Why We Need All Types

William Allen 0:00

We need all types. We do need those people on lower end of sensitivity that may take more risk, the people that push things forward. And our society tends to praise those people and reward them very, very well. But what's really cool about what's going on now in the world, and especially with more awareness about high sensitivity, is we're starting to recognize our gifts and what the world needs from us, and especially right now.

Meet William Allen And The Topic

April Snow 0:34

Welcome to Sensitive Stories, the podcast for the people who live with hearts and eyes wide open. I'm your host, psychotherapist and author April Snow. I invite you to join me as I deep dive into rich conversations with fellow highly sensitive people that will inspire you to live a more fulfilling life as an HSP without all the overwhelm. In this episode, I talk with William Allen about the complex journey of embracing your high sensitivity, the challenges faced by HSP men, and acknowledging your natural resilience and awareness. William is an author with a writer's heart and researcher's mind. After getting a degree in psychology with an eye on doing research, he recalibrated for a career in information technology. After retiring early from his corporate job, he then started a hypnocoaching and neurofeedback brain training business in Bend, Oregon. Then in late 2016, he began his blog, The Sensitive Man, about his experiences as a highly sensitive man. The blog became the genesis of his first book, Confessions of a Sensitive Man. His newest book, on being a sensitive man, focuses on how to live in the world, and he feels that HSP males need to take their keen insights and intuition and make them public. He would like to shed more light on highly sensitive males and the much-needed role they need to take in our society. For more HSP resources and to see behind the scenes video from the podcast, join me on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube at Sensitive Strengths, or sign up for my email list. Links are in the show notes and at sensitivestories.com. And just a reminder that this episode is for educational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for treatment with a mental health or medical professional.

Discovering The HSP Trait Late

April Snow 2:28

Let's dive in with a Phil, can you start off by telling us your HSP discovery story, how and when you realize that you're a highly sensitive person?

William Allen 2:55

Oh, sure, absolutely. It's actually kind of an evolution. As I had noted as a highly sensitive person, because you know how aware we are of things and how we interact with our environment, I knew from childhood there was something different about me. Of course, I heard over and over again many times, well, you know, you're too sensitive and you're too emotional and you too handle criticism too poorly. So I started getting sort of socialized to this idea to the term sensitive as a child, although it wasn't in the best of lights. And I grew up, you know, went through my adulthood, early adulthood, college experiences, having a family, and work career and everything else. And I didn't know that this was a trait until about 2005. I was probably about 50, 55 years old when I found out about it. As a trait, it's something you know, you know that you're different that way, but a lot of times you get a little too judgmental to with yourself because it doesn't sort of fit into the norm. But Douglas Eby had a newsletter. I really got drawn to him because he was a psychologist and was also involved in some way in the film industry. And I thought those are two great combinations that I was I like. And he had suggested at that time to read a book about high sensitivity, which was Elaine's book on her first book.

April Snow 4:24

Yes.

William Allen 4:24

So I picked up the book and I read it. And you know, I went through it and it was like everything was me. Yep, that's me, that's me, that's me. But you know, at the end of the day, April, it was hard for me to get my head and heart wrapped around the idea of being a sensitive man. It just all those years of conditioning and being told this, that, and the other about sensitivity or my emotionality or any of the traits that we have that are associated with sensitivity was a bad thing. So I acknowledged it, but I didn't embrace it and I didn't accept it. It took me almost 10 years after that, after I had retired from my career, to sit down and start blogging about high sensitivity. And so it was in that process of writing and researching, and I was asking questions that I didn't see anybody else writing about. They were about highly sensitive men, they were about circumstances that highly sensitive men would be in, and so forth and so on. And that was my initial self-education about the trait, and that was the thing that got me to the point where I put my arms around it and said, I'm okay with this. This is who I am. And the rest is history, so as they say. I wrote two books about it, and that was in and of itself a great self-discovery on what the trait was. But that's kind of how I came about. It was a long way, long journey, but it's taken me to where I am today.

April Snow 5:57

It's amazing. What you're sharing is so it resonates so much. And I've heard other stories that are similar where we know there's something different about us early on in life, just by how people respond to our emotions, our experience, or how our experience is so different. But it's different than knowing this is a trait. This is something specific that a lot of people go through. You said it took you about 10 years to embrace it. That's from 2005 to 2015.

William Allen 6:23

Yes.

April Snow 6:24

Wow. Okay. It's a long journey, isn't it, to accept it, especially when you've been told it's a negative, it's a it's a deficit, especially as a highly sensitive man.

William Allen 6:33

Yeah. And and you know, and I would never tell anybody that I was highly sensitive. I wouldn't just start a conversation about I was a little bit embarrassed, like I said, because of the past training that I had gotten and socialization that I'd gotten as a child. And I grew up in a very conservative part of the country in the South. This is the way men are supposed to behave, and they don't do these things, and those are feminine things, and you don't want to go there. So it was going against that indoctrination that, you know, was something I finally just was able to challenge in my own head. And I'm glad I did.

