There are three things that I relate to from what you said, from this bit and the surrounding text. One is that I think that feeling as if others can understand you is part of the journey to healing. There was a time when I felt that no one could understand what I was going through, mostly inside therapy, but occasionally IRL struggles. Some of that, when I look back, may have been projection. It can be useful to look at what we are pinning on other people, especially if it is something that is "hot" or something we think that others do all the time or it pings a repetitive experience with people. For me, I think there was a time when I didn't understand myself, or wasn't able to make much sense about what I thought or felt from week to week. Some of it was, I think, that I was disconnected from others emotionally, so nothing anybody said was ever going to hit that magic mark that made me feel understood. Some of it, now that I think about it, was that when I started to relate in a healthier way to others, including my T, this feeling started to evaporate. I think it's hard for others to feel connected to us when we feel they don't understand-- whether you say it directly or not, people sense it, and it makes them want to push away, or they feel pushed away.

Second, the difficulty with trusting that I had in therapy was mostly about breaking silence about my past. The easier part was understanding that I was a CSA survivor, of course I was going to have difficulty trusting anyone, especially men. One reason why I've had 2/3 therapists who were male. The breaking silence, though, that was loaded and convoluted and just insidious with emotional and physical flashbacks. I was thoroughly conditioned over a long period of time, directly by my perpetrator and indirectly by messed-up dynamics in my family of origin, not to talk, not to disclose, not to let on how I felt. The silence was thick, heavy, appeared to be unbreakable. It did not like being chipped away at, highlighted, turned over like a stone with icky living things underneath it. It was when I was able to sort through all those stories about how I was silenced, when I was able to understand what and who had made me silenced, that's when all those alarm bells (as you say) started fading away and I was able to trust pretty freely, if slowly, over time. I realized and I felt (those usually happen at different times for me) that there wasn't anything and anyone that could hurt me now for telling. In a lot of ways, being afraid of breaking silence is about other people ("they" will hurt me, etc), just like "they don't understand me."

Third, I wonder about the self-labeling you are doing in the quote above. I have felt like everytime I say something like "I am a person who [insert any inflexible, negative trait here, I have or pretty much have had them all]", it shuts me down, defines me in a way that doesn't allow me to move away from that label. I understand that you are making small changes, and that's the way to do it, and I get how hard it is. I feel that you could be working against yourself by insisting that you are "hypersensitive" and all the other things, you reinforce that message and make it more difficult to change. It's like you're wearing a groove in your brain that labels yourself, and then you behave in ways consistent with that label. It may be that you need to give yourself permission to observe the changes you have made and alter your self-perception, if you can't shift the label itself, inside your head.