My work examines why Highly Sensitive Persons, or HSPs, are so frequently misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and pathologized within contemporary mental health systems. What is often labeled as anxiety, emotional dysregulation, trauma, or even personality disorder is more accurately understood as a nervous system organized for heightened perception, emotional attunement, and environmental sensitivity functioning within relational and institutional contexts that do not adequately support it.

This research demonstrates that distress in HSPs does not arise from sensitivity itself but from attachment disruption. When a sensitive nervous system develops without consistent emotional mirroring, safety, and coregulation, it becomes hypervigilant, flooded, or inhibited. What is later identified as psychopathology frequently represents unresolved relational grief and nervous system dysorganization.

From this work, I developed several clinician facing frameworks, including the HARMS, DECODE, HEART, and PARTSnership models, to assist both HSP and non-HSP therapists in differentiating the equity of trauma response from personality based diagnoses, assessing relational context, and guiding treatment in a more developmentally and neurobiologically accurate manner.

Extensive research in attachment theory, affective neuroscience, and interpersonal neurobiology demonstrates that nervous systems do not regulate in isolation. They regulate through relational processes. For Highly Sensitive Persons in particular, accurate emotional attunement and coregulation are not subjective preferences but biological requirements for HSP coherence: nervous system stability, affect integration, and attachment security.

This work reframes trauma, grief, and sensitivity within a relational and ecological framework that integrates attachment science, nervous system physiology, cultural context, and (extra)relational systems. Healing within this framework is understood not as the reduction of sensitivity but as the restoration of connection inside the coherent system.

Because the dissertation is currently under ProQuest embargo, this link provides temporary professional access for review. I kindly ask that the document not be further distributed.

Full dissertation access:
https://docsend.com/v/gv3wx/macs_dissertation
Password: CtBb!25