[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to today’s episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. Thank you so much for tuning in. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be providing a series of episodes where each week I interview a couple’s therapist about how they would use their method, a couple’s therapy, looking through the lens of a highly sensitive couple. In each episode, I ask the couple’s therapists specific questions about relationships between a highly sensitive person and a non-highly sensitive person. We talk about what issues may show up in the relationship and some of the best self-care practices for couples. I would love to hear your feedback out these episodes. Please email me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. Today my guest is Dr. Lisa Blum. Dr. Blum is a licensed clinical psychologist and specializes in promoting healthy couple and family relationships through an attachment lens. Dr. Blum is a certified therapist and supervisor in EFT, or Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, one of the few research validated therapies for helping couples and family strengthen relationships and build stronger connections. Dr. Blum is in private practice in Pasadena, California, where her work includes individual, couples and family therapy and supervision training and public speaking on family marital parenting issues. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Blum. [DR. LISA BLUM] Thank you. I’m so happy to be here with you. [LISA] Great. I just want to get started how I usually get started in my interviews by asking all my guests, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person? If so, or if not, would you please share a little story about yourself? [DR. BLUM] Sure. I think I consider myself a sensitive person. I don’t know that I would consider myself highly sensitive, but since we’re all on a spectrum anyway, of traits, I certainly feel like I can have some understanding and some lived experience and empathy with folks who are highly sensitive. When I was a child growing up, I was always “accused” of, and I’m going to put that in air quotes, being too sensitive. That was a really difficult experience because of course for me, and for any of us, we just respond how we respond. There’s no sort of dial button to turn down and say, oh, now I’m going to respond in a low sensitive way, or now I’m going to respond in a high sensitive way, just how we respond. So then to hear that that was too sensitive was, especially accumulated over time kind of a shaming message. Took me a long time to understand that my sensitivity was a gift that I could harness and use, especially in becoming a therapist, that my ability to tune in to subtle cues, subtle differences, subtle feeling and tone changes is actually something that is really valuable and that I can use and help other folks with. So I’ve turned around in my view of sensitivity since I was a child where I used to wish that I could just let things roll off my back more or laugh things off, like I saw other people do, but now I really value my sensitivity and consider it one of my strengths. [LISA] Oh, I love that. That’s beautiful. I can relate to hearing the words being overly sensitive growing up, and then it does, I agree, it does over time feel very shaming and feel like, oh, there must be something wrong with my sensitivity or something wrong with me and then having to hide it or change the way I approach life and people. [DR. BLUM] Yes. One of the strategies I tried as a child, of course not consciously, but I would just try to fake it, I would try to act like I thought people acted who weren’t sensitive. And I would just sort of like try to fake this tough exterior or just laugh at hurtful things or just look like I wasn’t responding to something on the outside, even though inside I was. Of course, that’s awful to have to fake anything like that. It’s depleting and exhaust for the person doing that. So it never worked well anyway and it didn’t feel good. So eventually I just had to accept, this is me. [LISA] I love that too. I just love how you changed the way that you feel about yourself and how you respond to people. So just kind of shifting gears now to talking about couples therapy, what is your approach to couples therapy? [DR. BLUM] So I am a certified therapist and supervisor in Emotionally Focused Therapy, which is often referred to as EFT, but I do want to distinguish it from an EFT that a lot of other folks might know of, which is the Emotional Freedom Technique. My EFT is not that EFT. That’s the therapy that some folks refer to as tapping, and it’s an energy therapy for dealing with trauma and other body-based things. My EFT doesn’t involve any tapping. It does involve talking and it was founded about 25, 30 years ago by a psychologist named Sue Johnson. It is one of the few couples therapies that is very highly researched and very well, it has a lot of evidence in its effectiveness in really helping couples to heal relationship distress and turn their relationship into a really thriving, strong, secure bond. So that’s what I’ve been practicing for the last, let me just think for a moment about 14 years that I’ve been studying and getting advanced training and certification in EFT. And I love it. It’s transformed my work with couples. [LISA] If we look at the lens of like a highly sensitive person, a sensitive partner, a non-sensitive partner, how would EFT, how would that benefit them? [DR. BLUM] Well, it might help a little bit if I give a brief description just of how EFT works, and then I think I can answer your question better. So EFT really understands that we humans are designed to be deeply connected to each other. So it’s based on attachment theory, which was well developed in the sixties and since then, by a man named John Bobby, his work really showed us that it’s not just human infants who need to attach so deeply to a primary