Dear Gustavo:

I wanted to respond today to the first paragraph of your yesterday’s post: “after doing a personal search on myself three years ago I found out that I have characteristics of being Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and also an Empath”.

From hsperson. com and Wikipedia: The term Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) was coined by Dr. Aron and Dr. Aron (husband and wife) in he mid 1990s. They coined two terms: Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS): a personality trait involving “an increased sensitivity of the central nervous system.. greater sensitivity to subtle stimuli.. heightened emotional reactivity, both positive and negative”. People who have a particularly high measure of SPS are, according to the two psychologists, are HSPs.

An HSP is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment (ex: getting “easily overwhelmed by such things as bright lights, strong smells, coarse fabric, or sirens nearby”) and overthinks the  stimuli . She wrote that “in a culture that prefers confident, ‘bold’ extraverts, it is harmful as well as mistaken to stigmatize all HSPs as shy when many are not”, and states that being an HSP is “quite normal..  not a flaw or a syndrome’, but “an asset”, “something to celebrate”, and that HSPs (15-20% of the population) should assert their unique personality traits”.

“People with high SPS report having a heightened responses to stimuli such as pain, caffeine, hunger, and loud noises… easily overstimulated by external stimuli because they have a lower perceptual threshold (the weakest stimulus that an organism can detect), and process stimuli cognitively deeper than most people”.

Wikipedia on Empath: “A person with extra- sensory (also called sixth sense) empathy, in science fiction or parapsychology (psychic phenomena, telepathy and such)” Dictionary. com about Empaths: “In science fiction, empaths have a supernatural ability to feel, and sometimes manipulate, other people’s emotions”, and elsewhere it reads about an  “a person with the paranormal ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual”-

-I don’t believe in the supernatural,  paranormal, in telepathy (mind reading) that is often associated with the term. I take the following meaning of the term as valid: empaths are HSPs, who feel intense empathy for others, and otherwise being overly sensitive/ emotionally over-reactive (feeling intense distress, or intense joy) to stimuli such as other people’s facial expressions, tone of voice, body language during interactions with them. (I don’t believe that it is possible to feel exactly what another person feels).

Back to what you wrote: you wrote that the terms HSP and Empath “definitely explains things of the past, and I have been working to not make the same mistakes.. Me being so open with this girl was something new for me, expressing my feelings was not something so common in me. Also putting my emotions first is something that hadn’t happened before, especially because I tend to believe in the goodness of people and that they can change.. I’m a humanitarian worker”-

-My input today: congratulations for putting your emotions first and for being so open with this woman, for expressin your feelings and your thoughts to her, like you did, asserting yourself and holding her accountable to her words to you!

Also, thank you for your humanitarian work!!!

Expressing your feelings to her made it possible for you to learn about her, learn from her reactions to what you shared with her. For example, when you shared with her that you are very sensitive, she used it against you. If you didn’t share that with her, you wouldn’t have learned that she is not above using information given to her in confidence and in good faith against the person, when it is convenient for her.

Be careful with your assumption that people are good and that they will change to the better. There are quite a few people who hurt others, as you know, aggression in all kinds of form is very common.

Also, be careful regarding your tendency to feel too much of positive feelings for a woman, for example, feeling so intensely positive about this woman and your time with her (“passing time with her is amazing, that she has a beautiful heart”), so to avoid intense, premature infatuation with a woman.

Emotional Regulation Skills is a term you can read about as it applies to feeling-in-moderation, not too much, not too little, the perfect skill for an HSP to learn and practice.

anita