Copyright

The reader is advised that this book is not intended to be a substitute for an assessment by, and advice from, an appropriate medical professional(s). This book contains general information regarding high sensitivity and should be viewed as purely educational in nature.

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German language edition © 2017 by Junfermann Verlag.

English translation by Ben Fergusson.

This translation published by arrangement with Agence Schweiger.

English language edition first published in the US by Citadel Press Books, Kensington Publishing Corp. 2019

This Thorsons edition published 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Tom Falkenstein 2019

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Tom Falkenstein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008366445

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008366452

Version 2019-08-19

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Elaine Aron

Introduction

PART 1: THE PHENOMENON OF HIGH SENSITIVITY

1. A Turning Point in Masculinity: The Importance of Highly Sensitive Men in Society

2. Understanding High Sensitivity: The Scientific Background and Why People Differ in Their Innate Sensitivity

3. Identifying High Sensitivity: Am I Highly Sensitive?

4. Everyday Effects of High Sensitivity and How It Differs from Psychological Disorders

PART 2: LIVING (WELL) AS A HIGHLY SENSITIVE MAN

5. Strategies to Deal With Overstimulation and Intense Emotions: What Emotional Regulation Is and Why It Matters for Highly Sensitive Men

6. Strategies to Deal With Overstimulation and Intense Emotions: Mindfulness and Acceptance

7. Strategies to Deal With Overstimulation and Intense Emotions: Relaxation and Imagery Exercises

8. Your Relationship with Yourself: How Do You Relate to Your High Sensitivity?

9. Self-Worth and Self-Care for Highly Sensitive Men

10. Conclusions

Appendix: A Conversation with Elaine Aron About Highly Sensitive Men

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

List of Searchable Terms

Praise

About the Author

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Ben and Theo

Epigraph

This excessive sensitiveness very often brings an enrichment of the personality and contributes more to its charm than to the undoing of a person’s character. Only, when difficult and unusual situations arise, the advantage frequently turns into a very great disadvantage, since calm consideration is then disturbed by untimely affects. Nothing could be more mistaken, though, than to regard this excessive sensitiveness as in itself a pathological character component. If that were really so, we should have to rate about one quarter of humanity as pathological.

A certain innate sensitiveness produces a special prehistory, a special way of experiencing infantile events, which in their turn are not without influence on the development of the child’s view of the world. Events bound up with powerful impressions can never pass off without leaving some trace on sensitive people. Some of them remain effective throughout life, and such events can have a determining influence on a person’s whole mental development.

—CARL JUNG, on particularly sensitive people, 1913

Foreword

I REALLY LIKE SENSITIVE MEN just because of those two words. First, they are men and I usually like being with men. Second, they are highly sensitive. To me, that means I can have deep conversations with them. Superficial small talk is so boring for the highly sensitive. These men have ideas. But they are also usually better listeners than the average man. They often show warmth and empathy. If you dig down, not far, you find they have a spiritual vein. They are generally ethical in their behavior and nonviolent. They are never perfect, trust me on that, but that’s good, too.

So I like that combination: sensitive man. If you are reading this, I assume that those words describe you or someone you care about. This book is about joining those two words in your mind, as a wonderful thing, just as I join them.

If you are a sensitive man, please make that leap to valuing yourself, not only for yourself but also for the rest of us. We really, really, really need you. We need you to find ways to influence the world because you have what it takes—deep ideas, the ability to find the best strategies, empathy for others, and ethics. But we want you to do it in the right way for you. And we want you to do whatever healing you need and to stay grounded in your center, to not be overstimulated. There’s no need to burn out. Nothing is helped in the long run by that. You need to keep renewing your equanimity, meaning your wisdom, and this book is a treasure trove of ways to do that.

About your author: The minute I met Tom Falkenstein in 2015 I liked him. Getting to know him just a little more, I saw that Tom had everything needed to write this book: he has a good grasp of the science behind sensitivity and enough training and experience to have a wealth of practical ideas. Above all, he is a licensed clinician, meaning, among many other things, that he can tell sensitivity from psychological disorders. Sometimes highly sensitive people are misdiagnosed and do not have a disorder. Sometimes highly sensitive people can have a disorder. And sometimes a person will want to think the only problem is sensitivity, when there is actually something else there and the person is not highly sensitive at all. Tom understands all of this and will impart that to you as well.

Given all of this, I have been happy to help him in any way I could with this book. We had several video calls, Berlin to San Francisco. He asked good questions, and I think we enjoyed ourselves, too. Working with him, I found I trusted him, and I wish you could meet him, too. But I am sure his author’s voice will come across to you as warm, authentic, knowledgeable, and experienced—highly sensitive, perhaps like you.