caregiver, but that those needs for secure and safe bonds and having that person that we trust to have our back and that we can call on in times of distress, that that kind of safe, secure attachment is something we need from the cradle to the great. It’s not something we outgrow. Despite our culture, particularly our white Western culture, which tends to really emphasize independence and almost kind of a hyper independence, this kind of approach and attachment approach really understands that there’s something called a very healthy interdependence where we really can turn to each other and rely on each other. When we have that ability to do that, it actually makes us stronger, not weaker as our culture tends to tell us, but it makes us stronger more independent, more bold about going out in the world, facing challenges, dealing with problems, being able to problem solve. It also actually has a lot of impacts on our health when we have those kind of secure relationships to tap into for our emotional needs. We have better health outcomes as well. That’s just a really, really brief overview, but EFT really understands that when couples get into distress with each other, it’s often not just because there’s arguing over the chores or money or parenting styles. Those are the content of the arguments, but the stress really comes from an interaction pattern that’s happening between the two partners that is leaving them feeling like their bond with each other is being threatened. And when we feel like our bond or our safe attachment to our significant other is being threatened, we have a lot of self-protective strategies that we mount to try to protect ourselves from what feels like that potential impending loss. It’s those protective strategies, like for example, fierce anger or shutting down and withdrawal that then really do actually cause an erosion of the bond between the couple. So it’s kind of a catch 22. If we’re feeling threatened, then we mount these self-protective strategies and then those strategies do further harm to the bond. So the whole process of EFT is to help couples understand the cycle. We call it a negative cycle that they’ve gotten stuck in and how that negative cycle is occurring because their bond is feeling threatened. So how to stop the damage, how to turn it around and how to restore and repair what’s going on in the bond? That’s in a nutshell what EFT is. So now I think I can apply it to highly sensitive people, but let me just pause for a minute to make sure that that was clear and understandable or see if you have any questions. [LISA] No, that was very clear and very understandable. I’m really listening in and I’m like, okay, I can’t wait to hear more. [DR. BLUM] So now let me see if I can do justice to applying everything I just said to highly sensitive people. So a highly sensitive person is often very, very attuned to even subtle changes in the emotional experience between themselves and someone else. They can pick up often on body language and tone and a certain eyebrow raise or a certain look from coming from their partner. Then like all of us, all humans in interaction, we then make meaning of those signs and signals that we’re picking up. [DR. BLUM] Now we make meaning of those things, meaning if my partner sighs a heavy sigh, I’m going to make a meaning of that depending on a lot of contextual cues. So for example, if I know my partner is really overwhelmed at work right now, let’s say in these weeks, and I hear my partner sigh, a heavy sigh, I may be more likely to, oh yes, my partner is just exhausted and stressed and tired. I know that that sigh is just like, oh, so much work. But in a different context, like, let’s say, if I felt like perhaps this morning, we didn’t seem to connect that well and I’m a little bit worried about whether we’re okay with each other right now and I hear my partner make that heavy sigh, first of all, I’m going to be tuned into that. I’m going to notice this heavy sigh, if I’m a highly sensitive person and I’m also going to make a meaning of that, which might be in this case, oh, my partner’s kind of annoyed with me. That’s an annoyed sigh. I know that sigh. So I’m going to make a meaning and then I’m probably going to have some reaction to that. I’m either going to be concerned and worried like, oh no, what did I do to make my partner mad at me and how do I fix this? Or I might have a defensive reaction, what the heck is she so annoyed about? I’m the one who gets to be annoyed here because she didn’t do the dishes this morning or something like that. So if a highly sensitive person is picking up on a lot of cues and then naturally like all of us is making meaning of those cues, that might mean that there are a lot more things that need to get clarified and that need to get resolved. Now, if my partner and I are in a good place with each other, where I can just turn to her and say, “Hey, I heard that sigh, are you okay?” if we have that kind of flexibility right now, because we’re feeling safe and secure with each other, then it may not be a thing at all. My partner might say, “Yes, I’m thinking about all the work I have to do, or yes, I’m thinking about my mom, who’s sick right now and I’m worried about her,” whatever, and I’ll get the information and it’ll be clarified and it won’t become a thing. But if we’re not in such a great place right now, and by that, I don’t mean even anything terrible, but if I’m just feeling a little disconnected or we’re feeling a little off from each other, or maybe because she’s been working a lot lately, we haven’t had so much time to just connect and be together and I’m just feeling kind of separate then I may not be able to just turn to my partner and say, “Hey, I heard that sigh. What’s going on?” I may just run with the reaction that I have of like, oh, she’s mad at me. And now I’m either going to be anxious or I’m going to be angry. Then of course my behavior is going to reflect that back to my