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.
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