1. How has the holiday season been for you? You may have noticed from the posts of the last few weeks that I have been cranky. I reached peak crankiness last week. My crankiness is waning now and will be over by January 1st. The last two weeks of December are my least favorite weeks of the year because they’re always full of stuff I try to avoid: small talk, shopping, stress. The only time I drink is during the last two weeks of December. Alcohol doesn’t touch my lips at any other time. The idea of drinking alcohol doesn’t occur to me at any other time of the year. I don’t drink to be festive. I drink to take the edge off of my crankiness.
As I have written many, many times I don’t like to be told how or when I should feel certain things like having goodwill towards your fellow man and pretending to want peace and pretending to care and all that jazz because the calendar says it’s December. It’s so oppressive to me. The one thing we all have that is ours is our feelings and even that our culture tries to control and manipulate. You may be thinking “Just go with it, Mel”. No.
2. Ane Axford has finally re-emerged with a post on Facebook and she has again written something so … there’s no word to describe it. It just makes me say YES:
…Maybe there is no discrimination, only exploitation that we allow because we want to be fixed…our true weakness is the belief that we need to be fixed, rather than the belief that all we need is currently available to us. And if we can reveal the areas in which we feel sick or weak then we open them rather than allow them to become buttons for exploitation. I don’t want to exploit HSPs…”once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created. There is no blissfulness more precious than freedom, than being a master of your own destiny.” OSHO
…maybe freedoms is technical. Maybe it’s about allocation. Maybe it’s about not being exploitable. Not settling. Not settling for something you don’t really want now so that you can have the fantasy of something you want in the future instead. Not allowing the false situation that arises from my button being pushed. Not paying the price of the button. Letting the button break. Push it so hard that it shatters….”My mother said I broke her heart…but it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us…but within that inch we are free. I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It’s small and its fragile and it’s the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.” V for Vendetta…”it’s useless to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” Jonathan Swift
This is more powerful and inspirational to me than a thousand positive affirmations.I was never reasoned into so many things I have come through this year. And I have my inch. I was scared of losing it. Maintaining it was a tricky game for me within my work and what calls me. Things are burning down right now. My sites are down. But it’s not defeat or disappearance. It’s burning. I am burning. And I wanted to let you know that. I don’t have anything else to say but it felt important that I let you know that sensitive leadership has led me to a deeper place of sensitive leadership. This burning IS me. This space IS me. This silence IS me. More and more and more and more. Right now, I am moving slowly. It feels miraculous that I can move slowly. I am dancing slowly. It is a revolution. This is still the sensitive revolution. “A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.” V for Vendetta…”Zen says truth has nothing to do with authority, truth has nothing to do with tradition, truth has nothing to do with the past — truth is a radical, personal realization. You have to come to it.” OSHO
I am. I have. I do.
Why don’t I “just go with it”? That inch that says “no” is all I have.
3. Speaking of saying “no”, I’m saying no, again, to getting out of my comfort zone.
I don’t agree with this drawing by KaitlynSeeing this drawing just reinforced my beliefs about comfort zones which I wrote about here. This drawing has close to 800,000 notes on Tumblr. It seems to resonate with people. It is just plain wrong to me. It espouses the idea that things that are worthwhile and interesting are outside of you. The worthwhile and interesting things in my life are inside. This drawing suggests that you can’t have worthwhile and interesting things AND comfort. Why can’t you bring worthwhile and interesting things into your comfort zone? Why can’t you grow your comfort zone instead of always leaving it?
1. It’s boring (Why does academic writing have to be so dull?)
2. There’s very little new information.
I skimmed. Cooper only interviewed 35 highly sensitive people. Anyone without a Ph.D. could have written this paper and arrived at his conclusions which could be summed up as “HSP have a hard time finding fulfilling and appropriate work that fits their temperament”. Really?
The best parts of the paper were the personal stories shared by the participants. Here’s one from Samantha on her mission in life:
I have a very primal motivation that I don’t want other people to have the childhood I had. I don’t want people to have the life I have had. That underlies an enormous amount of what I do. I was treated in very unfortunate and unpleasant ways and I will be damned if I will let that happen to anybody else. There is a huge protective streak. There is a huge sense of wanting to make life better and there is a huge sense that each of us has something of importance. I spent a lot of time being told that I was over sensitive, and that I was immature, and that I was this and I was that. To look back on all of that and say all of these things have created a person who generally speaking is pretty damn empathic and is able to walk in other people’s shoes and help other people out and let other people see another perspective. That is playing to the world that I have created. My whole motivation is that I don’t want other people to live the life I have had to. I want them to have a better shot. I sort of fight for at least my little corner to be a nicer place.