—Elaine Aron

San Francisco

Introduction

“I HATE THAT I’M SO sensitive!” My client, a man in his mid twenties, was sitting across from me and had just clearly expressed how and why he felt so angry. It was the first warm day in London that spring, and suddenly the room was completely still. This young man had been coming to the clinic for some time and was being treated for recurrent depression. I was his psychotherapist, and over the course of his treatment, we kept indirectly coming back to the topic of sensitivity. But this was the first time that he had openly identified himself as sensitive and the first time that he had revealed the self-hatred he felt about his sensitivity. It was, for him, a painful but important step in dealing with his sensitive temperament, which he had struggled with since he was a child. For me, it was a key moment in my professional career because this client had clearly identified something that I had encountered countless times over the years in my work without, until that moment, having had a name for it or being able to concretely identify the phenomenon—the highly sensitive man.

During my postgraduate training in psychotherapy in Berlin, I kept coming across a particular type of client that I experienced as particularly sensitive, thoughtful, intuitive, conscientious, often introverted, and sometimes shy. These clients came to therapy for the most varied reasons: depression, anxiety, relationship problems. But they all shared an underlying characteristic: they were very sensitive, and because of this, they experienced their internal and external worlds in a very subtle and perceptive way.

After a while, I realized that I particularly enjoyed working with this group of clients, precisely because of the way that they perceived and dealt with the world. But it also became increasingly clear to me that it was my male, rather than my female clients who had the greatest problems with the sensitivity that they described and who in therapy often expressed a desire to be less sensitive. Again and again, I saw the huge amount of psychological suffering caused by the discrepancy between how these men were and how they thought a man should be. They often felt shame and a sense of inferiority about their sensitive disposition, which had been part of their lives since childhood, and they saw their sensitivity as “unmanly,” “feminine,” and “unattractive.” Many had tried for a long time to deny their sensitivity or to hide it from others—nearly always in vain. The conviction that being sensitive meant that you couldn’t be manly seemed deeply rooted.

During my sessions, I constantly heard male clients saying that they wished they were tougher, more physically and mentally resilient, and that they wished they could learn to be more extroverted in social situations. They usually thought that it was this that would make them more successful in their jobs and more attractive to potential partners. Often these men also wanted to have less-conflicted relationships with their own fathers and with other men. Essentially, though, it always came back to the same basic idea: they wanted to be more like what they saw as a “typical man.” And this typical man was not particularly sensitive.

At that time, I hadn’t yet come across the concept of high sensitivity as an innate temperamental trait (i.e., a characteristic that you are born with) and wasn’t aware of the extensive research done regarding the highly sensitive person (HSP) by the clinical psychologist Elaine Aron, Ph.D., and her colleagues. She has been researching this concept since the early 1990s, when she began to look into the concept of “innate sensitivity” in certain people. It was a concept that Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, had described as early as 1913. With my interest piqued by my experiences in London, I began to read more and more about human sensitivity and discovered the concept of sensory processing sensitivity, as high sensitivity is called in academic research. I had the feeling that I had come across a groundbreaking psychological concept that was going to have a huge impact on my work as a therapist. The idea that people are born with different sensitivities that affect the way that they react to the world around them seemed to explain so many things I had seen in my practice. So over the next few years, I immersed myself in all of the available material on high sensitivity and began a dialogue with Elaine Aron, who gave me an in-depth personal insight into her research and her therapeutic work with highly sensitive patients.

As I began to investigate the subject of high sensitivity more deeply, I really struggled to find books that described the specific challenges of high sensitivity from a male perspective. The majority of books on high sensitivity were written by women and seemed to be primarily aimed at female readers. Yet in my psychotherapeutic practice and my consultancy work, I saw that it was particularly men who struggled with being highly sensitive. And although a few self-help books touch on the difficulties that sensitive men experience when trying to live up to traditional ideas about masculinity in Western culture, there is still no book that really focuses on the topic of highly sensitive masculinity, which, of course, only exacerbates the taboo around it. That’s what I want to change with this book.

It is important to me that this book contributes to the long-neglected issue of empowerment for highly sensitive men because I believe that their role in the world is very important and that it comes with many challenges and opportunities. I consider the high sensitivity of many men to be a completely essential part of masculine identity and something that can enrich the lives of these men and the lives of others. Sensitivity is in no way a shameful or “unmanly” flaw that one has to get over.

