I take my place in a ragged, jostling line with the other six children in my class, proud in my new pink and gray bathing suit. My mother has just helped me change and told me to memorize my locker number. For months, I’d begged her for swimming lessons with all the intensity my seven-year-old self could muster. Now I’m hesitant around the other children in class, unnerved by the sharp clang of locker doors being slammed shut, and intimidated by the instructor’s brusqueness. But I really want to learn to swim and she’s got a cool whistle hanging around her neck, so I’m still excited.
We walk through a high-ceiling room studded with shower heads where I try to avoid small puddles, recoiling at the feel of cold, slick tiles under my bare feet. Shivering, I clasp my arms around my waist. A door opens. I’m assailed by a strong, unfamiliar odor—later I’ll learn what chlorine is and how much is needed to keep an indoor pool clean—and a cacophony of echoing noise created by splashing, shouting children and their whistle-blowing, shouting swim instructors. Already I’m in partial melt-down.
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As a child growing up in the 1960s, I was slow to feel comfortable in new situations. I became easily upset and prone to confusion in loud or crowded places. I hung back or retreated while other kids rushed happily ahead, and had less energy and stamina. I avoided answering questions in class and hated being singled out in a group. Once in a while, I’d ask my mother if I could stay in bed for the weekend. I teared up at the least provocation. I sought places to be alone. I startled easily.
I was not anti-social. I was not a crybaby. I was not stupid or incompetent. I was not unfriendly. I was not lazy. I was not a scaredy cat.
I was highly sensitive.
Accusations like scaredy cat and crybaby chased me through my childhood. Their adult forms—too sensitive, anti-social—plagued me from within as well as without. Only in the mid-2000s, when a friend with similar propensities directed me to a website, did I begin to understand myself. The website was authored by Dr. Elaine Aron, a clinical depth psychologist who was first to describe and study, beginning in 1989, what she terms the highly sensitive person (HSP).
Dr. Aron asks a few questions on the home page of hsperson.com. She wants to know whether you: Are easily overwhelmed by loud noises, strong odors, new situations; Avoid violent television shows and movies; Need to withdraw from busy days to a quiet place to be alone; Were labeled as too sensitive, or shy, during childhood.
Dr. Aron assures us HSPs we’re not alone, though we are a minority. Our sensitivity is innate, even genetic, as recent research has shown. Casting aside negative labeling, she tells us we’re more susceptible to subtleties in our environments because we’re more aware of them.
A sense of revelation poured through me as I clicked through the website. I wished I’d known about being highly sensitive eleven years before, in the early ‘90s, when I’d been hired to found a nonprofit, a residence for DC’s homeless women living with AIDS, Miriam’s House. Though I loved working alone in my office, other aspects of the work terrified me, and board meetings were excruciating exercises in highlighting all my HSP sensibilities. What I really wanted was to slip in just enough to get wet to the waist, then run away.
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I sit on the edge of the YWCA pool with the rest of my class, feet in the water. I can’t understand my teacher above the noise and begin to fear I’ll get her instructions wrong and drown. Having been thrust unprepared into this vast and turbulent space, I feel tiny and lost. All excitement about learning to swim is squelched in an avalanche of sensation, emotion and information. I watch as, one by one, the other children get into the water. They cling to the side of the pool with one arm, swirling the water with the other. The instructor looks at me and gestures. I slowly begin to lower myself as the kid next to me, already happily immersed, begins a lively experiment on the physics of wave motion.
Within a few minutes, I’m back in the locker room being scolded by my mother. “You’re only wet to the waist! You didn’t even get all the way in.” Sniffling and wiping my eyes, I get dressed to go home in disgrace.
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Michael Pluess, PhD, of Queen Mary University, London, began studying sensitivity during the 1990s. He has since become well-known in this area of research, partnering with Dr. Aron and other psychologists in phenologic (behavioral) studies and, later, genetic and brain structure studies. Early in his research, Dr. Pluess used then-standard diathesis-stress dual modeling (looking at responses to stress) for studying subjects in negative or stressful environments. He eventually discarded the method as too narrow. Why only look at what happens in negative circumstances? And why write outcomes using terms and observations tending to the pejorative, calling low-sensitivity resilience as though it’s the better of the two characteristics, the other being vulnerable?
Dr. Pluess reasoned there must be benefits to high sensitivity. The trait, known to exist in more than one hundred species—including bonobos, fruit flies, and sunfish—wouldn’t have evolved were it not beneficial. Studying only its negative aspects didn’t do it justice.
