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Highly Sensitive People
An aristocracy of the considerate.
Gabrielle Schwarz on Elaine Aron and the allure of labeling.
In the late 1980s, Elaine Aron went to see a therapist after struggling to recover, physically and mentally, from a medical procedure. Her family doctor suggested she was overreacting. “But of course you were upset,” the therapist told Aron after a few sessions. “You are a very highly sensitive person. As are most of the people who really strike me as worth knowing.” Finding scant mention of the topic in pre-existing psychological research, Aron—who would soon become a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Santa Barbara’s Pacifica Graduate Institute—decided to study it herself.
This anecdote is recounted in The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, Aron’s best-selling 1996 self-help book, which sets out her thesis of sensitivity as a feature, rather than a bug, of some people’s personalities. According to Aron’s research—conducted in part with her husband Arthur Aron (inventor of the sporadically viral “36 questions that lead to love”)—a 15–20% subset of the human population can be identified as what she calls “HSPs.”
An HSP’s nervous system, she explains, is more easily stimulated than the average person’s; therefore, their reactions—to everything from loud noises to childhood traumas to beautiful works of art—will be heightened. Ostensibly, they’re prone to be more creative, more spiritual, and more in touch with their unconscious. Aron also argues that, in Western cultures at least, HSPs have been marginalized for their enhanced sensitivity
An HSP’s reactions to everything from loud noises to childhood traumas to beautiful works of art will be heightened.
Over the years, the term has gradually gained visibility, spawning something of a cottage industry in the form of pop-psychology books and support groups. Its highest-profile proponent is probably self-proclaimed HSP Alanis Morissette, who, in 2015, starred alongside Aron in a low-budget documentary called Sensitive: The Untold Story. A few years ago, there was a spike of interest—and derision—after an episode of The White Lotus featured Sydney Sweeney’s character Olivia telling her mother, Nicole, that one of her friends had the “clinical diagnosis” of HSP. “Really? Who’s her physician, Lena Dunham?” Nicole retorts. (It’s worth noting that Aron does not claim HSP to be a clinical diagnosis.)
It feels a little embarrassing to admit, but when I first heard about HSPs, I experienced a jolt of recognition. I’ve always known—and been repeatedly told—that I’m on the sensitive side, emotionally and sensorially. Reading Aron’s book, I felt like I was being given a key to understanding so many different aspects of my life. Struggled to sleep as an infant? Check! Grumpy when hungry? Check! Prone to allergies and skin rashes? Check! An overthinker who is deeply affected by events both big and small? Check! I completed the book’s “Are You Highly Sensitive?” self-test and answered “true” to twenty out of twenty-three questions. Aron’s suggested threshold for HSPs is twelve. What also resonated with me was the idea that HSPs might struggle with self-esteem due to social perception of their trait as a kind of defect.
Struggled to sleep as an infant? Check! Grumpy when hungry? Check! Prone to allergies and skin rashes? Check!
Aron’s focus on differences in temperament draws significantly on the work of Carl Jung, whose famous split with Sigmund Freud was partly due to a disagreement over whether repressed sexuality really was the cause of all neuroses. Jung suggested that a child might instead have “a certain innate sensitiveness” that would predispose them to be affected by early experiences. Later, Jung developed a more thorough model of “psychological types,” based on two opposing attitudes to the world: introversion and extraversion. Aron suggests that a more accurate word for what Jung calls introversion (it’s not really about how social you are) would be sensitivity. But whatever you name it, the basic point stands. As Jung put it: “It is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment.”
Perhaps the appeal of the HSP label, then, is much like that of astrology, or the Enneagram, or the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator, or any other personality test. It tries to elucidate the obvious but still-mysterious truth that we can’t all experience the world in the same way.
I think what rightly irritates people, more than the crudeness of the label, is the sense that a self-identified HSP really believes they’re better than you. Aron opens her book with an epigraph from E.M. Forster that argues for an “aristocracy” of “the sensitive, the considerate” who “represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.” Later, she’s adamant that HSPs are not better than everyone else—and that if she is overemphasizing our positive characteristics it is only to counterbalance the negative cultural bias against us—but the seed has been planted.
I think what rightly irritates people is the sense that a self-identified HSP really believes they’re better than you.
This stratification of sensitivities seems obviously wrong to me. Recently, I experienced another (less pleasant) jolt of recognition when reading Lynne Tillman’s 2006 novel American Genius, A Comedy. The narrator of the novel is, like me, an introspective woman who suffers from sensitive skin. At one stage she observes that “people, women especially, like to hear they have sensitive skin or that they are sensitive.” And yet “no one is sensitive enough about other people. They are sensitive about themselves, their animals, their feelings and beliefs, and other people can go to hell with their dogs, their farts, and their feelings.”
Aron doesn’t totally dismiss this perspective. She acknowledges that sometimes being sensitive can make us more selfish than the average non-HSP, because we feel we can’t cope with other people’s feelings or the world at large. I’ve definitely felt this way—when I decided that I wouldn’t read the news anymore, or when I insisted on claiming the comfiest bed during a trip with a group of friends.
Ultimately, I’d rather not put a label on things. If there’s anything valuable to be taken from the notion of HSPs, it’s the reminder that there’s nothing wrong with being sensitive, but there’s nothing inherently right with it either.
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