being too sensitive

June 30, 2024

The Four Sensitivities

We all have friends who have been called sensitive. Some label themselves this way, wondering why they weep when peers shrug off the hurts. Parents do their offspring no favors when they make comparisons, pointing out the superiority of a sibling’s toughness or her speed at bouncing back. Life waits for the skin to grow thick. With age, delicate souls may harden themselves. It can be a matter of necessity. A second kind of sensitivity involves empathy. The pain originates in the other and is transmitted from her to someone who holds her dear. Though it is absorbed and felt by the empath, it does not disable her. Measuring one’s concern or affliction is a different question, but being empathic does lead to suffering and understanding at a deeper level. Such a person reads the sufferer’s internal state, listens to her, and cares. Anyone who responds with concern takes the role of a witness, carrying another’s wound. Thoughtful parents illustrate this in their identification with their children’s big and small misfortunes. Most people who offer solace bounce back faster than those who sustain the damage directly. Counselors present a special case. They maintain a therapeutic distance from the patient. If they were to duplicate their client’s feelings within themselves, they would (in a sense) become the client, as distraught or debilitated as she is. Any therapist or empathic individual who takes on too much of another’s feelings lacks the separation to soothe their counterpart. All helping professionals are trained to recognize the danger signs of burnout before compromising their ability to aid their clientele. A third level of sensitivity involves emotionality comparable to the person in anguish. Here is an example from my own practice: I received a referral to evaluate a teenager who sobbed when watching TV or listening to radio programs about victims of misfortune. These were strangers, but her heart broke just the same. Tears could not be prevented except by avoiding those media. No evidence of mistreatment, harsh parenting, or abuse was found. The extremity of her response to the world made living close to unbearable.

A fourth type of sensitiveness is similar to the painful reaction in the previous example but does not cause a complete breakdown. The sense of damage done to fellow humans causes her to take action despite her tears. This kind of individual tries to remedy the problem and will put herself at risk to do so. Her first step is to uncover the cause of the emotional or physical harm, which is related to the prevailing conditions within society at large. The life of philosopher, writer, and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) offers an unparalleled demonstration of this kind of virtue. When Simone, then six years old, heard that French soldiers lacked sugar and chocolate during World War I, she sent her sweets to the front. At age 10, she snuck out of her family’s residence to join striking laborers in a rally. In 1934, this young woman took a leave of absence from the school at which she taught to work in a series of blue-collar positions. These included engagement at the Elektro-Firma Alshom factory as a drill-press operator, followed by employment as a packer and then as a machinist for the car manufacturer Renault. Weil sought these jobs to understand the dangerous and mind-dulling conditions under which her fellow employees labored. Simultaneously dealing with the migraine headaches she experienced during her adult life, the first post brought her to the point of exhaustion. Weil sometimes wept, as she was expected to meet a quota that her limited manual dexterity and nearsightedness made impossible. On occasion, she endured burns because of the closeness between her workstation and a furnace. Simone came to believe she and her peers were the equivalents of slaves:
You kill yourself with nothing at all to show for it … that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the depths of your being.
Weil wrote, “Machines do not run to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men so that they may serve the machines.”

Others asked why she persisted in these efforts:
The suffering all over the world obsesses me and overwhelms me to the point of annihilating me. The only way I can release myself from this obsession is to take on a large share of danger and hardship myself. That alone can save me from being wasted by sterile grief.
Indeed, she did her best to influence those with authority during the worldwide economic Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Despite her pacifist beliefs, she also took arms against the fascists in the conflict in Spain. Simone Weil never became hardened or indifferent. She was hospitalized with tuberculosis brought on by malnutrition and exhaustion in 1943. Prior to her collapse, she was employed by the French Government in exile based in London. Defying her doctors, the patient refused to eat as much as she needed. This self-sacrificing woman ate no more than her countrymen had access to in wartime France. To the end of her life at age 34, Weil believed, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness means simply being able to ask him ‘what are you going through?'” Albert Camus, the novelist, and 1957 Nobel Prize-winning writer, called her “the only great spirit of our time.”

