Rebuild self-trust, embrace your unique gifts, and find balance as a highly sensitive person in a fast-paced, overstimulating world.
If you identify as a highly sensitive person (HSP), you may struggle with stress, sensory overwhelm, and intense emotions. When the world invalidates or rejects your sensitivity, this rejection can lead to feelings of shame, self-doubt, and alienation. Despite your inherent empathy, creativity, and intuition, you may feel confused and unsure of yourself. So, how can you embrace these gifts and thrive as your authentic self?
Trusting Your Highly Sensitive Self offers strategies based in Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) and parts work to help you reconnect with your core self, celebrate your intuition, rebuild self-trust, and reclaim wholeness. You'll discover the innate brilliance of your parts to adapt to the challenges of an overwhelming world, move past internalized negative messages, and cultivate the resilience and confidence needed to live your best life.
This groundbreaking guide will help you:
- Work effectively with 'inner critics'
- Navigate intense emotions with greater ease
- Overcome areas where you feel 'stuck'
- Look inward for wisdom and wholeness
If you're struggling to reconcile your inherent gifts of sensitivity with the demands of a high-stress world, the strengths-based, holistic, and non-pathologizing approach in this book can help you find clarity, peace of mind, and unwavering self-compassion.
About the Author :
Elizabeth Venart, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor with over thirty years of experience, and the founder of the Resiliency Center of Greater Philadelphia. A certified Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist, IFS Institute Approved Consultant, and trainer in IFS-informed eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Elizabeth is passionate about sharing the compassionate and transformative model of IFS with clients and therapists alike. As a counselor, educator, mentor, and fellow traveler, she supports highly sensitive people in discovering their creative resilience and innate wisdom. Learn more at www.elizabethvenart.com.
Review :
"Trusting Your Highly Sensitive Self provides a helpful map for navigating the complexities and competing needs of a HSP's inner world. Using IFS-inspired metaphors and her gentle therapeutic approach, Elizabeth skillfully guides you to understand the purpose of your coping strategies and reconnect with lost parts of your true self."
--April Snow, LMFT, psychotherapist; author of Big Feelings, Big Joy; and host of the Sensitive Stories podcast
--April Snow, LMFT
"A love letter to the highly sensitive, the deep feelers, and the internal explorers, this book is a gift to all who have ever felt like too much and not enough. Elizabeth writes with warmth, compassion, and a deep conviction that healing is possible. Her care and encouragement shine through every page, encouraging readers to see themselves through the same lens of kindness. A must-read for highly sensitive souls."
--Amy Marlow-MaCoy, LPC, founder of The Courageous Heart Institute, and author of The Gaslighting Recovery Workbook and The Clinician's Guide to Treating Adult Children of Narcissists
--Amy Marlow-MaCoy, LPC
"Beyond a guide to healing for HSPs, this brilliantly written book invites a deeper appreciation and respect for the highly sensitive parts within every person's internal family system. In that way, this book is truly for everyone. We all benefit from understanding our sensitivities and insensitivities. Highly recommended as a way forward for HSPs and anyone hoping to preserve sensitivity and move beyond current polarities to greater possibility and peace."
--Bruce Hersey, LCSW, IFS-informed eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) trainer and consultant; and featured author in the edited volume, IFS-Informed EMDR
--Bruce Hersey, LCSW
"For those of us who identify as HSPs, having had to adapt to a world that invalidates our gifts, this book is our road map to reclaiming our creativity, intuition, and emotional depth. Elizabeth's sensitivity and compassion, rooted in her clinical experience and the IFS model, helps us embrace, embody, and celebrate our gifts."
--Susan McConnell, IFS Senior Trainer; founder of Somatic IFS, which integrates somatic practices with IFS; and author, who trains therapists in her model globally
--Susan McConnell
"If you've ever been told 'you're too sensitive' and have come to view your sensitivity as a weakness, Trusting Your Highly Sensitive Selfwill help you see it as a source of strength. Venart offers an easy-to-follow road map to beautifully illuminate the intelligence and richness that comes with being highly sensitive, showing that sensitivity is not a flaw, but a profound source of wisdom and connection."
--Tamala Floyd, LCSW, author of Listening When Parts Speak
--Tamala Floyd, LCSW
"In this book, Elizabeth Venart invites HSPs to turn their compassionate gaze inward. She offers the lens of IFS to encourage understanding and illuminate connections between past and present. Exercises invite you to reflect on your life, tune in to what's happening in the present, and see your child self with new eyes. The book is both insightful and accessible, gentle and deep. You feel the warmth of Elizabeth's presence as guide and companion, and her stories offer hope for healing. The book's journey is a homecoming, embracing the big, beautiful hearts of sensitive children, while respecting the challenges of feeling so much. For anyone taught to mistrust or disown your sensitivity, Trusting Your Highly Sensitive Self calls you back home to yourself."
--Arielle Schwartz, PhD, psychologist, award-winning author, and founder of the Center for Resilience Informed Therapy
--Arielle Schwartz, PhD
"This book is a genius pairing of what it's like to be a highly sensitive person (HSP) with a well-organized, super-clear presentation of how to use Internal Family Systems (IFS) to reconnect with your natural strengths and vibrant energy. Personally, I found it a great reminder to use IFS methods to work through problems and realign goals with where my energy needs to go. A delightful counterpoint to more superficial, cognitive approaches. This one touches the soul. Highly recommended."
--Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, clinical psychologist and New York Times bestselling author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People
--Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD
"This book is a lively, useful, clinical guide for people who identify as highly sensitive and for people whose managers and firefighters have had to organize around obscuring their highly sensitive nature with numbing, distracting, spacing out, and more. I found it a pleasure to read and the exercises useful, and I plan on buying it for myself and to refer clients to as soon as it's published!"
--Joanne H. Twombly, MSW, LICSW, author of Trauma and Dissociation Informed Internal Family Systems
--Joanne H. Twombly, MSW, LICSW
"This book reclaims the gifts and goodness of a highly attuned inner system. Exercises help you explore your own constellation of parts, illuminating the beautiful ecology of your unique system. What Elizabeth offers--with intelligence, imagination, and love--is invaluable for anyone whose way of being in the world has been devalued and marginalized. HSPs are wonderfully made, and this book helps you appreciate your adaptive brilliance."
-- Mary Steege, LMFT, author of The Spirit-Led Life
--Mary Steege, LMFT
"With warmth, wisdom, and clinical depth, Elizabeth Venart offers a beautiful companion for the healing journey of HSPs. With clarity and care, she guides readers through the core tools of IFS therapy and how these tools can be applied to the unique wounds and gifts of sensitivity. Trusting Your Highly Sensitive Self is a generous, hopeful, practical, and meaningful resource for HSPs and those who walk alongside them on the healing journey."
--Carrie Newcomer, Grammy- and Emmy-recognized singer-songwriter, poet, author, and cohost of The Growing Edge podcast
--Carrie Newcomer