partner who’s going to be like, why are you being so short with me all of a sudden? And there we go. It’s the beginning of that negative spiral where we can start just kind of pinging off of each other in a way that nobody is conscious of in the moment, but we can start down that negative spiral where I think she’s annoyed at me. I react kind of short tempered. She thinks now why am I just being short tempered with her? And now she’s pissed off and there we go kind of rolling downhill in that negative way. So to sum up what I’m saying, a highly sensitive person who may be picking up on a lot more of these cues has a lot more of these moments where he or she, or they has to decide, is this something I can just check in about? Is this something I’m just reacting to? How am I going to manage this if I’m picking up a queue or a sign or a signal from my partner? [LISA] I love that. Thinking about highly sensitive people, they can pick up so much that sometimes it can feel so overwhelming and like, they’re like, I wish I didn’t pick up all of this. It kind of can feel like a vacuum cleaner in that you just notice everything, the positive and the negative. It can feel so overwhelming and then maybe even feeling stuck or frozen, and not sure even knowing what to do next or how to get out this situation. [DR. BLUM] Yes. I think you’re very right. And especially if you haven’t worked some of these things out yet with your partner where, say it is okay to check in and ask about that heavy sigh then the highly sensitive person is left sort of just holding all of these things, “I heard the heavy sigh and, oh, she didn’t seem that warm to me this morning. Or he seemed kind of rushed getting out the door. Maybe he didn’t want to really interact with me.” You know, the highly sensitive person can be left, just holding all of this and I think you’re right it can be overwhelming. It can be over-stimulating, it can lead to a kind of freeze because there’s just so much, and you don’t know which thing to respond to, or even which thing to trust as the accurate information about what’s happening between you and your partner. [LISA] What do you recommend when you are working with like a sensitive non-sensitive partners, the non-sensitive partner may not understand a sensitive partner, what do you recommend or what do you recommend or how do you work with a non-sensitive partner to help them understand what their sensitive partner may be going through or experiencing just like inside themselves, emotionally, physically, mentally? [DR. BLUM] Well, one of the first things we do, and this is going to sound so simple, and yet it is so very hard to do is we slow things way down. By that, what I mean is most of these interactions between partners, especially the ones where you’re processing incoming sensory information and processing often nonverbal things like just body, language tone, things like that, that kind of processing happens in humans in milliseconds. It’s super, super fast. So things can spin quite quickly. So one of the first things we do is really help the partners slow way down by looking at some snippet of interaction that happened between them, that both agree maybe, oh, that morning, Sunday morning, it didn’t go well and we just seemed to find ourselves in such difficult place, and we don’t even know what happened or why it happened. So we go back and we talk about it as like playing the film strip, one frame at a time for those of us who are old enough to remember what an actual film strip looks like. It’s basically a series of stills, all strung together, moving fast enough so that it looks like it’s moving. So what we do is we sort of go back and we kind of freeze frame for a moment, and we really try to understand, for say the highly sensitive partner, what was it that you think you first reacted to that Sunday morning when your partner came down the stairs and had a scowl on their face? Well, I think it was the heaviness of his footsteps coming down and I saw that scowl. Okay, so you saw scowl and you made a meaning of it. What was the meaning you made? So we really slow it down. When you saw his face and you made that meaning that there was something bothering him that morning and you were sure it had to do with you then what did you do? Or what did you say? So we literally sort of take it apart frame by frame and often what that does, and we do this for both partners equally, for the highly sensitive partner as well as a non-sensitive partner equally, to have them both describe in that slowed down, more detailed way what reaction chain happened for them. Both parties get to hear from the other side, “Oh, you were reacting to the scowl of my face? Oh, I was just off because I just heard that the Dodgers had lost the game. It had nothing to do with you.” But both sides get to hear what the other side was thinking and what meaning they made and what feeling they had and then what behavior and reaction they showed. And oftentimes both partners go, “Wow, I had no idea that’s what was going through you.” So it’s really equally helpful for both partners but I think particularly for a highly sensitive person that may have many sensitivities and many reactions and many perceptions, it can really be a window for the non-highly sensitive partner to start to get some glimpses of what it’s like inside the head and mind and body of their highly sensitive partner in a way that they might not really have been able to know if they were just looking at it through their own lens, their own experience. [LISA] It must be so validating for both partners and especially the highly sensitive person to have the other person really understand them or get them. It’s kind of just putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. [DR. BLUM] I think so. I mean, it’s true, I think for both partners to feel validated because often when these negative cycles happen because each partner is feeling somewhat threatened in their