New: listen to my podcast episode on being a gentle soul!
Modern society was created by and for extroverted, competitive personality types. This means that for what I call “gentle souls,” there is a bad fit between our personalities and societal institutions. In fact, many of our society’s values are actually toxic to people like us, because our personal characteristics are either not valued or actively denigrated within our society’s value system.
So what exactly are gentle souls? If you are into Myers Briggs (MBTI) personality theory, these are the NFs, or intuitive feelers of the group, and particularly the introverted types of that group, the INFJs and INFPs. But gentle souls are more than just types. They have a number of characteristics that can make life more challenging in our loud, fast-paced, busy-worshipping world. Our emotional makeup is often in the HSP range (highly sensitive people), and we tend to feel things deeply and complexly. Gentle souls have probably been called “too sensitive” more than once in their life.
Here are some other characteristics of gentle souls – you don’t have to possess all of them to be a gentle soul, but you probably possess more than one.
You’ve felt like you’re different all your life – because let’s face it, you are. You may not go so far as to call yourself a misfit, but there’s definitely something different about how you view and experience life.
You’re creative. Not necessarily in any specific way, though you may be an artist of some kind. But your creativity is bigger than just any one art you practice – it is a part of who you are and how you want to live your life.
You have a deep empathy for other people or animals – even plant life. It genuinely hurts your soul to see harm come to defenseless creatures and the natural environments of the world. You may even be haunted by a sense that everything is imbued by spirit.
You genuinely like being alone – in fact, when you were a kid your parents or teachers may have even been concerned by how much time you spent alone, immersed in your own fantasy world.
You have a keen understanding of existential loneliness, and probably have since childhood. You may be more prone to anxiety and depression than average – but only because you have a heightened sensitivity to pathos. You may also struggle with physical chronic illnesses – your body reacting to psychic pain.
You “see” things other people don’t. You may be highly intuitive, empathic, or even feel psychic. You are a keen observer and are constantly seeking meaning. For you, life is about finding, making, and experiencing meaning, not about acquisition or status.
What is so challenging for gentle souls isn’t that we are who we are – it’s that who we are is not generally valued by our society. From childhood we are socialized into a system that values extroversion, team players, competitive energy, and a go-getter attitude. People who aren’t naturally inclined toward those things are punished. Think about that participation grade in school – it may be a reward for certain people, but it’s basically a punishment for deep thinkers and observers. Think about job interviews – do you think you’ll get hired if you are honest about how much you hate working on teams? Living in an environment that punishes you for being who you are is toxic. It’s harmful and traumatic. Many of us gentle souls end up severely burned out after years, if not decades, of exhausting ourselves trying to fit in and be successful and failing to find the happiness we hope for and that other people seem to find so easily.
I’m here to tell you that the problem is not you – it’s society. If you feel rejected, it’s because our society denigrates the characteristics that make you who you are. But our society does need people like us, and increasingly so. It just doesn’t make it easy for us to find our way. When you live in a production-based culture that sees success in terms of how many items you’ve checked off a to-do list, it can be difficult to feel value in living in an experience-based, holistic way that isn’t based on clear benchmarks. For gentle souls, many of our successes and triumphs are deeply personal and internal. They may be massive achievements on the scale of our soul’s journey, but judged by outside eyes they may appear negligible.
Gentle souls aren’t all the same – we’re unique individuals, after all. But I think there are commonalities in our experiences, and I started this website to reach out to you. You are not alone, there is nothing wrong with you, and your personality characteristics can be leveraged to create your best life.