Thursday, July 31, 2003

California HSP Gathering Photojournal

As a continuing expansion of the "Inner Reflections" web site, I have created a photo journal of my experiences and impressions from the 2003 West Coast Gathering. It is rather more detailed than my previous entries here, and include my own-- as well as other Gathering participants'-- photos. It can be found at:

http://innerreflections.homestead.com/hsp03ca1.html

It seems that all my "writing bandwidth" since the Gathering has gone into both making the photo journal, as well as into the flood of correspondence between my new friends, and myself.

On top of that, Elaine Aron asked if I'd like to write an article for the "Comfort Zone" magazine, which I was also working on, until recently.

And then, of course, I have been doing some regular "work," in some kind of feeble attempt to pay for all this travelling I have recently been doing. And then, of course, I am trying to save up for the East Coast Gathering, which is the next event on the calendar...

Now that I have six weeks of "distance" between myself and the Gathering, I can definitely say that HSPs are-- in the broadest sense of the word-- "my Tribe." But even so, there are certain "types" within that tribe that I felt more of a connection with... they were the rather "luminous" and especially empathic and intuitive people. "Feelers," more than "thinkers." They had a certain "softness" about them, and I got this sense that they were all in tune with... a sort of "alternate reality" that wasn't visible to the naked eye. And they definitely had their lives "together," rather than feeling like "victims" of their lives.

And I really got a feel for just how important it is for "us" to have friends and connections who are "like us." I simply can't overstate the value of that.

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Feeling like an alien in my own family

I recently got an email from my cousin in Denmark. Unlike the majority of my family, she's someone I actually feel connected to, someone I can talk to.

I was an "alien" within my own family. I was born into a very "old"-- and old fashioned-- European family. Things were always done "a certain way," and I grew up in the spectre of the saying "Children should be seen, but not heard." As an introspective and highly sensitive child, I was OK with that.

The thing about my family-- as a group of people-- is that they are all (with the exception of this one cousin) "emotionally constipated." It is like someone has gone in and deactivated the DNA that connects them to the concept of "feeling." I mean, most of them are nice enough, and I suppose they mean well in a very "practical" sort of way. But I was never able to "connect" with any of them-- so although I grew up with a fair number of people in my life, I always felt completely alone. And, to this day, I have never been able to determine how the feeling dissociation in an entire family got to be so complete.

Personality inventories such as Myers-Briggs and the enneagram talk about "feeling" types and "thinking" types, and so forth. In my family, "non-feeling" struck me as more of a lifestyle than a personality trait. People who "felt" were viewed as weak, and occasionally as "hysterical." It was a desert wasteland for me to grow up in.

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