Kitabı oku: «The Highly Sensitive Person», sayfa 5

You Are More Than Genes and Systems

Let’s not forget that you are a complicated being. Certain investigators, such as Mary Rothbart of the University of Oregon, are adamant that temperament is quite a different matter when you study adult humans, who can reason, make choices, and exert willpower to follow through on their choices. Rothbart believes that if psychologists study children and animals too much, they will overlook the role of human thinking and a lifetime’s experience.

Let’s go over your development, and Rob’s, as Rothbart sees it, and how being sensitive would differ at each stage.

At birth, an infant’s only reaction is negative—irritability, discomfort. Sensitive babies like you and Rob were mainly different in being more irritable and uncomfortable—what Kagan called “highly reactive.”

At about two months the behavioral-activation system becomes functional. Now you showed an interest in new things in case they might satisfy your needs. Along with that came a new feeling—anger and frustration when you did not get what you wanted. So positive emotions and anger were possible, and how much you felt them depended on the strength of your activation system. Rob, having both systems strong, became an easily angered baby. But sensitive babies with a low activation system would be placid and “good” at this age.

At six months your superior automatic pause-to-check system came on line. You could compare present experiences with those of the past, and if the present ones were upsetting, as those in the past, you would experience fear. But again, you saw more subtle differences in each experience. For you there was more that was unfamiliar and possibly frightening.

At this point, six months, every experience becomes very important for HSPs. One can see how a few bad experiences when approaching new things could turn the pause-to-check system into a pause-and-do-nothing system, a true inhibition system. The best way to avoid bad things would seem to be avoiding everything. And, of course, the more the world is avoided, the newer everything will seem. Imagine how frightening the world could have seemed to you.

Finally, around ten months, you began to develop the ability to shift your attention, to decide how to experience something, or to stop a behavior. Only at this point could you start to handle conflicts between the two systems. A conflict would be I want to try that, but it seems so strange. (At ten months we might not use those words, but that would be the idea.) But now you could make some choices about which emotion to obey. One could almost see Rob doing it: Okay, it’s unfamiliar, but I’ll go ahead, anyway.

You probably had favorite methods of overriding the pause-to-check system if it slowed you too long or often. One way might have been to imitate those with less of it. You just went ahead and got some good things, too, like them, in spite of your caution. Another might have been the recategorizing of the stimulation to make it familiar. The growling wolf in the movie “is just a big dog.” But most of your help probably came from others who wanted you to feel safe, not afraid.

Social help with fears involves yet another system that Rothbart believes is highly developed in adult humans. It also arrives at about ten months. With it, a child begins to connect with others, to enjoy them. If these social experiences are positive and supportive, another physiological system develops for which humans are biologically prepared. One could call this the loving system. It creates endorphins, the “good feeling” neuro-chemicals.

How much could you overcome your fears by trusting others to help? Who was around whom you could rely on? Did you act as if Mother is here so I’ll try? Did you learn to imitate her calming words and deeds, applying them to yourself? “Don’t be afraid, it’ll be okay.” I have seen Rob using all of these methods.

Now you might spend a moment thinking about yourself and your childhood, and we will do more of this in the next two chapters. I know you don’t really remember, but judging from what facts you have, what was that first year probably like? How does your thinking and self-control affect your sensitivity now? Are there times when you can control your arousal? Who taught you to do so? Who were your role models? Do you think you were taught to control your cautiousness too much so that you dare to do more than your body can handle? Or does it seem that your lesson was that the world is unsafe and over-arousal is uncontrollable?

How Trust Becomes Mistrust and the Unfamiliar Becomes Dangerous

Most researchers on temperament have studied short-term arousal. It’s easy to study, for it’s quite apparent from the higher levels of heartbeat, respiration, perspiration, pupil dilation, and adrenaline.

There is another system of arousal, however, that is governed more by hormones. It goes into action just as quickly, but the effect of its main product, Cortisol, is most noticeable after ten to twenty minutes. An important point is that when Cortisol is present, the short-term arousal response is also even more likely. That is, this long-term type of arousal makes us even more excitable, more sensitive, than before.

Most of the effects of Cortisol occur over hours or even days. They are mainly measured in the blood, saliva, or urine, so studying long-term arousal is less convenient. But psychologist Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota thought that the whole point of the pause-to-check system might be to protect the individual from this unhealthy, unpleasant, long-term arousal.

