Review: The Handbook for Highly Sensitive People

The Handbook for Highly Sensitive People by Mel Collins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Many thanks to NetGalley, Watkins Publishing and Mel Collins for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are 100% my own and independent of receiving an advance copy.

What is a highly sensitive person? Well, Mel Collins claims that almost 20% of the population are HSPs. They include people who process emotions more deeply than others, often being told they are too sensitive, or shouldn’t take things too personally. They are more reaction to the positive and negative emotions of others and can have a heightened response to environmental stimuli. Collins is a UK psychotherapeutic counsellor, spiritual healer and reiki master. She makes It clear that she doesn’t come from a scientific background and has gathered this data by working with people (including the prison system) over the past 15 years.

When I first started reading about what an HSP was, I started to relate to a number of things. I have been told my whole life that I am too sensitive, that I should toughen up, have high levels of empathy and have a feeling of not belonging, including in my own family. I don’t have all the qualifiers, like the environmental issues, but enough that I certainly fell into this category. As I continued to read on about how this manifests in your life, how it shapes your personality, etc. I really began to get excited and thought “Wow! This sort of explains my whole life”. It certainly spoke to a lot of my childhood, career choices and decisions that I have made along the way. It was viewed as a negative and I really felt like it was just me. There was something wrong with me, that I heard things differently than other people and took things too personally and got too defensive. That other, “normal”, people didn’t behave like this. So, naturally, you start to feel some validation when you realize there is a whole group of people who are like that and that it can be viewed as a strength and not a weakness.

Collins does an excellent job at identifying and explaining what an HSP is and what the challenges you might have faced during your life. She walks you through an extensive number of self-help strategies to help reshape your thinking into finding the positive. There is a third section on spirituality that goes more into the “woo-woo” aspects of crystal healing, spiritual guides (angels), earthbound should (ghosts) and other such stuff that she says in the beginning, if that’s not your cup of tea, skip it.

What I found, as I started to go through the self-help solutions, was that I had heard all of this before. Collins talks about self-love and softening your inner critic. Forgiveness and not comparing yourself to others is something that can help everyone. Setting boundaries and using things like meditation and positive affirmations to help keep doubt and worry at bay. She also talks about tapping as another strategy to help you in real life situations where you need to get control over how you are feeling. I began to wonder, if these were the solutions, then what is so special about being an HSP. Everyone uses these solutions if you are trying to live a more peaceful life. Be in nature, be in the moment, don’t focus on the past, are all messages I have heard from many other experts.

These self help strategies, echoes of what others have said, are sound and it is nice to have them in a step by step format, in one place. You can easily skip those sections that you don’t personally have an issue with so I found the book easy to use. To me, however, it just undermined the whole notion of being a highly sensitive person. Worthwhile read, just not sure I buy into the premise.

View all my reviews