To see the opportunities that your sensitivity offers you, however, you have to learn to deal well and responsibly with it. You have to accept it, learn to value it, and use it positively in your relationships with other people. When this happens, I believe that a highly sensitive disposition can make men particularly good fathers, husbands, partners, son, brothers, and friends.

At the same time, I think it’s important to say that your high sensitivity—once you’ve detected it and identified it—should not be used as an excuse to avoid doing things that you actually just don’t want to do. I also believe that it is not something to become arrogant or boastful about, in the sense of “I’m special, because I’m so sensitive.” High sensitivity is a completely neutral disposition, an innate temperamental trait.¹ Having a highly sensitive disposition is not automatically a good thing nor is it a bad thing. It is, of course, an important part of your personality, but at the end of the day it is exactly that—one part, one aspect of your complex personal makeup. I thus feel that it’s problematic to reduce yourself to that one quality or to wear your highly sensitive nature like a badge of honor. I see highly sensitive men as neither “delicate flowers” nor as “golden children.”

In my work with highly sensitive clients, I often compare a highly sensitive disposition to being born with very fair skin. You can complain that you weren’t born with darker skin, and you might be envious of friends who are able to sun themselves on the beach, in the garden, or in the park and not worry about burning. But at the end of the day, you have to accept that your skin is different. It’s not better, not worse, just different. People with very fair skin can also go sunbathing if they want; they just can’t stay in the sun for as long as other people. They also have to take different precautions, such as using high SPF sunscreen, finding somewhere shady to sit, and wearing a hat or light-colored clothing. In fact, people with pale skin can enjoy the “sunny” moments in life just as much as anyone else; they just have to learn how to do it in their own and sometimes a slightly different way. And that’s the crux of the matter: to accept the situation as it actually is and, ultimately, to find your own individual and authentic way of learning to live with it.

There has been a sharp increase in the number of publications on and academic research into high sensitivity over the last few years. Through this, the term high sensitivity is becoming increasingly well recognized internationally. My guess is that this also has something to do with the time in which we currently live. I notice that many people feel that their personal lives and their careers are increasingly fast paced and achievement oriented, and they often feel constantly stressed, exhausted, overstimulated, and under nonstop pressure. The line dividing our private and public lives continues to become more and more blurred, and Western society increasingly seems to celebrate and demand that we cultivate personality traits that aren’t normally associated with sensitive, introverted, and reserved people.

What is increasingly valued is the ability to push on through, to work quickly and make quick decisions, to be able to do many things at once, and to appear self-confident and extroverted in front of groups of people—whether it’s with other children in the kindergarten or primary school or with other adults in the workplace. Added to this is the value placed on making a good first impression, the pressure to be constantly available via email and cell phone, and the ability to present yourself well, whether on social media or in real life. Many psychologists and psychiatrists have gone as far as labeling this as an “epidemic of narcissism”² in what they term a “narcissistic society.”³

It would seem, in the West, that more and more value is being placed on behaviors and qualities that highly sensitive people either often find more difficult to access or that make them feel overstimulated or exhausted. And yet these are the very qualities and positive characteristics of many highly sensitive people—a high capacity for empathy, emotional depth, and subtlety, a tendency to deal with things in an ethical way, and a finely tuned sense of perception—that seem more important now than ever before if we are going to be able to deal with the social and economic challenges of our world.

I believe that dealing with your own specific sensitivity in a natural and authentic way is not just vital for every single man but also vital for society as a whole. If highly sensitive men are able to live in harmony with their temperaments, to use their skills actively and positively, and to no longer feel ashamed about them, hide them, or believe that they make them inferior as people, then they can profoundly change the relationship that they have with themselves. But this will also change their relationship with other people, whether family, friends, or colleagues, and this could have far-reaching consequences. Because, through this, society’s conception of what it means to be a man could change. We could have a less rigid, less narrow, freer, more complex understanding of masculinity. The result of this change, which is already happening, could be a more realistic and more authentic male image, so that being manly and being sensitive no longer seem to be mutually exclusive. I believe that sensitive men in particular could drive this change and even lead it, but they can only do so if they have accepted their own high sensitivity and can sense that they are important, not just for the evolution of men but also of society as a whole.

