Episode #3: Sensitive and Thriving with Therapy and Ikigai
How Iris’s personal journey of cognitive behavioral therapy and Ikigai became a powerful path toward healing, self-confidence, and a purpose-driven career path.
Welcome back to The Happy HSP Podcast — I’m your host, Kimberly Marshall.
If you’re a highly sensitive person who struggles with self-confidence, people-pleasing, or knowing what your true calling is, then this episode is for you.
Joining me all the way from Italy is my good friend and colleague Iris Pilleri, a fellow HSP coach, psychology student, and a language teacher. She shares how therapy, self-acceptance, and the Japanese concept of Ikigai helped her find more clarity, purpose, and confidence in her life and career.
We talk about her experience with chronic exhaustion and career misalignment, as well as the joys of having a vivid inner world and overactive imagination, as many HSPs do. Iris’s story is a beautiful reminder that it’s never too late to come home to yourself — and that your sensitivity can guide you toward a more aligned and meaningful life when you have the courage to explore the road less traveled.
So, without further ado, here’s our conversation. I hope you enjoy it!
Kim: All right. Hi, Iris. Welcome to the happy HSP podcast. So excited to have you. As a start, I always like to ask people about what their journey to being a highly sensitive person has been like. So, we can just hear about how you found out an HSP and what that kind of looked like for you?
Iris: Hi. Hi everyone. And hi Kim, and thank you for having me actually.
Kim: Absolutely.
Iris: So my journey started, well, very early as for many HSPs as a child, when I noticed that I was really processing information differently, I was a very scared child. I was always first seeing if the situation was for me or not. I was assessing things before I got into a situation, and that sometimes made me the odd one out.
At parties when you’re a child, there is some overstimulation, and that’s actually the moment where me and also my mom said, okay, something is a little bit different here. And actually it was not so problematic to find a way to make me feel more safe or more at ease at parties, for example.
Kim: Yeah. So not only you felt that difference, but you noticed that your mom did.
Iris: And then there was another uniqueness, which was having a lot of headaches.
Yes. I arrived at the end of the day and I was first exhausted, and I also always had a headache when I was a child. And obviously we scanned the situation, medical exams, there was nothing. And we just discovered that I was processing so much information during the day that I arrived and I was just so tired and it’s escalated into a headache.
Kim: This was when you were a kid or just kind of throughout your life?
Iris: It’s a bit interesting because it started out when I was a child and the headaches were terrible, but then it got better in adolescence, almost disappeared, and now it’s back again.
Kim: Oh, you’re experiencing it again?
Iris: Yes. Fortunately, I’m an adult now and it kind of hurts less. I do remember how it hurt at the time, and it was really, really excruciating pain. Now it’s manageable, but some days I just, I’m so overstimulated I can’t do much.
But also, sometimes just a day of full-on study, a lot of information using different media like books and then a personal computer and then maybe iPad. And it’s just this lots of information that has to be processed. And actually, that’s what we are talking about, the sensory processing sensitivity.
We have only such an amount of energy every day. I feel like it is like that. I’m talking to many HSPs right now, and I’m really grateful that they are sharing their experiences. It’s also so natural, always also with you, and I think it is so important for us to connect. It makes us feel well, again, unique. There’s nothing wrong with experiencing the world this way. And I feel like talking between us makes us, it makes me feel like I’m a part of a group and that I’m understood.
Kim: How did you find out that you had high sensitivity? When did it all come together and what was that like?
Iris: I think it was in 2017 when I first read the book by Elaine Aaron, The Highly Sensitive Person. It just all came to circle. I just said, okay, that must be it. But I am a person who loves data, and I needed something more than just something written in a book. So, when I got through my personal cognitive behavioral therapy, I asked my psychologist to dive deep into my sensitivity and help me, well, manage it more because that was a problem, and we did.
In the beginning it was obviously difficult because I thought that emotions were just this, I can best describe it as monster, this big black monster that I had inside. And I was feeling that and that, and this person said this thing and it hurt so much, but maybe wait a moment, maybe I perceived things in a way, and they were not meant in that way.
That was my turning point where I said, okay, let’s see things more objectively and try to not always be so well hurt by some things people might say because maybe they say it for their reasons and not necessarily to hurt you. And then from that point on, I don’t know, I was able with cognitive behavioral therapy to say, okay, now I’m feeling this emotion. Now I’m feeling this emotion. And I really, I can say I don’t get triggered very easily now. For me, cognitive behavioral therapy, not, I don’t want to be too much of a fan. Everybody has his or her own way to go through therapy to choose therapy. But cognitive behavioral for me was great. And maybe also for other HSPs, it can be a good idea because it teaches you to manage emotions.
