Читать книгу The Highly Sensitive Person - Elaine N. Aron - Страница 12

I am a research psychologist, university professor, psychotherapist, and published novelist. What matters most, however, is that I am an HSP like you. I am definitely not writing from on high, aiming down to help you, poor soul, overcome your “syndrome.” I know personally about our trait, its assets and its challenges.

As a child, at home, I hid from the chaos in my family. At school I avoided sports, games, and kids in general. What a mixture of relief and humiliation when my strategy succeeded and I was totally ignored.

In junior high school an extravert took me under her wing. In high school that relationship continued, plus I studied most of the time. In college my life became far more difficult. After many stops and starts, including a four-year marriage undertaken too young, I finally graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley. But I spent my share of time crying in rest rooms, thinking I was going crazy. (My research has found that retreating like this, often to cry, is typical of HSPs.)

In my first try at graduate school I was provided with an office, to which I also retreated and cried, trying to regain some calm. Because of such reactions, I stopped my studies with a master’s degree, even though I was highly encouraged to continue for a doctorate. It took twenty-five years for me to gain the information about my trait that made it possible to understand my reactions and so complete that doctorate.

When I was twenty-three, I met my current husband and settled down into a very protected life of writing and rearing a son. I was simultaneously delighted and ashamed of not being “out there.” I was vaguely aware of my lost opportunities to learn, to enjoy more public recognition of my abilities, to be more connected with all kinds of people. But from bitter experience I thought I had no choice.

Some arousing events, however, cannot be avoided. I had to undergo a medical procedure from which I assumed I would recover in a few weeks. Instead, for months my body seemed to resound with physical and emotional reactions. I was being forced to face once again that mysterious “fatal flaw” of mine that made me so different. So I tried some psychotherapy. And got lucky. After listening to me for a few sessions, my therapist said, “But of course you were upset; you are a very highly sensitive person.”

What is this, I thought, some excuse? She said she had never thought much about it, but from her experience it seemed that there were real differences in people’s tolerance for stimulation and also their openness to the deeper significance of an experience, good and bad. To her, such sensitivity was hardly a sign of a mental flaw or disorder. At least she hoped not, for she was highly sensitive herself. I recall her grin. “As are most of the people who strike me as really worth knowing.”

I spent several years in therapy, none of it wasted, working through various issues from my childhood. But the central theme became the impact of this trait. There was my sense of being flawed. There was the willingness of others to protect me in return for enjoying my imagination, empathy, creativity, and insight, which I myself hardly appreciated. And there was my resulting isolation from the world. But as I gained insight, I was able to reenter the world. I take great pleasure now in being part of things, a professional, and sharing the special gifts of my sensitivity.