HSP therapy in Nelson, BC

Everything feels louder, brighter, more intense. You notice subtleties others miss—shifts in someone's mood, tension in a room, the hum of fluorescent lights that no one else seems to hear. You absorb emotions from the people around you, and by the end of a busy day, you're not just tired—you're depleted in a way that's hard to explain. You need substantial time alone to process what you've taken in, and without it, you start to shut down or feel overwhelmed by life's ordinary demands.

If you're highly sensitive, you've likely spent years managing a nervous system that processes the world more deeply than most people's do. Maybe you've tried traditional talk therapy and found that while insights helped you understand yourself, they didn't change how overwhelmed you still felt. You're looking for approaches that actually work with how your nervous system functions—not against it.

What it means to be highly sensitive

High sensitivity is a neurobiological trait affecting 15-30% of the population. It's not a disorder or something that needs fixing. Your nervous system simply processes information more thoroughly—you pick up on subtleties, feel emotions intensely, and need more time to digest experiences. This depth of processing is why overstimulation happens: you're taking in and analysing far more than most people do, and that eventually exceeds your system's capacity.

Your brain shows more activity in areas related to awareness, empathy, and detailed processing than non-HSPs encountering the same situation. This isn't overthinking—it's your brain doing what it's designed to do. The challenge isn't your nervous system itself; it's living in environments that rarely account for how you're wired.

What makes sensitivity particularly complex is that it's not just a vulnerability—it's responsiveness. In harsh or invalidating environments, highly sensitive people struggle more than others. But in supportive, attuned environments, they often exceed them. Your nervous system isn't fragile; it's highly responsive to conditions around you.

You were never "too sensitive"

If you've spent years hearing that phrase, you know how it lands. It suggests the problem is you—that you need to change, toughen up, stop being so affected. But that framing was never accurate. Your nervous system isn't broken or excessive. It's built to process deeply, sense subtly, and respond to environmental cues that others don't register.

Why body-centred therapy works for highly sensitive people

If you've done talk therapy before, you may have experienced the gap between understanding your patterns and actually feeling different. You can articulate where your anxiety comes from, name your attachment style, explain why you respond the way you do—and still feel just as overwhelmed when you walk into a crowded room or absorb someone else's distress.

That gap exists because insights alone don't shift nervous system patterns. Your body holds the overwhelm, the hypervigilance, the shutdown responses. And if you're highly sensitive, your awareness of body sensations is already heightened—you feel the tightness in your chest, the shakiness, the exhaustion more acutely than most people do. This enhanced awareness, which can feel like a burden, is actually what makes body-centred approaches so effective for you.

Somatic Experiencing® and body-centred therapy work directly with your nervous system rather than trying to reason with it. We track physical sensations, notice where activation lives in your body, and help your system complete responses it couldn't complete before. The work happens in small, manageable amounts so you're never pushed into overwhelm. We move between states of activation and calm, helping your nervous system learn that it can experience stress and return to regulation. The approach respects your need for gentleness while building actual capacity for life's demands.

Craniosacral therapy offers another pathway particularly suited to highly sensitive people. Through subtle touch and deep listening to your body's rhythms, it helps your nervous system shift into states of profound rest where healing happens organically. For people who absorb so much from their environment, this kind of receptive, wordless support can be deeply regulating. You're letting your body's own intelligence guide the process.

Both approaches meet you where your sensitivity already lives—in your body's felt experience—and work with your responsiveness rather than against it.

What becomes possible

The goal isn't to stop being sensitive. It's to move from constant overwhelm to having capacity for what matters to you. When your nervous system learns it can regulate—that activation doesn't have to spiral into shutdown—you gain access to the gifts that come with depth of processing.

You start using your perceptiveness as the strength it actually is. The same sensitivity that picks up on threat also notices beauty, reads emotional nuance, generates creative insight, and enables profound empathy. You develop skills for managing overstimulation before it becomes a crash. You learn to set boundaries that protect your energy without cutting yourself off from connection. And you begin recognising which environments and relationships support your nervous system rather than depleting it.

This approach is for you if:

You're easily overwhelmed by noise, crowds, bright lights, or intense emotional environments. You absorb other people's emotions and carry them without meaning to. You need substantial time alone to process what you've taken in, and without that recovery time, you start to feel frayed or shut down. You've maybe wondered if there's something different about how your nervous system works—if you're highly sensitive, or neurodivergent in some way. You've been told you're "too sensitive" and you know that's not helpful, but you're also aware that something needs to shift in how you manage your nervous system. You want approaches that respect how you're wired—that help you regulate without asking you to become someone you're not.

Getting started

I work with highly sensitive people both in person in Nelson, BC and online throughout British Columbia. If you're in the West Kootenay region (Nelson, Castlegar, Trail, Kaslo), you have the option of counselling, craniosacral therapy, or both.

Learn more about counselling or craniosacral therapy, or read about working with anxiety and emotional regulation—common concerns for highly sensitive people.

Contact me to book a free 20-minute consultation, or get started to learn what to expect.