Being different and "too sensitive"

Winona Ryder starred in the film based on Susanna Kaysen's novel Girl, Interrupted, and thinks Kaysen "captures a mood we've all experienced.

"It's like a reflective time we've all had in our lives.. You go through spells where you feel that maybe you're too sensitive for this world. I certainly felt that."

Psychologist Pat Allen, PhD, MFT recalls her mother using the phrase "Still waters run deep" to refer to her shyness. "In school, I had to sit at the back of the room," Allen notes, about being too sensitive to be too close to others. "While other kids were reading ‘Dick and Jane,’ I was reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica..."

She talks about the issue of self-medication [which I address in my article Gifted, Talented, Addicted]: "I took up drinking at five. I drank my father’s leftovers. I was sedated from five to thirty five; that was my street medicine. But at thirty five, it was destroying me.

"Coming out of alcohol... I’m much healthier than I ever was when I was young, and it’s because I know, I have always known, that I was different, that I was gifted, that I was brilliant, that I didn’t fit..."

Continued on Highly Sensitive People blog
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