Episode #16: Empowering HSPs Through Community and Connection
Helping highly sensitive people find belonging, resilience, and authentic relationships through gathering and exploration.
Welcome back to The Happy HSP Podcast. I’m your host, Kimberly Marshall. If you’ve ever felt the ache of loneliness and longing for deeper connection as a highly sensitive person, or wondered where you truly belong, then today’s episode is for you.
I’m joined by psychotherapist and community builder Cindy Gale, who has dedicated her work to empowering HSPs through both individual healing and the healing that comes with genuine connection. She shares her journey of discovering her own high sensitivity, why community is essential for our well-being, and the beautiful vision behind her innovative platform, HSP Connect.
I hope you enjoy it!
Kim: Hi, Cindy. Thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome.
Cindy: Thank you so much, Kimberly. I’m really happy to be here and thank you so much for the invitation.
Kim: Yes, absolutely. I first like to ask about your personal journey as a highly sensitive person. So how did you find out that you had high sensitivity and what did that journey look like for you?
Cindy: Well, I was thinking about that, I was thinking about that yesterday and I can’t exactly remember, but I think it went something along the lines of I was involved…I’ve always been involved in activism of some type. And I remember, I think it was about 2009, 2010, I was involved in some Joanna Macy work, The Work That Reconnects, I’m not sure if you’re aware of that, but it’s beautiful, beautiful heart-centered, soul-centered work around how we feel about the world and what to do with how we feel about the world.
And I got involved in this whole network, and then I think I met some other people there that started talking that mentioned high sensitivity, and I thought, oh, this is actually a thing. This is actually a thing. I need to investigate this. So, I think it was about 2009, 2010, something like that.
Kim: Right. So, when you learned about it, what piqued your interest? What resonated with you about it?
Cindy: I think that particularly some of the groups and some of the places that I was involved in at that time, it was, what I really noticed was that not everybody had the same level of depth of emotion, depth of experience, just depth of feeling basically.
Kim: So, once you learned about that and I’m guessing connected it to your own self, what kind of led out of that discovery?
Cindy: Well, what led out to that discovery? That’s a really good question. I think it was a reframe. That’s what I hear most highly sensitive people say. I don’t know whether that’s your experience as well of when you found out about high sensitivity, but I think it’s almost like a complete reframe. Oh, okay. Everybody’s not like this…this is a little tribe or whatever we want to call ourselves, and not everybody is like that.
Kim: Yeah. I think that did happen with me, a lot of soul searching and trying to figure out why I was feeling certain things. And I feel like a lot of us have gone through something like that. It’s almost like our families, our friends, give us this kind of feedback that we’re different, and it kind of starts us on this journey trying to figure out why.
Cindy: Exactly. Exactly. I think particularly for me, around that time, I was doing a lot of, and I’m still involved quite heavily in environmental work and social justice work, and I think particularly at that time I was feeling this real depth of emotion and depth of I need to do something sort of social justice thing and looking around at other friends and family and thinking, why don’t they feel like this? Why? And then learning about the HSP trait really over a few years really started to put things into place for me.
Kim: Yeah. Is that something you can share? How did it put things into place for you and where did that ultimately lead you?
Cindy: I think I read, I started with Elaine Aron’s book, the original book, The Highly Sensitive Person, which is what I say to everybody, start with that book focus, focus on the research facts, because I’m sad to say, but there’s a lot of nonsense written about and a lot of things that are not particularly helpful, written about highly sensitive people.
And I think I always say to people, go back to the research, go back to Elaine Aron’s book, but also go back to the wonderful research that’s being done at the moment, particularly sensitivityresearch.com, where all the sensitive researchers tend to gather and where they do their research. So, I think just learning about it and then consciously seeking out other highly sensitive people, which is what I remember doing at that time.
Kim: Yeah. There seems to be just a connection that we have, an understanding. It’s funny, we can, and I’ve talked about this with a few of us, it’s just like we don’t have to explain what’s going on and why we are the way we are. Just, it’s like an understanding.
