Challenges to High Sensitivity

• Although HSPs account for only about 15-20% of the population, they account for nearly 50% of clients seeking professional psychological help on issues such as personality disorders, depression and anxiety.
  
  
• Sensitive persons come into the world with thinner personal boundaries. They sense all too well the feelings of others, including the other’s needs, desires, and disappointments. They also fear being criticized for failing to do what is needed or expected.
  
  
• Regarding a misdiagnosis, the highly sensitive are going to “ruminate” or process the negative events in their lives more deeply. Their normal intense emotionality means one must be even more careful about a diagnosis of mood disorder. The question is duration and impairment.
  
  
• Even the least impaired highly sensitive persons are statistically abnormal and have been throughout their lives, and these differences can seem to them and others to create impairments that will not change substantially with any kind of treatment, even medication—they are very “inflexible.” Genes are that way.
  
  
•  There is an emotion many HSPs seem to have that cannot be regulated away by the better attitudes discussed above. That is the depression that occurs when there is less sun, in winter or areas prone to clouds or rain.
  
  
  Highly Sensitive Children 
  
  
• Since HSCs process things so deeply, they tend to be persistent. But their vision of how to do something perfectly can make them frustrated when they cannot achieve it, which leads to overarousal and a sense of failure, and then they want to quit and are not persistent. 
  
  
• HSCs are fairly distractible, since they notice so much, but their deep processing usually overrides their distractibility—that is, in a quiet place with no inner worries they have deep concentration.
   
• HSCs are often even more distressed than other children by unfairness, conflict, or suffering. 
  
  
• With too much criticism, HSCs can arrive at the conclusion that it’s best to assume they are usually wrong!
  
  
•  Shaming as a method of correcting an HSC is the sledgehammer method of putting in a thumbtack.
  
  
• If someone says one child cannot receive special treatment, ask if that is really true. Often there is special treatment, and even laws demanding it, if a child has, for example, Attention Deficit Disorder, dyslexia, disabilities such as blindness or deafness, and so forth.
  
  
• Be sure to point out that your child has no disorder, but does have an innate normal variation in temperament, which means that things go smoother for everyone if your child receives just a little special treatment at first.