That Sensitive Life

the art and science of human sensitivity

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Subtleties + Survival

One of the ways I’ve managed myself as a sensitive human being is to write. I’ve worked as a professional writer for many years, and in quiet times, I also write in journals, in pixels and on scraps of paper. Writing allows me to relate to the world, to process some intriguing fragments that visit my short-term memory and to express the subtleties that are important for my own survival.

In my work, I am acutely aware of both the expansive communication and the limitations of written language.

I tried to capture this language polarity and the contrast of embodied life in this poem:

BLOOD AT BOYNTON CANYON

In silence, I hear words
calling themselves into lines,
each one her own world,
like a cooling night in the canyon
where a lone standpipe
remains proud yellow
and stationary in the wind.

I’ve known these lines for a long spell—
each a lifetime of momentary redemptions
one layered upon the last
in the race around my veins.

Meanwhile, cottonwoods
weep dry tears and want for rain.
Sun rays carry this evening’s birds
to me—once far away friends
who now need days to sip the water.

—Cathy Capozzoli

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Background Sounds in the Foreground

Sensitivity describes me and my life: my self, my body, my environment, my needs, my dreams. And, most especially, my senses, and how my brain, central nervous system and peripheral nervous system process stimulation, both internal and external.

What is rousing or invigorating for many individuals might be draining for me.

When does stimulation become overstimulation?

Different for each of us, in terms of how we process our thoughts, our lives and our environments. And there can be different overwhelm triggers.

The question might better be: WHERE does stimulation become overstimulation?

A certain place in the human brain, called the Reticular Formation, houses the function of the Reticular Activating System. This screens out background sounds. I’m convinced mine doesn’t work. I hear everything, all the time. After a while, this is draining, and I must retreat to a cave-like environment.

So, why do we live in the city?

Well, we have lived in many different places from islands to mountains to rainforests to deserts. We love the available culture of the urban environment.

But we also need escapes. Simple escapes: we hold our ears in the street, strange homages to passing sirens and garbage trucks. We close windows and doors, run air filters as white noise.

Some escapes are more complex: breath practice, meditation, travel to quieter environments and, for me, writing poetry.

I wrote a poem once in which I tried to capture the exquisite serenity of the early morning, long before dawn:

SILK, AND MILK

Every once in a while,

in the early morning

my butter face

melts to cream

when the earth sighs—

stirs the shadows.

Sometimes, I don’t really know if my practices make me even more sensitive. I do know that I live to consider this more deeply. My exploration is life-long enterprise.

—Cathy Capozzoli

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Science, Knowledge + Human Sensitivity

So here we are, “The Art and Science of Human Sensitivity.”  Let’s begin to examine the “Science.”

Science… but first a digression on knowledge

Now, it’s already complicated. To write about “Science” we’ have to write about knowledge. Wikipedia describes Science as “…a systematic enterprise that build and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe,” and goes on to say Science “…most often refers to a way of pursuing knowledge, not only the knowledge itself.”  And here I’m sorry. I generally don’t like reading about subjects which are immediately introduced with one or another dry definition of the term under consideration, yet I have to start somewhere, and I need a frame.

Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge and what do we know about that?

Knowledge, to me, is a tricky thing, ranging from the relative certainty of answering the who, what, when, where, why and how of something to the relative uncertainty of whether we can know anything at all. The formal study of knowledge falls into the realm of philosophy known as epistemology and presumably is based on issues of belief, truth, and justification. Now instead of trying to define all of these words, I looked up their synonyms on thesarus.com. Knowledge has 46 synonyms, belief 49, truth 46, and justification 47. In my opinion, it’s no small wonder we have difficulty wrapping knowledge into one neat bundle of language.

A practice example…

I’m fascinated by the way knowledge plays out in our daily lives. For example, I’m sure I can go to Ralph’s, a large supermarket nearby, to buy a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and get home… the best known part… the navigating and ambulating. I want a pint of Chocolate Therapy, but if they’re out, I’m reasonably certain I can get another flavor, say Chocolate Fudge Brownie… the somewhat less sure part. However, when I get there, not only may they not have either of these, or none at all, not one pint… the unknowable part. This unknowable thing actually happened to Cathy recently, despite never occurring before on any of our hundreds of visits and thus statistically unlikely. If there is none, I’m still faced with a variant of “Know Thyself,” which by chance also happens to be the motto of my college alma mater, and at this moment, I’m not a bit sure of whether I’ll get home ice cream-less or not… kind of a knowing thyself or not, that is the question sort of thing… the least understood part. And, parenthetically, I did much better over the years with the education I received at Hamilton College than I did with the motto… hence the late discovery of myself as a highly sensitive person.

Knowledge, to me… and how it affects my view of science

I see two ways of looking at knowledge, especially as science pursues it. In the first, knowledge already exists as a thing outside us, available for our discovery, as in flakes of gold panned from a stream or the proverbial pearl pried from the oyster. This view implies a pure and abstract aspect to knowledge waiting there to be found and translated into worldly terms. In the second, we create knowledge by the application of our experience and the tools which we have at our disposal, as in the design and execution of the tests and experiments which we then carry out and evaluate. Thus knowledge is a man-made structure of some kind, not without some similarity to real estate, where maintenance, updating, and occasionally razing to create something like the “highest and best use” are necessary to maintain value.

I favor the second view.

Science… and knowledge… need to be considered carefully

When I was growing up in a small town in Vermont, there was a popular adage along the lines we all should look at things with a healthy dose of skepticism. Skepticism, like epistemology, is a realm of philosophy, and in the sense that skepticism questions the possibility of absolutely certain knowledge, I am most likely a skeptic. Dr. Barry Stroud, Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley has said on philosophybites.com “…maintaining skepticism means that a scientist will never be absolutely certain when they are correct and when they are not. It is thus an irony of proper scientific method that one must doubt even when correct, in the hopes that this practice will lead to greater convergence on the truth in general.”

