On Highly Sensitive People & Overcoming Feeling Misunderstood
Originally written by Gaby Ramos & Kaitlin Kindman; updated and maintained by Kindman & Company in 2026
If you often feel misunderstood—like people experience you as “too sensitive,” “too emotional,” or “too easily overwhelmed,” you’re not alone.
For highly sensitive people (HSPs), feeling different or unseen can become a familiar and painful experience, especially when others don’t understand the depth with which you process emotions, relationships, and your environment.
But being sensitive isn’t a flaw you need to overcome. Understanding your sensitivity can help you make sense of why you may feel misunderstood, respond with less self-criticism, and build relationships and communities where you feel more seen and understood.
To explore how, I sat down with Gaby Ramos, one of our therapists and a highly sensitive person herself, to talk about feeling misunderstood as an HSP—and how mindfulness, self-understanding, and connection can help.
For a long time, I thought sensitivity was a flaw. But here’s the shift: 15–20% of us have a unique neurobiology. Our brains literally process sensory information more deeply.
Being a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) means you're more in tune with beauty and empathy, but it can also feel like an affliction. To help us navigate the 'overwhelm,' I sat down with Gaby Ramos, one of our therapists, to discuss how to turn sensitivity into your greatest strength
Thanks to Gaby Ramos, one of our fabulous therapists, who sat down with me to have a brief chat about some common challenges that HSPs encounter and offer us some quick and easy mindfulness tips to go from feeling overwhelmed and misunderstood to confident and seen.
Why Do Highly Sensitive People Feel So Misunderstood?
KK: Gaby, can you tell us a little bit about working with highly sensitive people and some common challenges?
GR: I identify as a highly sensitive person and I think that across the board, what I hear frequently is that we're often misunderstood.
Our trait is relatively unknown and our experiences can make us feel like we don’t belong. I think that's one of the biggest challenges that highly sensitive people have.
Why Does Being Misunderstood Hurt So Much?
Feeling misunderstood isn’t just frustrating. Feeling seen and understood is deeply connected to our sense of belonging and safety in relationships. When your emotions, needs, or ways of experiencing the world are repeatedly dismissed or misinterpreted, it can become easy to wonder whether you’re the problem.
For highly sensitive people, repeated experiences of being told that you’re “too much,” overreacting, or taking things too personally can contribute to the self-critical cycle Gaby describes below. Instead of trusting what you feel, you may start questioning whether your emotional experience is valid at all.
KK: Feeling different or other is incredibly painful. I have definitely heard a lot of stories around a lack of belonging, and know it for myself as an HSP as well. What are one or two tips that you would recommend for how people can find more belonging and navigate the highly sensitive trait?
GR: I think there's a core piece of falling into a self-critical cycle, because of being misunderstood and feeling like we don’t belong. We tend to kind of turn inward and feel really pretty threatened by the environment and unsafe.
How to Cope With Feeling Misunderstood
And I think that’s where it starts—is trying to find that safety in ourselves.
Practicing mindful and grounding techniques has been really helpful for me to continue going inward but in a really safe space. I think that that is, as long as it's something that we practice and that we're mindful about, it can be really, really beneficial for HSPs.
Mindfulness in the Moment
KK: Can you give our readers one example of a helpful mindfulness exercise?
GR: Yeah, I’ve shared this with you. It's helpful for me to tune into some kind of recording or music that's really calming. I find the ocean waves really calming for me. In moments of stress, I find myself kind of going back to those mindful techniques and go ahead and close my eyes.
I think about the ocean waves. I'll think about how calm the waves are and I'll visualize the ocean breeze and the sun hitting my face. It seems really easy and I think it can be, and it can be really helpful when we feel those moments of stress, to go to those safe spaces and close our eyes for five to ten minutes and try to find that inner peace.
KK: Absolutely. That's something that all of us can do, right? We all have some safe space—maybe in nature or at the beach? And to take a moment and visualize it and connect with it with all of our senses to ground and soother our nervous system. And as HSPs our nervous system can easily feel really on fire or feel very wild. So Gaby, you’re gearing up right now to put a group together for HSPs, the HSP Empowerment Group. What would you say one of the key benefits for people who joined your group would be?
GR: I think it's really helpful to be around people who share our temperament and share similar experiences.
I think it's so validating to share in community and in a space where we can feel seen, heard and understood. And I get so excited about this topic because I think it's been really groundbreaking for me to be in environments where I'm really validated, where I feel really seen and heard. We get a chance to not only share our experiences, but to also learn more about our trait and learn other grounding and mindful tips to help regulate and soothe our nervous system when it feels like it's on fire.
How to Be Okay With Being Misunderstood
Part of feeling more secure in your sensitivity is recognizing that being understood by everyone isn’t actually possible. There will be people who misunderstand your emotions, needs, boundaries, or ways of moving through the world, and that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to explain yourself better.
The goal isn’t to become so skilled at communicating that no one ever misunderstands you. It’s to develop enough trust in yourself that someone else’s perception of you doesn’t automatically become your perception of yourself.
That might mean getting curious about whether there’s something useful in another person’s feedback, communicating more clearly when a relationship matters to you, and learning when you can let someone misunderstand you without abandoning yourself in an effort to change their mind.
You Deserve Relationships Where You Feel Understood.
Being highly sensitive isn't something to fix—it's something to understand, honor, and support. Therapy can help you build relationships that feel safer, strengthen your connection with yourself, and learn to trust your sensitivity rather than fear it.
→ Meet Our Relational Therapists
We also recommend reading our Empath’s Guide to Navigating a World in Crisis as a Highly Sensitive Person to get some very helpful tips on how to protect your energy, mind, and heart in an ever-challenging sociopolitical climate.