Amen.
I don’t think we need more people doing studies on HSP. We need more HSP to become revolutionaries like Samantha.
4. If you want to read something on the HSP experience that is not boring, read Kim Clair Smith’s touching and vulnerable article about being HSP and travelling and friendship, A Social Butterfly I Am Not. Great photos as well.
5. I was re-reading one of my old notebooks and I came across a list I started writing on lesser known ways to figure out if you’re highly sensitive. Here’s what I came up with:
You wouldn’t be the CEO of a corporation. You’d be the whistle-blower.
You feel weird but you think everyone else is weird and they don’t know it.
No one listens to you when you give them a warning or suggestion but then later (sometimes 20 years later) they admit that you were right.
You’re still trying to find yourself well past the age that this is appropriate or acceptable.
“Doing nothing” is a scheduled event.
Something bothers you. You try to come up with ways to prevent that something from bothering you. You get cocky and think you’ve found a way to handle the bother when you’re blindsided and bothered all over again.
You know you have a tremendous ability to be close to people and for intimate relationships but, you still have few of those relationships.
You want to live in a cave. A cave with Wi-Fi.
Maybe those only apply to me. Especially that last one.
The very long title and topic of this post comes from my blog’s search terms.
I could write a post just on how to deal with people and another on how to deal with people who don’t like you no matter what type of person you are. But I’ll keep it specific — how to deal with people who don’t like you when you’re a highly sensitive introvert.
The truth is a highly sensitive introvert should deal with people who don’t like them in the same way a hardy extrovert should deal with people who don’t like them: Don’t give a crap.
If that person or persons aren’t preventing you from being/doing/having what you want, who cares?
It takes getting older to reach that “I don’t care” stage. At some point you do some math and realize you have less time ahead of you than behind you and you make a decision not to waste the time and energy you have left caring about people who don’t like you. At least I made that decision.
However, highly sensitive introverts have some special issues that make getting to the “I don’t care” stage more difficult and involved.
Introverts or people who deal with stuff by taking it inside tend to, as Laurie Helgoe put it in her book Introvert Power,“hoard responsibility” when relationships become fraught or when everyone and their dogs don’t like them.
Highly sensitive introverts have the added tendency to not just hoard responsibility but to spin and spin and process and process, deeper and deeper the whys and hows of the dislike.
The highly sensitive introvert who was trying to figure how to deal with people who don’t like them probably wants to know not just how to deal with someone who doesn’t like them, but how to deal with the pain of it; how to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of disharmony and tension.
Short answer: the amount of pain you experience as a result of being disliked is directly proportional to the amount of energy you give to seeking the approval and validation of others.
Withdraw that energy and your pain will decrease.
Some time in the ’90s I read this heavily paraphrased sentence in the book Callings by Gregg Levoy : “Some people in life will love you, some will hate you, and everyone else is completely indifferent.” Sometimes what you think is dislike is really just indifference.
It’s comforting to me to think about people in terms of where they belong on this pie chart (I love charts). No need to take it personally when someone doesn’t like you. They’re just part of the largest part of the pie.
The other thing to look at (and you may not want to look at) is your unacknowledged dislike of other people.
It’s easier to assume the problem and the pain is being caused by someone and something outside of you. It’s easier to try and figure out how to deal with people who don’t like you than it is to countenance the fact that maybe these people you assume don’t like you are reflecting your own disapproval back to you.
Looking at your dislike of others is the only way to prevent you from dealing with people disliking you in the most useless, life-sucking way: by people-pleasing.
Highly sensitive people are especially susceptible to succumbing to the people-pleasing disease because we happen to be very aware, to KNOW, when people don’t like us. I know I am. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to be more talkative, open, and breezy or extroverted and easy going when I knew someone was disapproving of my regular reticent, inward-dwelling-and-loving-it self. I said yes to a lot of stuff when I wanted to say no. I hate that I put other people’s comfort and pleasure ahead of my own just so I wouldn’t have to deal with their possible disapproval.