This book is written in two parts: theory and practice. In the first part of the book, I will use theoretical concepts from the fields of psychology and medicine to discuss how we see men in contemporary Western society and the unique problems they are currently facing. I will illuminate the negative effects that a traditional, antiquated image of men can have and explain why it is highly sensitive men in particular who have the power to bring about necessary change and who thus have huge social value. I will then give you an overview of how the concept of high sensitivity was developed and describe exactly what high sensitivity is, as well as what it is not, and how you can tell whether you yourself are highly sensitive. You will learn what the typical characteristics of highly sensitive men are, but also how being highly sensitive can be both a challenge and an asset. And you will also learn to differentiate high sensitivity from psychological disorders.

In the second half of the book, I will give you practical tools that will help you deal with the challenges of being highly sensitive and the situations that highly sensitive people often find difficult. I will show you how you can fundamentally improve the quality of your everyday life through emotional regulation, mindfulness, acceptance, relaxation, self-compassion, and self-care. And I’ll show you the best way of putting these techniques into practice. I will offer you concrete exercises and numerous strategies that have been particularly helpful to my highly sensitive clients over the years.

Each chapter is also followed by a conversation with a highly sensitive man. In these sections, the men describe what effect their high sensitivity has had on their careers, their sexuality, and their relationships, and how they’ve learned to deal with its downsides and get the most out of their disposition. The book ends with a conversation between Elaine Aron and myself about the key role that highly sensitive men have in the world today.

As a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, it is, of course, in my nature to ask you to reflect on many questions over the course of this book, rather than just giving you a set of directives to follow. In doing so, I hope to spark off a process in which you begin to deal with your sensitivity in a very personal way. Once you have read this book, my hope is that you will feel more able to accept yourself as a highly sensitive man, exactly as you are, and that you will have learned to better look after yourself in your daily life. It would make me particularly happy if, through reading this book, any lingering feeling of being “not quite right” diminishes and that you learn to like your sensitive side more. Although I am aware of the limits of self-help books, I also believe in the power of books, which often leave behind subtle but far-reaching traces in us.

PART 1

The Phenomenon of High Sensitivity

CHAPTER 1

A Turning Point in Masculinity: The Importance of Highly Sensitive Men in Society

HAS THE TIME COME FOR male emancipation? And if so, then what would that emancipation look like? While feminism is experiencing its “fourth wave,” men seem to be having a much harder time dealing with themselves and their place in society. And yet anyone who follows current trends in the media will have noticed that questions around male identity and role models and men’s psychological well-being have been an increasingly common topic of discussion over the last few years. You only have to open a magazine or newspaper, turn on your TV, or open your browser to discover an ever-growing interest in stories about being a father, being a man, or how to balance a career with a family. Many of these articles have started talking about an apparent “crisis of masculinity.”

The headlines for these articles attempt to address male identity, but often fall into the trap of sounding ironic and sometimes even sarcastic and critical: “Men in Crisis: Time to Pull Yourselves Together,”¹ “The Weaker Sex,”² “Crisis in Masculinity: Who is the Stronger Sex?”³ and “Search for Identity: Super-Dads or Vain Peacocks”⁴ are just a few examples. They all seem to agree to some extent that there is a crisis. But reading these articles, one gets the impression that no one really knows how to even start dealing with the problem, let alone what a solution to it might look like. One also gets the impression from these articles that we need to keep any genuine sympathy for these “poor men” in check: the patriarchy is still just too dominant to allow ourselves that luxury.

In this chapter, I want to begin by dealing with the question of how men are really doing in Western societies and to bring in some opinions and studies from the United States, Europe, and beyond. Because this is a book about highly sensitive men, I think it’s important that we clearly outline the social context in which men are currently living. This chapter is therefore, in the first instance, a plea for greater diversity in masculinity—a diversity I believe we need and that could represent a possible solution to our so-called “crisis of masculinity.” I’m also convinced that highly sensitive men have a key role to play in this long-overdue emancipation of men from classic stereotypes of masculinity, precisely because they challenge and therefore expand our image of the “typical strong man.”

Is Masculinity in Crisis?

Though it was founded in 1901, it took the renowned British Psychological Society until 2014 to dedicate a whole issue of its journal, The Psychologist, to the psychological health of men.⁵ This followed a series of discussions among politicians and in the media about an apparent “crisis of masculinity” that was raging in the country.⁶ But this recent interest in the male psyche and in male identity isn’t just a European phenomenon. In the United States, too, the term toxic masculinity, describing a particularly unhealthy form of male identity, has increasingly been doing the rounds.⁷ Indeed, one of the most influential psychologists of our time, Philip Zimbardo—who gained international notoriety for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment—devoted his last book to the male identity crisis.⁸ Toxic masculinity has also been addressed by British author Jack Urwin in his book Man Up: Surviving Modern Masculinity,⁹ and in Germany, the magazine Der Spiegel published a column dedicated to the topic, titled “It’s a Boy.” The author, Margarete Stokowski, wrote, “There’s an English term, ‘toxic masculinity,’ used to describe a form of masculinity based on dominance and violence that rejects emotions. It’s a problem that boys and men are constantly told that ‘real guys’ don’t cry, are highly, almost animalistically sexual, and crush anything that stands in their way. It’s a problem for both men and women. This is the form of masculinity that we need to address. Just because it’s widespread doesn’t mean that it’s natural.”¹⁰

