So let\u2019s say that 2.3% of people, or maybe it\u2019s 8.4%?, are \u201ctoo sensitive.\u201d No big deal, there are those who are too nearsighted, or too all sorts of qualities. Evolution tries out all variations and sees what\u2019s most adaptive. Up to now, we haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
This is a sensitive sub-population. They need a bit of green-house-childhood. If they\u2019re 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\u2019s moderately more stressful\u2014and let me note that 35% of people have childhoods that are moderately stressful, or teen years, or marriages\u2014that can drive such people into a variety of mixed and hard-to-treat psychiatric diagnoses.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s hard to treat is the mis-diagnosis of sensitivity. It\u2019s no good saying to people \u201cyou\u2019re too sensitive,\u201d as if they could if they only would settle down their perceptual thresholds. Well, okay, 4.9% of \u201ctoo sensitive\u201d 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\u2019t get me started!), and having that extra-sensitivity on top of that. So I cut them some slack.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m speaking as a retired psychiatrist who continues to ponder the what\u2019s-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.\u2014some 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\u2019t do or do quite differently from me. No blame, but it is useful to recognize.<\/p>\n
(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: \u201cHow could they have not seen that? I mean it\u2019s just so obvious!\u201d Not really.)<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m waking up to a variable modern psychology and psychiatry hasn\u2019t really tackled, because it\u2019s really quite difficult to imagine and not pathologize types or levels of consciousness more quick, bright, intelligent, sensitive, and different from one\u2019s own. They all seem wacko. But that word is just a dismissal of that which we really don\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n
But we\u2019re smart, educated at good colleges, universities, professional training programs. We\u2019ve got degrees and diplomas. We know what\u2019s going on. Right? No, wrong. There are major, major horizons that the whole field of intellectual striving haven\u2019t even recognized are there\u2014other than one or two adventurous souls who tend to be mocked. Because that isn\u2019t a horizon of our knowledge beyond which we are ignorant. That\u2019s just stupid and crazy. Right? <\/p>\n
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\u2019ve devised are not\u2014cannot possibly be\u2014smarter, more sensitive, more discerning\u2014than 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So let\u2019s say that 2.3% of people, or maybe it\u2019s 8.4%?, are \u201ctoo sensitive.\u201d No big deal, there are those who are too nearsighted, or too all sorts of qualities. Evolution tries out all variations and sees what\u2019s most adaptive. Up to now, we haven\u2019t been able to use those qualities 99% of the time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literacy","category-psychotherapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":636,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions\/636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}