Content area
Abstract
Highly sensitive persons (HSPs) do not thrive in neurotypical therapeutic settings that pathologize grief and trauma response from attachment disruption. How can existing biopsychosocial assessment for HSPs be improved? Through the lens of the HSP, this study considers the nexus of current clinical psychology of attachment disruption response and biopsychosocial affect. It explores the following question: How does a systems theoretical approach in therapy help HSPs metamorphose attachment disruption into efficacious biopsychosocial landscapes? How can taking a systems, contextualized, and non-pathological view of attachment disruption response behavior inform assessment and treatment for a HSP population that draws upon their innate gifts? Popular cultural models addressing trauma and grief are structurally and problematically reductive. In contrast, this study applies a systems psychology theoretical framework to analyze attachment disruption, grief, trauma, and emotional regulation responses characteristic of the HSP. This study aims for therapeutic settings to adopt a multicultural ways-of-knowing framework that comprises conflated colonized and uncolonized viewpoints to illustrate how reductionist pathology perpetrates harm and evolve a decolonized widened lens. This provides important relief and liberation for those pathologized by colonialist views. The portal of HSP trait schema shows how and why expanded frames of awareness (including more-than-human) kinship can be assimilated into a clinical therapeutic process for transformed expanded efficacious outcomes overall.