So it seems everyone is talking about a “crisis in masculinity.” It is a crisis marked by men’s insecurity about their role in society, their identity, their values, their sexuality, their careers, and their relationships.¹¹ At the same time, academics are telling us that “we know far less about the psychological and physical health of men than of women.”¹² Why is this?

Michael Addis, a professor of psychology and a leading researcher into male identity and psychological health, has highlighted a deficit in our knowledge about men suffering from depression and argues that this has cultural, social, and historical roots. If we look at whether gender affects how people experience depression, how they express it, and how it’s treated, it quickly becomes clear that gender has for a long time referred to women and not to men. According to Addis, this is because, socially and historically, men have been seen as the dominant group and thus representative of normal psychological health. Women have thus been understood as the nondominant group, which deviated from the norm, and they have been examined and understood from this perspective. One of the countless problems of this approach is that the experiences and specific challenges of the “dominant group,” in this case men, have remained hidden.¹³

As we have discussed, though, this is finally beginning to change, with men’s psychological health beginning to become part of our public discourse. What in the past was taken for granted is now being questioned. And perhaps it is precisely this questioning and the identification, analysis, and redefining that this entails, that is being understood as a crisis in masculinity and as a challenge to the “stronger sex.”

How Are Men Doing?

While it is true that a higher percentage of women than men will be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or a depressive episode, the suicide rate among men is much higher. In the United States, the suicide rate is notably higher in men than in women. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, men account for 77 percent of the forty-five thousand people who kill themselves every year in the United States. In fact, men commit suicide more than women everywhere in the world.¹⁴ Men are more likely to suffer from addiction,¹⁵ and when men discuss depressive symptoms with their doctor, they are less likely than women to be diagnosed with depression and consequently don’t receive adequate therapeutic and pharmacological treatment.¹⁶

Young men are currently less academically successful at secondary school than young women. The number of men applying to university is now lower than the number of women applying,¹⁷ and a far higher number of men drop out.¹⁸ Men are also far more likely to be arrested. Ninety-three percent of people in prison are men.¹⁹ These are startling numbers.

Even in wealthy industrialized nations, men die on average around five to ten years earlier than women. Although the causes are potentially manifold, medical opinion increasingly points to lifestyle, behavior, and environment, rather than biological difference, as being the most likely reasons behind this disparity between the sexes. Indeed, Dr. Thomas Perls, a professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine, has been researching life expectancy for many years, and he believes that around 70 percent of this difference in life expectancy is due to lifestyle, behavior, and environment, with the remaining 30 percent being attributed to genetic or biological factors.²⁰ The conviction that lifestyle and behavior, rather than biological difference, are the reasons behind men dying earlier than women is also backed up by Dr. Marc Luy’s “cloister study.” His research shows that life expectancy among monks and nuns, who live in a nearly identical environment with a very similar lifestyle, is almost exactly the same. What’s more, the monks who took part in the study lived on average around four years longer than men in the general population. Luy believes that the reasons for this difference are rooted in the monastic lifestyle, which is based on a daily routine that is consciously organized and highly regulated, a healthier lifestyle, and lower levels of stress.²¹

If behavior and lifestyle do indeed have such a decisive impact on men’s psychological and physical health compared with simple biology, then this raises the question, What is influencing men’s behavior and the sometimes self-destructive lifestyle that results from it? The answer, to a very great degree, appears to lie in the socialization of men and the “masculine” values and norms that men consequently internalize and then express in their behavior.

When Is a Man a Man?

If we take a moment to ask ourselves what makes a man “manly,” that is to say, what the social expectations for men are, we will likely come up with different answers. I would assume, however, that many of us would name several classic, traditional masculine attributes: physical strength, stamina, emotional control, stoicism, independence, heterosexuality, drive, bravery, dominance, risk-taking, competitiveness, professional success, and sexual performance. In other words, we would probably describe, more or less, the typical image of the “strong man.” I suspect that words such as sensitive, emotional, delicate, or compassionate would come up less often.

