Having been asking myself for a few years, I finally recalled this week the very first thing that had ultimately lead me to the idea of becoming a life coach. It was my self-diagnosis that I was - and still remain - a highly sensitive person and started reading a book entitled The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine Aron after suffering in one environment which I thought was insensitive, and being forced to start receiving psychological counseling. It was February 2015.
Since then I've read and learned a lot about how to survive as a highly sensitive person in a society which seems to have far more people whose speech and action are characterized by insensitivity than all the other societies I know. Having fully realized that I can't change anybody except for myself, or to be more precise, my thought, I've learned to detoxicate or neutralize insensitive speech and action of others without speaking or acting insensitively myself.
Six and a half years since this self-diagnosis of mine, which was later confirmed by the above mentioned and other similar books as well as my first psychological counselor, I've recently started to find myself struggling with a new problem of hypersensitivity - toward a special type of sensitivity - thought this may sound paradoxical.
It's sensitivity that stems from a special type of fear - fear of how you are perceived by others. This fear is rather culture-specific; it's found disproportionately more in certain societies than in others. It seems to paralize not only behaviors of people who suffer from it but even their facial expressions. For fear of how they are perceived by others they gradually lose this latter thing that is fundamental to human beings.
I'm fully aware now that I'm also sensitive to this negative type of sensitivity. I simply absorb this negativity. In one extreme case I even lost the ability to smile for a few weeks. Now I have one special reason for learning urgently to protect myself from this negativity without losing positive sensitivity.