April Snow 7:09

Yeah. It has to be so counterintuitive to go against what you've been told, almost like going against your own survival or your own acceptance at that deep level of this is how men are supposed to be, this is what's acceptable, and then needing to rewrite that. It must have been incredibly difficult.

William Allen 7:25

It it was challenging. I'll put it that way. But the the idea was that you're absolutely right. When you start to realize you're living inauthentically, and to me, that you know, because as a highly sensitive person, I think we put a lot of emphasis on meaning and purpose in life. And when you start to realize you're walking a path that's not, that's not you, and to start opening the door and liberating yourself to being who you really are. That's one of the greatest, I think, gifts of enlightenment for yourself that any person can have. And I was really glad to be able to do that.

April Snow 8:00

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's so important. We often aren't living authentically. We're putting ourselves in a box, we're denying parts of ourselves, we're cutting off our emotions as much as we can. I'm curious, when you started to embrace the trait, what started to shift in your life? If there's anything you can point to?

William Allen 8:17

I think, well, first of all, I was on a path of self-acceptance. That was really hard for me up to that point, is to start accepting who I was. But then I started realizing about the traits themselves, the fact that I had compared myself over the years, especially at work, about how I process things differently than other people do. I process emotions differently. I tend to be more empathetic, you know, like a highly sensitive people are. And so learning about this as a trait, and there were behaviors that I had gone through in my life, because I wasn't living authentically, I was doing things that were counterproductive to me. And I started to realize why, after I'd gone through this, and after I had read Elaine's books, and especially her great blogs that she has, and writing about them myself, you know, you always hear from therapists you should write things down, you should journal, you should do doing a blog is very much doing a journal, but doing it publicly. And that process itself, being able to question things, being able to research things and get uh answers to questions I had explained a lot of my life. So it was a self-awareness thing more than anything else. I began to appreciate some of the things that I had done in the past that I'd questioned, but now I knew why. And that was very important.

April Snow 9:41

Mm-hmm. Yeah, having that context is everything. It really does shift. Like, oh, this I'm not living in alignment with who I am, with my temperament. Could you say

Being A Sensitive Man In Culture

April Snow 9:51

more? We talked, we've kind of danced around it, but I would love to go deeper into the unique experiences or challenges of being highly sensitive in a man. I know that there's a lot of pressure to be tough, to be stoic, to not be so impacted. I'm wondering what you have seen with yourself or with your coaching clients around that experience.

William Allen 10:11

Well, it it, you know, one of the things I've written a blog recently, right? And I think it was the one you caught on to. It was about diversity within the community of highly sensitive people. And when I was writing at the beginning, I was writing from my experience and generalizing to all highly sensitive men. What I've learned over time is we have a great diversity of people, even within that little narrow slither of highly sensitive men versus highly sensitive people in general. So I try to be careful not to generalize too much, but I have seen, especially with my men's group and working with men, highly sensitive men, certain things that I think are challenging for us, particularly challenging. One, again, is living up to that masculine type, that masculine template that culture has embedded on all men, not just highly sensitive men. And I think it's a in many ways, it is problematic for men, period, because the expectation is that we deny a lot of our humanity in being men. So for highly sensitive men, if I were to go up and ask a highly sensitive man or a group of highly sensitive men, are you concerned about your masculinity? I think the interpretation very often would be, well, not really. I, but I don't match up to what other men are supposed to be or what the cultural norm is. But they don't sit there and say, well, I don't feel masculine enough. I don't feel like a man inside. Well, here's the this is kind of the rub, right? Personally, you don't feel that way, but when you compare yourself to others, you can compare yourself to the norm. That's where it becomes problematic. And I think it's difficult for highly sensitive men very often to talk about that, that disconnect, that the idea that society says you have to be unemotional, you have to be stoic, you have to know everything. You can't ever have a problem, and you can't ask for help. It's not cool to be nurturing, it's not cool to be empathetic. You you need to be kind of this cold and calculated, logical creature like a machine. And of course, again, it denies humanity. So that's probably one of the biggest things that in my experience with working with highly sensitive men that comes up. Okay. It's a thing that comes up quite a bit. Another thing is, and this is really something I've noticed with the men's group, is that there is a longing for a sense of community with other men who are highly sensitive. I think a lot of these guys have lived, like I did, very much alone with our sort of secreting away the idea that we're highly sensitive people. And so they're looking for other men to say, is your experience like mine? What do we have in common? That kind of thing. So it's that sense of isolation and lack of community, I think that becomes kind of a challenge with a lot of men. I've got some points written down or something. Oh, great, yes. Down about this. But I think finally, if I was speaking in big three kind of things, is they don't really have a foundation with which to work. Like I did for most of my adult life. You know, Elaine didn't write her book until the mid-90s. By that time I was already 40 years old. So I had gone through all this time of my life where I had nothing to go on. You know, I had friends that were highly sensitive, but neither one of us knew that we were or a group of friends that we were sensitive, that there was a personality trait for this, or temperament trait. So I think that's another big challenge for a lot of highly sensitive men. They don't know that there's a community out there and they don't know that there's education that they can receive in learning about what the tool is to help them deal with some of the other challenges that come up.