connection with their significant other, we do go into a kind of more myopic. “I’m just in my mind, and I’m not really in a position of sort of empathy for your position. I’m just protecting myself.” So just normally this is what happens. Typically, this is what happens, that partners sort of lose that ability to take the perspective of the other when there’s conflict, when there’s stress and negativity happening between them. So this slowing down that I’m describing really lets them come back into that place of compassion for the other. I think that that is really validating for both partners, but maybe especially important for the highly sensitive person who maybe hasn’t had as much validation in their life for seeing things the way that they do [LISA] Yes. And does slowing down also bring the experience back to maybe the childhood, by just maybe the way that someone like your partner looks at you or does something that you may have a reaction to from one of your parents growing up? Is that common? [DR. BLUM] Yes. You’re now on the head there, because a lot of times the meanings that we may get of something that our partner does or says, or the way that they behave, many of those things just pass by. We’re like, oh, my partner just smiled at that. Or my partner just frowned at that, or my partner was warm today, or, oh, my partner’s tired. She was kind of distracted today. I mean, a lot of these things just passed by because they’re not sort of danger triggers to us or safety triggers to us, but oftentimes, and a lot of this is very unconscious, so I want to stress that, we can’t all be aware at every moment of why something might be setting us, setting a particular feeling off in us. That’s why the slowing down is so important. But oftentimes if our partner has a certain reaction to us, it will be triggering in the sense that we’ve experienced this before in a way that didn’t feel safe. And here, I just want to clarify when I’m using the word safe, I’m not in this moment talking about something that’s abusive or physically unsafe or even anything severe. I’m not using the word safe in terms of like real sort of black and white danger. I’m using it more in terms of emotionally safe and just feeling secure and connected and like my other, this other caretakers care for me is not in question. It’s not in danger. That’s what I mean. So if we’ve had say, let’s say a parent who was a key caregiver for us who tended to get very distracted and self-absorbed, and perhaps couldn’t always be so readily available for the child to say, be present if the child was upset or be emotionally responsive, if the child was scared or anxious, perhaps the parent without even doing any deep harm just had many worries perhaps, and was absorbed and couldn’t always be very emotionally present for the child, let’s say. That’s going to be a tender spot for that child than when they’re in their adult form. If their partner looks distracted and self-absorbed could be for a million different reasons, but that adult now is going to have a greater reactivity when their partner is even sort of temporarily unavailable, emotionally unavailable, that adult is going to have greater reactivity and then is going to have some self-protective behaviors that just automatically come up. So what I mean by self-protective behaviors is maybe that child got through that parent distractedness by just being really good at going off on their own and making their own projects and making their own games up or becoming maybe an avid reader, or maybe that child just coped with feeling like that parent couldn’t be there for them by really knowing how to pull into themselves and go do their own thing. And that’s not a bad coping strategy. That was maybe a very productive coping strategy, but you can see how this starts to be a snowball running downhill, because if I’m that child, let’s say, and now I’m an adult and I’m in my partnership and I perceive that my partner seems somewhat distracted, I may pull away and sort of get very involved with my own projects and go off. Then my part partner is left wondering what happened to Lisa ? Why does she seems so distant? Why is she gone? Where is she? What’s wrong with our relationship? So then my partner is going to start having some self-protective strategies, like fine, if she’s going to be that way, then I’m going to go off and I’m going to go out every night this week. She doesn’t want to be around me, then I’m going to go out. And you can see how it starts to become sort of this ping pong match then where our self-protective strategies are really pulling us away from each other. And the whole non-rocket science clue to unraveling all of this is just to be able to talk about it, but it’s not something we’re used to doing. It’s not something we’re used to saying, which is this vulnerable statement like, “Hey, you seem kind of distracted. I’m a little worried that it has something to do with us. Does it? Are we okay?” Checking it out? It’s again, kind of simple, but it can be very hard to do. So that’s where having that skillset where we’ve made it safe enough that we can ask each other, that we can check in, that we can find out what’s going on and not just assume that we have to go into our self protective strategies first. That’s really where the unraveling of these negative cycles comes in. [LISA] As I’m listening to this I’m hearing our coping strategies as children really no longer service as adults. It’s finding new ways, new coping strategies to be with yourself and also to be in relationship with your partner or in any kind of relationship. I’m also wondering how can we didn’t learn? How can we don’t know how to talk or be vulnerable with other people as adults? [DR. BLUM] Yes, that’s such a good question, Lisa. I’m sure that there are many writers and philosophers who have been able to talk about this, but I think that a lot of it, I mean, here’s some simpler answers. I think that a lot of times we