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The first image is the Milky Way as photographed by Laura Hedien on October 17, 2023, with her kind permission: Laura Hedien Official Website. Next is the George Frederick Watts painting Love and Life, 1884/85. The final two pictures feature Simone Weil. The first was taken during the Spanish Civil War, while the second shows her as a little girl with her family.
June 2, 2019

The Critics Among Us and Those Who Raise Us

The standard method to make a child to dislike himself is to contrast him with a sibling, one alleged to be superior in behavior or personality. It takes a kind of misbegotten skill, however, to use the technique on every one of your offspring. The destructive parent tells son X he isn’t as well-behaved as his brother Y. Meanwhile, the mom or dad complains to Y that he isn’t as smart as X.

“Try to be more like X. I’m only saying this for your own good.”

Both end up disliking themselves and their competitor, not knowing the other receives the same treatment.

Therapists, were they loathsome enough, might put such caretakers on commission, since they drive droves of the walking wounded to an eventual meeting with a counselor.

Ah, but wordy wickedness was practiced even in ancient times. Some parents unknowingly model their actions after the Greek god Momus, so foul he was expelled from Olympus, the gods’ heavenly home.

Aesop included Momus in a couple of his fables. In one he presides over a competition between a man, a bull, and a house. This ungodly judge gave no trophies, finding fault with them all. The man’s failure was to hide his heart, causing Momus to claim he could therefore not evaluate the merit of his makeup. The bull fell short because his horns included no eyes, the better to guide him whenever he charged.

My own favorite, however, was the umpire’s indictment of the house. The god of blame found the residence lacking in the wheels needed to avoid difficult neighbors. Momus might have a point here.

Critics also attract their own critics. A world famous musician on the downside of his career gave the local music scribes a name: eunuchs. Why? “Because they can’t do it.” Meaning, in his case, they wrote in complaint of him because they lacked his musical talent to perform.

The player’s bitterness revealed one of the dangers of being the target of denigration: becoming like the person who castigated you.

The “eunuch” example is odious. The extremity of such word-use is the point. Exaggeration is valuable to those who wish to damage; injure in an indelible, lasting way. We can all remember personal examples.

Who do verbal abusers and bullies aim for? Those weaker (children, subordinates) and the targets who betray their vulnerability, terror, or timidity by facial expression, downcast gaze, words, neediness, or posture. These are the preferred victims, though anyone will do. Protest their sarcasm and they’ll say you can’t take a joke.

Rise higher and you encounter a few jealous backstabbers. Fall down and you serve some as a doormat. But don’t discount life’s frustrations as a driver of lashing out under pressure. Almost everyone has a boiling point.

The right criticism is worthwhile. Corrective instruction and rigorous expectation by a mentor or supervisor are both necessary and inevitable. One only finds resilience in taking on that which is painful and challenging. If we received 24/7 adulation and applause, whether inside ourselves or out, the world of excellence would be beyond us.

Still, one must distinguish between those whose words can help or spur us on and the people intent on our obliteration. When you have been raised by folks who pretend the former, but shoot for the latter, confusion follows. Life requires us to identity disguises. False friends display affection so long as we are of use, not longer.

With therapeutic guidance it is possible to improve at ferreting out adversaries, the wolves clothed as sheep or protectors; those who vilify and believe your weakness is their strength.

Remember, no one is so fine a judge of character as to be foolproof. Disappointment and hurt contribute to the price we pay for love and participation in the human group.

Some flee from appraisal and keep out of range of the quiver full of arrows we all carry at times. Here is the best argument not to run, captured in the last line of a quote from a Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel.

“The opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

He did not survive the murder of family and friends to die inside, but to live with people, many of whom were kind.

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The first two photographs, both taken on May 24, 2019, come from Shasta County, south of Redding, California. The first is by Angela Walfoort, the second by Monica Leard. The final image is the work of Hans Hillewaert: Angola at Dawn on the Kunene River, seen from Epupa Falls, Namibia. It is sourced from Wikimedia Commons.