You Were Not Built Wrong — Anxiety, High Sensitivity, and What "Toughen Your Skin" Actually Cost Us

I was told to toughen my skin so many times as a child that I eventually stopped being able to feel the difference between the sensitivity I was born with and the armor I built over it. This episode is about what that costs and what it is actually possible to reclaim.We are talking about anxiety today, what it actually is versus what our families and communities called it, and why the throat clearing and the pacing and the deep breaths with averted eyes that showed up in the people around me were never personality quirks, they were nervous systems doing the only thing they knew how to do with what they were carrying.We are also talking about the highly sensitive person, a neurological trait that Elaine Aron has spent decades researching, that affects approximately fifteen to twenty percent of the population, and that in Black and brown children gets pathologized or hardened out rather than understood and honored. The sensitivity was never the flaw. The world that asked you to amputate it was asking for something it had no right to.This is the third episode in a four part mental health series and it is the one for everyone who was ever told they were too much, too sensitive, too intense, when what they actually were was built for depth in a world that didn't know what to do with that.If anything in this episode brings up feelings that feel bigger than you can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co