Jenna Forrest is a coach who offers “energy healing, intuitive coaching and spiritual apprenticeships to help sensitives experience inner peace, higher consciousness, and life transformation” and writes in her memoir Help Is On Its Way about growing up with the trait of high sensitivity. In our podcast interview, she talks about empowering and transcending sensitivity. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

“Millions of highly sensitive people right at this moment are carrying a heavier burden than the rest of society just because they’re perceptive of the world’s discord, which is coming at them every day from a laundry list of sources.

“This is where many sensitive kids and adults are right now, thinking that all these energies going on inside them are because something’s wrong with them.

“Highly sensitive people have a beautiful ability to turn these burdens into art, inventions, writing, acting and other expressions that speak to the hearts of humanity.

“They also have powerful, healing intuition that when developed, can be used to nullify the suffering that’s been endured by themselves and others.”

Continued in podcast interview (and transcript) Jenna Forrest on Empowering Sensitivity.

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Relieving anxiety for highly sensitive people

In this video, Jenna Forrest discusses “what every sensitive empath must know about anxiety in order to experience relief more quickly.”

..

Her site: Transformational Life Coaching and Profound Healing.

In the video, Jenna mentions the Tapas Acupressure Technique, which is an energy therapy, like EFT.

Learn more about meridian tapping and EFT / Emotional Freedom Techniques (including a video) on the Anxiety Relief Solutions page: The Tapping Solution – Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), and on The Tapping Solution site.

Winona Ryder starred in the film based on Susanna Kaysen’s novel Girl, Interrupted, and thinks Kaysen “captures a mood we’ve all experienced. It’s like a reflective time we’ve all had in our lives, whether to kill ourselves, whether to be miserable or move on. You go through spells where you feel that maybe you’re too sensitive for this world. I certainly felt that.”

“There was a time when I was 19 when I really, really, really thought I was going crazy,” she has said about her own brief stay at a psychiatric clinic. “I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression. I had had panic attacks from the age of 12 – probably from the pressure of working and then going through adolescence onscreen.”

She left to get a year of intensive therapy, and recalls, “I was wallowing and I eventually got sick of it – I got sick of being sick. I was coming out of my own serious depression and I didn’t know what to label it, just as Susanna doesn’t know what to label hers. There was nothing really wrong with Susanna. They called her a ‘borderline personality’ because they couldn’t diagnose her.”

[From article: Interviews with Stephen Fry, Winona Ryder and Stan Collymore on fame, fortune and depression]

Highly sensitive children – holding back

Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. has said she has seen “too many” highly sensitive children and adults “whose depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem prevent them from expressing whatever talents they have.” [From her newsletter article The Highly Sensitive Child (and Adults, Too): Is Sensitivity the Same as Being Gifted?]

Aron considers being an HSP “means, necessarily, that you are more easily overstimulated, stressed out, overwhelmed.” She says there is a common tendency to call high sensitivity “fearfulness” and cites a New York Times Magazine describing “animals that hold back” as “shy and fearful” rather than “sensitive and observant.” [From her newsletter article Reflections on Research]

Labeling and mislabeling

Diagnosis by others [particularly professionals], or simply how we explain our reactions and moods to ourselves, can have a profound effect on how those experiences impact our lives, for better or worse.

A common label many of us have put on our complex emotional experiences is “crazy” – as Winona Ryder admitted in another interview: “It’s just a feeling of ‘Am I crazy? Am I too sensitive to be in this world?’ A feeling that the world is just too complicated for me right now, and I don’t feel like I belong here.”

But, she added, “it passes, and fortunately today I feel blessed for all the good things in my life.” [From Autumn in New York : Interview With Winona Ryder]

Taking care of yourself

Ryder is interviewed in the new (Oct. 2009) issue of Interview magazine, as summarized by The Week magazine, which notes that after her widely publicized 2001 arrest for shoplifting, Ryder stopped taking major film roles.

“It wasn’t like a breakdown, but I had to just stop and take care of myself. I was struggling,” she says. “I never went out. I was just terrified and exhausted. I approached work very seriously, and it just got to be too much for me. I just felt like I really wanted to hold on to who I was and try to have as much a normal life as I could.”

