Hyper-Emotional Sensitivity?

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Reader’s Question

I am 52. I’ve been diagnosed with ADD and am being treated with Adderall. My psychiatrist also prescribe Lamictal 100 mg daily. I have just recently heard the term, ‘hyper-emotional sensitivity’. I am so this! I cannot watch upsetting things on TV, or even hear about them for that matter: abused animals, children, elderly…does more than upset me. It kicks me to the floor in a strange kind of way. It’s so extreme I can’t even explain it. I find that I must keep my TV tuned to very light material, and then I cannot sit and watch (most of the time) but can hear it in the background. I’ve always ‘felt’ things more than anyone else I knew — ever since I was born, I guess. It’s the only memory I own of myself in that regard. Is there anything I can do to protect myself? Often I feel like I just don’t belong to this crowd of everyone else. By the way, I am a writer, artist, musician and radio announcer for 35 years.

Psychologist’s Reply

I think that you can rule out ADD as being a cause of this, because:

  1. it’s being treated and contained, yet the symptoms persist, and
  2. these are not symptoms of ADD.

As always, I encourage you to rule out any physical/medical causes for your symptoms before you assume that this is a psychological problem. If you can, ask someone who knew you as an infant whether you were hypersensitive to sensations. Did you have an exaggerated response to being startled, touched, seen, etc.? Were you colicky, and did you have problems in your early schooling and socialization? What did your teachers say? In other words, collect a medical history of yourself and review it with your physician.

Now, if you can identify specific sensitivities that can be explained by a physical cause — say, an unusual sensitivity to light or touch — then you can protect yourself from overstimulation by wearing sunglasses or soft clothing. Some people are just hard-wired to be sensitive and need protective clothing to reduce stimulation. Often, when we are overstimulated by physical sensations, our emotional reactivity is also heightened. By the way, incidents in one’s life can also make one hypersensitive to stimulation. You may have heard of the young jazz singer Melody Gardot, who became sensitive to light after a near fatal car accident. She wears dark glasses now to perform. It’s the only way she can survive the searing pain caused by the glaring spotlights onstage.

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On the other hand, if you find noting amiss in your sensory organs and you are only emotionally hypersensitive, then the issue would seem to be psychological and grist for our mill. Even though the problem seems to stem from infancy, explore the possibility that some traumatic memory is being triggered by the stories of others. To the extent that is true, then you can explore what is being triggered in you, what that means to you, and what trauma may still be unresolved. Those are the kinds of things you can explore in therapy. For you, you seem to be especially sensitive to stories involving crimes of victimization. That could be a place to start your inquiry.

We all wear armor that shields us from feeling the pain of others too intensely. We all have weak spots in our armor where the pain gets through to us, penetrates the armor, and then the pain becomes our own. It’s up to each of us to look at those places where we are vulnerable and ask, why am I sensitive to this particular thing? Of all things that could possibly upset me, why am I sensitive to this? This line of questioning is opposite our natural inclination to avoid pain. This questioning drives us to focus directly on the pain, understand it, and then find a way to hold it in a way that does not disable us as your pain disables you.

There may be other possibilities, but I encourage you to explore these first.

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