April Snow 14:02

Right. Living completely in the dark. You said boxed in being a man is so it just as you're describing it, you know, not being able to feel, not being able to have a need, always having to be tough and know the answer to everything, it seems so suffocating and limiting. And so not having a space to express, to connect, it's really difficult as a human.

William Allen 14:24

And you know, uh, April, this is something that affects, as I said before, all men. Right, right. You know, and and in fact, I'm writing a blog today, in fact, where we're talking about the fact that this impacts, you know, especially the sensitivity part of it. It's not just the HSPs, but it's those, if you look at it sort of as a bell curve, probably 50% of men have a tendency towards high sensitivity or tendency towards sensitivity. Those guys are impacted as well. But not only that, all men, the the expectations we put on our young boys who are just learning about life and learning about being human, their emotions and their feelings and things like that, they immediately get quashed when they're young. And they're saying, don't cry, don't be like a girl, as if being like a girl would be the worst thing you could possibly be, right? So that's something that they men carry with them, whether you're sensitive or not, is this expectation that you're supposed to be this robot and we can't do it.

April Snow 15:29

No, because you're not a robot. You're a living, breathing human with emotion. And I appreciate that you're saying that all men suffer with this. All men are put in this box or put under these just awful expectations, these rigid expectations. And I want to go back to something you said earlier, which was when a sensitive man checks in with themselves, usually it seems like they're okay with their masculinity as it is. But when we put it into the context of the bigger picture, that's when it becomes the comparison, is the problem. Like, well, I'm not I'm not matching up to what I'm supposed to be. But if we just look at them internally, it's okay. Everything feels the way it should be.

William Allen 16:08

You know, I I I think for the most part, they look at themselves and they say, Yes, I'm a man. I I'm okay with that.

April Snow 16:13

There's no question.

William Allen 16:14

There's a there's no check. But when you say, Am I a man in the world? That's when it changes because it goes outside of self and it's externalized. And they have to do like we all do at some point in our lives. We compare ourselves to other people, the group that we're in, and this idea that they're not measuring up because they don't necessarily like all the things that uh what we call a traditional male would like, or what other men might like. And you you look at your behaviors in the context of the world where you maybe openly show emotion more, you're moved more by things, you express empathy and nurturing. And then there's those things like the way we process information slower, more thoughtfully, more deeply. And if you're in a corporate environment like I was, and I was a manager in an IT environment for a major bank, the ability to quickly process and make decisions is something that is prized. And taking the approach that I did, which was my natural approach, would be to thoughtfully go through data, weigh up things and alternatives before trying to regurgitate some kind of a solution. That was difficult for me. And it also made me feel like, you know, you're not working logically like other men do and that kind of stuff. Because I did rely a lot of times on my intuition to come up with solutions and so forth. And then finally being able to sense things that other people miss, they get really frustrated with you when you go, yeah, but look at this. Did you not see that? So, yeah, it all, if you throw the entire package out, you take it outside of self and you go out into the world, it could be a bit challenging at times to think, okay, do I measure up what am I then if I'm not like them and I'm not like this ideal?

Stop Comparing And Reframe Difference

April Snow 18:03

Right. Do I measure up? That's a big question. How do you grapple with that as a highly sensitive man? I'm just thinking about what do you need? How do we support you? Because the world as of right now isn't changing much. I mean, it's changing, but you're still up against that masculine ideal.

William Allen 18:22

I think the number one thing is to shift your attention and shift your as an individual, as a highly sensitive man, you would shift your attention to realizing that you are different and that it's okay to be different, right? One of the great things I think Elaine has done over the years is emphasize this is not a disorder. Okay. It's not a problem. You know, it is actually, and I love the way she put this as an evolutionary quality to this, that nature's baked this into the population, not only of us, but a hundred other animal species, that this is normal and we need this, and it's an important survival characteristic. And once you start assimilating that information, then you realize, okay, I am different, but it's okay. And then the comparisons start to fall away, and you start to realize that you're not a freak of nature, but you are carefully been placed by nature into the human population because of your thoughtfulness, because of your observational skills, because of your the way you think, and I think most importantly, because of your empathy and ability to see other people uh and live in other people's worlds so that you can identify and they can identify with you. So it's a shift. It's like, you know, I always think of it like this. Uh Carlos Castaneta wrote the books with Don Juan. There was a part in one of the books where Don Juan wrapped him right on the back of the shoulder and right the shoulder blades, and it was such a blow that it shifted his attention. That's what it was for. And that's kind of metaphorically what we have to do, not only as HSP men, but as HSPs, period, to rip make that shift jump that lets us change the kind of paradigm and way we view ourselves.

April Snow 20:11

Which is exactly what you've done yourself, going from sensitivity as a deficit to sensitivity, something to be accepted. I don't know if we need to celebrate it, but we at least can accept it as normal, as purposeful, as useful. I just think about you being at work processing that data. I think just be as the perfect person to do that, right? You're bringing your strong depth of processing, but you're also bringing your intuition and your emotionality, which is perfect for making important, complicated decisions.