The Week adds, “Today Ryder, 38, focuses on smaller, more independent films, writes almost daily, and avoids places where the paparazzi gather.”
[Why Winona Ryder dropped out, The Week theweek.com October 15, 2009]

Misdiagnosis

In their article: Misdiagnosis of the Gifted, Lynne Azpeitia, M.A. and Mary Rocamora note, “Since the gifted function with relatively high levels of intensity and sensitivity, when they seek therapy they are frequently misdiagnosed because therapists receive no specialized training in the identification and treatment of persons who have advanced and complex patterns of development.”

In her song “I’m Sensitive,” Jewel sings:
“Oh please be careful with me, I’m sensitive
And I’d like to stay that way…
I have this theory, that if we’re told we’re bad
Then that’s the only idea we’ll ever have…”
[From her debut album Pieces of You]

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Related books
The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D.
Misdiagnosis And Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults by J. Webb et al.

Some related Talent Development Resources pages:
Articles: anxiety / fear / courage
Anxiety relief products and programs
Mental health
mental health : teen/young adult

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high sensitivity personality, highly sensitive people, highly sensitive books, highly sensitive people books, sensitive and stressed, Winona Ryder

On the tv series “Heroes” she plays an assertive FBI agent, and has garnered acclaim for her dynamic acting in the series Carnivale, and many films including 21 Grams, The Laramie Project, and Girl, Interrupted – but Clea DuVall is candid about being introverted and sensitive:

“I’m an only child and I’m just a real loner kind of person, and yeah, kinda dark. But I’m happy. Not sad. I’m just shy and nervous.” [imdb.com]

In an interview [in 2000] about doing publicity for her films But I’m A Cheerleader, and Committed, Clea DuVall admitted, “That was my first photo shoot and I was so nervous. I was just nervous and shy and Matthew Lillard and Mary McCormick are just so outgoing and Brad Rowe and everybody else was getting along so well and I was just shy. I was just watching. I feel like I’ve gotten better and I’m not as in my shell as I used to be. I’ve gotten better at not making people feel uncomfortable with my shyness.” [28th Street, January 2000, posted on CleaDuVall.net]

And she has also said, “I was a loner in high school. I keep to myself, but I love life.” [tv.gen interview, unknown date]

Self-test for high sensitivity

On her site The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron [listed on the page High sensitivity resources] has a self-test for high sensitivity, which includes a number of items that Duvall and many other talented actors might agree with, such as:

* I have a rich,complex inner life.
* My nervous system sometimes feels so frazzled that I just have to go off by myself.
* I am conscientious.
* I startle easily.
* I notice and enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, works of art.
* I am bothered by intense stimuli, like loud noises or chaotic scenes.
* When I was a child, my parents or teachers seemed to see me as sensitive or shy.

A number of these characteristics seem to be common for many of us who are sensitive – but they are also qualities that can be real assets for actors and other artists.

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Technorati tags: gifted adults . acting . Clea DuVall . highly sensitive . anxiety



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Clea DuVall, actors and shyness, high sensitivity personality, high sensitivity resources

On the excellent Highly Sensitive People dvd by Jim Hallowes, psychologist Pat Allen, PhD, MFT recalls her mother using the phrase “Still waters run deep” to refer to her – something many of us could relate to. I think my own mother used the phrase, as a subtle form of affirmation of my shyness.

“In school, I had to sit at the back of the room,” Allen notes, about being too sensitive to be too close to others. “While other kids were reading ‘Dick and Jane,’ I was reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica…”

Self-sedated

She talks about the issue of self-medication [which I address in my article Gifted, Talented, Addicted]: “I took up drinking at five. I drank my father’s leftovers. I was sedated from five to thirty five; that was my street medicine. But at thirty five, it was destroying me.

“Coming out of alcohol, I had to go on medication, and I was unable to sleep more than two hours a night on and on and on. But in those hours of staying up and staying up, like I was on cocaine, I was being driven mad. My blood pressure was 250 over 148 for much of my adult life.

Just an old HSP

“Now it’s 110 over 70, and I’m much healthier than I ever was when I was young, and it’s because I know, I have always known, that I was different, that I was gifted, that I was brilliant, that I didn’t fit…”

Now, she notes how this high sensitivity serves her career in helping others: “The ability to be sensitive to another person’s vibrations is how I make a living. They say I’m psychic. I’m not psychic; I’m just an old HSP.”

