Episode #51: The Highly Sensitive Man’s Journey to Self-Acceptance with Mark Wigginton

How highly sensitive men navigate career struggles, vulnerability, and self-acceptance in a world that teaches them to hide their emotional depth.

Welcome back to The Happy HSP Podcast. I’m your host Kimberly Marshall, and today I’m joined by licensed professional counselor, coach, and writer Mark Wigginton for an honest conversation about what it means to be a highly sensitive man in a culture that discourages emotional depth.

Mark shares how he’s navigated overstimulation, addiction recovery, career struggles, and his emotional needs while also learning to embrace his true self.

So, if you’ve ever wondered how to navigate your emotional depth as a highly sensitive man and how self-acceptance can help you create environments, careers, and relationships that support who you truly are, then this episode is for you.

I hope you enjoy it!

Kim: All right, Mark, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s great to see you.

Mark: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on here and I’ve learned so much listening to your podcast that I’m really happy to be able to share.

Kim: Awesome. Well, I’m so happy you’re here with me. And my first question for you, which you should know, is your own personal experience with high sensitivity and your journey, what that was like for you.

Mark: Oh my gosh. So, like we talked about for just a minute before we came on, I’m an accidental HSP, and I was actually preparing for another podcast. I talk often about men’s mental health and I was going on a men’s mental health podcast and was doing my homework. So, I was listening to a few, and I was walking. I typically do a listening podcast and they started talking and they were talking about this highly sensitive thing. I’m like, okay, I get that. And then they went into their first interview, and I was listening to her first episode and it was with this lady named Elaine Aron. And so Elaine Aron, of course, is the person who really identified the traits of HSP back in the ‘90s. And as I walked along, I literally found myself arguing with Elaine Aron.

As I went about my own life and about some of the things that she was talking about and the reframe. So by the time I looked at nature and nurture, I was talking about nature and nurture. She was talking about oversensitivity. I saw that as hyper-awareness and we went back and forth in my mind about the HSP journey. And by the end of the episode, I was hearing so much stuff that really resonated with my own life experience that just got me curious. The more I learned, the more I identified it, particularly the DOES framework. And it really started giving me language for things that I’ve experienced for a really long time, but it didn’t have the ability to name.

Kim: And what were those conversations you were having with about this? What was coming up in that moment? I’m curious.

Mark: Well, I grew up in a very chaotic environment. If you kind of look back to my very early life as a starting point, so my mother was 18 when she was married, had me at 19 and was single by the time she was 20. So, we had this very kind of tumultuous life together. I went to 10 different schools before the 10th grade and there was lots of relationships along the way in her life. And I really grew up in this chaotic environment, and it has reflected throughout my whole life. And what I’ve really discovered through my HSP journey is overstimulation, emotional reactivity. Things that I thought were wrong with me that were a result of how I grew up, that chaos environment and how they carried forward into my adult life. Now I’m really kind of understanding. I have a frame that kind of lets me say, “Yeah, here’s another way to look at this.” And to help me understand the strengths that come from that.

Kim: Right. Yeah. The strengths versus the things that we grew up thinking are wrong with us. Like you mentioned, the emotional reactivity, I remember being a kid and just if I had a strong emotional reaction, my parents not really knowing what to do with that. So, it made me feel off or weird or kind of wrong.

Mark: Yeah, I get that. And again, with the constant movement that I had, I mean, I had to be very protective. I could think of myself and my emotional reactivity. It’s not like I was getting those kinds of messages from my mom. We were kind of really involved in our own lives and coping in our own way, but I was constantly restarting. So, I was constantly having to use ... I was either using empathic skills to try to connect to somebody. I was really learning how to read the room, understand the subtleties. Again, part of the HSP traits is that sensitivity to subtlety. So, all those things were tools that I used to cope as a kid that ultimately, again, like we just said, ultimately became real strengths as I moved to my career.

Kim: Right, right. Yeah. So, tell me a bit about that. Well, you did mention a men’s mental health, but I know you also do a lot of coaching. Do those intertwine for you, or are these kind of separate conversations we can explore?

