More on Being an HSP.

I think it’s about time I made a more detailed post about HSP. I’ve referred to it often enough, so let me try going into a bit more detail.

First off, I have to say that I have no proof that the HSP phenomenon is sufficiently concrete as to be medically recognisable. What I can say is that there is a condition, or more properly a personality variant, which is characterised by an exaggerated perceptual faculty and held in common by a relatively small number of people, including me. (I only found that out a year or so ago when somebody wrote to me and said ‘I’ve been reading your blog and I think you’re an HSP type. You match the symptoms.’) I can also say that a Canadian psychologist recognised this variant over twenty years ago and has been studying it ever since. She claims to have shown that it’s caused by our brains being wired slightly differently than those of ‘normal’ people, and who am I to disagree? The symptoms are certainly real enough, and it’s been my experience that they both differ sufficiently from the norm and accord sufficiently with the small percentage of like-minded others that I think it reasonable to proceed on the basis that it does exist. So let me do just that, using my own experience as my only guide.

According to that experience, there are two connected strands to HSP. The first is high awareness, the second high sensitivity. They both cause difficulty in our relations with life, but it’s the first of them that gets us most misunderstood. People know what sensitive means. Most people are highly sensitive to one thing or another that pushes their fear button, their anxiety button, their sadness button, or whatever, so it isn’t so difficult to explain that we’re highly sensitive to everything.

The difficulty comes with high awareness. People don’t think about awareness; it’s something that’s just there in the mind. It’s something we all take for granted, and I’ve no doubt that we all assume it’s more or less universal in its operation. I’m sure it more or less is for most people, but not for the HSP.

Being an HSP is like going through life seeing everything through a magnifying glass. Difficult issues loom more menacingly, bad atmospheres between people are more acrid, more detail is seen in the interplay of relationships, loud noises are effectively louder and bad smells effectively smellier, the energy of violence is more overwhelming, a small pool of blood becomes a lake on which floats the enervating perception of suffering, the play of light on a landscape is more complex, more connections are seen in the inflated spaces between the main message, objects which invade our space squeeze us to a sense of near-suffocation. And so on and so forth…

I expect the details vary with the individual, but what we have in common is the fact that everything looks bigger; and because it’s perception we’re talking about, if it looks bigger, it is bigger. Normal people are conditioned to their own level of awareness, and so they don’t understand ours. ‘Why is this bothering you so much?’ they ask. ‘It’s only a such-and-such.’ Yes, but it’s a much bigger such-and-such to us than it is to them. And it works both ways. We’re conditioned to our level of awareness, too, so we don’t understand why they don’t understand. Not until, that is, we bring HSP into the picture. I could tell the story of how, during my spell in the navy, I was brought to a state of near physical collapse by the repeated sound of gunfire from the big 4.5” guns. I didn’t collapse; it’s something you mustn’t do, because then you would lose face and have the shame to contend with on top of the collywobbles already turning your insides to a nauseating form of jelly. That’s what being an HSP is often about: hiding your true reactions so as to avoid being thought either a wimp or a lunatic. It helps a little to know that it’s because your brain is wired differently, and I suspect it probably plays a large part in PTSD.

It’s easy to become overloaded with all this awareness, and it’s easy to get swamped by the combined effect of awareness and sensitivity. The steadier ones might relieve the pressure by venting it through some creative pursuit, while those not so gifted might become alcoholics, or maybe go off the rails with an eating disorder or the proclivity for self harm. Most of us, I suspect, tend to live more in our own world than normal people do. And think of this: when society prides itself on punishing two offenders with the same prison sentence for the same crime, they call it equality of treatment. That isn’t surprising, but little do they realise that the punishments are far from equal if one of them is an HSP.

Maybe I should leave it there before the post becomes unforgivably long. And the news isn’t all bad anyway. High awareness brings benefits as well as drawbacks. I once heard a man with serious bipolar say that he’d always refused medication. He said that the highs were so good that he was prepared to pay for them with the lows. Well, maybe it’s a bit like that. I’ve survived so far without becoming an alcoholic or cutting slice marks into my arms, and I was brought to the verge of ending it all only once. Not bad, eh?

Tomorrow I might make the post about gay marriage, or write a silly ditty, or rant about idiot politicians (Ed Milliband’s rank opportunism raised my hackles this week.) Or maybe something will push me into the pit again. That’s how it is.