Kim: Got it. And that’s such an important point. Whenever we talk about things to try, they’re just things to try because what may work for you might not work for me, and that’s such an important point. I’m so glad you brought that up. And along this line, how would you describe cognitive behavioral therapy? What does that look like? What is that process?
Iris: Well, it’s actually very interesting. Right now, I’m studying cognitive psychology and I’m really in awe. I didn’t think I would be so interested, but it is data. It is evidence-based. And I can’t believe that because it is also used for people who well have committed crimes or for things that where it is necessary to change a habit, a behavioral pattern. And for me, I think I can sum the experience up like that. It was a way of slowly changing my habits and I think I formed new neuronal connections. I think that was it. And things that I used to perceive a way now I perceive differently. You just have to imagine being here, talking to you 10 years ago probably I wouldn’t have had the courage to do so.
I used to be so not sure of myself. I really suffered that through elementary school and then adolescence. And that’s a pity when I think about it. I say, oh, I wish that I would care that I had cared less like now, not cared less in a bad way, but people will always think things that we have no control of. So why not do what you like without hurting others, obviously, and just follow your road, your destiny without being too concerned about others.
And I think being yourself or discovering yourself has really, really a lot to do with being more self-assured and what I was saying previously, really finding yourself also happens when you are so sure of yourself that you say, okay, everybody can say what they want. I’m doing this now. I think that’s the best for me. And maybe it’s also the only time when we become really adults, the time when we really choose for us and we say, okay, nobody say anything. I’m trying to do this now.
Kim: We know ourselves better than anyone else. And yet we always fall into that trap of listening to what we think other people want us to be or hear.
Iris: It’s also normal to do so.
Kim: Yeah. How do you do that? How do you continue with that self-assurance? How do you tap into and get more confident about what it is you want?
Iris: My first thing is I would’ve never thought that somebody asked me this question because I was so terribly insecure. So that was a nice moment now. And well actually, I’ve always had this dream to become a psychologist I knew when I was 11 years old. And it just continued. The interest continued at some point, and that was the time when I was most lost in life for some reason. I took a different road, something more, a bit more corporate and those things…
Kim: Practical.
Iris: I don’t want to say that I lost myself. It’s a bit exaggerated. There was a kind of momentary, there was a kind of fog for a lot of years, but then I turned back to who I was.
So, what I’m saying is if you find what you really want, your Ikigai, let’s call it like that, the Japanese way of thinking, maybe that could be a way to connect with being more sure, because who cares what other people think about what you’re doing. You have to be sure of what you like, and it’s really only your business because in the end, you will have you, when we’re 80 and thinking about our lives, there won’t be so many people around us anymore. And we have only us left. What did we do with this life?
Kim: That’s such a beautiful thought. You’re so right. At the end of the day, the only people that we have to impress are ourselves. We’re going to be the ones with us. But I do want to ask you more about the Japanese way of thinking that you mentioned, because I’m not familiar with that. Can you share that with me?
Iris: Yeah. The Ikigai, it’s actually used also in therapy to understand what the path of a person is. It is based on what did you love to do as a child? How did you fill up your days and what is it that you could do and earn money? But it also makes your heart full.
It is all a way to find out what your path is, what your life calling is. Ikigai can also be, I don’t know, for a 60-year-old woman to be with her nephews, for example, what fills your life in that moment? Ikigai is the sense of life in a way, but they are more flexible. I mean, Japanese are flexible on that. They say it’s the way of life in this period of time. It can change over time. But the important thing is that you’re always connected with what you love deeply.
Kim: And making sure you have that purpose, meaning, joy, and connecting that with a way to make a living because we all have to do that.
Iris: Yeah, we all have to do that.
Kim: So what are the things about high sensitivity that you love, you celebrate, you enjoy?
Iris: Oh, so much actually. And I’m seeing them when I talk to my friends and to people that I perceive immediately are highly sensitive and then somehow it comes out that they are.
It’s kind of we have a bridge, we can really understand each other. I know you are for example, in this moment. I really like our intuitiveness. It can also save us sometimes from some situations, but I don’t want to say that too loud because well, what’s with people who get into a bad situation? Didn’t they have, no, that’s something different. It’s just to say that we are intuitive people for sure.
Kim: We don’t always get it right. There’s no shame, there’s no guilt. There’s no pressure there. Because sometimes, but we have a sense we things.
Iris: Yes, we sense when a job is not for us immediately, we sense when somebody feels not at ease in a room. I can sense that, and it makes me a bit anxious.