Mark: No, they really do intertwine. My journey has been one of real self-discovery for a really long time. I mean, I’ve been working on myself really since I was a teen as I tried to sort through what made me so goofy and why it was kind of a little bit different.

And that early chaos and developing a life that was really kind of managed by overstimulation or overstimulation was a big part. It’s something that really has carried through all throughout my career. So, I was in and out of college. I was in and out of the Air Force and I kind of settled into my first real job and I found myself ...

So, one of my big coping skills for managing overstimulation, particularly my teen years was alcohol. I discovered alcohol as a real effective tool to help manage my state and reduce my anxiety. And that works really well until it doesn’t anymore. And about the time I was 30, I went to rehab for the first time and started to really explore things. When I came out, I went back to school. I left my business career behind, and I went back to school, got a master’s degree in counseling psychology, and I worked for seven years in community mental health.

I worked in rehab centers. I actually worked in a rehab center in the jail, which is one of the areas where I became really attuned to men’s mental health issues, was working in a substance abuse treatment center inside a jail, which was quite an interesting experience.

And then after a period of time, I had my own experience with relapse and I just kind of totally turned the corner and went back into the business world. And Kimberly, it’s kind of something I think you and I have in common after listening to some of your podcasts is this real chaotic period where you’ve talked about having a lot of different jobs and the same thing was really true for me as you’re trying to sort through what it is that you want to do and how to use everything together.

So, for me, that career was about 15 years and in that window of time, I had 20 different jobs. And then as I matured and became more stable in my life, the last kind of phase of my career, the last 15 years, I had one job. So those two things were back-to-back because I learned new ways to cope and new ways that I didn’t even really have the language for.

I didn’t have the HSP language for, but I really learned how to use those skills more effectively. It’s funny, we have our common friend, Rachel Radway, and her frame of “perceptive,” taking the HSP traits, which are maybe not so highly respected particularly in the US and reframing them into a way that has a more solid business frame and making more acceptance and more acceptable. I think that’s something that I really found for myself on my journey.

Kim: Right. I love that you mentioned all that because it’s so true. It’s like with our careers, I feel like, and especially for you because as you mentioned, you’re newer to the actual term, but we’ve lived with it our whole lives and we’re building all these skills. It’s almost like we’re searching for that one job that lights us up at our passion, but at the same time we’re getting overwhelmed by everything. So, it’s like, oh, this must not be a good fit. When a lot of the times it could be the environment, it could be the way that people react to who we are. Yeah, we just have a different need when it comes to professional work. We have different needs.

Mark: And that’s so true. And it’s important that we discover that and it’s not easy to discover that because when you’re different and you kind of have a perception of yourself that’s different, that’s maybe a tiny bit, you kind of stand maybe a bit apart from other people, you’re a little more guarded and a little more protected because of trying to deal with how you see the world.

It becomes hard to really assess that and to really own that. One of the big things that happened for me that made that in that transition period when I went from all that period of changing jobs to really finding the strengths and getting to the place where I found stability is a tool that I mean I used in my own life and felt really worked, and I use it a lot with my clients today and it was kind of doing a job and inventory. And I’ve done this a couple of different times where I basically just sat down with a list and I looked at every job in my life from when I was 12 and I had my first paper route and it was throwing newspapers.

I looked at every job. I mean, that’s when I really came to this understanding about the 20 jobs and I came to really see the 20 jobs and understand what was happening here. But at first, I listed them all out chronologically and then I get kind of an inventory and the simple way is I said, what did I really enjoy about this job? What really sucked about this job and what did I take into the future? What did I learn that I could take forward?

What was good, what was bad, and what did I learn? And I started to see the pattern unfold, and I started to see how everything built on everything else and got me to that place where I became more integrated and it let me be more stable. So that last job at the end allowed me to use all the different things I learned on my journey.

Kim: Amazing. What were the patterns you were seeing? I’m curious.

