The Importance of Curiosity About Your Inner World

I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea that highly sensitive people have a “rich inner life”. It is a phrase we hear quite often, but I wonder how much we actually stop to consider what it means.

For me, it is about all the things that can be happening inside us that other people don't necessarily see. There can be thoughts, emotions, memories, associations, bodily sensations, fantasies, questions and ideas, all happening at the same time. We may process an experience long after it has happened, notice connections that other people don't seem to notice, or spend a great deal of time imagining, daydreaming and exploring possibilities in our minds.

There can be an enormous amount of life happening on the inside.

And yet, our inner world is largely invisible to other people. They only know what we choose to share, and sometimes we don't even know how to share it because nobody has really asked.

The importance of being curious about another person

I've been wondering whether this is one of the less talked-about aspects of childhood emotional neglect.

A child doesn't only need food, clothing, safety and practical care. They also have an inner world that is developing all the time. What are they thinking about? What are they fascinated by? What are they afraid of? What are they imagining? How do they experience what is happening around them? Not just “How was your day?”

A parent can be physically present and take care of everything a child needs on a practical level, while still having very little relationship with the child's inner experience. They may know what the child did during the day without knowing very much about what the day was like for the child.

And I think there is something important about the difference.

When someone is genuinely curious about us, it tells us that our inner experience matters. When someone asks what we thought about something, how it felt, what we noticed or what we made of an experience, they are showing an interest in the person behind the behaviour.

I know how much I value this in relationships. The people I feel most comfortable with tend to be people who are interested in what is going on underneath the surface. They don't have to agree with me or understand everything immediately. They are simply willing to listen and ask questions.

There is something very nourishing about being able to say, “Let me tell you what is happening inside me,” and having another person genuinely want to hear it.

What happens when nobody asks?

This is where I think high sensitivity and childhood emotional neglect can intersect in a particularly interesting way.

CEN isn't necessarily about something terrible that happened to a child. Sometimes it is about what didn't happen. Nobody was particularly interested in the child's inner world, or nobody had the capacity to meet them there.

And a child has to make sense of that somehow.

If you repeatedly experience that other people aren't interested in what you think or feel, you may eventually begin to assume that it isn't very important. You might stop talking about your thoughts because nobody asks. You might keep your imagination to yourself because other people don't understand it. You might stop mentioning the things you notice because they seem irrelevant to everyone else.

Over time, the inner world can become something very private.

It doesn't mean that the world inside you has disappeared. There may still be enormous amounts of thought, feeling, imagination and perception happening there. But you may have learned not to bring much of it into relationship.

And I think this can be particularly significant for highly sensitive people because there may already be such a rich and complex internal experience.

Maybe we need more than validation

We talk a lot about validation, and I think validation is important. But I've been wondering whether there is something beyond validation that we also need.

I've started playing with the word “curiousized.” I don't know whether it is a real word, but I like the idea behind it.

By curiousized, I mean the experience of having someone genuinely interested in your inner world. Not simply someone who tells you that your feelings are valid, but someone who wants to understand them. Someone who might ask what happened inside you when something occurred, what you thought about it, what you noticed, or why something mattered so much to you.

There is a subtle but important difference here. Validation can tell us that our experience is acceptable. Curiosity tells us that our experience is worth exploring.

And when a highly sensitive child repeatedly experiences the opposite—disinterest, criticism, dismissal, being told that they are overthinking, imagining things or being too sensitive—their inner world may gradually start to feel like something they should contain rather than share.

I wonder whether this is one of the ways we can begin to feel smaller.

What did you wish someone had been curious about?

One of the tools I use in my work with clients is what I call a wish list. I won't go into the whole exercise here, because it is something I often explore more deeply in therapy, but the basic idea is to look back at childhood and begin noticing what we wish we had received but didn't.

Perhaps we wish someone had been more interested in what we thought. Perhaps we wish someone had listened to our stories, noticed our feelings, encouraged our imagination or simply wanted to know more about what was happening inside us.

There can be something surprisingly powerful about giving ourselves permission to acknowledge those wishes rather than immediately telling ourselves that we shouldn't want them because the past is the past.

It doesn't mean deciding that our childhood was terrible or blaming our parents for everything that is difficult in our lives today. It means allowing ourselves to recognize what we needed and what may have been missing.

Sometimes we can spend years sensing that something was wrong without having the language to describe it. And sometimes what was missing wasn't practical care at all. It was the experience of being known.

Giving the inner world somewhere to go

I think this is also why healing from childhood emotional neglect can involve more than learning to regulate our emotions or change our thoughts. It can involve developing a different relationship with our own inner experience.

We can become curious about ourselves instead of immediately judging what we find. We can begin sharing more of what is happening inside with people who are capable of receiving it. We can write, create, spend time in nature, explore our thoughts and feelings, and allow ourselves to take our own inner experience seriously.

And sometimes we need another person to help us do that.

This is one of the reasons I believe therapy can be particularly valuable for people who are highly sensitive and have experienced childhood emotional neglect. Having a therapist who understands both can create a space where the things that have perhaps been kept private for a very long time can finally be explored in relationship.

There is no need to become less sensitive or less internally alive in order to heal. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether part of healing is the opposite: allowing more of that rich inner world to come back into contact with the world around us.

Maybe the question isn't how to make ourselves less.

Maybe it is how to give more of ourselves somewhere safe to go.