Is this love? A life quandary for highly sensitive people in all relationships– romantic, family, work, friendship, and with oneself. How do we express and act with love, especially when strong emotions can be so overstimulating?

Sometimes it feels like you might as well just stick with loving the forest, the sky, the ocean, the sunrise, or your dog. And yet, your HSP heart pulls you with strong empathy to be in relationship with others. You love hard and well. You need those close heart connections, and you need them to nourish you rather than drain you. 

In this masterclass, and in honor of HSP Love Month, we tackled common and difficult questions about love in the life of highly sensitive people. Welcoming back special guest Sage Lewis, we addressed all questions and scenarios you brought to this month of love. Read on for more thoughts on the HSP love of love. 

You think it’s love, but then it doesn’t feel reciprocated or even. It’s such hard work. How is your love picker? Do you find yourself loving others who are not able to love you unconditionally? What is the solution?

Just like love, heartbreak and disappointment can be more profound for a highly sensitive person. Your strong emotions and deep processing lead you to think and feel more than people without the trait of high sensitivity, and that can lead you down dark paths.

What is love? How do you know when you are loving, when your love is landing with someone the way you intend or the way they need.

What is the relationship between empathy and love?

Is helping love?

How do you love?

How does love appear in these four quadrants:  home, work, self, family?

"I think love is very confusing for sensitive people… it can look like conditions or even codependency.

Do you get your needs met by being of service?

INTERVENTIONS:

• Recognizing High Sensitivity 
• Heart Hug exercise
•  Couple Weekend Date Plan 
•  Make yourself HOT 
• Full Bucket 

QUESTIONS:

Question for Alane and Sage: suggestions for meditation methods for HSPs, or ways to calm or quiet the mind that are simple and easy to use, and don't take a lot of time as my focus is limited.