Of course, we have been talking about the “new man” for decades, embodied by the likes of “metrosexuals” and style-conscious figures like David Beckham. There is no question that society’s ideas around male identity have changed over the past decades, and there are plenty of indicators to back this up. For instance, fathers now spend on average eight hours a week on childcare; this is three times as much as was reported in 1965. And they spend on average ten hours on household chores, up from four hours in 1965.²² And yet our image of “new men” is still heavily influenced by those classic, traditional attributes: professional success, stamina, status, performance, self-control, and heterosexuality. This is backed up by numerous psychological studies over the last forty years that tell us that, despite huge social change, the stereotypical image of the “strong man” is still firmly with us at all ages, in all ethnic groups, and among all socio-economic backgrounds. In the face of problems, men tend not to seek out emotional or professional help from other people. They use, more often than women, alcohol or drugs to numb unpleasant feelings and, in crises, tend to try to deal with things on their own, instead of searching out closeness or help from others.²³ A new metrosexual masculinity that focuses simply on external appearance and the existence of paternity leave in many countries (ninety-two countries, but not the United States) have done very little to change this.

The socialization of men, so essential to their identity, lifestyle, and behavior, seems to be a decisive part of the problem. When we talk about socialization, we mean the process of integrating and adapting to the society and culture that surrounds us, through, for instance, the family, school, friends, the church, or the media. Early on in his life, a boy will begin to take on those gender-specific behaviors, attitudes, values, norms, and ideologies that the society in which he is growing up deems to be masculine and acceptable. The unfortunately still popular blue onesie is just the beginning of this process and is a public symbol of a socialization that often takes far more subtle forms.

We know, however, that the internalization of particularly restrictive socially masculine norms can have negative consequences on how a man feels.²⁴ This happens when he begins to feel that the way he is does not fit with the way he thinks he should be. We call this “gender role strain” and “gender role conflict.” Both concepts are used to measure and describe the emotional stress and conflict that men feel when they suffer emotionally from internalizing restrictive and unachievable masculine norms.²⁵ Jim O’Neil, the psychology professor and pioneer who first described gender role conflict, described the concept as follows: “Gender role conflict (GRC) is defined as a psychological state in which socialized gender roles have negative consequences for the person or others.”²⁶ Psychologist Michael Addis also uses this concept in his work, showing that it is precisely those men who have strongly internalized traditional masculine norms and values—such as self-sufficiency, strength, and independence—who have a higher risk of suffering from depressive episodes and are less likely to seek professional help to deal with them.²⁷ It seems that old but still active adages such as “boys don’t cry” and men need to “keep a stiff upper lip” can actually be detrimental to men’s physical and mental health. Certainly, all men could benefit from loosening the restraints put on them by traditional masculine norms and values, but unfortunately, the fear of not being manly enough holds them firmly in place.

The Fear of Not Being Manly Enough

O’Neil believes that men’s fear of not appearing to be masculine enough—or even worse, feminine—is often the main source of the hard and rigid armor that men put on, or allow society to put on them. He argues that this fear of the feminine is connected to strong, negative feelings that are related to stereotypes about feminine values, beliefs, and behaviors and that these stereotypes are formed during our childhoods by parents, peers, and social norms. Men’s conscious and subconscious fear of the feminine has been a consistent theme in academic literature for years.²⁸

I often observe this in my work with male clients—men who quickly feel ashamed when they believe that they haven’t behaved in a way that, in their opinion, fits with the behavior of a “real man.” The process often begins in childhood. Shame is an intense emotion and a powerful tool of socialization. When we feel ashamed, we often connect this with a fear of being shut out, of no longer belonging to a group. Among prehistoric societies, this was a matter of life or death.

But when the internalization of traditional masculine values and ideals has reached such a pitch that it has clear and grave psychological and physical consequences, when it even leads to men dying earlier because they seek out medical help too late or are unaware that they’re even ill, when they won’t ask for help or confide in anyone else, then it is surely high time that we question and broaden our definitions of these traditional masculine values.

I believe that the highly sensitive man has a key role to play in this, because his inborn high sensitivity and the emotionality and subtlety of feeling that comes with it automatically challenge traditional masculine norms, values, and behaviors, such as hardness, toughness, stamina, competitiveness, and self-control. And he does this without necessarily being conscious of it. He does it just by being himself. This is the vital role that the highly sensitive man can play in society—challenging taboos around vulnerability, sensitivity, empathy, and, in particular, emotionality. And all men can profit, be they young or old, heterosexual or homosexual, highly sensitive or not highly sensitive. If a more authentic, holistic, and multifaceted form of masculinity could emerge because of this, a form that would allow all men in society to be sensitive and emotional without having to feel shame, anxiety, or a sense of inferiority, then we all win.

