What are the particular challenges that highly sensitive men face in our society?
I feel like society sees sexually successful men as being promiscuous and also expects that men want to be promiscuous. Because of my high sensitivity, I don’t find it easy to instigate cursory sexual contact. Not wanting to do it isn’t an argument, though: a “real man” should want it. In this regard, I don’t think that men have been successful at emancipating themselves completely from society’s expectations.
How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with other men?
This observation may be something that’s just a coincidence, but I feel that I get along really well with gay men. Two of my good friends came out after I’d known them for a while. Other than that, I tend to be friends with women. I don’t do very well with activities that are “typical for men.” I have a particular problem with competitive sports, perhaps because I know that I don’t have much of a chance in those sort of games. I am just better friends with women. My sense is that they are more communicative. I probably assume that men are going to be more shallow.
How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with women?
I think that high sensitivity makes friendships with women easier. Depth of processing at an emotional level means that you can have deeper conversations. In relation to sexuality, I think I’m a bit insecure when it comes to recognizing sexual interest, eliciting it, and to attracting women. I think you need to exude a really robust self-confidence for that, which doubt-ridden highly sensitive men often don’t have. In terms of romantic relationships, I lack a certain playfulness with women. But if I’m emotionally involved, it feels like the stakes are very high, because the threat of being deeply hurt is so high.
What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being highly sensitive at work?
I never felt like being highly sensitive played any kind of role in my professional life. Sometimes I’ll be asked how a highly sensitive person deals with the sort of antagonistic situations thrown up by legal fights, which you experience a lot working as an attorney. But this is only an issue if you believe that the aggression in those situations is real and not just part of the game.
My advice for other highly sensitive men … ?
Free yourself from society’s expectations about how you should behave, what your preferences should be, or how you define success or happiness. Accept that you’re going to be following a different set of rules.
YOU MAY WELL HAVE READ a lot about high sensitivity in other books or online, thought long and hard about the term high sensitivity, and already decided that you’re highly sensitive. Or perhaps you’ve read a couple of articles about high sensitivity, heard about it here and there, and wondered whether you, too, might be highly sensitive. Or perhaps you’re not highly sensitive at all, but you have an inkling that your spouse, your partner, your son, your son-in-law, your brother, your father, or one of your friends might be highly sensitive and you want to better understand what it means. Maybe someone gave you this book as a present or lent it to you because that person thinks that you could be highly sensitive. Whatever the reason is that you’re reading these pages, I’m really happy that you’re here. Because the more people who know about high sensitivity and really understand what it is, the better.
In this chapter, so that you get a really clear idea of exactly what high sensitivity is, I want to give you a compact but detailed overview of the academic research on the subject. This will increase your knowledge about high sensitivity and give you a firm grounding in the theoretical background. I will also explain the scientific context, showing how high sensitivity complements the better-known term introversion. At the same time, it’s important to me that you understand that the concept of high sensitivity is based on the results of numerous robust scientific studies from around the world and represents a serious field of scientific research. It is in no way some sort of “new age” phenomenon. One can get this impression when one sees the myriad ways in which people try to sell the term high sensitivity and the way it is sometimes presented in online forums. High sensitivity is neither a silver bullet nor some sort of sixth sense. Highly sensitive people haven’t traveled from another galaxy, nor are they necessarily gifted. It is not a psychological disorder, but a neutral temperamental trait that can help to explain many things, but not all things. It is also very important to differentiate high sensitivity from a temporary psychological sensitivity during stressful life events or a short-term period of feeling thin-skinned after, for instance, suffering trauma or during a period of depression or anxiety. High sensitivity is not a temporary state, but a constant trait that you are born with and will carry with you for the whole of your life.
Sensitivity, Introversion, and Extroversion
We are all different, and we arrive in the world with some of these differences. Anyone who has kids or who has friends and family with kids knows that newborn babies already differ from each other, even in their very first few weeks of life. Before we have been influenced by experiences, other people, our education, or any number of other factors that help form our personalities, we are already reacting differently to stimuli and consequently display different behavioral tendencies. “She’s a much worse sleeper than her sister,” “She cries much more than her brothers and sisters,” or “He feeds really slowly because he’s always distracted by things he sees” are just a few of the kinds of comments I’ve heard from parents describing and comparing their children. So children’s innate temperaments have a substantial influence on them and are observable from Day 1. And a child’s temperament also has an influence on its parents’ behavior, which, in turn, influences how secure the parent–child bond is. This means that differences in temperaments between parents and children can sometimes lead to problems in this relationship and that parents can sometimes become frustrated if they feel that their child has a “difficult” temperament. I can recall a highly sensitive client who was often yelled at and even punished by her stressed and overworked mother because, as a child, she cried far more often that her elder sister and her mother couldn’t bear it.
If we are going to talk about temperament, this, of course, raises the question of what the term temperament actually means. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460–375 BC) was one of the first Western thinkers to tackle the question of temperament, developing his own temperamental theory. Since then, countless writers, philosophers, doctors, psychologists, and academics have explored the idea of temperaments and defined a range of different temperamental traits. To this day, research into human temperaments remains an important area of developmental psychology.
Professor Silvia Schneider of Ruhr University, Bochum, offers a clear and easily comprehensible definition of what temperament actually is: “The word temperament describes a constitutional factor that is inherited and which predisposes someone to react to situations and people in specific ways. Temperamental traits can be understood as those that form the basis for the development of the personality, appear early in life, are stable over time, and which are influenced by biological factors.”1
Simply put, our temperament