William Allen 20:41

Yes. Yeah. And I and I think it engages all aspects of your humanity when you do that. We're often taught as men, but as a culture, because we have, unfortunately, and I hope it's just shifting, is this high heavily masculine way of running society. And it discounts emotion, it discounts intuition and empathy and those things that highly sensitive people bring to the plate. And I, you know, I'm hoping that we get more and more of our highly sensitive people, both male and female, to start recognizing that, but particularly men, because I think we can be good, excellent role models for other men to utilize those things.

April Snow 21:24

Absolutely. Highly sensitive men can be amazing emotional leaders. Also, as you're talking, I'm thinking, I need to redefine masculinity in general to make more space. Because you can be masculine and intuitive, masculine and emotional, masculine and nurturing. And we want to be men to be more whole humans.

William Allen 21:42

Aaron Powell Yes, absolutely. And I think that's a very key point, is that we embrace our entire humanity. We we have emotions for reasons. And I'm not discounting emotional regulation. I'm not discounting being able to be resilient with our emotions and so forth. Sometimes they can overwhelm. But the idea is to suppress or discount them or not even acknowledge them. To me, that's wrong. We're built in with these things for a purpose. And to deny our being able to have the emotion is not only wrong, but it's not healthy.

April Snow 22:21

It's not healthy. And when we deny our emotions, that's a straight path to dysregulation, honestly. Yes. Right? When we start to repress and they come out sideways in anger or other behaviors that don't feel aligned with who we are. So being able to feel our emotions, uh, as you're saying, not to a point of them being out of control or completely taking us over, but just having them be present because they do serve a purpose. They're useful.

William Allen 22:44

Absolutely. Absolutely.

April Snow 22:47

Can

Sensitive Awareness As A Strength

April Snow 22:48

you speak to other ways that sensitivity is maybe been an asset, one that you've come to accept? Maybe looking back and realize, oh, that actually was a gift or was useful in my life, even if I didn't recognize it at the time.

William Allen 23:04

Yeah, going back to my corporate days, uh IT is actually kind of a STEM field. And in STEM, uh you focus on scientific observation and being impartial and looking at the data and that kind of thing. And when you're talking about programming, which a lot of the my staff were programmers, there's a way to do it, there's a way not to do it. It either works or doesn't work. It's kind of binary that way. And so people tend to treat each other in those kinds of terms. You know, they it's very objective, it's not very emotional, it's right or wrong, whatever. And what I felt like I brought to the table as a manager was I cared about the people. I cared about when they went home at night. A lot of my staff at the time, this was to be way before COVID, were working from home. It was an option that was made available to them, which was really good. But I tried to be very cognizant of them working way beyond the normal hours and trying to edify them by helping them get the training they needed and all that kind of stuff. So when I left Wells Fargo and I retired, I got so many felt messages from staff who said, you know, you treated me like a human being. You cared about me. And that was so important to me. That was a kind of a validation that doing that was a good thing, that was a positive thing. And I think my sensitivity shone through doing that. I was a people manager. They weren't just numbers to me, and they weren't just workers to extract more hours out of. They were human beings. And I think that was one of the things that I saw that as an absolute bonus. But you know what, April? I think the greatest thing that I think of the gift of high sensitivity, if you look at the four main characteristics that Elaine has brought up the does model, depth of processing, overwhelm happens to happen to us over stimulation, uh, emotionality, and empathy, and then of course sensing the subtle. The output to all of those things, and I think this is something that's very important, is what I call sensitive awareness. It could be called environmental awareness, emotional awareness, whatever you want to call it. I call it sensitive awareness because it relies on our sensitive processing powers. And what that does is it makes two things really that are important that come out of that. One is it makes us aware of how our environment impacts us. So we know when something's not working, we know when something's not working well, and it's not good for us. We also know when it is good and when things should be encouraged. But the other thing that I think a lot of people miss on this is it also makes us aware of our impact on other people. Yes. That makes us aware. There's so many people that walk through life, you know, we use this term narcissist maybe a little too much in our society, but the point is they're not aware of what they're doing to other people. And a lot of people go through life never paying attention to that. Highly sensitive people, I think, have that in complete reverse. We are very much aware. If I say something that hurts your feelings, I feel it. I know it right away. And that's what that sensitive awareness does. And I think that is by far and away the greatest gift. If you were to do it in sum of what all of our attributes and traits and characteristics, that's the output, is that sensitive awareness.

April Snow 26:39

Beautifully put. Because we are really taking in the big picture, not just our own experience, but our impact on others, what others need, how to make this whole thing work. And it's going back to that, the evolutionary purpose of our trait, we're noticing, we're making sure everyone's okay. We need that. We need the people that are just gonna dive in too, but we need us that are gonna hang back and like, how's everyone doing? How am I, how can I be a positive influence, which is exactly what you did at work, maybe without even knowing it, just let being yourself.

