{"id":5774,"date":"2018-06-14T11:21:05","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T15:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5774"},"modified":"2018-06-14T11:21:05","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T15:21:05","slug":"too-sensitive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5774","title":{"rendered":"“Too Sensitive”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNone of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, \u201cSome people have a thick skin and you don\u2019t.\u00a0 Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.\u00a0 The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.\u00a0 However you\u2019re not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade.\u00a0 Just hang on.\u201d \u00a0 Stitches<\/a>, Anne Lamott, p33<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was always told \u201cDon\u2019t be so sensitive\u201d when I was a child.\u00a0 Which made it sound like it was a choice.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t seem to be able to make myself be different.\u00a0 The first time anyone ever helped me was at a women\u2019s retreat called \u201cWoman\u2019s Way.\u201d\u00a0 We had done \u201cdream body\u201d drawings, inside an outline of our body on large paper.\u00a0 We colored pictures and wrote information on them, then hung them up on the wall.\u00a0 I walked around looking at them, and I was really taking them in and starting to get overwhelmed, when Zanda<\/a> said something like \u201cYou are taking in too much.\u00a0 Use your venetian blinds.\u201d\u00a0 That image was a big help to me.<\/p>\n

Much later, I read the book about Highly Sensitive People<\/a>.\u00a0 I answered all the questions in the affirmative.\u00a0 I learned that we are 20% of the population, and that turns out to be true of many species of animals as well.\u00a0 Our brains work differently, where 80% of the population would see 3 shades of red (in a garden, say) we will see 10.\u00a0 So we can make much more nuanced observations, but we can also be easily overwhelmed.\u00a0 Since overwhelm of the brain and nervous system\u2019s capacity to process information is the cause of trauma, I think we will also be more easily traumatized.\u00a0 Certainly the culture we live in is toxic for people who take in more information, making our lives that much harder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNone of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, \u201cSome people have a thick skin and you don\u2019t.\u00a0 Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}