sensitive nature, she’s been able to identify her own specific needs, boundaries, and “overwhelm triggers,” and implement new strategies for both preventing and navigating the discomfort of overwhelm in healthier and more direct ways.
In other words, she’s working to make her negative patterns obsolete, exactly like we do with body image issues, so that they can kind of just fade into the background of our lives— no willpower required.
For what it’s worth, the more I’ve learned about HSP over the last year, the more convinced I’ve become that understanding and embracing our natural sensitivity levels is the key to thriving, and we need to be talking about it more.
If my client’s story resonates with you (or you want to stop trying to change yourself using willpower, and are ready to explore and dismantle the root cause of any patterns or traits that bother you), I would love to work with you!
I have upcoming small-group coaching spots available still, in two separate twelve-week coaching programs.
One group is for HSPs who want to learn to stop feeling so overwhelmed all the time and learn to thrive. The other is for folks looking to finally overcome body image issues, and cultivate a morally neutral relationship to food, weight, exercise, or the way they look.
I also have a few private one-on-one coaching spots opening up soon!
No matter what your goals are, or what topics you’re struggling with… if you want help getting to the root cause and making changes without relying on “willpower,” I’ve got you.
I’m loving getting to apply my bottom-up coaching style to topics beyond body image, and I can’t wait to hear what you’re working on.
Also, if you’re looking for a super low-cost way to get support or learn more, my monthly Patreon Community Zoom Call will happen this Thursday January 16th at 6:30pm ET, and we’ll be talking all about how to thrive as an HSP!
To get the zoom link, just join my Patreon at the $5/month level or higher– hope to see you there!
Big hug,
Jessi
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