Читать книгу The Highly Sensitive Person - Elaine N. Aron - Страница 45

A storm threatens. The sky turns metallic. The march of clouds across the sky breaks apart. Pieces of sky fly off in different directions. The wind picks up force, in silence.… The world is disintegrating. Something is about to happen. Uneasiness grows. It spreads from the center and turns into pain.

The above is a moment of growing hunger as experienced by a hypothetical six-week-old infant called Joey, as imagined by developmental psychologist Daniel Stern in his charming book Diary of a Baby. A tremendous amount of recent research on infancy informs Joey’s diary. For example, it is now thought that infants cannot separate inner from outer stimulation or sort out the different senses or the present from a remembered experience that has just happened. Nor do they have a sense of themselves as the one who is experiencing it all, the one to whom it is happening.

Given all of the above, Stern found that weather is a good analogy for an infant’s experience. Things just happen, varying mostly in intensity. Intensity is all that disturbs, by creating a storm of overarousal. HSPs take note: Overarousal is the first and most basic distressing experience of life; our first lessons about overarousal begin at birth.

Here is how Stern imagines Joey feeling after he has nursed and eased his hunger:

All is remade. A changed world is waking. The storm has passed. The winds are quiet. The sky is softened. Running lines and flowing volumes appear. They trace a harmony and, like shifting light, make everything come alive.

Stern sees infants as having the same needs as adults for a moderate level of arousal:

A baby’s nervous system is prepared to evaluate immediately the intensity of … anything accessible to one of his senses. How intensely he feels about something is probably the first clue he has available to tell him whether to approach it or to stay away … if something is moderately intense … he is spellbound. That just-tolerable intensity arouses him.… It increases his animation, activates his whole being.

In other words, it is no fun to be bored. On the other hand, the infant/body self is born with an instinct to stay away from whatever is highly intense, to avoid the state of overarousal. For some, however, it’s harder to do.