What We Define as Masculine is Not Set in Stone

Society’s view of how a man should be and what attributes are desirable and attractive in him is something that is more flexible than we think. In her book A History of Male Psychological Illness in Britain: 1945–1980, historian Allison Haggett, Ph.D., describes the development of men’s psychological problems in the United Kingdom since the Second World War.²⁹ When I talked to her, she explained to me that she finds the current, very narrow definition of masculinity in the Western world to be “problematic and restrictive,” referencing numerous psychological and medical studies on men’s health.

Haggett also describes how our understanding of typical masculinity has changed radically throughout history and says that, from a historical perspective, it is much harder to define than we might suppose. In her book, she argues that masculine attributes are first and foremost socially constructed and not biologically determined. They are, therefore, prone to change and have often done so in the past. She describes how, during the Georgian era (1714–1830), just before the start of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the picture of a desirable man was completely different from the image we have today. At that time, masculinity was equated with wisdom and virtuousness. Not only was it socially acceptable for a man to express himself emotionally, it was positively desirable. The Georgian man was not afraid of being scorned for showing emotion. According to Haggett, this led to a culture of introspection among men, in which it was socially acceptable to be self-reflective and contemplative.

The central nervous system was also seen as being particularly important in understanding the human body at that time, and it was believed that a particularly nervous or sensitive disposition was a clear indication of a noble or educated background and refinement, not a sign of a lack of masculinity. The finer and more sensitive a man’s nervous system was, the better. What we might now call “weak nerves” used to be something that was valued.

Our understanding of masculinity was, however, profoundly changed by the new focus on productivity and efficiency during the Industrial Revolution and the twentieth century’s two world wars. Since then, open displays of emotion by men, with the exception of anger, have been stigmatized and are commonly seen as something negative and embarrassing.³⁰

In order for men to assert themselves socially and professionally, it became increasingly important in the Western world for them to develop characteristics such as dominance, independence, and high performance. But as we have seen in this chapter, men have paid a high price for this. The rest of society has paid, too: their partners, their families, their children, their siblings, their parents, and their friends. It has affected all of us.

It goes without saying that when I talk about men as a whole, I am generalizing and simplifying enormously. But let us allow ourselves to do just that for a moment so that we can create a picture of the symbiotic interdependence between the sexes. When the position of women in our society changes—which has particularly been the case since the feminist women’s movement from the 1960s onward—then that has an effect on men and vice versa. A man who finds it difficult to recognize his own emotional needs and feelings, and who cannot express these fully to other people, will find relationships with other people difficult and won’t be able to become an emotionally satisfying or emotionally available partner. A man who primarily defines his own self-worth through his professional success or has learned to only express emotional intimacy through his sexuality is just as problematic. Both of these personality aspects will have negative outcomes on his partners, his family, his relationships, his health, and his whole community. It is therefore in the interest of both men and women that men are better able to free themselves from the traditional values of masculinity. This will allow men to open up emotionally, to be seen as multifaceted, to be vulnerable, and to show their emotions without being scared of being shamed for being a “wimp” or a “sissy.” Men and women both profit when they are able to live fully as complete equals—free, autonomous, self-confident, multilayered, and multifaceted, with space for personal growth.

Male Emancipation

So what might male emancipation look like? I don’t believe that all men have to become more sensitive or somehow soften their appearance or their nature, nor do I think that we should be aiming to return to a Georgian ideal of masculinity that values the particular traits of the highly sensitive man. What I do believe is that we need to expand our idea of what masculinity can be and feel able to define it more freely, so that it includes every man and boy as he is, encompassing all of his unique facets, complexities, and contradictions. We need to stop reducing ourselves and being reduced by others. We need to stop seeing everything as black and white and start seeing the great spectrum of shades that exists among men. We need to stop saying “either-or” and start saying “as well as.” Masculine and sensitive, masculine and emotional. And the more that the highly sensitive man is able to deal with and thrive with his high sensitivity, to live with it with more self-confidence, more self-awareness, and more authenticity in the eyes of others, the more he can drive this social change.

If we are going to talk about a crisis of masculinity, then we have to see this crisis as an opportunity. An opportunity for change. Through the process of coming to terms with ourselves, we begin to ask questions and to define things in new ways, which, in turn, changes people’s thinking, their attitudes, and their behavior. This process can be both frightening and unsettling, but it can also be liberating and exciting. Perhaps it is exactly this process that we can see happening all around us and that will eventually allow men to lead more authentic, intimate, emotional, and sensitive lives.