I remember at parties, I would go towards the people who looked really not really happy being there. And we formed this little group. I don’t know if they were highly sensitive. I was 16 or something, but this is what came natural for me to do.
And for me, it’s always such a lesson. It’s a continuous lifelong learning with my friends. Because yes, we might be highly sensitive, but it’s like Elaine Aron says, we’re snowflakes. Every one is different from the other. And yes, I have a very creative friend. She’s writing a book and I’m so happy for her. And then another friend, I was not sure that she was highly sensitive. I always had a suspect. And probably this year she told me probably she is, but she’s very, very, I don’t want to say tough because that’s, she’s a very tough person. She’s very high functional in her workplace and all those things. I would’ve never said that she was highly sensitive, but in the end she is.
Kim: Some people tend to be able to show up differently. Like you said, we all have high sensitivity, but I mean some of us are extroverts, some of us are introverts. Some of us like data, some of us create…we’re all across the board.
Iris: One thing I want to say is that I don’t want to pass the message that highly sensitive people are weak or, and people who are nonsensitive are the ones that are not nice or something like that. Absolutely not. Because as you know, when you have an Instagram page, you do have to, well focus on a ulterior motive. And I see that some people act like what they do is the best thing ever and the rest is bad. And this is not a message I like…people who are, I would say not well, not highly sensitive, they are not less than a highly sensitive person, only because we are maybe more intuitive. That’s nothing.
Kim: I agree with you wholeheartedly. Everybody has these feelings that we talk about. It’s just the high sensitives tend to have them deeper, more, we feel it a little bit more in our bodies. So that is a great point.
Iris: Yes. So, a highly sensitive person can be extremely tough because as you know, there’s the high-sensation seeking type. I don’t want to dive too deep in that because I’m for sure not an expert on that because I’m not high sensation seeking first off. But yes, there are people who really do also dangerous things, and they are highly sensitive.
Kim: So, these are the things that you enjoy about high sensitivity. What do you struggle with?
Iris: Well, I would say the physical symptoms that sensory overload brings.
Kim: Yeah, the physical part of it. Yes.
Iris: Yes. It’s like it makes you so tired in a way. And we do need during the day, we do need to do what we have to do. I mean, there’s no way out. Some days, I’ll tell you really the truth, when I have very good days where my energy is high, I try to do a lot of things for the days I won’t have this type of energy.
Because well, HSPs really also in the workplace, you know that very well, that’s what you do. They really struggle at the end of the day. So, you know what? You have to cook maybe, and you have children, which I don’t, but I can’t imagine how it is when you’re in a corporate job and you come home, and you still have to do so many things. I really try to put myself into the shoes of somebody like that because I really, I’m not in a corporate job and I arrive in the evening and I’m so tired just because I have this processing of emotions of exterior and of internal stimuli.
Kim: Did you have any other difficulties that you wanted to share or did that touch on everything?
Iris: I’m thinking because I used to trust people a lot…now, no, I mean I still hope for them. I do believe in the good in people. So, I’m really always obviously a bit well deceived when I discovered that somebody wasn’t like I thought he or she was, but now it’s not really a problem because I learned to set boundaries and that’s something so difficult for HSPs and I still obviously struggle with it. I mean, it’s always a battle, but I’ve learned to do that before I was just not able to.
Every person has sometimes a reason out of trauma or something because of why they do something to us. So, I don’t want to say I’m better because I choose to this and this. I just choose to still believe that there is good in humans, even though I have seen there is not. I’ve seen it a lot.
Kim: So, what advice do you have for HSPs who may be struggling with finding that meaning, purpose, and joy in their lives?
Iris: The first thing I would say is to learn to understand yourself and be your best friend. I know it sounds so obvious, but it’s something I learned in therapy, and it changed my life completely. For me, it might not be the same for everyone, just think that. But when you learn to treat yourself and to talk to yourself how you would to your best friends, your life gets better because you start to forgive yourself.
You say, oh, you’re not able to do that today. No problem. Or, oh, that person said this to you. Okay, but do you really believe that of yourself? No, you don’t. So what? And it really helped me so much. So, I hope that could be an advice. It really sounds obvious, but sometimes it’s the obvious things that can help a lot.
Kim: And we can be so harsh on ourselves and it’s like, how would you treat your friend? You wouldn’t tell her these awful things.
Iris: I would never.
Kim: Yeah, why would we say that to ourselves?
