The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant in Your Role, Even When the World Overwhelms You

by Elaine N. Aron Ph.D.

Overview

First, she taught you the value of your highly sensitive nature in her bestselling classic The Highly Sensitive Person. Now, Dr. Elaine Aron is back to teach you how to utilize your sensitivity to tackle a new challenge: Parenthood.
 

Parenting is the most valuable and rewarding job in the world, and also one of the most challenging. This is especially true for highly sensitive people. Highly sensitive parents are unusually attuned to their children. They think deeply about every issue affecting their kids and have strong emotions, both positive and negative, in response. For highly sensitive people, parenting offers unique stresses—but the good news is that sensitivity can also be a parent’s most valuable asset, leading to increased personal joy and a closer, happier relationship with their child. 
 
Dr. Elaine Aron, world-renowned author of the classic The Highly Sensitive Person and other bestselling books on the trait of high sensitivity, has written an indispensable guide for these parents. Drawing on extensive research and her own experience, she helps highly sensitive parents identify and address the implications of their heightened sensitivity, offering:

   • A self-examination test to help parents identify their level of sensitivity
   • Tools to cope with overstimulation
   • Advice on dealing with the negative feelings that can surround parenting
   • Ways to manage the increased social stimulation and interaction that comes with having a child
   • Techniques to deal with shyness around other parents
   • Insight into the five big problems that face highly sensitive parents in relationships—and how to work through them
 
Highly sensitive people have the potential to be not just good parents, but great ones. Practical yet warm and positive, this groundbreaking guide will show parents how to build confidence, awareness, and essential coping skills so that they—and their child—can thrive on every stage of the parenting journey.
 
 
“This book is filled with validating, healing and empowering information about how to navigate one of the most important roles of our lives while being highly sensitive. It changed my life in the most healing and empowering ways.”
—Alanis Morissette, artist, activist, teacher

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806540580
Publisher:	Kensington
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	162,091
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

ELAINE N. ARON, Ph.D., obtained her doctorate in clinical psychology from Pacific Graduate Institute and trained at the Jung Institute in San Francisco. She is widely published in academic journals on the subject of both sensory processing sensitivity and, along with her husband, Art Aron, the scientific study of close relationships. She is also the author of The Highly Sensitive Child, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love, The Highly Sensitive Person Workbook, Psychotherapy and the Highly Sensitive Person, and The Undervalued Self. She conducts workshops for HSPs around the country and internationally, and maintains a blog for them on her website, www.hsperson.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Are You Highly Sensitive? A Self-Test xiii

1 A Deeper Look at What It Means to Be a Highly Sensitive Parent 1

2 Coping with Overstimulation: The Proper Care and Appreciation of a Highly Sensitive Parent 25

3 Getting Help: Yes, You Need It 53

4 Depth of Processing: Making Decisions, from Buying the Healthiest Bread to the Purpose of Your Life 79

5 Enjoying and Regulating Your Greater Emotional Responsiveness 101

6 Navigating the Intensified Social Contact: From Teachers and Other Parents to Well-Meaning Relatives and Health Professionals 137

7 Sensitive Parents and Their Partners: The Issues and Some Tools 167

8 More on Sensitive Parents and Their Partners: Making Progress on the Tough Problems 201

Source Notes 225

Acknowledgments 237

Index 239

About the Author 253

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR DR. ELAINE ARON AND HER GROUNDBREAKING CLASSIC
THE HIGHLY SENSITIVE PERSON
 
“Elaine Aron’s perceptive analysis of this fundamental dimension of human nature is must reading. Her balanced presentation suggests new paths for making sensitivity a blessing, not a handicap.”
—Philip G. Zimbardo, author of Shyness
 
“Enlightening and empowering, this book is a wonderful gift to us all.”
—Riane Ensler, author of The Chalice and the Blade
 
“Shy people fear being judged or rejected, whereas highly sensitive people have a keen awareness of their environment, frequently becoming overstimulated by it.”
—Self
 
“If you are easily overwhelmed by noise, chaos, and emotions; perform poorly when being observed; and require time alone each day as much as you need food and water, there is no need to worry; recent research shows your heightened sensitivity can do you more good than harm.”
—Counseling Today
 
“The first book that helps readers to identify their highly sensitive trait and to make the most of it.”
—Counseling and Human Development
 
“Aron combines self-tests with useful, nonclichéd advice on stress control and provocative descriptions of research on how people become HSPs.”
—Fitness
 
“At book signings, people have come up to her [Elaine Aron] and said, ‘You've saved my life.’”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Aron's book is not a fly-by-night, self-help tome, but instead a serious, five-year effort to explore a subject on which little has been done.”
—Portland Oregonian
 
“This book is a valuable resource for the HSP, as well as those who are trying to understand the HSP.”
—The New Times (Seattle)
 
“This innovative psychologist has figured out that the extreme reactivity of a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) can be a good thing. This comes as a relief to people like me—and probably you, too.”
—Pathways (Washington, D.C.)

From the Publisher