Quotes from Elaine N. Aron

The Romans had a great general named Cincinnatus. The legend is that he had wanted to live quietly on his farm but was persuaded twice to return to public

Watch for the phrase that was almost your "middle name"—the one they would put on your gravestone if given half a chance.

The bottom line is that in those first years you either learned to trust the other, and the outer world generally, or you didn't.

It is true that even when exhausted you still are providing something to those you serve. But you are out of touch with your deepest strengths, role-modeling self-destructive behavior, martyring yourself, and giving others cause for guilt.

Perhaps the greatest maturity is our ability to conceive the whole universe as our container, our body as a microcosm of that universe, with no boundaries. That is more or less enlightenment. But most of us will need more finite containers for a while, even if we are beginning to learn to make do with intangible ones in a pinch. Indeed, as long as we are in bodies, enlightened or not, we need some bit of tangible safety, or at least a sense of sameness.

Children are seriously children for about a decade. But for five or more decades after that, they will be your friend - if you're fortunate to like each other.

My favorite line from Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation is, "I have made some fine mistakes in my life." It is so humble, wise, and self-confident, all at once.)

You want to have some professional boundaries. Especially at work, you need to spend more time with the less sensitive, who can be a great balance to you, and you to them. Develop outside of work the more intense sorts of relationships that offer you the emotional depth you seek.

sensory processing sensitivity

You possess one piece of the "good." It would only be arrogance to think any of us should have it all.

anthropologists speak of ritual leadership and ritual space.

What is highly arousing for most people causes an HSP to become very frazzled indeed, until they reach a shutdown point called "transmarginal inhibition." Transmarginal inhibition was first discussed around the turn of the century by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who was convinced that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reach this shutdown point and that the quick-to-shut-down have a fundamentally different type of nervous system.

Individuation is, above all, about being able to hear your inner voice or voices through all the inner and outer noise.

If someone caring for you became angry or dangerous, the conscious mind buried that information as too awful to acknowledge

As I have emphasized, HSPs are prone to low self-esteem because they are not their culture's ideal.

The extraverted are right, however, when they say that "a stranger is just a friend I haven't met yet.

It is not surprising that artists turn to drugs, alcohol, and medications to control their arousal or to recontact their inner self. But the long-term effect is a body further off balance. Moreover, it is part of the myth or archetype of the artist that any psychological help will destroy creativity by making the artist too normal.

They are living evidence that this rich and varied world with its overflowing and intoxicating life is not purely external, but also exists within . . . Their life teaches more than their words. . . . Their lives teach the other possibility, the interior life which is so painfully wanting in our civilization. Jung

It is important that we and the public not confuse high sensitivity with "neuroticism," which includes certain types of intense anxiety, depression, overattachment, or avoidance of intimacy, and are usually due to a troubled childhood. True, some of us were dealt both hands in life—high sensitivity and neuroticism—but the two things are not at all the same.

It was as if [highly sensitive subjects] found it natural to look beyond their cultural expectations to how things "really are.

Life is short and filled with limits and responsibilities. We each get a piece of the "good" to enjoy, just as we each contribute a piece of that good to the world.

Because you're more sensitive, you don't need extra discomfort or stress around you. A situation may have been deemed safe but still be stressful for you. Likewise, others may have no problem with fluorescent lights, low levels of machine noise, or chemical odors, but you do. This is a very individual matter, even among HSPs.

Whatever the times, suffering eventually touches every life. How we live with it, and help others to, is one of the great creative and ethical opportunities for HSPs.

As you saw in chapter 2, in Rotherbart's description of how we develop, adult humans are capable of directing attention, using willpower, and deciding to overcome a fear. If your envy is strong and you decide you want to do something, you probably can.