Reading showed me light when my real life was darkness.

It gave me permission to feel, to process, to make sense when I felt like I was losing my mind.

Books held my hand and walked me through things I didn't yet have language for.

I wasn't consciously doing therapy through story as a child. I didn't know

that that's what I was doing. But in retrospect, that's exactly what it was my relationship with

books. It was narrative therapy. Hello, welcome to the show. This is Emotional Badass, where Moxie meets Mindful. I'm your host,

Nikki Eisenhower, life coach and psychotherapist. And on today's episode, I'm discussing highly

sensitive people and reading, nervous system regulation and focusing issues.

Hello, y'all.

Happy spring.

Before we even talk about reading and what that does for our nervous systems, I want to talk

about where I'm coming from.

In my family, despite all of the dysfunction I grew up with, the ethos was knowledge.

Reading wasn't optional for me as a child. It was a non-negotiable. Reading was as normal to a day as

breathing. I was required to read as a child every night. Soon, it didn't feel like a chore. I looked forward to this. I would read

hours at a time without anyone prompting me. I loved it. My grandmother, my Grammy that I talk about so much on the show,

she had a master's degree in history and library science.

She owned and ran her own bookstore when I was a young child. Books were everywhere.

Stories were everywhere. It was the one thing that I was allowed to do without any supervision.

I could pick out and read any book at any age level when almost

everything else in my life was very, very controlled. Now, before we pathologized damn near everything

into diagnosable symptomology like we do currently, my Grammy was known for what we called being in another world if she had a book in her hands.

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