Research shows that when people first encounter something new and potentially threatening, the short-term response always comes first. Meanwhile, we start to consider our resources. What are our abilities? What have we learned about this sort of situation from past experiences? Who is around who might help out? If we think we or those with us can cope with the situation, we stop seeing it as a threat. The short-term alert dies out, and the long-term alarm never goes off.

Gunnar demonstrated this process in an interesting experiment. She set up a threatening situation much like those Kagan uses to identify “inhibited” children. But first, the nine-month-old babies were separated from their mothers for a half hour. Half were left with a very attentive baby-sitter who responded to all of the child’s moods. The other half were left with a baby-sitter who was inattentive and unresponsive unless the child actually fussed or cried. Next, while alone with the babysitter, each nine-month-old was exposed to something startlingly new.

What is so important here is that only the highly sensitive babies with the inattentive baby-sitters showed more Cortisol in their saliva. It was as if those with the attentive sitter felt they had a resource and had no need to make a long-term stress response.

Suppose the caretaker is your own mother? Psychologists observing babies with their mothers have discovered certain signs that tell them if a child feels “securely attached.” A secure child feels safe to explore, and new experiences are not usually seen as a threat. Other signs indicate that a child is “insecurely attached.” The mothers of these children are either too protective or too neglectful (or even dangerous). (We will discuss “attachment” more in chapters 3 and 4.) Research on sensitive children facing a novel, startling situation in the company of their mothers has found that these children do show their usual, strong short-term response. But if a sensitive child is securely attached to Mom, there is no long-term Cortisol effect from the stress. Without secure attachment, however, a startling experience will produce long-term arousal.

One can see why it is important that young HSPs (and older ones, too) stay out in the world, trying things rather than retreating. But their feelings about their caretakers have to be secure and their experiences have to be successful or their reasons not to approach will only be proved true. And all of this gets started before you can even talk!

Many intelligent, sensitive parents provide all the needed experiences almost automatically. Rob’s parents are constantly praising his successes and encouraging him to test his fears to see if they are realistic while offering help if he needs it. With time, his idea of the world will be that it is not as frightening as his nervous system was telling him it was during that first year or two. His creative traits and intuitive abilities, all the advantages of being sensitive, will flourish. The difficult areas will fade.

When parents do nothing special to help a sensitive child feel safe, whether the child becomes truly “inhibited” probably depends on the relative strength of the activation and pause-to-check systems. But remember that some parents and environments can make matters much worse. Certainly repeated frightening experiences will strongly reinforce caution, especially experiences of failing to be calmed or helped, of being punished for active exploring, and of having others who should be helpful become dangerous instead.

Another important point is that the more Cortisol in an infant’s body, the less the child will sleep, and the less sleep, the more Cortisol. In the daytime, the more Cortisol, the more fear, the more fear, the more Cortisol. Uninterrupted sleep at night and timely naps all reduce Cortisol in infants. And remember, lower Cortisol also means fewer short-term alarms. It was easy to see that this was a constant problem with Rob. It may have been for you, too.

Furthermore, if sleep problems beginning in infancy are not controlled, they may last into adulthood and make a highly sensitive person almost unbearably sensitive. So get your sleep!

Into the Depths

There is another aspect of your trait that is harder to capture in studies or observations—except when strange fears and nightmares visit the sensitive child (or adult). To understand this very real aspect of the trait, one leaves the laboratory and enters the consulting room of the depth psychologist.

Depth psychologists place great emphasis on the unconscious and the experiences imbedded there, repressed or simply preverbal, that continue to govern our adult life. It is not surprising that highly sensitive children, and adults, too, have a hard time with sleep and report more vivid, alarming, “archetypal” dreams. With the coming of darkness, subtle sounds and shapes begin to rule the imagination, and HSPs sense them more. There are also the unfamiliar experiences of the day—some only half-noticed, some totally repressed. All of them swirl in the mind just as we are relaxing the conscious mind so that we can fall asleep.

Falling asleep, staying asleep, and going back to sleep when awakened require an ability to soothe oneself, to feel safe in the world.

The only depth psychologist to write explicitly about sensitivity was one of the founders of depth work, Carl Jung, and what he said was important—and exceptionally positive, for a change.