1. Can you talk about how an HSP could experience love and intimacy differently than non-HSPs?  I'm particularly curious about romantic and platonic love, sexual attraction, and asexuality - but also welcome commentary on familial love, self love, and love from "the universe." 
2. What is love? That is a question I’ve been asking myself a long time.  I’ve experienced childhood emotional and physical neglect by parents who said they loved me. There were many manifestations of abuse delivered with the words “this is for your own good” or “this is because I love you.”  In adulthood, I experienced sexual violence by a person who said he did it as a way to express love. My current and long term intimate partner relationship has been more practical than emotionally or spiritually nourishing.  I know that it also is not realistic to rely on one person for what an entire village historically used to provide, paraphrasing Esther Perel. However, it’s been a struggle to find the rest of my village. I know that while I’ve been in neglectful, abusive, and draining relationships, I’ve also loved and have been loved in healthy relationships, but most of those had a season and are gone.  I remember clearly and vividly feeling wholly loved for all of me by my first boyfriend in high school - now decades ago.  I remember feeling loved by my cat of 20 years who with her love, vibrating purrs, and biscuit making helped me mentally survive the years with my parents.  I cherished her even though I was allergic, and I cherish these memories of love - and I am sad they seem few and far between.  When I was a kid, I had hoped that loneliness would magically go away in adulthood (this was likely part of my “escape fantasy”) but it hasn’t. I know that the most important thing I can work on is self love and to re-parent and it may take as many years or a lifetime to learn to do this. I am committed to doing this and am doing so with a therapist.  In the meantime, I’m not quite sure what love is anymore, especially with other people as I’ve experienced so much betrayal and challenges. And it’s still lonely as f***.  It’s challenging to balance my strong desire for close, deep relationships with non-attachment and acceptance that I may never get what I crave in a sustained fashion.  I’ve wondered if my expectations of people are too high.  Maybe some of them are, but I think most of them are not “too” anything - just a result of my uniqueness.  I have actually had to work on the contrary - to hold higher standards and work on people-pleasing.  How can I be happy now while knowing that I want more love in my life (both to give and receive with people in a healthy way)?  I know I have a trauma history and also want to listen to and strengthen my intuition; how do I recognize what love is or if I have idealized expectations?
3. What is love?  As I've gotten older, I've had increasing difficulty saying those words to people I do care about a lot (family, friends, my intimate partner, etc.).  Admittedly, my thinking pattern is often very "intense" and "meta" (quoting some lovely, likely-non-HSPs in my life, haha) and existential - whether they have to do with love or other things.  I have difficulty with the fact that love feels like an abstract concept and subjective; I've observed people using the phrase in passing, which makes it feel overused and with little thought - similar to the phrase "how are you?".  I also have great difficulty grappling with the fact that the phrase "I love you" is often in close conjunction with actions that do not seem loving.  My deep thoughts on this are likely from a lot of trauma I've experienced from people who I've loved and who have said they love me.  My question :  1) How do I arrive at a place where I feel like I know what love is for me and how can I find an authentic expression of it?   2) How do I find a verbal expression of love that doesn’t feel so weighty and full of existential thought (even though I do embrace that I find love and care very deep and meaningful things)? 
4. For highly sensitive people who are also high sensation seeking, how does our high sensation seeking impact us in love? Some “positives” and “negatives”. 
5. As an HSP, we are spiritual and highly conscientious hence we may have needs beyond just a partner and a family. I don’t think these need to be independent or incompatible endeavours in and of themselves but it can definitely impact and affect each other negatively if they are not aligned.
6. I have overcome so much, learning the journey of self love and how being an HSP impacts the way I love myself and others, I now prioritize my self-love first so I have enough to give to everyone else most importantly my kids, as a mother, partner HSP, worker, etc all the roles we play, lately I have been trying to ask myself do i need to fill my own cup or empty anything out of my cup so I don't get overstimulated and that seems to have been helping any tips or exercises you can share that are great for self-love as an HSP? 
7.  I have been in a Life Partner type relationship for nearly 18 years. As I am discovering my authentic self and what I really want and need vs. being a people pleaser who hates conflict and therefore has tried to live up to what society, family, friends, etc. expect me to be/act, I am realizing my partner and I seem to be on diverging paths with different “definitions” or “expectations” of what type relationship we want, what it means to be a “Life Partner”, and his focus on a metaphysical “exit from this world/reality” while I am learning how to handle the struggles of life IN THIS world/reality. When some issues about our relationship developed a bit over a year ago I tried talking with him and expressing my feelings/emotions, and related concerns/questions. The response I received essentially rejected and dismissed all of it. I have been unable to bring myself to discuss hardly anything about our relationship since then (protective and coping mechanism, I know, and am working on this with my counselor). He has openly stated “I’m self-centered and narcissistic” and until recent years I didn’t seem to have an issue with it – until I began to search for and discover my authentic self. I have several questions related to this situation: 
1. How do I tell if what I have been calling “love” is truly loving him, or simply co-dependence?
2. I love him, or have thought so for years – but lately I’ve been questioning whether I really do or not. Is it possible to stop loving someone? Or is my hesitation in saying “I love you” or sending a heart emoji in a text, simply a symptom of the emotional turmoil and stress I am experiencing in trying to figure out what I really want in life and this relationship specifically?
3. My counselor and I have been working on items related to this relationship for over a year now, and I have come to recognize that intentional or not, he often gaslights me, has just about zero Emotional Intelligence (or at least in the types of emotional support I want/need from a life partner), and am seeing symptoms of the classic “domestic abuse” situation in our relationship from an emotional/mental standpoint. I don’t believe he says/does these things consciously to cause me pain/harm. I vacillate between wanting to stay or leave the relationship part, yet because I believe I love him and I enjoy spending time together on a “friendship” type level, I have a lot of conflict in my decision making. In my indecision, I find myself wanting to end the life partner relationship and try to keep the friendship part. I don’t know if I am capable of that, whether he will be willing to only keep the friend part, or if that is even a healthy decision. Any thoughts or suggestions? 
8. Love has always been an abstract concept vs. an experiential reality for me. I liken myself to someone who is colorblind. I cognitively accept that love exists, but the hues and saturation elude me. I grew up with an alcoholic father who was sexually abusive and a high-functioning autistic mother. I have complex PTSD as a result. I have worked and continue to work in therapy to heal, but love remains a mystery to me. I have recently discovered (within the last year) that I am an HSP, and I hope that since therapy can prove especially helpful for HSPs, love is something I will eventually experience and not just accept as fact through faith. My questions are, are some things broken beyond repair? If essential childhood bonding did not occur, is it something I can learn as an adult? And how does being and HSP impact the healing journey? 
9. Good day, beautiful community! I started my self-realizing and healing journey because of the burning question : why can I not feel love like other people? After almost 7 years of soul searching, I believe that although I am an HSP, I had to lock all my emotions away in Order to belong and be safe in my family of origin. I still struggle to feel love (or any emotion for that matter) unless it is strong enough to overwhelm me. I am grateful that I can at least feel something, but I am yearning for a full emotional life with its ups and downs. Do you have any advice about how I can access blocked emotions and how I can establish a constant connection with my emotional World? I feel that I am missing my most precious resources and that my life is empty without them. Thank you very much!
10. My makeup is one dominated by sensitive, water energy. My spouse’s makeup is dominated by practical earth energy. On a practical level, our partnership is very fulfilling (kids, house, joint retirement planning, etc). But I don’t feel a soulful connection. And I don’t think I would be allowed to seek out that type of connection with another person because it would likely threaten the foundation of the marriage. How can I find a deep, soulful connection with another while staying in this marriage. I see my tween HSP child also looking for this type of connection and being disappointed in her friend options. I don’t want to set her up for future problems by us finding this type of connection in one another. That seems too intertwined for a parent/child relationship.