I recently taught a continuing education seminar for mental health professionals with Leading Edge Seminars. This seminar is taught with mental health professionals in mind, but it is also great for other health and educational professionals, or even for HSPs themselves who might be therapy clients. The great news, the workshop is available “On Demand” and is quite affordable for 3 CEs. It is CAN$60 or US$45.  Below you will find the list of questions that I addressed throughout the webinar–a lot of questions. If you are interested, I invite you to register and listen/watch at your leisure.

Identifying, Treating, and Understanding Highly Sensitive People

Alane Freund, MS, MA, LMFT

International Consultant on High Sensitivity

• Does HSP help inform approaches to learning disorders?
• What are some other examples of subtle sensitivities to stimuli?
• Can you speak more to the estimate of 30% of the HSP trait in the population, as I had previously mostly seen the 10 – 20%?
• The response re: learning disorders leads me to wonder about HSP and possible overlaps with autistic spectrum disorders.
• What’s the relationship between this trait and epigenetics factors?
• Is Auditory Processing Disorder part of HSP?
• As a person who answered “yes” to every question on the self-test, I often find I am highly reactive to tactile stimuli.  Would you comment on this? There were no items related to this in the self-test.
• I find that after very full days that include a lot of effort on my part, that I need 8-9 hours of sleep at night to “integrate” all of that activity.  Would you comment on that please?
• What are your thoughts on the relationship between HSP’s and attachment style?
• Do you think you can talk about highly sensitive families?
• Can you say a bit more about the higher response to positive experiences in HSPs? What is a higher response? Would that be just that it is arousing, draining?
• Does this trait correlate with awareness of time or timeliness?
• Do you know if someone who shows some characteristics of high functioning autism is more HS person. They have not been diagnosed but family wonders.
• Do you collaborate with occupational therapists when you work with HSP children and adults?
• Regarding differential sexuality. Is there any study regarding  “resolution timings” after orgasm? As it is getting trendy to say “everyone can be multiorgasmic” and from the HSP frame it looks it could go either ways : more sensitive= need for longer resolution time or more easily “reactivated”.
• Since traits are not something you outgrow can you be very sensitive as a child and then not have the same sensitivity as an older adult?
• In regards to discussing designing a life for your HS trait, can you speak to the possible difficulty then with flexibility? (i.e. life interrupting routines etc.)
• Please comment on medication and HSP. I am taking a medication that I feel is not good for me. Secondly could you please comment on a rich inner life?
• Since Personality disorders are developed later in life and HSP is something we are born with, it looks like after therapy the HSP (Borderline for instance) could “adapt his/her lifestyle” and learn how to handle his/her “ups and downs” (due to their higher response to therapy.) But can the Personality disorder really disappear after adapting and attending their HSP needs?
• Can you recommend resources to support HSPs that have difficulty focusing … I have been using guided meditation and would love other resources to provide
• Is there a high rate of HSP diagnosed with fibromyalgia or IBS?