Welcome to the High Sensory People Podcast with Jane Elizabeth Aston and Elisha May!

We are High Sensory People, which means that like 20-30% of the world’s population, we were born with the genetic trait now referred to as High Sensory Intelligence®. The scientific name of the trait is Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) but it’s commonly known right now as being highly sensitive. We are passionate about raising awareness about the HSP trait and reframing it from being highly sensitive to High Sensory. 

In this week’s episode we talk about addiction in part 3 of our three episode series on this. It’s an important topic and we have quite different experiences of it. Over the last two weeks, Eloish and Jane have told their very different stories of how drinking became a problem for them, and how they overcame this.

This week we talk about what addiction and compulsion can look like for HSPs – and whether it might manifest a little differently to how it looks for non-HSPs?

Based on our own experience, we have a few suggestions of things to try and places to go for support if you are struggling with alcohol, drugs, or any other addiction.  Places to go for help or to provide support include:

THERAPY, COACHING AND WELLBEING SUPPORT

Therapists, especially those specialising in trauma and addiction – Elisha found that therapy helped her to recover from grey area drinking.

High Sensory coaching – this can help support the huge changes we need to make to overcome addiction and compulsion.

Acupuncture – Jane has found this very helpful in supporting her while working her 12 step recovery programme

Massage, and all manner of self care

12 STEP FELLOWSHIPS

Jane has worked through a number of different 12 step recovery programs to tackle various addictive and compulsive behaviours. They are a wonderful, completely free resource, they are organisations with a spiritual focus, but they are not religious in any way.  Here are some of the most popular ones:

Alcoholics Anonymous https://www.aa.org/

Narcotics Anonymous https://www.aa.org/

Marijuana Anonymous https://marijuana-anonymous.org/

Overeaters Anonymous https://oa.org/

Codependents Anonymous https://coda.org/

Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families https://adultchildren.org/

Debtors Anonymous https://debtorsanonymous.org/

Workaholics Anonymous https://workaholics-anonymous.org/

Underearners Anonymous https://www.underearnersanonymous.org/

And for those with family members in addiction or alcoholism, Al-Anon is a good place to seek support https://al-anon.org/ and there is an equivalent for those with family members in addiction https://www.nar-anon.co.uk/

THE 12 STEP HSP NEW ONLINE COURSE

Jane is currently piloting her exciting new online course called The 12 Step HSP: The basic guide to being a High Sensory Person in 12 step recovery. This will be released worldwide early in 2024 so to find out more and be the first to know about the full release of the course, visit Jane’s website and sign up for her mailing list at janeelizabethaston.com 

The HIGH SENSORY TRIBE online community is now open!! It's free to join for the first month, and then just £10 (about $12) a month  – ⁠click here⁠. We would love to see you there!

If you want to find out more about High Sensory Intelligence®, You can do the Inluminance test devised by Willow McIntosh here 

You can find lots of information about being HSP and do the original HSP test on Dr. Elaine Aron’s website.

Thank you so much for joining us!

If you have any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes, we’d love to hear from you. And please subscribe, like and review our podcast!

You can also get in touch with us at highsensorypeople@gmail.com 

Find out more about us and the work we do at highsensorypeople.com  

 janeelizabethaston.com and elisha-may.com

Thank you to Nathan Wills for the wonderful original music.