haven’t seen it modeled. We haven’t seen that kind of vulnerability and that kind of emotional sensitivity modeled well. So we haven’t learned it. As I mentioned earlier on, I think that our culture does a particularly bad job of dealing with feelings at all. And feelings are seen as weakness. Emotions are seen as weakness, that we’re somehow supposed to be able to just stiff up our lip and override all those internal emotions that are happening to us all the time and just have logic and rationality be the premier and only way that we deal with situations and problems. It’s kind of an ethic in our culture. I think that it does a real disservice because I think that our ability to make decisions and solve problems based on a balance of our emotions and our reason is really what brings us to the most wise and compassionate answers. I think that our culture doesn’t really permit a lot of emotional space to men or to women or to non-binary people. I don’t think we are allowed a lot of emotional space. We’re supposed to somehow be very very, just sort of coldhearted and logical. I just think most of us haven’t seen this model. It does take some relearning, some unlearning and some relearning to get good in it, in our personal relationships. If I may just give one quick example of this, there’s something that happens where we know that we need to do sort of the emotional softness with children and then somehow somewhere along the way, we think that as adults, we don’t do that. So many of us, if we see a child we know or care about who’s crying, we’ll go over softly, we’ll knee down, depending on your relationship with the child, of course, we might offer to pick them up and hold them. We’re very gentle and responsive and compassionate with children who are experiencing emotion, or perhaps even if they’re not crying, if they’re scared of something, but somehow you see the same thing with an adult who’s crying or scared about something. We’re like, oh, come on, you can handle this. Man up. Put your big girl pants on. So we really shame adults who express emotions. Of course, I’m making gross generalizations here. There are plenty of people who don’t, but in large, in our culture, we just don’t have an ethos of like, oh, there’s an emotion happening. That’s important information. Let’s find out what’s going on. Now, we usually try to squelch it instead and move on to something more rational. So I don’t know all the reasons why I just know that it’s harmful and that I’m doing my work and even if it’s sort of one couple at a time trying to help them make space for a different kind of response to each other. [LISA] I agree. I agree with you. It’s like we don’t have the capacity to allow emotions in because if we allow emotions in, then we’re going to know how everyone’s feeling. Maybe we don’t want to know how everyone’s feeling like, honestly. [DR. BLUM] That could be a part of it because yes, then that evokes emotion in me and then I have to deal with that if I really know what’s going on with you. [LISA] What are some of the best self-care practices recommend for couples? [DR. BLUM] So one of the things with all these emotional reactions is that they do happen lightning fast, and they happen in the parts of our brain that are less about thinking rationality and more about survival. So one of the things that you need when you’re going to sort this stuff out is not just a slower pace, but sometimes you also need a little sort of downtime to be able to sort out what exactly it is that I’m feeling or what just happened that made me so reactive. So I talk with couples about a concept called constructive timeout. I want to really differentiate this from the kind of timeout where a couple is say, arguing or in conflict and one says I just can’t talk about this with you and we just need to stop talking about this and then the whole conversation shuts down. That is not a constructive timeout. So I want to separate what I’m proposing from that. This is more where both parties are in agreement that in this very moment, one or both of us is too reactive to really be able to talk about this productively. So we’re going to take an agreed upon time, and this could be anywhere from 10 minutes to a day but, but it’s an agreed upon time and we’re both going to work on figuring out what got each of us separately, we’re each going to work on what got me so triggered, what got me reactive to you? Why did I react the way I did? Then we’re going to come back together and we’re going to try to talk about it in that slower way, bringing that compassion and bringing that empathy, try to sort out what was really happening between us. So that constructive timeout is a real self-care strategy for individuals and for couples. Because often if you’ve done the timeout well, meaning you’ve really worked on soothing yourself and calming down and regulating your nervous system, oftentimes when you come back together, you are able to have the conversation differently. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes you might come back together and the conflict just starts right up again and that’s okay. It’s just important to say, whoop, we clearly didn’t take enough time. Time out to redo. Why don’t we give ourselves a couple of hours this time and we’ll come back together? But I do want to say that it’s very, very important that the couple have agreed upon time and that they abide by it. So even if you’ve had, let’s say a difficult argument and you say, okay, two hours, we’re going to come back together and talk about it and say, in two hours, one of the partners is still feeling too revved up and angry it’s really important to still come back and say, “Hey, I know we said we talk now, but I really think I’m not ready. I think I might need to wait till tonight, like after dinner, when more time’s gone by and I’ve had more of a chance to sort this out.” So you’re not bound by the time that you initially set, but you’re bound by the