William Allen 27:13

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's important. A point you made just a second ago is that we need all types. We do need those people. Let's say if it's a bell curve, the people on the lower end of sensitivity. Well, they're people that may take more risk, they may take more impulsive action, but in many ways, they're the people that push culture forward. They push uh things forward. And our society tends to praise those people and reward them very, very well. But what what what's what's really cool about what's going on now in the world, and especially with more awareness about high sensitivity, is the other end of the curve is just as important as the curve that goes out and takes the chances and takes the risk. Now, I realize there are some high sensation-seeking sensitive people. That's fine too. But what I'm talking about is there's that balance, right? That we need to have to keep the ship upright. And I think that's where we're starting to recognize our gifts and what the world needs from us, and especially right now.

April Snow 28:16

Absolutely. Right. We're realizing that it's a collaborative effort. We need each other. Yes. It's not all just the kind of risk takers, extroverted, like hyper-extroverted people who are out there jumping right in. We need the we need that balance from the sensitive people as well.

William Allen 28:33

Absolutely.

April Snow 28:34

Absolutely.

William Allen 28:35

And I think as more people find out, more people come online, if you will, people come on board with the trait and recognize it, you'll start to see some movement there. And I'm seeing it now and sensing it now. And we just need to keep educating our peeps, right?

April Snow 28:51

That's right. That's really it. You know, just letting folks know that this is real, this is important, it's naturally occurring. And so this next generation or next few generations can grow up knowing about it, not feeling different or ostracized or repressing their sensitivity, but using it as a as a gift or as a tool.

William Allen 29:16

Yeah, and I kind of like to look at it that way too. I know a lot of people say it's a you know superpower and all, but it's and there are there is a gift to this. There's a giftedness to this.

April Snow 29:26

Right.

William Allen 29:26

But if you look at it in the whole context of things, like we're talking about the bell curve, that we're all in this together and we all need each other, that it's just a way that nature has said, I'm going to take a certain percentage of people and they're going to be the risk takers, and another certain percent that are going to be the thoughtful, cautious advisors and counselors, spiritual people to a lot of extent, to offer that balance. And I think that's how I look at it. It's just a natural thing.

April Snow 29:54

That's it. It's it. And I have kind of pulled away from that superpower label because I do want to emphasize that that this is just what we personally bring to the table. And then we're balanced out by the folks who aren't born with a highly sensitive trait. So let's just normalize that.

William Allen 30:10

Exactly.

April Snow 30:10

This is what I bring, this is what you bring, we're all working together.

William Allen 30:14

Exactly. I totally think that's a perfect way of putting it.

April Snow 30:17

Yeah.

Overwhelm Recovery And Brain Resilience

April Snow 30:18

So as we're able to step up and use these abilities, how do we keep the overwhelm at bay? Or how do you personally keep that at bay so you can show up with your thoughtfulness and your creativity and your empathy and your intuitiveness?

William Allen 30:35

Yeah, that that's a great question because it it weighs on just about every highly sensitive person I know. How do I deal with my overwhelm? How do I deal with overstimulation? The thing about it is, and something I learned before, right after I left corporate, I started my own business in Bend. It was a, it started off as a hypnosis business. It was kind of what I call hypnocoaching. I was helping people with things, it wasn't therapy, and I never tried to pretend to be a therapist because that's not my strength, or it certainly wasn't what I was certified to do. But I used hypnosis as a way to help people calm down, to relax, to de-stress. And I had some great tools I used. It was it was a lot of fun. I love working with people. But I then branched out into doing neurofeedback brain training, and I found a really good tool from some other people that I had worked with before. And what it did essentially is using neurofeedback to help train the brain to become more resilient. And what was so cool about this tool, it didn't require a lot of neurofeedback stuff, it requires an interactive, you know, you do you do this and it moves a thing, and then you this is none of that. It was basically put on the headphones, let me put the sensors on your scalp, and the software and your brain interacted, and I just backed away. Oh, wow. And the thing that was nice about it is it let the brain react and do things on its own in its own time. So it wasn't like I was forcing more theta, more alpha in the temporal area, and more of this and the occipital and all that. It was the brain working with signals from the software that was tracking what the brain was doing. Complicated sounding, but it was really quite simple. And really, I did it on myself. And what I found is that I was more resilient. I could be in a situation where I'm in traffic, and everybody has an experience with this, unless you don't drive, is that you're caught in a traffic jam, somebody cuts you off, you have a natural reaction to be angry, whatever. I found that my brain wouldn't go there. It was like a memory that said, you need to be angry, and my brain was not allowing that to happen. So the upshot of all this, and why I'm telling this, is because it taught my brain resiliency, recovery time. So I don't think there's any way we're ever going to get rid of overstimulation and overwhelm for highly sensitive people. But the important thing is how quickly do you bounce back? How do you get back to your normal homeostatic state that you're feeling at peace and calm and so forth? And so there's lots of ways of doing it. You know, there are brain training techniques, they don't have to be used with uh software or electronics or anything like that. Meditation, breathing exercises. I was just thinking about Andrew Wells. I think it's 4, 7, 8 or whatever is the countdown. Simple, easy, portable. You carry it with you everywhere you go. Learn a meditation technique. And there's there's nature. Go out and walk in nature. Go take an hour walk, be by yourself, let yourself calm down. And as you're doing that, you're also training your brain. This is how to get back to where we were. This is how we want to get back. And over time, you start building the resiliency. And so I think that's the key word. We're not going to get rid of overwhelm. We're not going to get rid of overstimulation, but how do we deal with it when we get there? How long does it take us to come back? And so that should be, in my opinion, that should be the kind of the emphasis that we should be looking at. And a million different ways to skin that cat. But the simplest, easiest ones are learning things like meditation, breathing exercises, and going out in nature. Those are, and there's benefits in going out in nature, obviously. But you know, the Japanese do what they call for uh forest bathing. There's a Japanese term for it, I can't remember what it is. But trees emit a certain chemical that we breathe in and absorb when we're around them, and it does affect our state of mind. So it's not just being around green stuff. It's also about being out where nature's interacting with us as well.