Now I use my ability to know when someone doesn’t like me to rejoice. I rejoice because it’s one less person with whom I have to spend energy making small talk. Yippee!
If you spend too much time pleasing people, at some point you’ll look around at yourself and your life and wonder “What the hell happened? Where am I?” What happened is you sold yourself out in order to please people and it sucked the life right out of you. There is no you anymore.
So resist the urge to “deal with” or do something about someone who doesn’t like you. Because if you are a real, raw, honest, complicated, feeling, human being there will always be people who don’t like you. And you should want to be a real, raw, honest, complicated, feeling, human being.
I still struggle with wanting to be liked by everyone and feeling like crap when it doesn’t happen. Just yesterday I learned that I was not well-liked for who I was and for reasons that have nothing to do with me. And I was sad and angry about it…for about 3 minutes.
Then I felt a fire inside of me.
If people aren’t going to like me no matter what I do, I might as well do whatever the fuck I want.
Sometimes people not liking you feels like freedom.
Can you pick up on who’s a highly sensitive person without asking if they are? Is there a way to tell if someone is HSP or not without administering the self-test? Why do I care?
It’s a game a play with myself. I’ve been doing it my whole life without knowing I was doing it and even before I knew what being highly sensitive was.
The game consists of answering one question: could I be friends with that person? The answer usually comes suddenly without much thought after being around someone for a while or listening to them talk about their life or reading about them. Or reading their work or listening to their music. The highly sensitive people are the ones I’m sure I could be friends. In other words I could be my weird self with them instead of the kind of closed off, distant, self-protective person I am with people I know ain’t sensitive.
It’s all intuition and based on a feeling you get about someone. Elaine Aron wrote about this in an article titled How Do You Recognize an HSP? She susses out HSP in a similar way:
I think I can sense an HSP just by being around him or her for a few minutes. Sometimes I imagine I can spot them in a line. But I have a lot of practice. The trouble is, I don’t know exactly how I do it, or even how accurate I am. There’s a look in the eyes, sometimes a certain posture and certainly differences in how they express themselves over a few minutes.
Aron recommends applying the DOES guide to make it easier to figure out who is highly sensitive, especially in the workplace:
D is for Depth of processing
O is for easily Overstimulated
E is for Emotionally reactive
S is for Sensitive to Subtle Stimuli
The words that describe a highly sensitive person and their behavior and attitude are similar — deeper, more, longer, over, stronger.
One of the points Aron made that I think is so important is that highly sensitive people will feel things before other people: “Does he or she become angry, curious, sad, anxious, or joyful sooner than others?” and that the quickest way to spot a highly sensitive person is to ask them how they feel about something. HSP will always have an answer. A very detailed answer.
There are two other ways you can tell if someone is highly sensitive. One is that they seek or determine the truth by how they feel. Facts are part of it, but only a part. I feel around for the truth in my body.
The other way to figure out if someone is highly sensitive depends on the highly sensitive person doing the figuring. Most of the time I figure it out based on how my sensitivity shows up in my life or how I’ve experienced and dealt with being sensitive and I can see that same sensitivity showing up in someone else’s life, words, actions in the same way. My sensitivity is responding to someone else’s sensitivity.
It happens a lot with famous or well-known people. I’ve made a list of people I believe are highly sensitive. This is merely the opinion of my sensitivity:
1. David Foster Wallace
2. Philip Seymour Hoffman
3. J.D. Salinger
4. Harper Lee
5. Jodie Foster
6. Keanu Reeves
7. Joaquin Phoenix
8. Kristen Stewart
9. Shia LaBeouf
10. Mel Gibson
11. Illustrator Gemma Correll. I read this tweet by her and my HSP-sense went off:
Your HSP-sense probably picks up on the sensitivity of a different list of people depending on how you experience sensitivity and well, because everyone is different. No two people experience or see the world and people in the same way.
Can you spot a fellow HSP? Any other well-known HSP to add to the list?
Yesterday, someone found my blog by keying in “why is it ok to be a highly sensitive person if others have to tiptoe around them” into a search engine.
My first thought/question was “Why does the tiptoer even know that the person they’re tiptoeing around is highly sensitive?”
If you have discovered or suspect you are highly sensitive, why would you tell anyone?
Because I didn’t.
The people in my offline life do not know I consider myself highly sensitive.