Mark: So, there were a lot of them. One was creativity, one was sensitivity, one was being really able, like I said before, being able to really read a room that became kind of a superpower for me in a sales role or a consulting role, even in a training role as I kind of went through the period of time where there were a lot of changes. A lot of it is the strengths that tie back to the HSP style. I was able to process really deeply. So, I was looking at all the different pieces as I went along. I was learning how to manage the overstimulation, like you said a minute ago.

Maybe I would get caught up in chaos at a work situation and I would decide I would have to leave or maybe I would generate chaos or generate overstimulation in a position and maybe not be invited to come back.

I mean, those kinds of things all play out together and the same thing with emotional reactivity. It could be that I would respond something less than appropriately-

Kim: Inappropriately, right. 

Mark: Right. Because I was feeling things so deeply, those were the patterns that I really started to cover. But again, I didn’t have the words for it. I mean, I’m 66 years old, I’m going through this change this time in my life in the late ’90s, early 2000s, and Elaine was just writing the book. She was just publishing the book that really identified her work and identified the traits in the mid ’90s. So, it wasn’t prominent yet. It wasn’t really known. So, I was kind of struggling my way through it. And again, that’s why when I discovered the frame, it made such a big impact in my own life and in my own journey.

Kim: Right. I’m so happy you mentioned all that because I feel like for us there’s a certain sense of shame. I don’t know if you went through this, but I did…a certain sense of shame. I’m intelligent. I can do this. I had a great job working for Time Magazine. I felt proud of my work, but there was something in me that just I would overreact, or I was too into what the people were doing, and it was embarrassing because I couldn’t help who I was, and I couldn’t help what I was feeling or thinking or wanting. It just wasn’t a good fit for me.

But yeah, I definitely went to that place of shame, why can’t I find something that works for me? I’m flawed. There’s something wrong with me. I can’t have this when it just wasn’t a good fit. And I feel like for us, it takes a while to get to that good fit.

Mark: And it’s about identifying what does work in that situation. So, for me, the results of the early part of my life where I was always moving and changing and moving, I found a way to create a life that worked for me, and it was project-based.

So, that’s part of why there was 20 jobs because I would work on a consulting gig for a while, or I would work on a training gig, or I would be doing sales training. I mean, even when I was working in community mental health, I would work in five different places at the same time because I needed that variety. It was part of not being able to manage overstimulation. I would always have to be busy, always have to be doing something different. So, it’s just been a key of that. And again, yeah, there’s a lot of shame, particularly I think as a man in this culture where you can’t be stable.

And you’re trying to provide ... My wife and I have been married for a very long time. We don’t have children, so we didn’t have that, but it was a long time where she worked for the state of Texas. We lived in Austin for a really, really long time, and she worked for the state of Texas and had this nice, stable job and was able to retire at 58 because she’d been there for so long. She had the little magic formula and I’m bouncing, I’m kind of on the road and always away and always starting something new. So, at one point you look at it and you go, “Holy cow, why is it that I can’t find the stable part?”

But then I did, and then I did and I found a way to tie all the people together. I still did project work, but I found a way to manage it. I worked in a consulting, a small niche consulting firm, and I still spent time away, and I still worked on lots of different projects, but I was able to manage it instead of being out of control. I was in more of a leadership role, so I could choose my time. The last part of that chaos window, I worked for that same company as a consultant on the road, and I was gone for 250 days in that last year, 200 straight.

Kim: That’s a lot.

Mark: And so that’s hotels and airplanes and just all the stimulation and it resulted in real problems in my life. And then those problems got me to a place where I made changes in my life and everything began to get a little more together. I kind of look at my life in these chapters and I see a zero to 15 chapter and then a 15 to 32 chapter and then a 32 to 47 chapter and then 47 to 62 chapter and then the chapter that I’m in now.

And I learned something in each of those sections, but I also learned something that I think both of us experience when we work with clients, and that’s that there aren’t very few people that are going to make a shift in their life. Their life’s at 98, on a scale of a hundred, if their life’s at 98, there are very few people who are going to go, “I want to get to a hundred.” Everything’s working great, but I’m willing to work to get to the next level. Most people are going, “I’m at a 40, my life’s come off the tracks and I’ve got to find a new way to cope. I’ve got to find a new set of skillsets or a way to integrate this skillset.”

