Читать книгу The Highly Sensitive Person - Elaine N. Aron - Страница 17

Kristen was the twenty-third interview of my research on HSPs. She was an intelligent, clear-eyed college student. But soon into our interview her voice began to tremble.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But I really signed up to see you because you’re a psychologist and I had to talk to someone who could tell me—” Her voice broke. “Am I crazy?” I studied her with sympathy. She was obviously feeling desperate, but nothing she had said so far had given me any sense of mental illness. But then, I was already listening differently to people like Kristen.

She tried again, as if afraid to give me time to answer. “I feel so different. I always did. I don’t mean—I mean, my family was great. My childhood was almost idyllic until I had to go to school. Although Mom says I was always a grumpy baby.”

She took a breath. I said something reassuring, and she plunged on. “But in nursery school I was afraid of everything. Even music time. When they would pass out the pots and pans to pound, I would put my hands over my ears and cry.”

She looked away, her eyes glistening with tears now, too. “In elementary school I was always the teacher’s pet. Yet they’d say I was ‘Spacey.’”

Her “spaciness” prompted a distressing series of medical and psychological tests. First for mental retardation. As a result, she was enrolled in a program for the gifted, which did not surprise me.

Still the message was “Something is wrong with this child.” Her hearing was tested. Normal. In fourth grade she had a brain scan on the theory that her inwardness was due to petit mal seizures. Her brain was normal.

The final diagnosis? She had “trouble screening out stimuli.” But the result was a child who believed she was defective.