I have never discussed it.
Only recently did I let a couple of people know I even have a blog. They don’t even know what the blog is about and I don’t care if they know or read it.
I write about high sensitivity for me and other highly sensitive people. I really do not care if non-HSPs understand it or even know about it.
I don’t think high sensitivity will EVER be considered a positive character trait to possess by most people in North America. (Elsewhere it may be a more admirable trait.)
But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t positive. I believe it is.
The power of high sensitivity comes from those who have the trait accepting it and leading with it.
It’s an inside job.
What does telling other people accomplish?
Once I accepted my high sensitivity, I finally realized I will always be triggered, bothered, irritated, annoyed, overwhelmed by SOMETHING or OTHER. Always. To expect the world and other people to change or understand me seemed childish and unrealistic.
I realized I’m not weird or spazzy. I’m just really aware. I just have to take care of myself and my sensitivity. I have to take it care of it. No one else.
What does that mean?
It certainly doesn’t mean telling everyone how triggered, bothered, irritated, annoyed and overwhelmed by everything I am.
It simply means saying no.
It means saying “I don’t want to do that, thank you very much.”
It means if a situation is overwhelming or overstimulating, removing myself from it. It means carrying my headphones wherever I go.
No tiptoeing required.
(And by the way, don’t we all tiptoe around some person in our lives, whether they’re sensitive or not? Or is that just me? I’ve always thought that when someone hurls the phrase “You’re too sensitive” at you, they’re usually being a jerk and they’re trying to tell you “how dare you be bothered by my jerky behavior”. Or, “You’re too sensitive” means “I can’t handle your feelings … or my own.”)
Since I’ve started writing about being highly sensitive, I’ve found that I think about it less. It’s less of an issue than it has been. I’m almost not even aware of it because I take care of it. I pay attention to it and it takes care of me.
I suspect that if someone has announced to people that they are highly sensitive and those people are now tiptoeing around that person, they might have a sensitive narcissist on their hands. Just my opinion.
The Highly Sensitive Person’s motto should be: Never complain. Never explain.
Wheat Field With a Lark by Vincent Van Gogh. Was Van Gogh too emotional?
The word “emotional” has a bad and unfair reputation.
When the word “emotional” is used to describe someone, it’s usually not a compliment. It’s shorthand for: out of control, overreacting, unreliable, biased, fragile, delicate, a cry-baby, someone you have to tiptoe around, weak, and crazy. Someone who is “emotional” is incapable of making the best decisions.
To be called “emotional” is almost an insult. It’s like when men use the phrase “like a girl” to describe how lame another man is. “Girl” and “emotional” mean inferior, less than, not up to par. If you’re being emotional or reacting emotionally, you’re wrong somehow. It’s as if emotionalism is disease. People say “I’m not going to make an emotional decision” as if they were saying “I’m not going to make a decision with Mad Cow Disease” or “I’m not going to make a decision while smoking crack”. Emotions definitely should not be considered while making decisions. Decision making is a rational and analytical process and those pesky emotions just get in the way.
The only times you’re allowed and encouraged to be emotional (there must be something wrong with you if you aren’t emotional enough) are the times when you’re falling in love; getting married; having a baby; getting divorced; or grieving a death and the amount of time you’re allowed to spend being emotional while experiencing any of these life events is minimal. Spending too much time feeling any negative emotions is wallowing, another word that has a bad and unfair reputation.
Emotional Sensitivity
If being called “emotional” is bad, being “emotionally sensitive” is even worse. To be emotionally sensitive means you are regularly irrational and fragile and it makes you even harder to deal with. Emotional sensitivity implies not just inferiority but defectiveness. To be emotional means you’re weak. To be emotionally sensitive means you are ashamedly weak.
It’s no wonder that many highly sensitive people, those who experience their sensitivity primarily physically, make a point of stressing that high sensitivity is not to be confused with emotional sensitivity and focus on the physiological expressions of the trait. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t experience their sensitivity emotionally or it’s because of the way our culture views being “emotional” and being “sensitive” and what it means to be both. But, I think we need to embrace both being emotional and emotional sensitivity as part of being highly sensitive.
Taking Back “Emotional”
The first thing we need to do is reclaim and redefine what “emotional” is. Emotions are just information. To be emotional is just having access to and allowing yourself to be affected by more information. Doesn’t everyone want as much information as possible while making important decisions?
