Julie Christie

“I found films to be turbulent and stressful. They have caused me an enormous amount of anxiety, because I do not have a lot of confidence. You are working, intellectually and mentally, and you are having to be with people and socialize all the time. Actors like it, on the whole, but I was not born with that quality. I am very quiet and would much prefer to talk to a few people rather than a crowd.” //

“I could never really see the point of being high-profile when I loathed it so much. Every now and then, you can go to something like an Oscars ceremony, but nobody is holding a gun to your head. The rules were the same 40 years ago as they are now. You can either choose your spotlight – or you can stay at home.”  [imdb.com]

Jennifer Beals

“I get emotional all the time,” Jennifer Beals [left] once said. “I get emotional every time I make a speech, or talk about other cast members,” she says. “Every now and again, my heart just explodes and expands.”

Laurel Holloman, her castmate on the Showtime series “The L Word,” has seen this firsthand: “If Jennifer is passionate about something, it comes to the surface within seconds. My theory on that is all the best actors have a couple of layers of skin peeled away. There’s a huge emotional life in Jennifer, and it’s kind of beautiful.” [From article The Real Beals, by Jancee Dunn, Lifetime lifetimetv.com, August 2004]

Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman has noted, “You live with a lot of complicated emotions as an actor, and they whirl around you and create havoc at times. And yet, as an actor you’re consciously and unconsciously allowing that to happen… It’s my choice, and I would rather do it this way than live to be 100… Or rather than choosing not to exist within life’s extremities. I’m willing to fly close to the flame.” [Interview mag., Oct 2003]

Brittany Murphy

Brittany Murphy once commented that she thinks she is “a very oversensitive, vulnerable person. You have to be to do this for a living.” [Premiere, November 2000]

Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson has noted that sensitivity can have a dark side: “I think I was born with a great awareness of my surroundings and an awareness of other people. I know when I really connect with somebody… Sometimes that awareness is good, and sometimes I wish I wasn’t so sensitive.

“I’m so happy I’m not walking around life with a cloud over my head, not really knowing which way to look or which way to turn. But then, on the other hand, sometimes you don’t wanna see what’s behind people’s doors.” [Interview mag., July, 2001]

Winona Ryder has commented, “I’ve never been a suicidal person. But there have definitely been times when I’ve thought, I’m too sensitive for this world right now; I just don’t belong here – it’s too fast and I don’t understand it.”

Ellen Muth

Ellen Muth [in the TV series Dead Like Me] has noted her character George/Georgia does care about people, “but she puts on this front like she doesn’t really care about anything and I kind of like that. George’s sensitivity is very hidden, but when it slips out she very quickly makes it so nobody else sees it… George tries to hide her emotions and I tend to do that.”

She adds, “One of the great things about acting is that you are able to release all sorts of things through another character.”
~~

See more in related post: Actors and Artists As Highly Sensitive People.

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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]

~~
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

Scientists in Germany and the United States have reported evidence linking genes to anxious behavior. The findings appear in the August issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, published by the American Psychological Association.

By showing that people who carry a common variation of a gene that regulates the neurotransmitter dopamine have an exaggerated “startle” reflex when viewing unpleasant pictures, the researchers offer a biochemical explanation for why some people find it harder to regulate emotional arousal.

Their sensitivity may, in combination with other hereditary and environmental factors, make them more prone to anxiety disorders.

Continued in article Genes affect anxiety and startle response.

Image from book: Boo! Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex, by Ronald Simons.

“It is also good every so often to go away and relax a little for when you come back to your work your judgment will be better, since to remain constantly at work causes you to deceive yourself.”

Leonardo da Vinci

In her article What’s the rush?, Jenna Avery describes how constantly striving and being urgent about our lives and careers can have such negative impacts on emotional health, especially for highly sensitive people, who “don’t like to work under stress and pressure,” she writes.

“It makes us nervous and lessens the quality of our performance. As people with particularly high standards and conscientiousness, the conflict between wanting to do well and feeling unable to do so builds into an intense and painful internal struggle. It’s no wonder we sometimes explode, and more often burn out.”

She challenges sensitive souls “to step outside this rushaholism and become leaders in honoring the deeper intuitive messages that guide our lives.”

For more perspectives on stress, and approaches to slowing down and being mindfully centered, see my article Gifted and Stressed, and the pages Meditation and Stress resources.
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sensitivity and stress, freeing yourself from pressure, stress reliefresources

Houston agrees that ‘psychic’ has been used in our culture as a pejorative term:

“Don’t I know it,” she says with a laugh. “I think what we call the psychic trait is something that is extended through our nervous system as part of our perceptual sensibilities.

being a sensitive

“When I made the long studies of Margaret Mead, over a six or seven year period, she was certainly what you would call, quote, psychic, but she never called herself that.

“She said she was a ‘sensitive.’ And that’s what I think a lot of so-called psychics are; they have highly developed sensitivity patterns and perceptual patterns, and they are picking up peripheral things that most people are missing.

