Adam Blatner

So let’s say that 2.3% of people, or maybe it’s 8.4%?, are “too sensitive.” No big deal, there are those who are too nearsighted, or too all sorts of qualities. Evolution tries out all variations and sees what’s most adaptive. Up to now, we haven’t been able to use those qualities 99% of the time but in some cultures they become shamans and saints and gurus, and geniuses in other ways.

This is a sensitive sub-population. They need a bit of green-house-childhood. If they’re offered the standard child-rearing experience, it inhibits them; if it is a bit more stressful, it stifles them and makes them a little crazy. If it’s moderately more stressful—and let me note that 35% of people have childhoods that are moderately stressful, or teen years, or marriages—that can drive such people into a variety of mixed and hard-to-treat psychiatric diagnoses.

What’s hard to treat is the mis-diagnosis of sensitivity. It’s no good saying to people “you’re too sensitive,” as if they could if they only would settle down their perceptual thresholds. Well, okay, 4.9% of “too sensitive” people do make mountains out of molehills, play the victim and the drama queen, act spoiled rotten, etc., but this is a combination of ignorance, coping with an un-evolved family and sub-culture in growing up, dealing with what is still a moderately ignorant and un-evolved culture even now (don’t get me started!), and having that extra-sensitivity on top of that. So I cut them some slack.

I’m speaking as a retired psychiatrist who continues to ponder the what’s-it-all-about and has become aware that there are people on both sides of him in every way: There are people more and less talented, skilled, bright, sensitive, kind, blind, etc.—some are astonishingly, wonderful, and I still struggle to appreciate them; some I need to refrain from judging other than to accurately assess what they don’t do or do quite differently from me. No blame, but it is useful to recognize.

(I say this because I continue to discover how non-discerning I have been. And to excuse myself a bit, maybe not just maturity but cultural experience, the emergence of new paradigms, etc., all play a part in this. I suspect that in a century and again in five centuries, people will look back and perhaps with more personal enlightenment and charity, wonder at the density and narrowness of perspective and consciousness of now, just as we do for our predecessors centuries ago: “How could they have not seen that? I mean it’s just so obvious!” Not really.)

So I’m waking up to a variable modern psychology and psychiatry hasn’t really tackled, because it’s really quite difficult to imagine and not pathologize types or levels of consciousness more quick, bright, intelligent, sensitive, and different from one’s own. They all seem wacko. But that word is just a dismissal of that which we really don’t understand.

But we’re smart, educated at good colleges, universities, professional training programs. We’ve got degrees and diplomas. We know what’s going on. Right?   No, wrong. There are major, major horizons that the whole field of intellectual striving haven’t even recognized are there—other than one or two adventurous souls who tend to be mocked. Because that isn’t a horizon of our knowledge beyond which we are ignorant. That’s just stupid and crazy. Right?

Sigh. I enjoy cultiviating a sense of wonder and not-knowing, and part of that is considering that odd folks who are not fully qualified according to whatever standards of qualification we’ve devised are not—cannot possibly be—smarter, more sensitive, more discerning—than wonderful us. But what if there are in fact lots of folks whom we have thus marginalized who will end up being our creative pioneers and teachers in a few centuries. Hmph!