To be emotionally sensitive is to be more affected, more responsive and processing emotions at a deeper level.
What if we used the phrase “emotionally responsive” instead of “emotionally sensitive”? It’s different, right? “Responsive” doesn’t have the negative connotation that “sensitive” does. Responsive implies openness, awareness and curiosity. HSP pioneering researcher Elaine Aron wrote in her Comfort Zone newsletter “sometimes I wish I had started out with ‘highly responsive,’ although I’m not sure it would have made matters clearer, and many fewer people would have recognized themselves in the title The Highly Responsive Person!” I think more people (especially men) would be more likely to recognize themselves in the description “highly responsive person”. The word “sensitive” has an ugly, unfavorable history. Few people want to be linked with the word. But, as Aron wrote in an another article in her newsletter:
HSPs are in fact “more emotional” than others. Humans have to evaluate every situation for whether it is good, interesting, desirable, dangerous, sad, and so forth. If a situation has even a touch of these, it is processed further. This processing can lead to more emotion still. Hence emotion leads to processing and processing often leads to more emotion. Since HSPs process everything further, they have to be more emotional–emotion is initiating their processing and is often a consequence of their doing so much processing. By the way, being more emotional does not cause poor decision-making. Most of the time emotions improve decisions–we can better appreciate the importance of something and are more likely to act.
Or as someone online put it “(emotions) may not have a pretty face, but they have beautiful legs.”
There is another benefit to being an emotionally sensitive person — we allow other people to express their emotions and not just the negative ones. We become, as Aron describes us, emotional leaders:
(Highly sensitive people) also feel more love, joy, pride, awe, and all the other positive emotions. When others are not yet conscious of what they are feeling, we often are. So we can be the emotional sensors. If this is an appropriate time to cry, rage, run in panic, express gratitude, give a hug, not give a casual hug, and so forth, we often do it first–or refrain from doing it–so that others do the same. Of course we can have the wrong reaction, in the sense that ours turns out to be based on misinformation or our own complexes, which can make us feel quite ashamed. But that is the risk with any kind of leadership, and can happen whether we choose to lead or just find ourselves being followed.
This is why HSPs exist. Our power lies in demonstrating how strong you can be while being emotional and sensitive. When I hear someone being described as being “emotional”, I think they’re brave, authentic, and healthy. “Emotional” can mean passionate, committed, and present. It can mean being wise.
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence:
If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.
You know what they call the complete opposite of an emotionally sensitive person?
Before I show my appreciation for the ways Ane Axford’s writing and ideas have changed my way of thinking about sensitivity, my way of seeing the world, and my highly sensitive self, let me say how grateful I am for all the people who have visited my blog, read my writing and left comments in the past couple of days. I appreciate all of you.
In Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist (which I highly recommend, by the way), he suggests writing a fan letter to those who’ve inspired you to “show appreciation without expecting anything in return”. The point of it is to “get new work out of the appreciation”. This post is my public fan letter to my highly sensitive heroine, Ane Axford of Sensitive and Thriving.*
Since discovering her last year on the HSP Health Blog, Ane’s ideas have created, to borrow a phrase from the late author Caroline Knapp, a “kaleidoscopic shift” in me and how I think about high sensitivity, how I viewed myself and what is possible. Knapp beautifully described this shift in an article titled “The Merry Recluse”:
(It is a) kind of sudden internal restructuring that occurs when an established set of facts about the self seems to spontaneously shift, presenting itself in a new order, a surprising light. An old thought becomes a new thought; a prior definition takes on a twist, a new edge, a new meaning.
Here are a few examples of “new thoughts” inspired by Ane:
On being a person who is Highly Sensitive vs. being a Highly Sensitive Person
I planned on writing about a different topic for my second post of the week, but last night I visited Ane’s (AA from now on) Facebook page and what she wrote and the fact that she continues to write things that create that “kaleidoscopic shift” in my thinking made me scrap my plans.
if in a world where sensitivity is not seen as relevant, or seen as weakness, or something not real…where sensitivity is put last if at all…maybe for a time we did need to put sensitivity before the person. Maybe that was in response to a world where sensitivity was misunderstood and misused. We needed the protection of the sensitivity before our personhood. My person was too weak to come first at that time, I believe.