“And then those things constellate in consciousness as images. Now, the images can then become probability patterns. And many of them are as wrong as many times as they are right; nobody talks about that.

intensity

“But because the images are in their minds with such intensity, whereas many of us will just have a kind of a passing thought ‘Oh, this is going to happen’ or ‘That’s going to happen’ and it’s just a vague glimmer — with them, it’s a whole concrete thing, and when it does happen they talk about it, and they have a tremendous sense of its inevitability.

“It’s like a hologram, operative in itself, a whole virtual reality, where for most of us it’s a vague glimmer that falls away.”

Houston thinks “a lot” of giftedness, though by no means all, “has to do with having a broader palette of perceptual capacity, being highly sensitive to all the senses, and also operating on different modes of intelligence: the ‘standard brand’ ones of visual and kinesthetic and auditory, as well as the intuitive and emotional ones.”

In an interview with Healthy Wealthy nWise magazine [March 2007] she talks about a number of artists and leaders having “high sensory ability” and able to access deep levels of the sensory, sensual aspects of both outer and inner life.

One of Jean Houston’s book: A Passion for the Possible: A Guide to Realizing Your True Potential

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Related Talent Development Resources pages:
High sensitivity resources : articles products sites books
Psychic ability
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Jean Houston, highly sensitive books, giftedness and psychic ability, gifted adult books

Jenna Avery, a coach for “Highly Sensitive Souls,” says in her audio interview that one of the issues for highly sensitive people is constantly questioning “Why can’t I fit in? Why don’t I react to things like other people?”

But, she adds, “There are so many interesting things in our world right now… The Secret and What The Bleep Do We Know?… There are spiritual movements afoot that are becoming more and more mainstream.

“So many people are becoming attracted to developing their intuition, to being true to themselves, to finding spirituality in their lives.

“I hope very much that our culture is beginning to shift in a positive way. I do believe that it is. And I hope that it makes it a more sane place for highly sensitive people to live.”

[From audio interview by Jeff Wessman: Beyond Coping: Highly Sensitive & Highly Successful]

See Jenna’s articles at article authors / titles

For more on The Secret see the information page

Image from What the Bleep Do We Know!? dvd
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Jenna Avery, high sensitivity resources, intuition

She says, “The idea of acting versus reacting is so important for highly sensitive people, because we do take in so much from our environment. I like to use the idea of mindfulness…

“Be aware of ways in which we can be overstimulated.. it’s not that overstimulation is a consistently bad thing; it’s like, what is that optimal level of arousal? If we’re understimulated, we’re bored; if we’re overstimulated, we get too much cortisol in our system…”

She also talks about Dabrowski and excitabilities versus high sensitivity, and how HSPs can empower themselves, including connecting with others, such as at the HSP gatherings co-created by Jacquelyn Strickland with Dr. Elaine Aron.
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Jacquelyn Strickland, high sensitivity personality, overxcitability, overstimulation and sensitivity

“This can be both confusing and overstimulating because we are unable to distinguish whether we’re operating from our own center or someone else’s. I believe that it’s critically important for sensitive souls to learn how to protect themselves and to clear away the energy and emotions of other people.”
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Jenna Avery, high sensitivity personality, high sensitivity resources, feeling emotionally overwhelmed

Like a number of other dynamic and creative musicians and actors, Gwen Stefani admits being highly sensitive: “I’m really emotional. I don’t fight with people – like, I can barely fight with my husband because I’ll just start crying instead. I’ve learnt not to do that.” [imdb.com]

A musicomh.com interview article says about creating one of her albums “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.” that her insecurities are depicted in the exuberant video What You Waiting For, “where Gwen plays Alice chasing around the rabbit, symbolizing inspiration, in Wonderland.

“Stefani was working for the first time with former 4 Non-Blondes leader Linda Perry, the woman behind hit songs by Pink and Christina Aguilera: ‘I’d never worked with the woman before. I went in the studio the first day and cried. Linda was so magic, driven, inspiring and beautiful. She was saying: ‘What you waiting for, Gwen? C’mon! I know you got it in you!’”

Her video Wind It Up is a kind of homage to her favorite film The Sound of Music
One of her latest CDs is The Sweet Escape
Photo: as Jean Harlow in The Aviator (2004)

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HSPs intense relationships

Stefani’s relationship with her husband may be a very stable and happy one, but as Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. comments on the site for her book The Highly Sensitive Person In Love, “on the average HSPs’ relationships in general are less happy.. at least for the HSP.

“Why? HSPs have nervous systems that pick up more on subtleties in the world and reflect on them deeply. That means, for starters, that they will tend to demand more depth in their relationships in order to be satisfied; see more threatening consequences in their partners’ flaws or behaviors; reflect more and, if the signs indicate it, worry about how things are going.

“Because HSPs are picking up on so much, they are also more prone to overstimulation, quicker to feel stress – including the stimulation and stress that can arise in any intense, intimate interactions. They need more down time, which can cause a partner to feel left out. They find different things enjoyable compared to others.”
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Gwen Stefani, highly sensitive books, feeling emotionally overwhelmed, highly sensitive relationships

He has a wide range of informed perspectives in this trait and how it relates to gifted and creative people.

See this page to play or download mp3.
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Jim Hallowes, Highly Sensitive People podcast, high sensitivity personality, high sensitivity resources