That was a really long answer.

Kim: No, it’s beautiful. I love that journey because when you were saying that, I just have so many similar experiences same with my ex, he had a great job forever. He’s been with the same company for over 20 years. I remember when I went into coaching and I was like, “I think I’m going to try coaching” after all the million career switches I did. He flat-out looked at me and was like, “And what if this doesn’t work out now?” He was done with it.

But it is…I think for us, it’s that exploration process and figuring out, like you said, what works for you, for me it’s more of a gentler pace. Yeah, I’m smart, and I’m intelligent, but I can’t be in fast-paced environments. I always said I could, but I struggle. I need gentle schedules, I need slow pace, I need to take my time with my work, and it’s just owning it.

At some point you just have to own what works for you and recognize it and be like, okay, this is just how I work versus…

Mark: You’re right. And it’s so important for us to figure that out for ourselves. What does it look like? And so that’s what mental health is all about is finding somebody having been a licensed counselor or a mental health professional and having been a coach, you kind of can see the difference between the two roles and how the two things complement each other to help somebody, depending where they are on their journey. They may need to resolve the stuff that’s in their path and so maybe they need a mental health professional to do that. They may be forward-focused on how do I take what I have and integrate it to move forward? And that’s a great place to be the coach to help you explore that, to help you really understand your strengths.

Kim: So, you’re saying in terms of finding what works for you specifically, is that what you mean, the tie-in to mental health? Is that the-

Mark: Well, I think for many people, if you’ve got to go back and look backwards and figure out what the source of your challenges are, then that may be a good place for a mental health professional to intervene. And if you’re forward-focused, if you’re trying to get to a place where saying, “Listen, I’m here, I’m trying to get there, I’m trying to understand what my strengths and my roadblocks are,” and that’s a great place for a coach, somebody to come in to do the kind of work that you do and then I do where you’re helping people identify their strengths and helping them really focus on building on those strengths.

Kim: Yeah, I love that because it’s like we’re always trying to fit ourselves into other people’s boxes, and then we wonder why we can’t cope. It’s not for us.

Mark: Yeah. It’s funny, Kimberly, something just registered for me as I listen to our conversation and back to strengths. And one of the biggest things that I wind up helping people do is deal with strengths blindness. It’s this whole conversation that we’re having right now about turning what was a weakness into a strength. People don’t understand or see the other side of the strengths that they have. And it’s something that I work with often. So, I was listening to one of your interviews, and I don’t remember the name of the woman, but she was a midlife career coach, and she was talking about strengths specifically. And I could tell from what she was saying one of the tools that she used and you get a list of 24 strengths as a result of that tool. And so often when I work with clients with the same tool, it’s like they don’t have any idea.

They don’t have any idea that the things that are really core for them can really help them grow. They may not see it at all. Particularly people who are dealing with career struggles, maybe they can’t see that social intelligence is something that’s been really important to them, or love of learning is something that’s been really a critical tool for them because they’ve processed through their life. And that’s one of the first steps is really just being able to identify what those strengths are, then you can build.

Kim: Yes, because I think we think, especially in terms of career, we think of strengths in terms of skillset like, “Oh, this is my skill. I’m a writer, I’m a drawer.” But you have other strengths that maybe aren’t listed on that job posting that would make you an awesome fit, and these are the softer skills that we have.

Mark: Right, absolutely. So just to follow the same string of this conversation, that tool identifies really soft skills or traits, almost more than skills, more like traits. And so, my top five have really changed post-career with everything that I’ve gone through in the last couple of years. And my number one skill is gratitude, or my number one strength is gratitude. It’s really being appreciative of things that I’ve learned.

And if you go to somebody and say, well, yes, you should hire me because I’m a grateful person, that may not work. But, if you can understand and translate that being a person that understands gratitude and is grateful means that you can appreciate your team. It can make you an effective team builder. It means that you can be part of, you can interact with your customer in a way that will really help you focus on them and what they really need. What does that sound like? That sounds like empathy. That sounds like subtlety, like sensitivity to subtlety.

