Edition #55: Weaving Webs and Turning Over Stones
Creating The Webbd Wheel: High Sensitivity
Rose Red is a highly sensitive character. I deliberately and specifically use the term coined and defined by Elaine Aron, PhD., to describe a person who is neurodivergent and has heightened sensitivity to physical, emotional, and social stimuli. Such people may have deeper or more expanded central nervous systems.
High sensitivity is frequently looked upon as a flaw or something needing to be fixed. However, highly sensitive people are gifted with many positive traits: empathy, compassion, intuition, imagination, creativity, spirituality.
Highly sensitive people are easily overstimulated and overwhelmed. Sometimes it happens abruptly, in the middle of a peak experience. The nervous system crashes and one is jerked out of intense engagement and presence into painful chaos and distress.
Many highly sensitive people carry shame about their experience and behavior, even if they have no language for their personality type. Frequent feedback to “grow a thicker skin,” “stop being so sensitive (or intense),” or “stop being so dramatic,” creates scars, and cause such a person to withdraw, isolate, and hide, or create a callous mask in order to look and behave like everyone else.
Some people who claim to be “highly sensitive” mean they take everything personally and are so fragile they’re unable to hear honest feedback and information. That’s not the same thing as a true HSP, as defined by Dr. Aron.
Rose Red, in this excerpt, is swept away by her passion and desire, and crosses the line between ecstasy and overwhelm without realizing it. Shame overtakes her and she shuts down, devastated and exhausted. Sensitive people need time to recover from such episodes, solitude in which to put themselves back together. In real life, they often fall sick or get hurt, thereby forcing themselves to down tools and recover quietly in a culture-approved way. Our culture is not geared towards those who operate with Rose Red’s intensity. Her nature is wild, even fey.
Sensitivity does not mean weakness. Quite the opposite. Such people can be very strong if they’re able to take appropriate care of their needs. If you or someone you love is highly sensitive, congratulations! Rose Red is for you.
Weaving Webs
I am weaving webs, but in my personal life. I’m about to embark on a trip back to my home place in Colorado to transition my 85-year-old demented mother into care. My brother and oldest son will be the rest of the team. As you might imagine, it’s a challenging situation on every level. Mom’s downward slide began in October with a broken hip and now she’s drifted into severe dementia, leaving her house, animals, car, memories, and life behind. We’ve had various barriers to coordinating a team effort. My brother lives in New York. I’m in central Maine, which means I begin the trip with a 3+ hour bus ride to Boston Logan Airport so I can get a direct flight into Denver.
I was going to leave this heading blank this week, but as I stood doing dishes a few minutes ago, it occurred to me how apropos the heading is right now. This crisis has redefined family relationships in unexpected and interesting ways. My adult son is, for the first time, ready to see his mother as a real person rather than a paper doll, with history, scars, and experiences he was not aware of as a child. My brother and I have become closer than we’ve ever been as we coordinate Mom’s care long distance and share POA responsibilities, he for legal and me for medical. (That might be incorrect grammar, but I’m probably not going to take the trouble to look it up!)
Somehow Mom, who has always been challenging to deal with, is bringing us together at the end of her life, reweaving a family system divided by distance and trauma. It feels a little bit miraculous, in spite of the difficult circumstances and my tangle of feelings.
Webs get destroyed.
But they can be rewoven.
Turning Over Stones
Questions:
Do you have feelings about and/or experience of highly sensitive personality types?
Do you have feelings about and/or experience of people who take everything personally, are victims, and are unable to deal with honest communication?
What kind of condition is your family web in?
If you could reweave your family web all by yourself, what would it look like? Who would you leave out? Who would you put in?
Leave a comment below!
Thanks for this post, Jennifer Rose. It's encouraging to me to read what you've written as I struggle with my own challenges of sensitivity and not fitting in and my chronic issues with health. I've been skeptical about highly sensitive people before, even though I score pretty high on the tests for this. I've read Elon Aronson's book, but still felt skeptical--however, reading what you say has made me reconsider this again and also the further research you linked to. Is it just a lot of trauma or is it genetic or what?--or perhaps a powerful gift I haven't figured out how to grow into very deeply? I'm fearful of not being normal and also fiercely protective of my core oddities. It's taking me decades to sort some of this out . . . and overcome my inner protectiveness.
Well, its a puzzle, to go down that road of causality and defining and fitting well into the world, but wonderful to read your perceptive writing and I also wish you much healing reconnections with your family--what a great gift unfolding out of seeds of challenge. Transformation, the hardest work any of us can do--
I love your writing and am certain your book is well-crafted and extraordinary enough to be published by some publisher who can get it into more people's hands, with its amazing characters and powerful storytelling--so alive and so true to the depth of this human being in the world. I've learned a lot from reading your work and your posts, thank you.