Being an HSP in End Times for Planet Earth

An HSP in the Age of Trump

by John Omaha aka Star Man

I looked at the news on the internet this morning and found myself close to tears, because I am a highly sensitive person and the daily reports of violence by humans against each other and against the environment overwhelm me with grief.

Highly sensitive people are called HSPs, a term invented by Dr. Elaine Aron to describe people who are more sensitive than average. I am a psychotherapist who organizes therapy around emotion and its regulation. We humans are apparently genetically programmed to experience 10 emotions. Each of the 10 has a threshold, and the thresholds are genetically determined. HSPs apparently have a low threshold for the emotion distress-anguish. Distress is the low level of the continuum, and anguish is the upper end. Because HSPs have a low threshold for distress-anguish, we are more likely to feel distress in any given situation than people with a high threshold for the emotion. The low threshold for distress-anguish explains why the daily news overwhelms me.

I feel overwhelmed when I read about abuse of our beautiful planet. Tears well up in me when I learn that the oceans are contaminated by plastic and that enormous swirling gyres of discarded water bottles cover thousands of square miles far out in the Pacific and the Atlantic. Shooting animals for what appears to be the joy the hunter experiences in taking the life of a magnificent creature immobilizes me with sadness. Thinning of the polar ice caps devastates me. I have to choke down distress when I read about another child shot “accidentally,” and I have to suppress rage and anguish when I see Wayne LaPierre's face and read how the NRA colludes with Congress to expand access to weapons. The United States Constitution is a beautiful document, and it is being desecrated in the name of profit and of spiteful hatred and I feel impotent sadness reading yet another example.

Being HSP is a blessing and a curse. As an author, HSP is a blessing because it provides the sensitivity necessary to observe keenly and write with emotional clarity. HSP is a curse because it makes it impossible to deny the reality of gigatons of methane beginning to bubble to the surface from beneath the melting permafrost and warming oceans. HSPs cannot just shrug off the effects of overpopulation and disappearing fisheries and drought and famine. HSP makes it difficult to tolerate Trump, Pruitt, Price, Carson, Mnuchin and the claques of ignorant fools who appear to accurately represent the electorate that voted for them. I feel grateful to have experienced with HSP senses the earth when it was relatively more pristine. I feel supremely sad knowing this glorious home planet will soon be trashed beyond repair and the whales, elephants, grizzlies, and other beautiful creatures will be gone along with the insensitive as well as the HSP humans.

I truly get that I am describing my suffering in this essay. I also understand that the Buddha said that all life is suffering and that suffering is caused by grasping, and I get that I am grasping for a time on Earth when the water was pure, when the soil was uncontaminated, when the air did not contain carcinogens, and when humans were not wholly infected with The Contagion of greed, individualism, money, violence, racism, etc. I understand that I grasp for a fantasy in which all humans live by the eight-fold way or even by the golden rule. If only we treated the environment and All Our Relations the way we would like to be treated. If only.

We humans have the capacity to envision a world and a life free of Contagion, what the Native People called Wetiko. Sadly, we are so driven by our unconscious processes, what we learned very early in life from watching others, what we learned about how the world works. We learned grasping and violence and greed and individualism and money and racism and misogyny. We are driven by our unconscious processes. It is our unconscious processes that are destroying us and the planet we live on. Star Man