as small as a world and as large as alone, compasswaters: 100% of people who tell you...

8:37pm May 24, 2014

100% of people who tell you you’re too sensitive are saying it because they don’t want to be held responsible for your reaction when they mistreat you

95% of people who tell you you’re too sensitive are saying it because they don’t want to be held responsible for your reaction when they mistreat you.

5% of people who tell you you’re too sensitive have other reasons, and not all those reasons are bad. (Although some of them are, sometimes.)

Context is everything.

Most people who’ve told me I was too sensitive were people who wanted to excuse bullies, and make it seem like what the bullies were doing to me at school, wasn’t actually that bad. "Amanda needs to learn to tolerate silently minor inconveniences caused by her peers.“ Actual report card statement, there.

However, I also learned that having your emotions open to the world all the time makes you vulnerable to attack. And that being open in that way is not a good thing. There are options besides being totally open to the world, and totally closed off to the world. I learned to set boundaries for myself and for other people, from people who told me that I was too sensitive.

Because I had no boundaries, because I had been ripped open so much by the world that it was like I had a gaping hole in my body that anything could get in through, and that attracted predatory people. And the more they ripped me open, the more sensitive I got. This is not a good kind of sensitive. This is not just feeling deeply. This is the kind of sensitive you get when you’ve been injured. And part of healing those injuries involves building up the natural barriers that are supposed to be in place for your protection.

Your natural barriers are not the same as becoming walled-off and defensive and cold and unfeeling. Skin is a natural barrier that you’re supposed to have. I had gotten to the point where, emotionally, I had no skin. Everything hurt me. This was not a good state of affairs.. And it made me too sensitive.

Luckily, I knew people who were willing to explain all this to me, and explain to me how to grow an emotional skin. How to have reasonable, normal barriers against emotional assault. And actually, growing this emotional skin did not make me feel less. It allowed me to feel more deeply and more authentically because I was not constantly being overwhelmed by emotions that were turned up to eleven, limited mostly to pain, rage, and fear, and therefore impossible to truly experience. My emotional range and emotional depth both improved vastly by becoming less sensitive.

I’ve seen posts floating around that make it sound like being ‘too sensitive’ isn’t real, or like it’s not ever a bad thing. Or like the only alternative to being 'too sensitive’ is being unfeeling and cold and walled off from the world.

And certainly, most of the time, when people say you’re being too sensitive, they have bad reasons: They don’t want you to notice injustice, they don’t want you to react to being treated badly, they don’t want your emotions to make their lives harder.

But sometimes when people say you’re too sensitive, it’s because they care about you, and they see you walking around without any skin, and they know that’s not good for anyone. And when someone does that, and it’s someone you trust, then it might be good to listen.

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