“We needed the protection of the sensitivity before our personhood.” — not only is sensitivity something you hold, something you take care of, but it is protection in AA’s opinion. The idea of sensitivity as protectionblows my mind. I don’t even know what I think about it yet but the kaleidoscope is shifting.
On uncertainty and failure
I’m highly sensitive and I like to be certain. My sensitivity and desire for certainty constantly clash. Being highly sensitive is about being attentive and responsive to what is and with attentiveness and responsiveness comes uncertainty. In an interview with Jocelyn Paige Kelly at Realizing Your Creative Life, AA made me look at uncertainty anew. She says “presence means being uncertain. If you are certain, you are not present.” Without presence, you will not be at peace. AA also says she faces uncertainty on purpose and “thrives with uncertainty by engaging in it”.
I was never really afraid of failure but I have been afraid that whatever I tried would somehow fail me and be just another thing that doesn’t work for me. In the same interview with Kelly, AA discussed failure and what she said has helped me countenance the idea of failure better:
What words of wisdom would you give to an entrepreneur who’s afraid of failure?
Axford: I would tell them to try to fail. To do things as simply, easily, quickly, and basically as possible. I think that trying not to fail is the antithesis of creativity. Especially for HSPs who can tend to want things to be absolutely perfect and to have a perfect plan before they begin, just beginning is essential. Everything is in progress. There is no final failure that ruins you forever and there is no final success that saves you forever.
These words were in my mind as I started my blog after thinking about starting one for almost a year, wanting “things to be absolutely perfect”. Now I think “if something doesn’t work it doesn’t mean I’m a failure. It just didn’t work. Start over.” I value creativity and if creativity comes with failure, then I accept it. Now I engage with failure by asking some questions suggested by Jonathan Fields:
What if you fail? How will you recover? What’s truly worth doing, whether you fail or succeed? In this failure, what went right?
On the Highly Sensitive Hierarchy of Needs
Sometimes I think the world is messed up and people are messed up. I wonder why most people value what they value and how they can possibly operate the way they operate. I think the world is upside down sometimes and the way it works doesn’t work for me. It seems like people just go from point A to point B without much thought or soul-searching or effort. They’re at A and want to get to B (whatever that may be — bigger house, better job, more romance) and they just…go to B? I start at A, I think about B, but remain at A still, think about B some more, circle and circle and circle and then maybe eventually I’ll get to B. Maybe. Does anyone understand what I’m saying?
I never understood why I’m so at odds with the way other people operate until AA wrote about the Highly Sensitive Hierarchy of Needs on her website and in a Tiny Buddha article. I don’t completely understand it and would love to know more.
If anyone else has a grasp on it, could you please write about it?
What I do understand is HSPs are motivated by and driven by meeting our needs at the top of the pyramid first and the non-HSP are motivated by meeting the needs at the bottom first. What this looks like for me is always asking these questions before I do anything: Who am I? What do I need? The answers have nothing to do with a body or what it needs, its safety or belonging. I start with what I sense, feel, and want/need to be myself. Hence the reason I have trouble going from point A to B. It’s a slow process.
Even though I don’t completely grasp the HS Hierarchy of Needs, I know for sure that it is at the heart of helping HSPs thrive. I just know intuitively that it’s a powerful concept. My mind goes to it whenever I’m struggling and feel like I don’t know how to function in the world. I say to myself “what works for everyone else does not work for you” and then I try to find something that works.
On floating
Speaking of struggling, in AA’s article “Are You Drowning in a Sea of Sensitivity?” , she offers highly sensitive people a new approach to life: floating. The idea that one can float through life and thrive seems completely antithetical in the minds of most people in our stressed out, goal driven society. Remember the HS Hierarchy of Needs though. In the article she compares our constant sensing and feeling to water and suggests we walk or float on all those sensations and emotions and let them carry us through life:
Just float. Let yourself be where you are and do what feels easiest or best to you in that given situation. Don’t compare it to any other situation. It’s showing up right now in you, it’s not random and it’s not outside of you.
This approach to life actually requires that you be strong and trust yourself. It is not for the faint-hearted.
I love the imagery. One of my favorite memories is of floating in the Caribbean Sea when I was twelve years old. I don’t remember ever feeling as calm as I did then. Floating actually requires you relax and let go. Since reading this article I’ve realized that I had been thrashing about in the sea of life. Compare the imagery of floating in water to the imagery of thrashing about in water. One makes you feel peaceful. The other is the quickest way to drown. It reminds me of something Alan Watts wrote:
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, you float.