Way back when psychotherapy began with Sigmund Freud, there was controversy about how much innate temperament shaped personality, including emotional problems. Before Freud, the medical establishment had emphasized inherited constitutional differences. Freud tried to prove that “neurosis” (his specialty) was caused by traumas, especially upsetting sexual experiences. Carl Jung, Freud’s follower for a long time, split with him finally on the issue of the centrality of sexuality. Jung decided that the fundamental difference was an inherited greater sensitivity. He believed that when highly sensitive patients had experienced a trauma, sexual or otherwise, they had been unusually affected and so developed a neurosis. Note that Jung was saying that sensitive people not traumatized in childhood are not inherently neurotic. One thinks of Gunnar’s finding that the sensitive child with a secure attachment to his or her mother does not feel threatened by new experiences. Indeed, Jung thought very highly of sensitive people—but then he was one himself.

That Jung wrote about HSPs is a little-known fact. (I did not know this when I began my work on the trait.) For example, he said that “a certain innate sensitiveness produces a special prehistory, a special way of experiencing infantile events” and that “events bound up with powerful impressions can never pass off without leaving some trace on sensitive people.” Later, Jung began to describe introverted and intuitive types in similar ways, but even more positively. He said they had to be more self-protective—what he meant by being introverted. But he also said that they were “educators and promoters of culture … their life teaches the other possibility, the interior life which is so painfully wanting in our civilization.”

Such people, Jung said, are naturally more influenced by their unconscious, which gives them information of the “utmost importance,” a “prophetic foresight.” To Jung, the unconscious contains important wisdom to be learned. A life lived in deep communication with the unconscious is far more influential and personally satisfying.

But such a life is also potentially more difficult, especially if in childhood there were too many disturbing experiences without a secure attachment. As you saw from Gunnar’s research and as you will see in chapter 8, Jung was exactly right.

So It’s Real and It’s Okay

Rob, Jerome Kagan, Megan Gunnar, and Carl Jung should have you well convinced now that your trait is utterly real. You are different. In the next chapter, you will consider how you may need to live differently from others if you are going to be in healthy harmony with your quite different, highly sensitive body.

By now you may be seeing a somewhat dark picture too—one of fear, timidity, inhibitedness, and distressed overarousal. Only Jung spoke of the trait’s advantages, but even then it was in terms of our connection to the depths and darkness of the psyche. But remember that this sort of negativity is, once again, largely a sign of our culture’s bias. Preferring toughness, the culture sees our trait as something difficult to live with, something to be cured. Do not forget that HSPs differ mainly in their sensitive processing of subtle stimuli. This is your most basic quality. That is a positive and accurate way to understand your trait.

• Working With What You Have Learned •

Your Deeper Response

This is something to do right now, just as you have finished reading this chapter. Your intellect has taken in some ideas, but your emotions may be having some deeper reactions to what you have been reading.

To reach these deeper reactions, you need to reach the deeper parts of the body, of your emotions, of the more fundamental, instinctual sort of consciousness that Jung called the unconscious. This is where the ignored or forgotten parts of yourself dwell, areas that may be threatened or relieved or excited or saddened by what you are learning.

Read all of what is here: then proceed. Begin by breathing very consciously from the center of your body, from your abdomen. Make certain that your diaphragm stays involved—at first blow out through your mouth fairly hard, as if blowing up a balloon. Your belly will tighten as you do this. Then, when you inhale, the breath will be taken in from the level of your stomach, very automatically. Your breathing in should be automatic and easy. Only your breathing out should be extended. That, too, can become less forceful and no longer out through your mouth once you are settled into breathing from your center, your belly, and not from high up in your chest.

Once settled, you need to create a safe space within your imagination where anything at all is welcome. Invite any feeling to enter awareness there. It might be a bodily feeling—an ache in the back, a tension in your throat, an unsettled stomach. Let the sensation grow and let it tell you what it is there to show you. You also might see a fleeting image. Or hear a voice. Or observe an emotion. Or a series of these—a physical feeling might become an image. Or a voice might express an emotion you begin to feel.

Notice all that you can in this quiet state. If feelings need to be expressed—if you need to laugh, cry, or rage—try to let yourself do that a little.

Then, as you emerge from that state, think about what happened. Note what stirred the feelings you had—what it was in what you read, what it was in what you thought or remembered while you read. How were your feelings related to being sensitive?

Afterward, put into words some of what you have learned—think about it for yourself, tell someone else, or write it down. Indeed, keeping a journal of your feelings while you read this book will be very helpful.

3 General Health and Lifestyle for HSPs Loving and Learning From Your Infant/Body Self

In this chapter you’ll learn to appreciate your highly sensitive body’s needs. Since this is often surprisingly difficult for HSPs, I have learned to approach it through a metaphor—treating the body as you would an infant. It is such a good metaphor, as you will see, that it may not be one at all.

Six Weeks of Age: How It May Have Been

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.