So, it’s all a matter of finding the vocabulary to take your character strengths, your value-based strengths, and turn them into real things that can be used in business.

Kim: Absolutely. Can you share with me a little bit about your experience in the mental health place, especially when it comes to men? I know you mentioned you worked with men in that way. Can you share a bit about that?

Mark: Yeah, it was a really an interesting part of my journey that resulted in an awful lot of growth for me. And I’m a middle-class kid, and like I said, I bounced a lot, but after I went back to school, I had an opportunity to work inside the Travis County, that’s Austin, Texas, so the Travis County Jail in the substance abuse program for men. And I learned so much there. I learned so much about the struggles that men have kind of owning their emotions, owning their feelings. And there’s one very specific thing that happened in there.

I mean, I could spend an hour talking to you about the experience, but there was a very specific thing that happened. And again, this is in the late ’90s and this is when the era of bootcamps for teens was out. So, there might be a diversion for a felony, a kid that was on the felony path or had tried to commit a crime.

Anyways, I’d work, as they say, inside the fence. So, I’d work with adults in groups and just a regular substance abuse rehab. And then I’d go outside and I’d work with the teens. And what I found was I would be talking to these men, and they would be talking about grief, and they would be talking about sadness, and they would be mourning the loss of the relationships they didn’t have with their son and their nephews. And then I’d go outside the fence and guess who I was talking to…their sons and their nephews who were now talking about the anger that they had because they didn’t have relationships with their fathers and uncles.

So, the fathers and uncles were talking about the grief and loss that they had because they didn’t have these relationships, and the young people were angry about the other side of the table.

And that led me to this really deep understanding about what masculinity is and about the importance of being able to talk. And I mean, it’s even more important today if you look at statistics related to men’s suicide, you look at these young men from maybe 15 to 24, 25, in a population of 100,000, it’s four times more likely that a young man will take his life than a young woman will take her life. And part of that’s because of isolation and part of that’s because of the inability to have relationships. And then it kind of stabilizes a little bit in the middle, but then you get to the far end, you get to 65 to 75, it’s 5X and 75 and above it’s 10X

And it’s because people grew up in a culture where they really weren’t able to talk about things like they’re feelings. I grew up with a vision of masculinity that was John Wayne. And I still have my autographed John Wayne picture from when I was 12 years old. But if you really look through the lens of an HSP at some of the things that John Wayne’s characters did, some of the messages that came through, they really kind of shine through. So, these movies may or may not mean anything to you. The movie The Searchers, have you ever seen the movie The Searchers?

Kim: No.

Mark: It’s a John Wayne movie where he’s kind of that strong, silent type guy. He’s constantly scanning and he’s constantly sensing, but he’s not in a place where he can integrate. So, he’s sensitive to everything that’s happening around him, but he’s not able to own it. And the last scene of that movie is he’s kind of reunited this family, and the last scene of that movie is iconic in the John Wayne field, and it’s like he’s standing in the door leaning against the doorway with the friends right behind him just outside enough, just away enough. So, his sensitivity, his sensitivity to the subtleties, it’s kind of who he is as a person. And then there’s a second movie called The Shootist. I don’t know, again, may not know these movies, but the character, J. B. Books, the character in that movie knows that he has cancer and has come to terms with it and he’s kind of grounded.

He’s processing deeply what his life experience has been like and he’s making proactive choices of how he’s going to go out. So, these guys look like the strong silent type, but in the reality, it’s about sensitivity, it’s about processing deeply. And even today, John Wick, you look at, my generation was John Wayne, this generation is John Wick. He’s all about emotional reactivity and empathy in his life, his intensity comes from how deeply he feels, particularly how deeply he feels lost. So, we have these role models of what masculinity is supposed to look like, and understanding that we have to be strong and we have to be silent and we have to be stoic and we have to do it ourselves. But really underneath that is that the real level of opening up and being really connected to who you are.

Kim: Yes. And after all of that, you know what came up for me when you were saying that it’s like, well, what is strong…is strong, pretending that you don’t feel so deeply, pretending you don’t have this grief and keep ignoring it, pushing it down, or is strong being able to share what’s on your heart. That takes more strength. That takes more bravery because that’s hard. It’s hard to do.

