Helping clients with Energy Spirituality, I come across terrible suffering on a regular basis. I do what I can to facilitate help.

Most clients come back for multiple sessions, which is how cumulative progress is made. Sometimes it takes several healing sessions for a person to get this very important Aha!:

Long-term emotional and spiritual healing cannot just involve taking out. It’s tremendously important to also put in more of what will really improve your quality of life.

Certainly that holds true with Energy Spirituality. When I facilitate cutting cords of attachment, the system I use involves putting back in quite a lot of significant things: Knowledge about what used to be in the cord of attachment, discussion of logical consequences for the client’s life on the whole, an energy bandage, homework. (That’s why it’s called “12 Steps to Cut Cords of Attachment(R)” and not “Have a cozy chat every day with Archangel Michael.”)

Over the powerful healing journey of cumulative growth, sometimes the healing centerpiece for a session will involve putting in something new. For instance, there’s “Social Skills Upgrade with Energetic Literacy.”

What is that? My client, Joe, will relate a troubling incident related to his intention — which is, perhaps, “Having more tenderness in my life.” I’ll pull out an energetic hologram of Joe and the other person in that troubling incident. Then I’ll read relevant chakra databanks about the person who upset Joe. (If you’re interested in finding out what makes people tick, and how they’re deep down different from you, there’s nothing like aura reading with Stage Three Energetic Literacy!)

Then we discuss what Joe did in that situation. What might he have been done differently? Essentially, Joe learns how to interface more effectively with reality.

Yet a lot of life’s put in healing can be done all by yourself. No fancy expert needed, and no fee for services rendered. You might just need to start asking some new questions. For instance….

What can you add so more people will treat you with tenderness?

Adding in — that’s the part so many people forget about when they’re in pain. Today’s post is about ways you might wish to heal disappointment and frustration by adding in something new. Ten somethings new, actually. Here comes our Tenderness Seeker’s List.

1. Reasonable Standards About Tenderness

I’m as big an idealist as you are. (Probably.) Yet I have also gained a healthy respect for reality.

Making contract with reality is actually required to support idealism. How can you start to bring your loftiest skyscraper -scale desires into manifestation? Make contact with the ground floor of life. Better yet, a foundation where earth is solid.

So let’s talk realistically about the desire for tenderness, wanting people to treat you with more softness, sweetness, consideration. (And by “talk,” that means I am inviting you to comment below to your heart’s content.)

This whole thread about tenderness began with a recent sophisticated quiz about being an empath. Tongue in cheek, I wrote this Question #10:

“Each empath is a very special person who should be treated tenderly by life.”

Some of the responses really shocked me, and today’s post was motivated by the kinds of longing and pain I felt underlying some of those comments. So much pain in life comes from unrealistic expectations. Let’s think together: Which situations in life typically include big-huge-fancy demos of tenderness?

• Taking care of a baby, like that little cutie at the top of today’s post.
• Helping someone who is ill or is recovering from a terrible shock.
• Custodianship of a person who is elderly, frail, or dying.
• The first romantic stages of a love relationship.

If you  don’t fall in these four categories, why expect strangers to reach out, gently touch your cheek, and whisper words of endearment? Have you been watching way too many mushy movies or what?

Many positive qualities can infuse adult relationships. They include respect, compassion, consideration, kindness, and everyday good manners. It is reasonable to seek out relationships with such qualities. Hunting for perpetual tenderness, however, is about as realistic as a diet of birthday cake icing.

2. HSPs, Revise Your Expectations

I have admired Dr. Elaine Aron hugely ever since she first published Highly Sensitive Person, a book I rave-reviewed for Pathways Magazine. Her body of work, and work from others who help HSPs, is tremendously important.

I have noticed one tendency, however, as people have taken up her work. Sometimes the sensitive person is advised to adjust expectations and lifestyle as though sensitivity were a disability. “Drive in the slow lane” wrote one teacher of HSPs, for instance.

Hey, I’m an HSP. One in five people, worldwide, counts as a Highly Sensitive Person. Not only are there loads of us in this world. We’re not disabled, nor do we perpetually have to drive in the slow lane.

Neither do we need to take life easy in other contexts, nor fear mainstreaming ourselves. (Do I think Dr. Aron ever intended this as part of her message? Of course not. Only some people have needed to go there.)

Being a well adjusted HSP requires discernment, not overprotectiveness. Sure, I avoid horror movies. In what way does that limit my life? Every adult has the right to choose a lifestyle, and mine happens to omit gratuitious violence in the guise of “entertainment.”

That’s different from turning all baby-tender, as in “I’m so special. I need to wear only the softest of clothing and eat only the softest foods and listen only to mellow music.”

Ridiculous! Let’s consider the limitations caused by STUFF. (STUFF, as in stuck emotional and/or spiritual debris, at a level of a person’s aura that corresponds to the subconscious mind.) HSPs have STUFF, like everyone else. And that STUFF can always, always, always be healed.

Many HSPs confuse their STUFF with their sensitivity. You Blog-Buddies know better, right?

But did you know this next part?

There is a Continuum of Sensitivity in life, how deeply you let your perception go and how much you emphasize the subjective nuances of life. Say that this Continuum of Sensitivity goes from 1 to 100.

Being an HSP means that your consciousness can travel all the way from 1 to 100, and stop at any point in between. Not that you are doomed to the 100-point setting in all social situations.

Go ahead. Live more shallow sometimes. For instance, choose to pay attention to objective reality, what people say and do right on the surface of life. You’ll slide yourself right down that scale.

Non-HSPs go up to what, 20? Depending on how highly insensitive, the person goes maybe up to a 3. Not your problem.

It’s a great thing that you can go so high up that continuum. But this is your choice, your opportunity.

You don’t need to walk around living at 100 on the Continuum of Sensitivity, then demanding that everyone else meet you there by treating you as fragile.

Let’s stop our Tenderness Seekers’ List right here and cover the remaining eight points in the following post. Because I just realized that this last idea is not necessarily obvious to all you Blog-Buddies who are HSPs or empaths. (1 in 4 HSPs is an empath; all empaths are HSPs). So I want to give you a chance to reflect and respond before we continue further.

The post Disappointed by the lack of tenderness in your life? appeared first on Rose Rosetree.