I loved the “floating” metaphor so much that I was going to call my blog “Melene Learns to Float”.
High Sensitivity is your Superpower
Ane Axford is the only HSP expert (that I know of) who has even suggested high sensitivity could be a superpower and a gift instead of a burden you endure and complain about and manage. If she contributed nothing else, that would be enough. Since I read these words in “Are You Drowning in a Sea of Sensitivity?” — “your sensitivity, this ocean of emotion, is your superpower” — I have felt empowered and sought to find out if what she wrote is true and to make it true. But, language matters. The fact that she wrote it at all changed everything for me.
If you haven’t read the introduction and the first chapter of her book Super Sensitive, please do. What she has written and shared so far is fascinating and I look forward to reading the whole thing so I can be inspired even more so than I already have been if that’s possible.
MM
*January 2015 — Ane Axford has discontinued her site Sensitive and Thriving. If you click the link it will take you to her new site, Sensitive Leadership. I don’t know if the old articles on Sensitive and Thriving will be available on the new site.
This week I read a uninformative listicle in the Huffington Post titled “16 Habits of Highly Sensitive People”. Most of the 16 items on the list are not “habits” — “that annoying sound is probably significantly more annoying to a highly sensitive person”? That’s not a “habit”. That’s being cursed with good hearing and an inability to ignore those annoying sounds.
Articles like this one aren’t interesting to me, but I’m glad information about high sensitivity is getting broad exposure. I get it — the title is a play on the title of a best-selling book and is for people who don’t know much about the high sensitivity trait. I don’t like it, but I get it.
The “habit” I disagree with the most is: “Violent movies are the worst. Because highly sensitive people are so high in empathy and more easily overstimulated, movies with violence or horror themes may not be their cup of tea.”
Violent movies aren’t the worst. Bad movies are the worst. I hate horror movies because they’re bad, not because of the goriness or cruelty or creepiness. I laugh at that stuff.
Bad movies affect me because they’re…bad. They waste my time, don’t contain believable characters, and insult my intelligence.
Violent movies don’t affect me because I don’t let them affect me. When the shooting starts or there’s a beheading, I can’t help but think about the choreography of the scene, the props, the fake blood, the actors with bullet holes in their costumes as they sip green drinks in their trailers. I think about the artists who create the illusion of severed limbs and head wounds. Sometimes I wince and then think “I wonder how they did that”. I’m amazed, not traumatized.
I am bothered by the idea of violence as entertainment. I’m (slightly) bothered that I’m regularly entertained by it. I’ve spent many Saturday nights watching men and women try to knock each other unconscious in the octagon, but is this violence? Both fighters are willing participants subject to the same rules. That makes it a game, not violence.
Here’s a situation that illustrates the difference between a game and violence: in 2010, two welterweights, Josh Koscheck and Paul Daley, fight for two boring, uneventful rounds. At the end of the third round, the bell rings, the referee separates the fighters, and Daley takes a shot at Koscheck. What happened in the 15 minutes before Daley took that shot wasn’t violence. The suckerpunch was.
When someone is being stomped to death in a movie or…I’m trying to remember another violent scene I watched in a movie recently and I can’t come up with one. See how little it affects me? I see it and feel it then I shut down and shut it out. Am I becoming desensitized to violence in movies? Maybe, but who cares?
It’s not real violence.
I care very much about and save my upset and empathy for real violence that affects real people — Chris Brown beating up Rhianna, the shooting at Sandy Hook, a girl who commits suicide because she’s being bullied, or a boy who’s shot because he’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt and looks threatening. I’m affected by hate, injustice, sexism, discrimination and formulaic movies. I don’t have empathy to waste on movie violence.