Cindy: Completely. Yeah. I mean, you must get that obviously from interviewing highly sensitive people and people involved in the high sensitivity world about that sort of connection and that sort of shorthand.
Kim: Yeah. It’s like we don’t have to put on airs, and we can just have these conversations where we just ramble and dig and ruminate and it’s just natural for us.
So, what’s the work that you do? And, I was reading about all the things that you’re active in, and it sounds like you have a lot of things going on. Can you share some of that with us?
Cindy: Yeah. The primary thing that I do, well, there’s sort of two primary things that I do that’s a bit of a contradiction, but hey, so I’ve been a psychotherapist for about 22 years. I think? I had to work it out the other day, 22, 23 years. I’ve been a psychotherapist having had lots of different previous careers, which again, I think is quite common for HSPs to sort of do things and think, oh, I’ve mastered this and now I need to do something else, and now I need to do something else. So, I’ve had many, some quite different careers, but I’ve been a psychotherapist for about 22 years, and it was a few years after that discovery about highly sensitive people that I started talking to other HSPs and I got involved with some local groups. One of them was run by Barbara Allen Williams, who I know you’ve spoken to. And then over a few years I thought, I’m going to specialize in working with highly sensitive people. I’m going to specialize in working with my people.
So that’s my primary thing. And then on the back of that, I think the world of psychotherapy is very, it is wonderful. It’s wonderful for people in many, many ways, but it can, focusing on the individual is sometimes not completely helpful.
So, there was something about my work probably five years ago, five or six years ago, and I thought what people really need, they need, sometimes they need individual work. Absolutely. Sometimes they need group work. And I do a lot of group work as well, and I hold a lot of groups, psychotherapy groups. And what I realized that people were really needing probably more than anything, was community and HSP community…to meet other people like them.
So, I piloted and tested and experimented with a few different ways of bringing HSPs together and launched something last year called HSP Connect, and HSP Connect is a platform for HSPs to meet other HSPs and make friends if they want to or to share ideas and put on events.
So, people are just starting now actually to put on their own events, and I’m really encouraging that and host the events themselves.
Kim: Is this like a Meetup, the app Meetup, but for highly sensitive people? Is that what this is?
Cindy: It’s not like Meetup. So, I run a big Meetup group for highly sensitive people for about 12 years, I think it was. I’m still running it now, but I’m about to let it go for about 12 years. And Meetup is very sort of, it’s bit one dimensional. You can go to events, you can have events like we are talking now, and you can have events, and you can have group events, but they tend to be sort of one-offs.
And I wanted something where people could develop relationships over time so they could really get to know each other over time and get to trust each other over time and get to share things with each other over time and where I wasn’t…what I really have a thing about within the HSP community, I don’t want to be the guru. I’m not a guru. I want to facilitate people doing this for themselves
And very much about empowerment. I’m very much about empowerment, and I’m very much about making this more egalitarian. So that was my vision. My vision for HSP Connect was a place where HSPs could come and meet each other and form and develop lasting relationships, lasting friendships. I think I say on the landing page, the HSPConnect.app, I say something like generally, not just for HSPs, but I think we have a crisis of friendship. People are very individualized and quite lonely. There’s a real epidemic of loneliness. I mean, everywhere in the west, certainly. So, I really wanted to address that, and I really hope that’s what I’m doing. That’s what this community is enabling.
Kim: And where do you meet and what could someone expect, who wants to sign up?
Cindy: So, it’s a little bit like a cross between a private social media platform. It’s a little bit like a cross between that. So, there are lots of posts. There are lots of events, but it’s just for the community. It’s just for the community who join. And the platform has the ability for people to, so for example, somebody has just talked about how they were, one of the posts was about intellectual stimulation, and it was about, Does anybody else? Does anybody else have this thing where I go and see a film or I read a book, or I go to a play or I read something and I haven’t got anybody to discuss it with because my partner or my family, they really don’t get it. They’re really not that interested in unpicking it and seeing what we found in there.
