Kate: Welcome back to the Selfworthy HSP Summit. My name is Kate, and this is Alissa Boyer . She has a passion for helping fellow highly sensitive people to unapologetically embrace their sensitivity and leverage it as a strength in their lives. She's a creator of the Sensitive Archetypes, founder of the Not Too Sensitive Club, host of the Not Too Sensitive podcast, and author of an upcoming book which will be coming out in May 2027. That's so exciting! Yeah!
... Alissa, and welcome to the summit.
Alissa: Amazing, yes. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here and be part of this.
Kate: I'm happy to have you here. Let's take, a couple of breaths to ground and attune. You can try filling through your side ribs, your waist.
Let that out. And then try filling your belly down even toward your pelvis. And let that out.
And finally, imagine filling up the back of your body, and feeling the length of your spine, your strong back. And letting that out.
So many highly sensitive people grow up believing their sensitivity makes them less capable, but you have built this whole body of work around the idea that sensitivity can be, or is, a strength. What helped you begin to see sensitivity differently?
Alissa: For me, first learning that I was a highly sensitive person and that the trait existed was really eye-opening for me because it felt like the first time there was, like, a possibility that it wasn't a bad thing to be highly sensitive, but rather just it was how I was created, and there were other people who were the same way as me.
So in my experience, just having awareness of the trait was a really great way to open the door to begin seeing sensitivity in a different light. I remember reading the book The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine Aron, and she talked about some of the strengths of being highly sensitive, how we're attuned to other people, and we are...
have extra empathy, and we're intuitive, and things like that. And that Made me start to just feel excited about it. Like, maybe this thing I thought was so bad my whole life actually isn't bad, and there's some unique, cool, traits that come along with it.
The other thing for me was, I wanna live my life feeling good as much as possible. I wanna feel happy, I wanna feel peaceful, and I knew it didn't serve me to think that being sensitive was a burden. It wasn't going to help me feel good in my daily life. I recognized that if I wanted to be happy and live my life in the way that I want, I had to shift my perspective around the way I saw myself.
During the time that I learned I was a highly sensitive person, I really went on a journey of building my confidence and self-worth, and just getting to know myself and accept myself. And so a huge part of that was just learning about the strengths. Of being a highly sensitive person, and that started to help me feel empowered and like, "Oh, this is this cool, unique thing about me," and it just allowed me to start to accept myself more.
It really was a conscious effort of choosing how I wanted to see it.
Kate: You've defined these different strengths, and I feel like the caretaker archetype especially stood out to me for the summit's goal. So why do highly sensitive people so often slip into the role of the emotional caretaker?
Alissa: Yeah, so I see this a lot because of a few reasons.
Our high levels of empathy, just naturally how we're created. We are extra empathetic, so we care a lot about other people. We feel for them. You just can feel it in your body when you're a highly sensitive person. And that in itself is a gift. But because of past conditioning that a lot of highly sensitive people have, a lot of HSPs will find their sense of belonging and worth and value in being the over-giver in their friendships, or in their relationships.
If you don't have high self-confidence and high self-worth, you could find yourself in dynamics of relationships where you're doing more. You're trying to be the savior, the fixer for other people. It's almost like you can use your- empathy and your caring, attuned nature as kind of a kryptonite against yourself.
And that's a lot of what I talk about in my book coming out next year, because I want HSPs to see that being sensitive in itself is not a bad thing. There's such strengths in it, but you do have to recognize when you are operating from a conditioned place, from a place of trying to earn belonging, earn value, earn worth, through actions that are actually hurting yourself.
The trait of empathy and caring in itself is so beautiful and healthy, but you have to be really aware of the place that it's coming from when you are taking these actions. Because there's complete difference between being empathetic and caring about people and conscientious and all of that versus being codependent, over-giving, people-pleasing.
They're not one and the same.
Kate: I remember a student saying, "But I want to please people."
It's totally just where it's coming from.
Alissa: Yes. Exactly. It's a beautiful thing to care and want to please people, but it has to be coming from the right place and not at your own detriment.
Kate: Right. So if there is a sensitive person that has learned to confuse empathy with responsibility for other people's feelings, how can they start to tell the difference between genuinely caring for others and abandoning themselves in the process?
Alissa: Notice the times where you have the urge to overgive, and recognize where that's coming from and what it's feeling like in your body.
The way I explain it is, let's say somebody asks you if you're available to help with something. Pausing before you immediately respond because you might notice that you have this feeling of urgency. Like, "Okay, I have to say yes or they're gonna be mad at me," or, "I have to do this, otherwise they're going to think I'm a bad person, that I don't care about them," or, "If I don't say yes, I'm going to feel guilty," any of those are showing that the place that it's coming from is not necessarily the healthiest place.
It's coming from a place of abandoning yourself to get a certain response from other people so that you can feel safe and okay.
If it's coming from that place, we know that's more of a self-abandonment behavior. Versus if you're coming from healthy empathy, you might notice that it's more from a place of overflow.
Like, "Oh, this feels aligned to me. Yes, I wanna do this. Yes, I have capacity for it," rather than this urgent feeling like, "Oh my gosh, I need to do this or else I'm afraid this will happen." So that's the little thing to look for and feel into.
And once you even have that awareness around the differences in how you might be operating in these different ways, it helps people to start to see these patterns more quickly within themselves.
Kate: Even that pause can be difficult for a lot of people. Just like realizing that we have a choice.
Alissa: Definitely. That alone takes practice to not just have that knee-jerk compulsive reaction. But rather to take a moment to breathe and to feel into your body before you take an action.