Mark: And I think that we’re getting to a place where it’s more acceptable.

When I was 25, it wasn’t. I kind of shortcutted the move from community mental health back to work. I mean, I relapsed. I was sitting here talking to people every day about learning basically how to live in the gray, learning how to not be stuck in I’m good or I’m bad, but how to get back up and to be resilient and if you screwed up to start again. But when I screwed up, I was like the expert. And so, I totally turned my back on all of that, and I went back to the business world. I used skillset, and I went through this crazy eight-year odyssey where, at the end of that eight years, I was the guy on the side of the road in handcuffs.

Kim: You were harder on yourself than you were on the other end that you were helping.

Mark: I mean, I wasn’t willing and that’s help us a lot with helpers is that we’re there to help other people, but sometimes it’s really hard to help ourselves. So that journey was about, I can offer you all the help you want, but I can’t ask for it myself.

Kim: Yes.

Mark: It’s what you just said about “What is being strong?” Being strong is really being vulnerable enough to say, “I don’t have to do this on my own.” And, I mean, that’s a really important part of what’s happening for me in this chapter of my life right now. I learned to live this protected life where I was just apart enough from everything in life to protect myself, and now I’m learning to be open enough to become vulnerable enough to be a part of, to be here talking to you today to be a part of this tribe.

Kim: You’re not standing sideline, just kind of observing you’re in it now. Can you explain maybe what that looks like for you or to ... I could just imagine some men who may listen to this wondering, well, what does that really look like? How would you explain that?

Mark: Well, first off, I think most people aren’t going to do it unless they have consequences. It’s like we said a minute ago, if your life’s a 98 and you’re trying to get to a hundred, you’re probably not going to be as willing to do the work if the wheels have come off.

Kim: Something’s got to push you.

Mark: Yeah, something’s got to change and push you along the journey. But so much of that happens at midlife where people decide they have to make a change. For me, the catalyst that made the change that enabled me to start making a change in my life was what I just talked about a second ago. When I went in an eight-year period from being a person who helped people find their way to recovery, to find their way to abstinence, to being the guy that was on the side of the road in handcuffs because I was still managing my life ineffectively. I mean, that was the thing that made me say something’s got to change and find a new set of coping skills. And I think that’s what that journey looks like is finding ... And it’s a long evolution of finding the tools that work for you.

But even though the new tools were more socially acceptable, they still kept me isolated. What I did was I began running. I tried to take care of my health. And so what had running become? It became half marathons and full marathons, Ironman triathlon, more and more, but it was still all separate. That’s all still living apart from on multiple ways, hours and hours of being just with myself, going to a business meeting where you’re eating apples and sitting on a lacrosse ball so that you can work your hamstrings and being up at four o’clock in the morning so you can go run before the session while everyone else kind of nursing.

I mean, all those things still kept me separate. And in all honesty, Kimberly, I never resolved all that in my career. It wasn’t until I went to this next chapter, this kind of post-career chapter where grief became such a big part, where I really had to deal with the loss of so many people in my life that I really started to become introspective and get to that place of becoming a part of. Understanding that I don’t need to protect myself by being one step away from the community, I can really be integrated and be honest and be true. And again, that’s probably the biggest credential that I’m bringing to this call today. It’s not my coaching credentials and my counseling credentials, and I kept my license for 30 years as a counselor, all that.

Yeah, that’s fine. And what really matters is that we’re here having an honest conversation today, and I’m integrated in that conversation.

Kim: And what I was hearing when you were explaining that is you spent so much time in the empathy space and healing others and that probably healed you too and running and chasing all these things outside of you, but that moment almost made you say, “Okay, I got to get real with what’s in here.”

Mark: Yeah. I mean, again, it’s in response. I mean, part of that was that I left full-time work because my mother had Alzheimer’s disease and it was important to be there to support. And then I had this window of time where Alzheimer’s is a long goodbye, but often it has a very quick end.