Highly Sensitive People dvd by Jim Hallowes

Her site: drpatallen.com

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Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Intensity / sensitivity
introversion / shyness
Alcohol and talent: teen / young adult
psychic ability

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Technorati tags: gifted adults gifted and talented introversion highly sensitive
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Dr. Pat Allen, hsp dvd, high sensitivity personality, gifted adults

Musician Keith Urban recently checked himself into a rehab center for alcohol abuse, with support from his wife, actor Nicole Kidman.

A number of other stars have sought treatment for drug or alcohol problems, including Haley Joel Osment (star of The Sixth Sense), Mel Gibson, Robin Williams, Robert Downey Jr., and soprano Andrea Gruber, who sang with the Metropolitan Opera.

Many talented actors and performers can be identified as unusually sensitive, and sometimes use drugs or alcohol to dampen that sensitivity.

Awareness can be overwhelming

Psychologist Elaine Aron identifies The Highly Sensitive Person [the title of one of her books] as someone having an uncommonly sensitive nervous system, and says it is a normal occurrence for about 15 to 20 percent of the population.

“It means you are aware of subtleties in your surroundings, a great advantage in many situations,” she notes. “It also means you are more easily overwhelmed when you have been out in a highly stimulating environment for too long, bombarded by sights and sounds until you are exhausted.”

A strategy gone awry

Johnny Depp has blamed his previous alcohol addiction in his early movie career on his needing to block his discomfort. “I’d go to functions and back in those days I literally had to be drunk to be able to speak and get through it,” he said in a magazine interview. “I guess I was trying not to feel anything. My drug of choice back then was alcohol more than anything.”

Beverly Hills addiction psychologist Marc F. Kern, Ph.D., notes that altering one’s state of consciousness is normal and that a destructive habit or addiction is “mostly an unconscious strategy” and “simply an adaptation that has gone awry.”

The alternatives

In their article A Bioanthropological Overview of Addiction, Doris F. Jonas, Ph.D. and A. David Jonas, M.D. write people sensitive to perceiving the minutest changes in their environment can become overwhelmed.

Those with less sensitive nervous systems are, they write, “better adapted to our more crowded living conditions. The more sensitive can only attempt to ease their discomfort by blunting their perceptions with alcohol or depressive drugs or, alternatively, by using consciousness-altering drugs to transport their senses from the dysphoric world in which they live to private worlds of their own.”

Fortunately, many gifted and talented actors, musicians and others have been able to stay healthy and use their high sensitivity to give us the pleasure of their outstanding performances.

Photo from new Keith Urban album Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing

Related articles:

Growing Up Gifted Is Not Easy by Elaine Aron, PhD

Gifted, Talented, Addicted by Douglas Eby
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high sensitivity personality, sensitivity and drugs, highly sensitive books, feeling emotionally overwhelmed

The photo is Christina Ricci as Wednesday in Addams Family Values (1993), which also featured David Krumholtz [now in the tv series Numb3rs] as a rather stereotypical highly sensitive kid, repressed and using an inhaler to cope with asthma.

But Wednesday may represent another sort of coping with high sensitivity: responding to situations and other people with snide irony and contemptuousness. That may be another way to cover or hide from feelings that seem too strong.

Writers – intelligent and emotional

In her book My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers, Jane Piirto, PhD quotes a writer remembering their childhood, with thoughts that Wednesday might have shared: “What I feel as I think of summer camp is completely ugly. I want to kill my parents for doing this to me! I want to hack them to death for this… they threw me away and tried to make me ordinary! They threw me away with a bunch of normal kids who thought I was strange and made me feel strange until I became strange!”

Dr. Piirto goes on to comment, “This quotation illustrates the combination of high intelligence…and high emotionality…that are hallmarks of the personality of the creative writer.”

Also see her related article: Themes in the Lives of Successful U.S. Adult Creative Writers

Potent memories

This intensity of emotional memory is something Elizabeth Wurtzel spoke about in her memoir Prozac Nation: “No one will understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them.”
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writing book, high sensitivity personality, sensitivity and giftedness, gifted talented characteristics