Telling the HSP to Ignore the Discord.

I saw one of those bits of typical tabloid fluff recently, in which a ‘leading psychologist’ (who’d just written a self-help book; they’ve always just written a self-help book) gave the readership the benefit of his vaunted advice on How to Think Positively and be a Happier Person. It included such gems as ‘concentrate on the good things in your life and ignore the bad.’ Laughably simplistic? Of course, but he also failed to take account of those unfortunates afflicted with the level of awareness generally known as HSP. Let me explain it this way:

Suppose you’re part of a group of people watching an orchestral rehearsal. During a rousing passage involving the whole orchestra, the 2^nd trombone plays a b flat instead of a b natural. You don’t notice the one wrong note among the hundred right ones, and neither does the rest of the audience. After all, it’s only one instrument playing a semitone out. The conductor does, though. He hears the discord immediately and it makes him wince; he stops the rehearsal and admonishes the offending player. If it happens several more times, he’ll be tearing his hair out.

Life is a symphony made up of countless sensory experiences, and the HSP is acutely aware of every one of them. It might be the sight of something out of place, or a bad smell among the sweet scent of flowers, or a sound that’s out of harmony with the natural order or his own choices. Such things affect the HSP like an instrument playing out of tune with the rest of the band. They irritate and sting and depress the spirits.

Unfortunately, he isn’t a conductor who can stop the music until it’s put right. I can’t, for example, knock on the door of the woman around the corner who plays dance music through an open window in the summer, and ask her to stop. For me, it wrecks the harmony of summer growth, the song of birds, and the rustle of leaves, but there’s nothing I can do about it. She has her rights too, and as long as she’s exercising them within the parameters of general consensus, all I can do is wince, then grit my teeth and live with it. The HSP, however, doesn’t function in accordance with general consensus, and few days go by without some discord somewhere.

So please, Mr Psychologist, don’t tell me to ignore these things. HSPs aren’t equipped with blinkers. You might as well tell the conductor to ignore the 2^nd trombone playing a b flat instead of a b natural. Life might be that simple for most of the population, but not for us.