Our Sensitivity

Over the past year, I have been struck by one of the gifts of the feminine genius. I have encountered this gift in new ways and have seen how it can be both an asset to growth in virtue and a barrier to communion. The feminine gift of sensitivity has become especially apparent in my own life.

As I have journeyed into my vocation as a wife and mother, I have encountered women who have deeply blessed me and others who have deeply challenged me. I have also sat with countless clients and dear friends who have shared experiences that mirror my own. As I reflected on these encounters, I realized they all pointed to the same truth: the vocation of being a wife and mother is an incredibly tender place in a woman’s heart.

And where there is tenderness, there is vulnerability.

Because these areas of life matter so deeply to us, they can also become places where comparison and judgment take root. We see it in the tender areas of fertility, motherhood, marriage, work, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. We can easily find ourselves evaluating another woman’s choices, often without knowing the circumstances, sacrifices, or discernment behind them.

The truth is, these decisions are deeply personal because they are deeply connected to our hearts.

Being seen in these vulnerable places is difficult. And when we do not know how to meet one another with grace and mercy, judgment can become a form of self-protection. We may judge others, or we may begin shaping our own choices around what we think will earn approval.

Without realizing it, we can step into the bedrooms, nurseries, and delivery rooms of women everywhere without first learning how to extend mercy—to ourselves and to one another.

The word sensitivity comes from the Latin root sentire, meaning “to feel, perceive, or think,” combined with the suffix -itive, meaning “capable of.” That is exactly it, dear sisters: we are capable of feeling deeply.

We feel deeply about the parts of our vocation that are sometimes beyond our control. We feel deeply about the choices we make and the circumstances that shape them. And because we feel deeply, we can sometimes react when another woman’s experience looks different from our own.

Perhaps because we feel so deeply, we search for guardrails to help us feel safe. But when judgment becomes that guardrail, we create distance where we were meant to create communion. We begin to “should” all over one another.

No one person knows the exact boundaries another woman needs in her marriage or friendships. No one knows the circumstances surrounding her work, her maternity leave, her birth experience, or how she chooses to nourish her child. These are places where each woman is called to discern with the Lord prayerfully.

And before we can offer mercy to one another, we must learn to receive mercy for ourselves.

I have found myself returning to one question again and again: Where am I placing judgment on myself? Where am I telling myself what my life should look like? Is that voice coming from the Lord, or from the expectations I have absorbed from others? Or from the evil one? 

I believe it is only when we recognize these places of self-judgment that we can bring them before the Lord and allow His mercy and truth to reshape the way we see ourselves and one another.

Our sensitivity—the ability to feel deeply, perceive deeply, and love deeply—is a gift. It is not something we need to suppress or overcome. It is something we are called to steward.

The question is not whether we will feel deeply. We will. The question is what we will do with what we feel.

Will we allow our sensitivity to become a place of comparison, fear, and judgment? Or will we allow it to become a place of compassion, understanding, and love?

The same tenderness that makes us vulnerable to being wounded and to hurting others out of these wounds also gives us the capacity to deeply bless them. Our sensitivity allows us to notice, empathize, accompany, and love in uniquely feminine ways.

May we receive this gift with gratitude. May we surrender the ways fear has distorted it. And may we use our sensitivity for what it was always intended to be: a pathway toward greater love, mercy, and communion with one another.