April Snow 34:47

Exactly. Taking a more active role in the process. I think a lot of times HSPs assume I'm just overwhelmed, I'm stuck in this state, I can't do anything about it. But as you're saying, doing something about it. Absolutely. Take yourself out on a walk in the woods or at a park where you can be around some trees, do some mindful breathing, lots of different, and as you're saying, there's so many different practices. Find what works for you.

William Allen 35:11

Yes, absolutely.

April Snow 35:13

Every HSP is unique. It's not a one size fits all. That's the beauty, though, that we can lean into whatever makes us feel more relaxed and helps us recover because we are resilient. I always think about that. Just think about all that we experience and take in, and yet we still keep going.

William Allen 35:29

That's right. We we're gonna bounce back anyway. And I guess the thing about the dread of or stimulation is how long am I gonna be down?

April Snow 35:37

Right.

William Allen 35:37

You know, how am I gonna, you know, and there's nothing wrong with taking the time you need. But the point is, if if the idea is that you want to be able to recover quickly and forward thinking into the idea that next time I hit a stimulation overwhelm moment, maybe my overstimulation won't be as great as it was before. Right. And I can recover quickly. So that's that's kind of the way I look at it.

April Snow 36:02

Yeah. Can I have a different experience?

William Allen 36:04

Right.

April Snow 36:05

Just as you did with anger when you're stuck in traffic. We can have a different experience. We can kind of, I'm not sure, disarm those alarm bells.

William Allen 36:14

Yes.

April Snow 36:14

Yes, if we are taking care of ourselves. Yeah, thank you for that. It's just it's always a good reminder to hear that we're not stuck in the difficult parts of being sensitive.

William Allen 36:25

You know, and I think that's what a lot of highly sensitive, especially what I consider the newbies that are coming on board. I just found out about a and then they list all the things that are wrong in their life because of that what they think is attributable to high sensitivity. There are challenges, let's face it. I'm not gonna say there aren't, but they're all manageable. Every single one of them are manageable, but you've got to educate yourself, and you're right, you have to be active. You have to approach this not from a passive point of view, but from an active point of view.

April Snow 36:55

Right. We can have a different experience than maybe the one we've already been having before we realize this is a trait, and it's just a matter of making some adjustments.

William Allen 37:06

Yes.

April Snow 37:06

Yeah, that's it.

Writing Books That Build Community

April Snow 37:08

Well, I want to carve out some time to talk about your books because you've written two books for highly sensitive men, Confessions of a Sensitive Man and on Being a Sensitive Man. And you share with me that you're also working on a novel, which is very exciting. Can you speak to what inspired you to this writing? I know you talked a little bit about blogging, but what led you to then think I need to write these books?

William Allen 37:30

Well, actually, I think to the preface to the first book I wrote, I think it was not an exact quote, but I wrote this book uh from my older self to my younger self, sharing my experience. The first book was an experiential book. It was about my experiences of being a highly sensitive man. And I've had lots of men write to me and say, you know, you captured exactly what I was feeling or what I was doing. And that's I that's a a thing that I think there's great value in writing these experiential books because uh there's great books out there about being highly sensitive. Uh, there's great books out there about being highly sensitive men. And very often they're come from a psychological point of view, which is important that we understand that part of it. But it's also nice to have sort of a layman like myself come in and write a book about this was my life, this is what it was like. And so the inspiration essentially was I wanted to put all that information that I had accumulated and in using some of the blog articles and reworking them for the book to be able to share those experiences with other men. And I think that's very important. That's a sort of reaching out, offering up some community to these men that they may never have had before in their lives. The the second book was written basically as okay, here's all the things I learned, right? And I put it in a book on being a sensitive man and how to cope and deal with the challenges and so forth that I had experienced throughout the course of my life. So one is sort of telling you, okay, this is how I got here, and this is the other one is how I dealt with getting there. So that that was a great experience, and I loved writing those books. It was just it was wonderful.

April Snow 39:15

It's like you're being that template that you needed.

William Allen 39:18

Absolutely, absolutely.

