Architecture of Meaning

Cultivating Meaningful Engagement for the Highly Sensitive Person

The late bloomer-

Late to speak~
Late to walk~
Late to find a career path~
Late to find love~
Late to marry ~
Late to have children ~
Late to succeed ~
Late…

So it seems to be about time or timing. Being a late bloomer is not to do things in the timing of the culture.

Yet, through a different lens, the late bloomer is weaving together the necessary threads to be ready, fully ready for whatever the task is. It may be that the late bloomer is attending to more internal threads than most people.

We assume that being highly gifted carries with it a capacity for self expression and a comfort in communication. As if the gift naturally comes with an accompanying mechanism that facilitates sharing. It is often exactly the opposite.

…The longing to belong, to connect, to live in a field of connectedness is as strong for the gifted as for anyone else. However, the road to this belonging is much harder to find. The mere act of reaching out and asking for help can be excruciating for the highly gifted.

I remain surprised by the number of extraordinarily gifted clients who, even after reading on the topic of giftedness, will say - “Gifted? That’s not me!”. Who knew how loaded this word is in our culture?! To most of us over the age of 30, gifted means being a genius. We know we are not Einstein or Oppenheimer - so we could never be gifted.

It is not the label that has meaning. Rather, it is the predicament a highly engaged enthusiast finds him or herself in in a culture that is not operating at the level of engagement, enthusiasm, depth or intensity that is natural to the highly engaged enthusiast. This HEE can end up thinking something is wrong with them when the world does not meet beauty, complexity, challenge with the degree of engagement so natural to the HEE.

We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual…If we had keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot, Middlemarch

For someone who is gifted and sensitive, there is often no rest from perceptiveness, complex thoughts and a feeling of overwhelm. Until the gifted and sensitive person gains a vocabulary for inner experiences, their qualities of experience are often assumed to be “just the way people are”. It is often surprising for the gifted person to realize other people’s minds are not always responding to things in multiple ways at once, or that for many - a rose is just a rose.

In order to understand this notion of intensity - imagine a pot of water at a low simmer and a pot of water on high boil. Most people’s nervous systems operate at the low simmer level - needing a high flame (a great deal of stimulus of any kind) to produce a high boil. For you, being on a low flame still feels like a high boil.