If a basic characteristic like the fear response or, say, sensitivity, has evolved in a species, it means the trait has something to do with survival. Thus, the extra-observant bonobo, aware of and assessing details in its surroundings, notices the stalking lion. She alerts her less-observant compadres so the troop can escape through the trees to live another day. The “bolder” sunfish, not attuned to small differences in the water around it, swims into something carefully avoided by its “timid,” observant schoolmate, and gets eaten. Antelopes who notice and remember succulent bushes near certain water holes lead the herd to life-sustaining food. Environmental sensitivity keeps species alive.
Dr. Pluess[2] observed the varying ways people respond to both negative and positive stimuli. He discovered HSPs (for consistency throughout this book, I’ll continue with Dr. Aron’s term rather than switch back and forth from highly sensitive to newer terms like differential susceptibility) respond better and gain more benefit from positive environments than do less-sensitive subjects. He calls this vantage sensitivity—vantage meaning a position, condition or opportunity likely to provide superiority or advantage. His term for less-positive responses to better environments is vantage resistance, indicating an individual who does not show benefit in a positive experience.
Dr. Pluess’ results can seem surprising. Highly sensitive adults, I know from experience, tend to be dismissed as unsophisticated, uninspiring, too thin-skinned, too emotional. If we manage to work up the nerve to speak in a group or in class, we’re easily interrupted or our ideas get short shrift. It’s a vicious cycle: we’re not comfortable in groups so we hesitate to speak up, then, when we are able to brace ourselves to talk, our diffident, perhaps emotional manner and differing perspectives get us ignored or dismissed. We’ve learned what we say is not valued and begin to devalue it ourselves. We become even more hesitant to speak up. Our self-esteem crashes.
Yet Dr. Pluess' research has indicated that HSPs have vantage sensitivity. We have a resiliency not found in others, and have the strength to derive maximum benefit from positive situations and circumstances. This trait is evident in childhood, he found. Highly sensitive children in Baltic orphanages who’d been terribly affected by institutional life improved significantly upon placement in good foster or adoptive homes. They benefited more than less-sensitive children placed in similar circumstances. In addition to being able to notice subtle environmental cues, they were better equipped to assimilate and combine the information in creative, beneficial ways. The very sensitivity that caused them grief and stunted emotional growth in the orphanages helped them adapt to a secure, happy home with vigor and strength.
For Dr. Pluess, the vantage sensitivity he discovered in behavioral experiments was a way to explain and describe persons who do particularly well in positive environments. Soon he would begin exploring the physiological and genetic explanations for this trait.
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Eight years after my YWCA embarrassment, I watch Jane, third swimmer on our relay team, lose the lead opened up by Marybeth and then increased by my older sister, Joan. Why does she always do this? Our race—the fifteen-and-over freestyle relay—is the penultimate event of a meet we must win to have an undefeated season and advance to the league’s top competitive tier next summer. At the other end of the pool, Jane’s flip turn is slow. She’s not really trying. The two laps each of us is swimming are supposed to be an all-out sprint, what does she think she’s doing?
Swimming had become the passion of my life at age eight when I’d started lessons at this outdoor pool. What had been intolerable indoors proved negligible outdoors and I was a proficient swimmer by nine. That year, one of the lifeguards started a swim team that my sister, Joan, and I joined. In the water I felt free and happy, completely competent in a way I didn’t on land. And it brought out in me a fiercely competitive streak.
The score is close, and we know if we win this race, we’ll win the meet. But Jane is three body-lengths away from where I’m waiting on the starting block, and the other team’s anchor has already dived in and is sprinting away. I concentrate, eyes fixed on Jane, crouched and tense. The world narrows to this moment, and this, and Jane’s hand touching the wall, and my body, released from its coiled tension, launches over the water.
I don’t hear my cheering teammates. I don’t look for the other swimmer. I’m lost in a fiery competitive drive and the fizzing joy of going all out to win. I’m not calculating how fast I must go or how much distance I must make up. It’s only me, the water and a gritty determination I won’t appreciate until decades later. At the finish, I stand, gasping, engulfed in a wall of sound from all the leaping, shouting, arm-pumping teammates at the pool’s edge. Joan, screaming, grabs my arm to help me out of the pool. We’ve won.
Decades later, my brother-in-law, who once was my coach, tells me he and his friends still talk about how I swam in those races. “You were a monster in the water,” he says.
[1] Maria Hill, The Emerging Sensitive: A Guide for Finding Your Place in the World, Maria E. Hill 2016, page 48
[2] The following information is taken from the Vimeo lecture I mention: https://vimeo.com/267268676