So, she fell, she had a very quick end. Six weeks later, my stepmother died suddenly six weeks after that, my father died. So, this 99-day window, I lost these three significant figures in my life and then I started saying, “What’s it all about?” And that’s what led me on the journey. That’s what finally led me on the real journey to move to become a part of a community, to become a part of my life instead of this much separated.

Kim: It’s like that moment we just let all the walls fall, all the BS, all the things that we’ve masked to keep ourselves safe, and we’re just real. With others, with ourselves, it’s like everything in our lives leads us up to maybe a moment or so when we’re just so sick of the struggle, and we’re like, whoever really. And it sounds easy, it’s not. It takes, like you said, it unfolds over time.

Mark: It’s tons and tons of work. And there are people like you and your peers, people who are a generation behind me, who are younger, who are opening the doors and enabling both men and women to be able to talk about these kind of…

Kim: Mental health is much more on the forefront these days. People are realizing the importance of it.

Mark: Right. And they’re realizing that it’s critical for their life success for them to be able to figure out. Right. Yeah.

Kim: Awesome. So what would you say you struggle with when it comes to your high sensitivity? What’s a challenge for you, would you say?

Mark: I still am a little oversensitive. I still have to deal with that a lot of not reacting, of being able to respond and to choose. So, it’s something I still work on a lot. I don’t understand why people don’t cry at commercials.

I don’t know. The worst commercial of all for me is the commercial with the dogs that have the chains on and they’re shivering outside to try to ... Can’t fast forward Zoom, won’t watch a show that has it unless I have the ability to fast forward because I’m really kind of dealing with being oversensitive. But I really think the way that that really shows up for me is self-acceptance and still getting to that place of being able to say, “You know what? It’s okay. It’s okay that I might cry when I see that commercial.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay that I can get wound up really, really quickly and have to find a way to come back down.” “It’s okay that I can react to something.” “It’s okay that maybe I’m reading more into what’s happening in the room than other people are.” So that self-acceptance of my journey is one of the things that I admittedly still struggle with.

Kim: Yeah, I hear you. Do you remember those old Iams commercials with the old dog that was aging and couldn’t get up the stairs?

Mark: I cry at the Subaru commercials with the dog family, the one where they’re all in the car. Yeah, that would get me every time, but I will stop and watch that. I will backtrack to go pick up the Subaru dog commercial.

Kim: Yeah, poor dogs…I’m with you. What are some of the things you love about being sensitive? What would you say?

Mark: I think that one of the things that I really have always appreciated again is really the kind of creativity. And if you were going to label it in the frame and say it was the sensitivity to the stimuli, I love being creative and looking at things in a different way, finding things just slightly different. And early in my career, I worked in my 20s right after we got back. I worked for one of the first big companies out of Silicon Valley, and it was trademarked by the fact that it had a 75-person hot tub. So it was really kind of an interesting deal.

But it was dealing with these computerized phone systems, and they had very limited memory, like a half a K. There was no memory in these things. And as a software coder, your job would be to say, okay, Kimberly’s phone A and her phone is covered by phone D and if that person nobody’s there goes to C and you’d make a little chain like this. But when I did it, it would be, okay, Kimberly’s covered by A and everybody in that region, CD, EFG, they all are people that could really kind of take the call and behind them is a whole other set of people that could take the call. And so I would make this really good elaborate, huge giant thing and because this is so awesome.

And I would watch it in track and like, “Oh, it’s so cool. It’s done.” And then I get called in by my boss who’s like, “Okay, Mark, we have a very limited amount of memory here, and you just took 10 times what you needed to do to accomplish that.”

But I love that. I mean, I love the creative thing and I met for years with a group of guys and we would kind of talk every week about what we wanted to do and what our goals were. And they would then become my turn and they would turn to me and go, “And now Mark will give us the theme for the day.” Because I would be able to tie together what everybody was talking about as the goals.

Kim: Yes. I love that so much. 

Mark: Well, this is what I heard as somebody. So I love that. I love that kind of creative energy and I do a lot of writing right now and I’m adjusting a lot of things. And I just have to go back for a second to the movies because how the HSP is kind of coded into movies, it’s because so many creative people really are HSPs, whether they identify or not.