Iris: And I found it’s a way to live better…And then to take every road that you feel like taking and try many things out, doesn’t matter if one thing doesn’t work, you can jump to the other and see if that other thing that you wanted to do works. And we only learn through trial and error. And I know that for HSPs, they sometimes tend to be avoidant of situations. And I can’t just sit here and say, oh, just do it. No. For some people it’s like, and I’ve been there, it’s like, I don’t know, achieving something enormous, going to the Everest or something.
So, trying, obviously with common sense, but trying, because you might discover something that you would’ve never imagined in your wildest dreams and have friendships that bring you so much joy. I can confirm. I had some very beautiful experiences in that sense when I opened myself up and lost my fears.
Kim: I think our instinct is to keep ourselves safe.
Iris: It is so much.
Kim: Then we miss out. There’s a lot we can experience when we allow ourselves to kind of push past the fear. And it doesn’t have to be crazy. It could be gentle, but something.
Iris: Would you say that you have fomo?
Kim: It’s so funny you ask me that. No, I, it’s the jomo. Did you ever hear of Jomo, the joy of missing out instead of fear of missing out? I have joy of missing out.
Iris: Me too!
Kim: Where it’s like…No, no, I can’t go. Sorry. I have plans…
Iris: …With my cat…
Kim: I’m knitting. Yeah, totally. It’s so funny. Yeah. Zero shame.
Iris: Yes. I always say the world is vast. I’d love to go to Japan to French Polynesia, but even if I am never going to go there, it’s no problem. Because as HSP, my inner world, it really is satisfying to me. I know that sounds so weird or self-enamored, but it’s not. It is just that since we feel things so deeply, we have a whole landscape inside of ourselves. And, also, our dreams. Like my dreams, I am actually happy every time I go to sleep because there’s such a wonderful dream landscape. I can’t describe it. I travel inside of myself. It’s so weird. I try to explain that to people that are new to me. I don’t know if they understood what I mean.
Kim: I feel like for me it’s the real world sometimes doesn’t satisfy certain things, that there’s this play and imagination and creativity that comes from this inner world.
Iris: And I think it was the same for you, maybe when we were children, that was something that stood out. Creativity and imagination. I used to imagine all these extra things happening in a story or in a book with pictures. I imagined extra things.
I would say really take an opportunity when it comes up. I know it's scary, obviously check everything out, no weird things. Always get your information on who the person is, who gives you an opportunity or what you’re about to do, but I’ve seen people change their lives at 50. So there’s really nothing to be scared of when you try out things. I mean, the world is scary, but we have to be more open to the possibility that the bad things could not happen.
Kim: It’s so beautiful. Iris, thank you for sharing that. Where can people find you if they want to follow along on your journey?
Iris: Oh, okay. I am on Instagram and I’m actually talking about high sensitivity. I’m @Irishspcoach and what else…well, I’m on LinkedIn as Iris Pilleri, and I think that’s it. Yes.
Kim: Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a beautiful conversation, and I appreciate your insight.
Iris: It was really nice.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Iris and that her story reminded you that whether you’re struggling with overstimulation or confused about what comes next, it’s okay to take your time, follow your curiosity, and let your imagination and sensitivity guide you.
If something in this episode resonated with you, or you’d like to be a guest on the show, I’d love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out to me on Instagram @happyhsppodcast.
You can also find support on my website at happyhspcoaching.com and while you’re there, be sure to download your free HSP Career Clarity Guidebook.
Thanks again for listening, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review so other HSPs can find this space. There are so many of us that need that sense of encouragement and community, so it’s a simple act that can make a big difference.
Thanks again for listening and take care!
About Iris Pilleri:
Iris is an HSP coach, psychology student, and language teacher based in Italy. She connects with clients and colleagues from all over the world through her ability to speak English, Italian, German, and French.
She coaches at Iris Sensitive Coaching, and in her business, “Iris” stands for Imagination, Respect, Intention, and Safety — the four pillars of her work.
Follow along with Iris’s journey:
Instagram: @sensitivity_life
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iris-vanessa-pilleri-0304aa322/
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📩 Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out to Kimberly at: kmarshall@happyhspcoaching.com
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About Kimberly:
After 20 years in the publishing industry working for companies like Time Inc., Monster.com, and W. W. Norton, Kimberly Marshall left her corporate work to create a gentler and more nurturing career that better suited her as an HSP. After repeatedly struggling with burnout and low confidence in the workplace, she now helps HSPs create careers that bring them lots of purpose, meaning, and joy. With the Happy HSP Podcast, Kimberly hopes to shed more light on the reality of living with high sensitivity and inspire more HSPs to embrace their empathetic, generous, and loving natures.
Hosted/produced by Kimberly Marshall
Edited by Fonzie Try Media
Artwork by Tara Corola