And then loads of other people piled in with, Yes, that’s me! Yes, that’s yes! Yes. So, two of the people who were heavily involved in that conversation, I said to them, well, this platform has the ability, I don’t have to host everything myself and Priyal, my partner in HSP Connect, we don’t have to host everything. I can give you access for this bit, and you can host it yourselves. So that’s what they’re doing. They’re doing that I think next week.
So, they’re hosting this sort of discussion around, I can’t remember what they’ve called it, but it is like a book club, except it’s going to expand beyond books. It’s to plays and music and theater and anything else that they happen to have they want to discuss.
Kim: That’s wonderful.
Cindy: I really like it, but I really like that sort of emergent property that sort of, I empower, give people the tools and give them the opportunity and see what happens. See what emerges.
Kim: Yeah. What a great idea. I feel like it’s hard to find our kind, and I think one of the biggest things I’m learning, the more HSPs I speak to, is the high sensitivity journey is so personal and not everyone feels comfortable sharing that they are or identifies with it or, so, you can’t really go around saying, Hey, are you highly sensitive? Someone may feel like that’s not something they identify with. So, what a great idea to have people be able to come together voluntarily to find that connection.
Cindy: Yeah. I really love the way it’s evolving. I really love the way it’s evolving into, I have this sort of intention. It’s like having a vision for something, but then I’m not wedded to the outcome. I’m quite happy to see where it’s going to go, how it’s going to go. I mean, the thing that I was absolutely passionate about when I set it up was actually creating a safe enough container for people. We have a very strong set of values. We have guidelines of course, because I set up my stall from the beginning effectively. So, if you want to come and join the community, then it will be a safe enough place for a diversity of different views and different opinions, but within some very clear guidelines.
Kim: So, it sounds like you did a little setup and then it’s just kind of taking off on its own, has a little mind of its own.
Cindy: Absolutely.
Kim: The best projects.
Cindy: Yeah, exactly. It’s that sort of emergent property. We’ll just see where it goes as long as it goes within these sort of guidelines. We’ll just see where it goes.
Kim: Perfect. You also mentioned in your biography that you do environmental work, and you have a Shaman background. Did I read that correctly?
Cindy: Well, yes. I was mentored for, I’ve been very, very blessed to be mentored by some fantastic, fantastic people. So, I’ve done the sort of shamanic practitioner training and was also mentored for about 10 years by the most wonderful healer from Dano, Burkina Faso, called Malidoma Somé, Patrice Somé.
So, he was my mentor for about 10 years, and in lots of the old ways, I would call it, learning lots of the old ways, lots of the old nature-based ways, and yeah, it’s work that I still do today. It’s work that I still do very much about connecting people back to themselves, but also very, very much back to nature.
Kim: Yeah. It feels like there’s such a need for that today, the way that we treat our earth.
Cindy: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, the way we treat each other and the way that we treat the earth. Absolutely. So, I’m cohosting an online event tomorrow evening actually, which is called How to Stay Open-Hearted in a Broken World for Highly Sensitive People. And it’s based on the work of the wonderful Joanna Macy, who died very recently, died a couple of weeks ago, and she created this whole body of work called The Work That Reconnects, and it’s deeply spiritual and deeply grounding and beautiful, beautiful work.
And it is all about how we come to terms and how we express our emotions when our hearts are breaking. There’s a wonderful quote from a Joanna, the heart that breaks can contain the whole world, can contain the whole universe. I think it is the heart that breaks can contain the whole universe. This idea that if we actually go to where most of us fear to go, the depths of our grief, the depths of our sorrow, then actually somehow it liberates us and we are able to build resilience and we’re able to hold so much more, so much more. So, there’s a huge paradox there. Huge paradox. But it’s absolutely beautiful work. Beautiful work.
Kim: Wow, that sounds so beautiful. It’s almost like making room for more joy and love by clearing out all that grief and pain.
Cindy: Absolutely correct, Kimberly. Absolutely correct. You put it much more eloquently than I do. I often talk about it as clearing the sludge. Yeah, clearing the sludge so that we’ve actually, we come back to clear water again, but you have to do this work again. This is work that you have to do in community. You need to do it with other people. It’s really important.