Kim: I love that.

Mark: And so, they code it into the movies.

Kim: Yeah. I’m a big literature person, and it’s the same thing. So many of the writers write about creative people or writers themselves because it’s just like a natural tie-in to who we are. It’s what we understand. It’s what our lives look like. It makes total sense. And all the actors and the creative people, all of that, I’m sure.

Mark: Yep.

Kim: Yeah, I hear you.

Mark: Yeah.

Kim: So, what would you say to highly sensitive people who may be struggling with their trait? What advice could you offer?

Mark: Well, like I said, I’m here today as a member of the tribe, so I hesitate a little bit about giving advice, but I’ll say what I’m finding. So, what I’m finding on my own journey is that having a framework like the highly sensitive person framework has really kind of helped me get off my own back. It’s really helped me to see that I’m actually pretty okay and that some of the things that I thought were weaknesses or really strengths when I can understand that.

It also reminds me that I’m not alone. I think it’s really easy for those of us who are highly sensitive to who see things differently to think maybe we are alone. And like I said, that sense of aloneness has been a big part of my story, and I’m starting to see how I can connect. Again, like I’ve said a few times in here that I can really lower those barriers and become a part of a community.

And I think maybe the biggest thing that I’m still learning is that it’s really okay to start again, and it’s okay to start again as many times a day as you need to.

Kim: Awesome. That can be so hard, but I’m with you. What other choice do we have? We got to keep trying again. Yeah, that’s been my journey too. Thank you so much for sharing that. Where can people follow along on your journey?

Mark: Well, I had a long business career, so I hang out on LinkedIn. You can find Mark Wigginton at LinkedIn. I will probably be the only Mark Wigginton that’s connected to Kimberly Marshall, so that’ll be a good thing.

Kim: You never know.

Mark: Even though there are a couple of others out there. Also have a website for my practice. It’s called it’s focusingonresults.com. I have a newsletter that comes out twice a month, every other Tuesday that’s really focused on midlife journey. It’s called Your Next Chapter. We talked about all the different chapters today.

Kim: And where can people sign- I’d love to

Mark: Have your people subscribe. They can go to my website to subscribe to that.

Kim: Amazing.

Mark: I’d love to have people join the list and I share stories from my own experience and from other people’s midlife experiences.

Kim: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. It was such a pleasure.

Mark: Yeah, I really, really did enjoy it, and thank you for making the space.

Thanks so much for listening in on my conversation with Mark. I hope it reminds you that sensitivity is not a weakness, and that healing begins when we stop trying to fit ourselves into spaces that were never built for us in the first place. When we are strong enough to embrace who we truly are…unapologetically…the path to authentic living becomes clearer than ever.

Until next time. Take care!

About Mark Wigginton: 

Mark Wigginton is a licensed professional counselor, certified professional coach, and writer who discovered only later in life that he’s a Highly Sensitive Person — specifically a High Sensation Seeking HSP — a realization that helped him make sense of a lifetime of overstimulation, restlessness, deep processing, and adaptation.

His story includes recovery, reinvention, grief, and endurance, all of which shaped his belief that life’s next chapters often begin with understanding ourselves differently.

 Through his coaching, writing, and conversations with others, Mark explores what it means to navigate change with greater self-awareness, curiosity, and compassion.

Follow along on Mark’s journey:

Website: focusingonresults.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/focusingonresults/

Let’s Connect:

🤍 Loved this episode? Share your biggest takeaway or follow us on Instagram @happyhsppodcast — we’d love to hear from you!

🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review to help more HSPs find this space: thehappyhsppodcast.buzzsprout.com

📩 Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out to Kimberly at: kmarshall@happyhspcoaching.com

📖 Learn about Kimberly’s work or grab your free Career Clarity Guidebook: happyhspcoaching.com

About Kimberly:

Kimberly Marshall is an ICF-certified Energy and Intuition 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 reconnect with their intuition, energy, and soul’s purpose so they can live gentle, heart-centered lives in alignment with who they truly are.

Through her work, 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