April Snow 39:20

Yeah. And we need that lived experience to show up on the page. It's what we do need to learn about the traits we can understand and we can justify living differently. However, we also need to hear the stories and have a sense of community on the page. Yeah.

William Allen 39:35

Absolutely, absolutely. And I that's kind of the science is very important. It is for somebody like me. I really love to read the books that Elaine's done and some of the other people, the psychologists that are out there, and always follow the studies that uh they're doing out of uh Michael Plouis and um and others who are working on doing this research. But you're right, yeah, it's the other metaphor I used in the beginning of the book was it's the old guy sitting around the campfire sharing stories with the younger people, right? Yes. And that's kind of how I looked at the book from a metaphorical standpoint, too.

April Snow 40:14

I mean, what a gift to have those stories. We need those.

William Allen 40:16

Yes, yes. Right? I agree.

April Snow 40:19

Yeah, and I'm curious if you're well open to sharing what is this next novel about? You're veering into the world of fiction this time.

William Allen 40:29

Well, I've kind of sat back and I thought, I was gonna write another book on what we talked about earlier, defining masculinity. How can we make masculinity more inclusive? And I may still write something like that. There's quite a few good books about that now that are coming out. But I thought, you know, my heart has always been why not write something that gives you the freedom to go wherever you want to go? You're not restricted by science or whatever. You can just take off and drift away and write what you want. And this story idea has been with me for like, oh, 10 years. I've been wanting to write something along this line. And it really is a hero's journey about a highly sensitive man, although the book itself is not about high sensitivity per se. Uh, on a journey of self-discovery. He has uh some exciting events at the beginning of the book that gets him launched on this journey where he just walks away from a life that's disappointed him, and he goes on this journey. And on this journey, he meets seven or eight uh wise women. And these women become his muses, and they all teach him something about himself, about the spiritual nature of life, and he's confronted with and presented with all these unique ways of doing things, and it is part of that evolution of his growth. The upthrust of all this is he becomes his authentic self. He learns how to be who he truly is. And it's been a I just finished the first draft about a month and a half. I'm starting the second draft now. It's been just this marvelous, wonderful experience of just allowing it to flow out of me. And I uh I'm just looking forward to getting it published and getting it out there. I think it's a book for could be for highly sensitive men, but I think it's a book for everybody. There's something in there for everyone, male, female, and and so forth.

April Snow 42:26

It's so relatable just hearing this journey of you know finding yourself and being allowing yourself to be inspired and kind of pull down those walls and come back to self. I mean, that's such an important story. Yes. And cherry on top that it happens to be someone who's highly sensitive.

William Allen 42:44

Exactly. And and he's learning to come to grips with that too as he's going through that, you know, is through his journey. Very similar experiences to what I went through, but of course that makes it relatable for me.

April Snow 42:55

I was wondering. Yeah.

William Allen 42:56

Yeah. It is a little, well, a little autobiographical. I think the character is a little bit like me, but I'm trying to make him his own person.

April Snow 43:05

Yeah.

William Allen 43:05

And um I'm just I'm looking forward to to getting this out. It's been so much fun writing it.

April Snow 43:10

Oh, I bet. It I'm curious. I know you started writing blogs after you discovered sensitivity or the trait. Were you always a writer? Or is this something that's developed later in life?

William Allen 43:21

A long time ago, uh when I first moved out to LA back in the late 70s, I wanted to be a screenwriter. And I had written screenplays and stuff like that. Actually got an agent in Hollywood. I thought, oh, this is great. Um that career's taken off. But I wrote a screenplay that was so uniquely different and was something that would have been very difficult to make, and maybe a little bit ahead of its time in terms of the technology at the time. And I got caught up in having a family, living a life, working at work to have to support the family. And I drifted away uh from writing screen. Place, but it's always been a part of me. And I've always been told, Bill, you're a good writer, you should write. And it was one of those things I had to convince myself over the years that I could do this and it would be well received. I've been very blessed that I had a lot of compliments about the way the books were written. So it's encouraged me. So if you want to keep me writing, folks, you gotta give me some compliments and feed feed the ego a little bit. That's right. Always love doing it, always love using words and that kind of thing.

April Snow 44:30

It's such a great way of for me at least processing it's a catharsis, of understanding myself, but also making sense of what I'm absorbing from the rest of the world, also. Yeah, I'm I'm sure I'm sure you don't have a published date yet, but do you have any sense of when this book might come out into the world next year in two years?

William Allen 44:49

It's all you know, the the publishing industry is so different now than it's ever been. It's they're very more, much more selective about what they're picking and things like that. I had a friend tell me, you know, I've written a book about high sensitivity, and he says, Why don't you write something that's going to sell at a mass level? And I thought, wait a minute, just you know, there's a lot of highly sensitive people out there. But so I wanted to write something like this novel and have a broader appeal. Uh, but you'll still yield to those concepts that I think are important to highly sensitive people and to people generally. So I'm hoping to have it wrapped up sometime first quarter next year, and hopefully get it pitched to an agent and see if I can't get somebody to take it on forward to a publisher.