Doing the inner work to understand your own abandonment wounds and the reasons why you might be going into these patterns is essential. Because when you can understand, "Oh, this is coming up maybe because of the relationship I had with my parents or because of things that happened to me in school," and you can look beneath the surface at your own hurtful experiences, that can also be helpful. To notice your own patterns.
Coupling all of this with looking within, having support and working through it. It really goes hand-in-hand.
Kate: Yeah, and having the desire for a change.
Alissa: Yes. You have to have that desire. Absolutely.
Kate: As we know, highly sensitive people are incredibly intuitive. But many of us were taught to second-guess ourselves. How does self-abandonment disconnect sensitive people from their inner wisdom?
Alissa: This definitely happens a lot for highly sensitive people because a lot of us, probably grew up hearing,
"You're too sensitive. You're overthinking it. You're making this too big of a deal. You're being dramatic."
The majority of people around you are not highly sensitive and they're living a different reality. Something bothering you or you picking up on a feeling or an energy, other people around you might not understand that.
You probably heard throughout your life, "Oh, you're making this big deal." So over time, this can make a lot of HSPs feel like, "Oh, this is in my head. I'm being dramatic. I'm making this up."
It disconnects you from your intuition. It disconnects you from trusting yourself. And not listening to those intuitive nudges, just outsourcing your power and your decision-making to other people is self-abandonment, right?
So this is why doing the work to come home to yourself, to build your self-worth, to build your self-trust is so important so that you can listen to those intuitive feelings that you have and learn how to trust them and to follow them.
That is something we innately have. You have to trust yourself. And again, there's a lot of conditioning often that blocks HSPs from knowing how to do so.
Kate: Yeah. And luckily we do have some talks that delve into that conditioning.
Alissa: Oh, good. That's great.
Kate: I feel like every single one of these talks interconnects, and it's really beautiful. Somebody called it a symphony.
Alissa: I love that.
Kate: So what becomes possible for highly sensitive people when they no longer believe they have to abandon themselves in order to be loved, safe, or accepted?
Alissa: That's when you can really leverage your sensitivity as your strength. This is when you can go through your life and your intuition helps you to make decisions and live your life in a way that feels magical, where you're looking for synchronicities and you have the confidence to follow through on those little nudges that you're having.
It allows you to use your emotional intelligence as a strength, right? So you can build deeper, more meaningful connections with people. I have a client who I worked with one-on-one, and she's in a sales role. And when she first started, she's like, "I don't know if I'm gonna be good at this. This is very intimidating to me."
Quickly she's become one of the top salespeople at her company because she's highly empathetic, she's highly emotionally intelligent, and she has this very genuine nature about her. She's very warm. So she builds connection with people. She builds trust, and that is huge for building relationships.
But it has to come with confidence, right? Otherwise, if you think about it, if you're like, "Oh, I'm not any good at this, and I'm too sensitive and no one cares what I have to say," then it's gonna be very hard to tap into those strengths. But when you're like,
"I'm good with myself. This is me. Take it or leave it." You can stand more confidently in being who you are, being different than other people, and feeling proud of that. And that allows you to listen to those nudges and to trust the energy you're feeling and the attunement you have to other people.
And it just allows life to work more in your favor. Doesn't feel like you're swimming against the current. You're able to flow with things more easily. It definitely takes effort to get to that place where you're trusting yourself, leaning into your gifts.
Yeah, it's so possible, and it's beautiful things. I have a belief that HSPs have a divine mission to uplift and make a difference in the lives of other people. And for some, that might be on a large scale, impacting thousands of people. For others, that might be in their home or in their workplace.
But what I believe is that when you are confident as an HSP, you can literally go around and impact other people in beautiful ways. But you have to be in that place of believing in yourself and in your strengths first.
Kate: But we can't just jump right to the confidence. We kind of need to have acceptance and self-awareness. Which your free gift, if you'd like to talk about that, really helps with that self-awareness piece.
Alissa: Yes, definitely. When you can recognize the ways that you are holding yourself back currently, the blocks, the shadows that are holding you back, then you can start working through them.
Awareness is everything. Having that first place of knowing where to start. For me, the hugest blocks I had as a highly sensitive person were being highly self-critical, comparing myself to other people. When I started to just work through those things, recognize, "Where did this stem from? Why am I doing this?"
Noticing the things that trigger me, that cause me to go into those old patterns. Then, one by one, I could just start working through it.
Life is our classroom, triggers are our teachers, 'cause you're gonna get triggered by things. So for me, it would be like, " I did a presentation and I stumbled over my words, and that harsh self-critic would come up.
But when I could support myself through it and recognize where that came from, bit by bit I started to become more accepting of myself. Healed those old wounds, bit by bit.
But you're right, you can't just jump from fear to confidence. It takes work, and self-acceptance is the roadmap there.
My sensitive archetype quizzes. The shadow archetype quiz, highlights five of the main shadows or limiting beliefs that I see in highly sensitive people. When you take that quiz, most people have a range of several of the shadows, and that's totally normal. And with each result you get a free mini training to help you start working through it. Things that you can apply to your life right away.
And then my strength archetype quiz helps you to see your main strengths as a highly sensitive person.
The way I see it is the more you work through your shadows, the more easily you can tap into your strengths. So with the strengths I also give you practical ways that you can start leaning into those and you can share about it with your friends which I think is also super empowering for highly sensitive people.
So those quizzes go hand-in-hand. It's a really beautiful roadmap of what's possible for you and what to work through to help you amplify the strengths that are already within you.
Kate: What an amazing creative gift that you offered us, so thank you.
Thank you ... so much, Alissa.
Alissa: My pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Kate: Thank you for joining us.