commitment to come back and tell your partner what’s happening for you. That’s really key because otherwise the partner who might be feeling a little more insecure in that moment could get very panicky feeling like, well, when’s my partner coming back and are they really coming back? Are we really going to be able to talk about this? So being able to feel secure that we really are going to talk about it, but after we’ve both had some time, that’s really important. [LISA] Oh yes, I love that. I hear it’s, for the partner that has to wait, it’s also, I think they’re building their emotional capacity or emotional tolerance maybe to sit on some feelings or emotions that have to wait. Actually, in the way I feel too, there’s good things that happen in that waiting time. [DR. BLUM] Yes. And I want to just sort of give a shout out for how really hard this can feel sometimes because partners have different processing styles. And I think for highly sensitive people, often the way they process is more being able to talk things through and emote and kind of do this out loud. It can be very hard for somebody who wants to process that way, needs to process that way to take this space in this time and go do something that’s more self-soothing and self-regulating, it can be really hard and it can be a process of having to send off the anxiety that comes from not being able to resolve it right now and having to trust that your partner will show back up. And obviously that has to be an earned trust but there is a good process that comes from knowing what your individual ways of self soothing are, whether that be music or nature or water and taking a bath or calling a friend and doing some processing with somebody else, whatever those ways are. It can be very empowering, I think to know that I can take care of myself in these moments for this short time. I can soothe myself. I have my strategies or I’m learning my strategies, I’m practicing them. And when I come back to my partner, because we still do need to resolve what happened, I’m not suggesting that just going off and soothing yourself is enough, you’re soothing yourself in the interests of being able to come back to your partner in a less reactive state so that the two of you can have a genuine conversation and a repair conversation about whatever led to the conflict or the disconnect to begin with. So I think it’s really empowering to know, I can take care of myself in this way, and then I can show up even sort of more ready and better able to be in a good place with my partner while we work this through. [LISA] Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Blum. I have two last questions I’d like to ask you. What is the most important you want listeners to know or take away from our conversation? [DR. BLUM] One of things that I think I would like highly sensitive people to understand about the gift that they have to bring to their relationship is that their sensitivity and in particular, their increased sensitivity to different signals between themselves and their partner is actually a real strength that they bring to the relationship. Doesn’t always feel like that sometimes because what we were talking about before, how registering all these different cues between what’s happening between the two partners can feel overwhelming at times. So I know this doesn’t always feel like a strength and a gift, but I really think that it is. Because one of the things that I help couples do when I work with them through EFT is understand that there’s kind of a whole world of meaning that’s happening underneath their awareness. So it may seem like they’re fighting about the dishwasher or the dog or the money, but that there’s really a much deeper emotional world underneath those things that’s going on between them and that’s really where the distress is. And being able to tune in to those more subtle, emotional meanings and cues and connections and disconnections is really what allows them to deepen and strengthen their secure base with each other, their way of feeling really tightly and safely connected to each other. That it’s sort of being able to look under the hood, so to speak and tune in to all those emotional subtleties that really lets them build a stronger foundation. So I think the highly sensitive person has a gift to bring to their partnership because that’s kind of the level that they’re tuned to a lot of the time. They’re much more attuned to those different signals and emotions and changes in kind of feel in the room and with others. So that knowledge can really help the partnership, I think, see more of what’s happening between them. I hope that a highly sensitive person could work with a couples therapist that would also see that as a gift that they bring to the partnership. [LISA] Oh, that’s so helpful and encouraging. Thank you so much. And where can listeners get in touch with you? [DR. BLUM] I have two websites. One is just my name, Lisa Blum with a Dr., for doctor in front of it. So it’s drlisablum.com. Then I also have a group practice with a team of folks who are trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy. So we can be found at eftresourcecenter.com. Either website gets you to me. [LISA] There you go. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today. [DR. BLUM] It’s my true pleasure. Thank you, Lisa so much for inviting me. [LISA] And thank you, my listeners for tuning in today. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. to find out more about highly sensitive persons, please visit my website, amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and show you that it’s okay to not take on everyone else’s needs or problems. And feel free to email me about what you would like to hear on the show. Email me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This is Lisa Lewis, reminding each and every one of you that you are ok. Until next time, take care. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.