Elizabeth Cush: Highly Sensitive People and a High-Conflict Ex

If you have been told your whole life that you feel things too much, this episode reframes it. Therapist Elizabeth Cush describes high sensitivity as a genetic trait rather than a temperament problem, and one that changes how you should handle a high-conflict ex.

Elizabeth Cush, known to most people as Biz, is a therapist licensed in Maryland and Delaware who has built her practice around soul support for highly sensitive women, though she works with men too. She hosts the podcast Awaken Your Wise Woman. She is a mom of three and a rescue dachshund owner, she is highly sensitive herself, and she is also a survivor of domestic violence, which she says she has in common with a good share of this audience. Elaine Aron's research is where the field started, and Aron's self-test at hsperson.org is where Elizabeth sends people who want to check.

Elizabeth and Lisa work through what the trait actually covers: processing everything deeply, overstimulating easily, feeling other people's emotional weather as if it were your own, and real sensitivity to sensory input, down to a clothing tag or the seam on a sock. They talk about the common misuse of the label, where an aggravated or unkind person gets described as sensitive, sometimes by their own choice as a way to manage someone else.

The rest of the conversation is about surviving contact you cannot avoid. Why the empathy that makes you good to people also keeps you supplying excuses for an ex's behavior. Why a manipulative person who has clocked those traits can reach you so easily. And what to actually do about it: build in recovery time on either side of every exchange, and take the pause, out loud if you need to, because a deep processor asked to decide something in the moment is being asked to work against their own wiring.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What high sensitivity is as a genetic trait, and what it is commonly mistaken for
• Why deep processing means you need longer to work out that you were not misreading it
• How heightened empathy makes it harder to leave, not easier
• Why highly sensitive people so often become people-pleasers
• What high sensitivity looks like in children, from clothing tags to reading a room
• How to build recovery time in before and after contact with a high-conflict ex
• How to take the pause out loud, and why a delayed reply is usually the better reply

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Sensitive versus highly sensitive, and why it is a genetic trait
3:00 Meeting Biz, and how sensitivity shows up in kids
5:00 Empathy on overload, and learning to manage everyone else's state
7:30 How common it is, and the misconceptions people carry
9:30 When a claim of sensitivity gets used to manipulate
11:00 Why empathy makes leaving harder, and where people-pleasing starts
12:30 Elaine Aron's self-test, and the upside of feeling deeply
15:30 Protecting yourself when you cannot get away from the person
18:00 The pause, the permission slip plan, and why waiting works

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Elizabeth Cush Coaching: https://www.elizabethcushcoaching.com/
🔗 Progression Counseling (her therapy practice): https://www.progressioncounseling.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.