Beyond Mask

Seeing Human With The Help of Highly Sensitive People

Today, let’s talk about our individual and collective sensitivity.

It’s estimated that 70% of adults in America alone experience or have had a traumatic experience. Thus, then that experience if it overwhelms our ability to cope becomes our trauma. Trauma is our internal emotional response to an extreme event like an accident, national disaster, sexual abuse, hurricane or even any seemingly casual incidents that cause physical, emotional, spiritual or psychological harm.

For Highly Sensitive People, in other words, those of us who feel and sense things more deeply and intensely than most, our world has become nothing less than a battlefield. We absorb data and imagery, we connect the dots and often process information at deeper levels.

And yet, shrugged off and often dismissed by main stream society, we can be physicists and scientists, firemen and physician, more often than not we are found in the fields of art, music and other creative endeavors. The good news is that HSP’s bring relief, understanding and creative ways of problem solving to that very same battlefield.

Data indicates we are about 20% of the population, though keep in mind we are all sensitive because we are all human. Some call us empaths or sensitives, while others consider highly sensitive people weird or dramatic.

What we are not, is living easy in 2021.

Recently the term “window of tolerance” came into my radar and what that means is that during “normal” times we are able to keep our emotional state regulated. Regulation is our ability to remain and maintain calm and wellbeing in the body.  

But today’s division and anger, opposing opinions on public health, fight for gender and racial equality, and the national trauma of more than 650,000 Americans dead from Covid has left us flailing.

We’d be better off in western culture to address our suffering at its’ root cause and see human beyond our masks.

At our best, I believe we do what our love reveals and what the heart asks of us. The rest of the time, we live a traumatized exhausting experience, a collective experience that’s been passed generation to generation, from ancestor to ancestor. I wish, as most of us would, to do more of the former. 

Keeping the body, mind and spirit in regulation, in my experience as a HSP, is a constant challenge. 

There aren’t any magical answers, ways or disciplines to avoid our human conditions other than living as monks in a less than glamorous cave on the side of some isolated mountain.

But we can learn a new way of living.  

The ability to remain calm. Ah, there’s that grouping of words again. And, the skill of listening, civility, and negotiation can all become part of our new way of living.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought all of our individual and collective flaws to the forefront of our lives. 

Our traumas have surfaced, each different, some collective, all in dire need to be addressed.

Covid has collectively shrunk our ability to regulate, as well as added additional stressors like increased poverty, housing in-affordability, social unrest and a very heightened sense of fear and anger.

Doesn’t it just feel sometimes like life’s a war zone wherever we seem to go? People are like fuck you, get a job, do this or do that, while those struggling with poverty, health or in crisis are asking to be heard while asking for help.

Covid, along with our personal traumas, along with 5 years of an expansion of division, along with climate crisis and please —feel free to add on the endless list of what we watch on the news each day, led us straight into collective overwhelm.

A far cry from emotional self-regulation.

Let’s not give up though. 

After all, what is always consistent is change and since we as humans have the ability to change, we can if we focus, create something new and beautiful.

Our collective trauma has caused a contraction in society. While triggers that were more easily managed have now become hot buttons, and while we’ve become angrier and more aggressive in proving our point of view —the miracle will come when we can truly accept ourselves. 

There is another way. 

Yoga, meditation, massage, float tanks and eating well are my top go-to disciplines that help my HSP body to calm and regulated. Knowing there are countless more, I encourage all of us to freely explore what works for each of us individually. 

HSP’s offer help. 

As difficult as it’s been and as easily misunderstood as you might rightfully feel, HSP’s are the seers of a new narrative and new way of living. Critical thinking is exactly why we need Highly Sensitive People. To See, to feel and to heal ourselves, our collective society and our worldwide humanity.

Somehow we have to step up. Rise up, together. The world is tired, we’re seemingly self destructing and yet —in the middle of chaos, there is possibility. 

I don’t always feel it, I don’t feel it now. But it’s there. 

In our calling out to each other, may we hear each other. 

We are good people and the world needs us to do good things. 

May that thought help us to rise lovingly. And with that power, let us redirect our narrative from one in which we buy our children toys of war into one we offer them toys of creativity and skills of compassion and empathy. 

We're taught love & empathy, compassion & caring is weak. Truth is, these are the qualities that sustain life. 

Trust me, I get not wanting to let anybody in. I get it. We get hurt. But let that not become our closing argument against a forward thinking society, one that, in collaboration with empathy delivers the promise of our possibility —seeing human in a beautiful world.

*image courtesy of Unsplash

Richard Silvia, Author, Artist, Survivor https://linktr.ee/YesRising