In my next blog post, I plan to expand on why this concept possesses such great importance when reading about the science of things.

—Sherman Souther

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How Am I Who I Am

As I’ve said, I am, by definition, a highly sensitive individual. This alone raises so many questions about the nature of being, I’m almost overwhelmed. Yet this is exactly the path I want to explore.

First, the definition of the highly sensitive person didn’t exist until about twenty years ago. There is another way to say this, which reflects on the nature of being. Until about twenty years ago, the manifestations of being highly sensitive had not yet been recognized as a personality trait. I was something, or possessed something, that didn’t seem to exist.

Lacking Bridges

During all those years of namelessness, so to speak, many activities, which most of my peers appeared to enjoy, left me uncomfortable. Participating brought little pleasure. Not participating didn’t appear an option. One way or another, I saw myself as peripheral, marginalized, or outside… inept, odd, or nearly a failure. That wasn’t pleasurable either. And during those years, there was no name, no insight, no understanding on which to build a strategy for managing my behavior and the feelings which came with it.

Glimmer #1

My first glimmer of insight came three or four years after Elaine Aron published “The Highly Sensitive Person.” Alas, her work was unknown to me at that time, and even if it were, I can’t be sure I would have benefited.

A small digression… to me, language is odd and complicated. It represents a tool the speaker, or writer, uses to deliver a message, and it requires a receiver who hears, interprets, and incorporates the message… all as it was intended. Much communicated to me seems, at best, noise… reasonable but with little pith. On occasion, I feel directly addressed and positioned to respond as intended. Something transcendent occurs.

Transcendent was that first glimmer. A friend at Naropa recommended I look at David Keirsey’s battery metaphor in his book, “Please Understand Me II; Temperament, Character, Intelligence.” Keirsey was a respected American psychologist and best known for his development of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter as an alternative to the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory. Check out kiersey.com and his Wikipedia entry for more detail.

So what is this battery metaphor? In his note on Extroversion or Introversion on pages 331 and 332 of his book, Kersey suggested that for many people… in fact probably the majority… expressive, outgoing, i.e. extroverted, behavior charges their “battery,” giving them a feeling of well being. Conversely, such people often feel drained and lonely without human contact. On the other hand, people who manifest reserved behavior, i.e. introverts, obtain energy and charge their “battery” from solitary activities. For them, “excessive” social activity is depleting, and they must retire or regroup to recharge. For me, Kersey revealed the answer to the largest mystery of my life… why did the low battery light or warning go off so often during family and social interactions, and interacting with others… at some point far less than for most… depleted me.

Another Glimmer

My second glimmer of insight came from my wife and partner in this endeavor. We met at Naropa. A teacher assigned a group project. Cathy’s description of the look on my face, I cannot capture here. “… Horrified,” she says, “at the least.” She befriended me. I got though it. We dated. She often spoke of things, encounters, or activities as overstimulating. I began to see my own reaction to events in the light of the amount of stimulation they generated. This, too, became transcendent. Overstimulation depleted my battery.

More Hope

The third glimmer came from my ongoing interest in the science of brain function. Remember, this journey began with a book on brain lateralization I never wrote. There is, almost certainly, a neurophysiological basis for the highly sensitive trait. Somehow I take comfort in the possibility nature plays a role in this trait, as opposed to some quirk of nurture.

So what have I learned thus far? I take comfort in the knowledge I am most likely wired this way, as opposed to just being odd. I prepare for overstimulation. If I cannot avoid it, or limit it, I attempt damage control.

Often simple awareness offers the most help. I pay attention to my battery. If it runs too low, I’m especially careful. Then, I make a time and place to recharge it as soon as possible. These strategies have brought me greater ease in my interaction with the world, especially with daily life. Believe me, this is a considerable reward.

—Sherman Souther

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Welcome to That Sensitive Life

As I began work on this website, our web designer asked about colors and themes. Colors were easy. I just looked around our home at the colors we live with.

Themes were much more challenging. What is a theme, anyway? A central idea that brings unity. Themes, it seems to me, aren’t assigned. They emerge.

So, I began looking for a theme in the body of work I have as a creative writer, all that I have written since I finished MFA school in 2001.

Ideas came, and as many writers do, I opened a new document on my computer. But to name that file, only one idea came, and that’s all I needed: Sensitive Life.

I added “That” which I think of as a word of emphasis.

Domain name available. Theme emerged: “That Sensitive Life.”

But what about the website?

I want to both have a voice as a writer, and help others find their words, their themes. I’ve been doing both of these forever, helping entrepreneurs and businesses and corporations and charitable organizations find their words. My creative writing informs these activities, and helps me express my own super sensitivity.

I asked my husband. A completely appropriate next step, because we met at that MFA school. He writes too. Language is vitally interesting to both of us.

He said he gladly would contribute to a website entitled “That Sensitive Life.”

So here we go.

In 1996, I bought a copy of the first edition of Elaine Aron’s “Highly Sensitive Person” book in an actual bookstore. I passed her test, read the book and saw myself.

Through the years I’ve tried to learn—and this continues to unfold—how to cultivate a life that allows me to thrive as a highly sensitive individual.

I imagine that building a website is a little like building a house. Many decisions must be made along the way—decisions that require us to project ourselves into a new living arrangement. Please join us here as we live, study, articulate and celebrate That Sensitive Life.

—Cathy Capozzoli

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