Kim: That just makes so much sense because I feel like we’re always trying to add things to our plate and add ways, and we’re always searching outside ourselves, looking for the next thing to fill us up. But if we don’t make that space and we don’t clear out that sludge, there’s nowhere for it to go. There’s too much, too much that we can’t fill that space with the good stuff if we don’t get rid of all the bad stuff.
Cindy: Completely. Right. You’re completely right. It weighs us down. It weighs us down. So, periodically we need to do this work and we need to do it with others, and it’s beautiful work, and it’s so ripe for HSPs this work. So, if any of your listeners are intrigued about it, I don’t run sessions on it now very often. I used to a lot, but I do sometimes, and I do in person, and I do online, but there are many, many, many other people doing this work out there. All you need to look for is something called, it’s either called The Work That Reconnects, or it’s called Active Hope, beautiful work. It is based in ritual, and ritual, again, is something that we have largely lost, but something that is so powerful and so sacred and so important for community, community bonding through ritual, beautiful work.
Kim: And it sounds like a really loving and supportive space to do that kind of work.
Cindy: Absolutely is.
Kim: So, when it comes to challenges that highly sensitive people face, what would you say are some of the things that you struggle with personally or believe that HSPs struggle with in general?
Cindy: Well, things that I struggle with, and I think even more so as I get older, and I think Elaine Aron writes about this, about how our sensitivity increases as we get older. So, I would definitely say to the younger HSPs out there, really understand the trait and learn about the trait and get really good support around the trait when you are younger, because it will make it so much easier as you age, as you get older.
Things that I find particularly difficult I think are noise sensitivity. So, I’ve just had some new neighbors moving next door to me, and it was a bit of a shock to say it mildly. It was a bit of a shock. And I don’t think any HSPs particularly like confrontation, but it got to a point where I had to go over, I had to say something, touch wood, fingers crossed, whatever the ritual is. Things have been much, much better ever since. Much better. But I think that noise sensitivity is something that you can’t always block it out.
Kim: Right. Are you familiar with Dr. Kaaryn Cater?
Cindy: No.
Kim: She writes for the research website that you mentioned, the HSP research, and she did research in education, and she found that students who were highly gifted were failing their exams. They did a study on why that was happening, and they found out that it was because people in the room had crunchy water bottles, and it just took so much mental capacity from them that they couldn’t concentrate. So yeah, noise is a big one for us. Sounds are huge.
Cindy: Yeah, that’s fascinating research. I’m going to go and look that up. That’s really interesting.
Kim: And I mean, that’s in a classroom, it’s different when it’s in your home and you can’t escape it, not pleasant. What are some things that you love about high sensitivity and celebrate?
Cindy: I think it’s that whole sphere of vantage sensitivity. The fact that, which I think has been researched now and discovered fairly recently, I think, and discovered that HSPs have vantage sensitivity that other people don’t have. And it’s this idea that we really thrive with the positive and the supportive experiences. We really, really thrive much, much more than anybody, the non-highly sensitive people.
So, our sense of awe and wonder and joy and happiness and pride and feeling love from being in community and people that really get us, it’s a peak experience. It’s like peak experiences and other people don’t have that.
So that’s what I really love. I always used to wonder, I ran an HSP retreat last weekend, and we were talking, it was actually in my garden. It was actually in my beautiful rewilded back garden with a pond and everything else. And there’s lots of little creatures because I don’t use any chemicals in the garden. It’s a sort of natural rewilded organic garden. And we were talking about the wonder of seeing a grasshopper and just how exquisitely beautiful it is and how we all gathered round sort of all 10 of us gathered round to look at this grasshopper. And we were talking about that there, about, oh, this is the only environment we could do this in. Because non-highly sensitive people go, oh yeah, it’s a grasshopper.
Kim: Yeah. Meanwhile, I’ll be like, oh my God, look at the wings. Look at all the markings, look at the colors. They must think we’re nuts.
Cindy: Exactly. So, there’s like 10 of us all grouped around this grasshopper the grass. What was the grasshopper thinking? That’s what I’d like to know, but hey.