April Snow 45:35

Beautiful. Yeah, I mean, what you're telling, the story is universal. It will be especially important to HSPs, but it'll touch everyone. Everyone's been on that journey of finding self and yeah, going on that journey. It's important.

William Allen 45:49

Absolutely, absolutely. So I hope some people when they're reading can vicariously live through this and maybe set out on their own personal journeys to find themselves.

The Three E’s For HSPs

April Snow 45:57

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Bill, if you could leave us with one message for HSPs, what would that be?

William Allen 46:04

Well, I always leave with one thing that I always tell uh highly sensitive people. First of all, let me just say this it's all gonna be okay. You know, it will all be okay, even though if you feel like you're overwhelmed, it's too much to handle, it'll be okay. And the way it'll be okay is what I call the three E's. First of all, and most importantly, educate yourself. Learn about the trait. There's so much more stuff that's out there now, published and online, than there was even just six or seven years ago. And it's growing kind of exponentially. So there's lots of books, and just on the uh horizon here, the movie that Will Harper and Tracy Cooper have released, Sensitive Men Rising, will hopefully be out in distribution soon. So be looking for that. But they also had done sensitive and so forth. So there's a body of films that you can look at as well, and one more coming on the way. But do educate yourself about the trait, understand what it is, because a lot of times you're dealing with just the chatter in your head, you don't realize that there's some normalcy to this as well. Secondly, once you educate yourself, embrace the trait. I took me 10 years to do it, but whatever long, however long it takes you to do it, get to a point where you can wrap your arms around and embrace the trait and say, I'm okay being this person. And once you've done that, finally, the final E is evangelize. We need to get out and let people know about the trait. We need to teach our young people, we need to teach our families, our coworkers, we need to teach the world about it. Whether you do it at an international level or whether you do it at a community level, it doesn't matter. Get out there and start letting people know about it. And when you do that, you're owning the trait and you're displaying the trait to people. And you'll feel a lot more confident about yourself when you do that.

April Snow 47:59

Thank you for that. I love that. Three E's. Educate, embrace, evangelize. First, learning about it for yourself, working on that acceptance. And I appreciate you saying let it take as long as it'll take. It's a process of reframing and relearning. And then, yeah, share it with others. You know, there could be other HSPs in your life, or at the very least, so people understand you and you can show up how you need to.

William Allen 48:22

Absolutely.

April Snow 48:23

Important.

William Allen 48:24

Absolutely.

April Snow 48:25

Well, this has been a lovely conversation as always. Thank you. Always love connecting with you.

William Allen 48:30

I and same here, April. I always love talking to you, and I really appreciate you having me on.

Free HSP Men’s Group And Closing

April Snow 48:35

Of course. And I'll be sure to share all your resources in the show notes, your website, your social media, your several books, and then also so grateful that you offer an online men's group. And I'm wondering before we go, if you could just tell listeners a little bit about what that looks like, your online group.

William Allen 48:51

Um yeah, it's a it's an international group. I and I don't charge anything. There's no paywall to get in. I was very advancing about doing that. Not that there's anything wrong with people who do that. It's just that I thought it was really important that men have no reservations about joining because of cost or anything like that. You can get connected with that group on my website. There is a tab that says that's HSP Men's Group, and you register there. Now we've evolved the group a little bit. It initially started out as just one big group, but it got to the point where we're having 20, 30 people on. It was not good for intimate conversations like that kind of thing. We still have what we call the big tent meeting, and that's usually for people coming in to try it out and see if they like it. But what we've done is we've made smaller groups, pod groups that are regional, you know, different places. So you're in the same time zone. It's easier to meet your schedule. And you it's autonomous. It's run by a facilitator, volunteer facilitator, and you run the meeting the way you want to run it. But the point is that you get to meet people and talk and build that community. So that there's two options there, and I encourage anybody that's interested to reach out and and get involved with it.

April Snow 50:04

I love that. The big tent group, and then you can connect with folks locally. That's what Elaine always did in her retreats and gatherings. You get to break off and actually connect with people locally. It's so important.

William Allen 50:15

Yeah, and I think it kind of works well for a lot of HSPs who would rather have a small intimate group than have a huge group where there's lots of people and they may be a little intimidated.

April Snow 50:26

Absolutely. Yeah, it can be easier to show up in a smaller group. Thanks so much for joining me and William for today's conversation. What I hope you'll take away is that you're not doomed to feel overwhelmed as an HSP. Your sensitivity is a normal trait, it's not a deficit. And masculinity can include emotion, intuition, nurturing, and softness. If you're a highly sensitive man looking for community and support, be sure to check out William's online HSP men's group and his books. You can find more information in the show notes or go to thesensitiveman.com. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the Sensitive Stories podcast so you don't miss our upcoming conversations. Reviews and ratings are also helpful and appreciated. For behind the scenes content and more HSP resources, you can sign up for my email list or follow Sensitive Strengths on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Check out the show notes or sensitivestories.com for all the resources from today's episode. Thanks for listening.