Highly Sensitive People (HSPs)

Hullo beings from another spatial dimension!

I'm at clinical on lunch break... bringing you the special lunch edition of Paper Faces! I was cleaning out my email inbox and found an excerpt from Elaine Aron on highly sensitive people. It's always fun to rediscover truths that you've forgotten about.

Elaine defines the HSP as having a sensitive nervous system, being aware of subtleties in his/her surroundings, and being more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment. A key quality is that they process everything around them much more - reflect on it, elaborate on it, make associations. When this processing is not full conscious, it surfaces as intuition.
http://www.hsperson.com/books/the-highly-sensitive-person/

She also notes that HSPs have stronger feelings and that this is NOT a flaw. However, it can sometimes make things more difficult. We can be overwhelmed and overstimulated quickly - and also experience pain with more intensity. This chunk of quote struck me the most today.

"For whatever reason, we are more easily struck by the full impact of a birth or the threat of death. When a mother behaves badly we feel her as more than that--as the archetypal bad Mother with all her devouring and destructive energy. When we have a chance to do good, we feel the thrill of the heroic as we step in to do our share. When we see lightning strike close by; stand near a river overflowing its banks; hear a child crying in despair; or watch two large, angry male animals fighting for dominance; we are moved to our very roots, every sense alert and every nerve alive."

This is particularly true of me... and speaks to so much of the reason I'm here writing. Because I am aware of so much, I'm constantly processing - and I like to make associations and may pick up on subtle social or cultural connections. My feelings of loneliness and difficulty with people leaving my life also stem back into this. I tend to demand more depth in a relationship to feel satisfied and that is why I often am left feeling lonely or discontent with relationships - because many people cannot sustain a relationship that deep. Plus, I see more threatening consequences in people's flaws or behaviors - which is why I worry all the time that my standards are too high. Additionally, I've always had sort of sixth sense about emotional and social situations... which is reflected in that intuition of processing that is not fully conscious.

Anyway, enough about me for now. It's just nice to be reminded that I'm not crazy or maudlin. I'm just me. :)