Kim: It’s like probably the same. These people are nuts!
Cindy: But we were talking about it there about how beautiful that is, that we all, it’s like, where do we put that love and that joy? Where do we put that love? And I think that’s one of the things, again, that brings me back to HSP Connect. It’s because I’ve heard so many during in my psychotherapy practice, so many HSPs talk about how they’re lonely and how they have so much love to give, but nowhere to put it, nowhere to put it. So that’s partly why I created HSP Connect.
Kim: Right. That’s such a great point. Because we have such big feelings and lots of love, and when there’s nowhere for that to go where it’s accepted or valued, it can feel like we’re just holding onto so much of that, and that can be so, yeah…not ideal. Well, thank you so much for sharing that, and thank you so much for joining me today. How can people who would like to follow along on your personal journey or the work that you’re doing, how can people connect with you?
Cindy: They can subscribe to my occasional newsletter on my website, which is cindygalehsp.com. They can join if they’d like to join HSP connect HSPConnect.app. And I’ve shared a coupon code for your listeners, and it’s a very reasonable price anyway. It’s a very, very reasonable price. But I’ve shared with you a coupon code, and I do have some social profiles, but I’m not very active on, absolutely honest, really not very active on them. Not very active at all. I mean, I have a LinkedIn profile, I have an Instagram profile, not really very active on them. So probably the best way to connect with me is on HSP Connect or subscribe to my newsletter. But that’s sort of one way, and that’s a newsletter.
Kim: And for people who are listening, I’m going to share information about this coupon code in the show notes so you guys can sign up. And if you’re interested, check that out. So, thank you so much for joining me today, Cindy. It was such a pleasure.
Cindy: Thank you so much, Kimberly. Thank you for the rich discussion. And yeah, it’s just lovely to talk to another HSP as usual.
Kim: Same here.
Thank you so much for listening in on my conversation with Cindy. I hope it inspires you to see how building genuine connection can help you heal along your own HSP journey. I hope it also reassures you that even though being highly sensitive can sometimes feel isolating, we are never alone and there is a community of other HSPs out there seeking the same genuine connection you are.
If this episode resonated with you, I’d love if could write a review or share it with another HSP in your life who might need to hear these words. It’s a great way to spread the love and help other HSPs find more connection and support.
Until next time. Take care!
About Cindy Gale:
Cindy Gale is the creator of the HSPconnect.app community and a psychotherapist working with Highly Sensitive People. With a background that spans engineering, physics, psychotherapy, management consulting, shamanic practice, setting up charities and a published author, Cindy brings an eclectic, rare and powerful blend of experience and insight to our HSP community.
She supports HSPs in discovering and living their authentic selves and is sparking local HSP support and social groups across the world, helping sensitive souls collaborate, create, and connect. She also runs the therapeutic support team for the Climate Psychology Alliance where anyone with eco-distress can access 3 free sessions of support.
Cindy is a long time Active Hope (aka Work That Reconnects) facilitator helping people to foster resilience in the face of global crises. Her mission is clear: to help people deepen their relationship with themselves, others, and the natural world.
Follow along on Cindy’s journey:
Website: https://cindygalehsp.com/
HSP Connect: https://hspconnect.app/
***Use code HAPPYHSP to gain access to 20% off the standard price of HSPconnect.app for the first year of membership. Offer valid until October 31, 2025.
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About Kimberly:
Kimberly Marshall is a career coach for highly sensitive people (HSPs) and host of The Happy HSP Podcast. After 20 years in the publishing industry working for companies like Time Inc., Monster.com, and W. W. Norton, she left her corporate career to pursue work that better suited her HSP needs. She now helps HSPs overcome burnout and low confidence in the workplace and create gentle and nurturing careers that bring them lots of purpose, meaning, and joy.
Through her work and creative ventures, Kimberly hopes to shed more light on the reality of living with high sensitivity and inspire more HSPs to embrace their empathetic, loving, and gentle natures.
Hosted/produced by Kimberly Marshall
Edited by Fonzie Try Media
Artwork by Tara Corola