Name: Guy Smith, created by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred Alias he hates: Mr. Sensitive Alias he prefers: The Orphan, Leader X-Force/X-Statix (offshoots of The X-Men) Why he prefers the name The Orphan: He believed his parents died in a fire when he was a boy. It turns out that they tried to kill him for being a mutant What kind of mutant is he?: Skin that is spotty, purple, and easily irritable; has antennae; supersensitive to pain Special powers, abilities, talents?: Master martial artist with great reflexes, speed, and co-ordination; ability to paralyze opponents by striking nerve points; ability to levitate; senses vulnerability Cool accessory: A special suit and ointment developed by Professor Xavier to dull his senses and let him live a relatively normal life Odd/weird fact: Plays Russian roulette with himself Great Quote: “It’s no good. Can’t feel deep enough. The costume helps me control my sensitivity. But most of all it stops me from hurting all the time. But there are times when you’ve just got to hurt.” (From X-Force Issue #119)
I’m going to give Mr. Sensitive the Highly Sensitive Person Self-Test:
Is he “easily overwhelmed by strong sensory input?” Yes Does he “tend to be sensitive to pain?” Huge yes. Does he “seem to be aware of subtleties in the environment?” He has a “danger sense”, so yes. Does he “have a rich complex inner life?” He frickin’ levitates! Yes! Is he conscientious? Yes. “Guy had a high regard for human life, and he was the team’s most genuinely heroic member. When X-Force was ordered to hand over a young boy named Paco Perez to the United States government because his mutant body was a treasure chest of possible cures and medicines, Guy made the controversial decision to hide the boy safely out of the government’s reach. He decided that one life was not an acceptable sacrifice, no matter what cures could have been found by ‘strip-mining’ Paco.” (From Wikipedia)
My assessment? Definitely highly sensitive.
Would I want a suit that dulled my senses like the one Professor Xavier created for Guy? I thought at first it would be cool and useful under certain circumstances. It would allow me to experience certain things I enjoy without being overwhelmed or overstimulated, like going to concerts. I wish there was a helmet I could put on that prevented me from thinking too deeply sometimes. Or, when I put the helmet on I could only enjoy the most superficial and simplest things like videos of cute cats and guys who perform with spoons and I could only enjoy them in the most superficial way. With the helmet on, I could only say things like “That’s nice.” The helmet would prevent me from thinking, “What a waste of time this is” or “Viral cat videos are proof of the dumbing down of human beings.” I would just watch and feel nothing.
I realize though that no matter how annoying it is to overthink, overanalyze, over personalize, over everything, sometimes it works for me. Sometimes, very rarely, it is like a superpower. It’s like what Voltaire said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Learning to thrive with high sensitivity means learning how to deal with its great responsibility. There are times when you’ve just got to hurt.
Here’s a story with many interpretations and lessons:
The Fisherman and The Businessman
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite a few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we pay guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”
The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
***
I argue that one interpretation of the story is to demonstrate how differently highly sensitive people and non-sensitive people operate in the world.
Highly Sensitive researcher and pioneer Elaine Aron should ditch her Highly Sensitive self-test and just have people read this story and ask them who they identify with: the Fisherman or the Businessman?
HSPs are the “Fishermen” of the world and the hardier, non-sensitives are the “Businessmen.”
The Businessmen are materially oriented and motivated. That’s how they figure out what life is all about.
The Fishermen are spiritually oriented and motivated. We are built to be aware of the big picture, to know what life is all about first and then try to figure out how to bring that awareness into the world.
Businessmen are motivated from the outside — they’re driven to be competitive, to measure up, to stand out.
Fishermen are motivated from the inside — who am I? What do I want? What’s my purpose?
Only later in life do Businessmen ask these questions. Us Fishermen ask these questions before we do anything.
Fishermen struggle when we try to be like Businessmen. We wonder “why can’t I just do what the Businessmen do? Why am I always sick, overwhelmed, and failing when I try to think and live like a Businessman?”
Instead of having midlife crises and breakdowns at forty, we have these crises in our 20s. I had one at 22. I wondered “how do I live?”
We live, truly live, and thrive by figuring out who we really are, what we really want and what our purpose is and let that inform everything we do.
And it’s hard. It’s hard to just fish when everyone else is trying to make as much money as possible. It’s hard to listen to our inner voice and trust it when we’re conditioned to be Businessmen, the world is full of Businessmen, and it is created for Businessmen.
You have to be strong to be sensitive.
I finally realized and accepted that the only way for me to be in life is to be a Fisherman.
As Ane Axford wrote, “everything else flows out of this (understanding). Without this, you’re fighting your own nature and using your superpower against yourself. With this understanding, we are unlimited.”
There’s nothing wrong with being a Businessman. We need the Businessmen of the world.
SENSITIVE NEW WORLD 