The clinical psychologist Martin Seager is one of the cofounders of the Male Psychology Network of British physicians and psychologists, which organizes an annual conference on the subject of men’s mental health. Seager is convinced that the traditional rules of masculinity put an enormous amount of pressure on men to think, to feel, and to behave in a certain way. When I talked to him, he summarized for me the rules of masculinity.

1 A real man is a fighter and a winner.

2 A real man is a provider and a protector (of women and children).

3 A real man is controlled and disciplined.

Seager doesn’t believe that these social expectations will completely disappear, but he does have the impression that society is currently in the process of changing and broadening the application and the content of these rules. What does this process look like? Well, providing for others could also mean providing for them at an emotional level, instead of just a financial and physical one. These are all important and legitimate ways of being a provider. A man could look after his partner by trying to be emotionally present and available. He could share childcare, which also represents a form of masculine provision and masculine protection. If society as a whole (and men themselves) expects men to fight and to win, then we could also broaden our definition of what that means. What might a contemporary form of masculine fighting look like in the twenty-first century? How about fighting for something that matters to you or fighting for a good cause? How about fighting for your family or your relationship? And could success also mean having close and emotionally satisfying relationships with other people, leading a long psychologically and physically healthy life, and having a career that gives your life meaning? If the only definition of success is status, if professional and sexual success only relates to material wealth, then that can only lead to a situation in which most of us don’t feel successful and our attempts to become real men in our society are going to falter and eventually fail.

To redefine these rules, however, men also need the support of women who allow them to be who they are. And they need the support of other men who treat them with warmth and acceptance and in doing so enable this emancipation from the narrow rules of masculinity.

SUMMARY

This is what the emancipation of men, which, to my mind, is long overdue, could look like. And what could it feel like? How about friendly, fatherly, brotherly, benevolent, accepting, equal, communal, generous, caring, and liberating? Both to ourselves and to others. Including instead of excluding. What would happen if men started to take more notice of their emotional needs and to verbalize them? If they showed the full spectrum of their feelings, not just anger and rage but also loneliness, sadness, helplessness, joy, and excitement? If our society was completely open to boys and men being emotional and sensitive and saw these qualities as something attractive and masculine? Just imagine if men were able to steadily free themselves from the strict categories of what is typically masculine and typically feminine and be less defined by them?

What would change in your friendships, in your relationships, in the way that you parent, in the career that you choose? The aim wouldn’t be to become more feminine or to sweep aside any differences between men and women; that would be neither possible nor desirable. The aim would be to feel freer and lighter, to throw off that heavy old armor.

In order to achieve this, we need highly sensitive men who can be an example to others, showing less sensitive men that they can be sensitive, emotional, tactful, and masculine and that it’s a great way to live your life. A few years ago, I had a long conversation with Christopher Germer, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions.³¹ We covered many topics, including masculine identity, shame, introversion, and high sensitivity. We also spoke about how completely revolutionary it would be, and how much it would change the world, if every man started to try to deal with his feelings and could realize that everything that he felt, thought, and did was automatically manly because he was a man, whether or not society currently saw him as typically masculine. Germer hit the nail on the head when he summed up our conversation by saying, “A man is just a human being living in a male body. We sometimes forget that.”

How can we all make sure that we remind ourselves of this more often?

John: “Free yourself from society’s expectations.”

I think John is a particularly good role model for highly sensitive men because as well as being a highly sensitive man, he is also a highly successful attorney in a professional field that we usually associate with traditional masculine attributes and behaviors. He also talks about how he has tried to free himself from society’s expectation that a man should want to be sexually promiscuous. Interestingly, this is a subject that many highly sensitive men, whether gay or straight, have discussed with me.

When and how did you first notice you were highly sensitive?

That fact that I was more sensitive to stimuli than my peers began to crystalize when I was in my late teens. Looking back now, my first sense was that I couldn’t “endure” activities that were typical for people my age, like going to parties and clubs, because I was too sensitive to noise. It wasn’t until I was a student, around twenty-two, that I started to think that other people might feel the same way and I started to do some research and read around about it. That’s when I came across the concept of high sensitivity.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being highly sensitive?

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, and high sensitivity seems to trigger specific characteristics that—depending on the situation—can be helpful or unhelpful. It means that you have an intense sensory perception, an intense life and experiences. But I could do without the intensity of experiencing acute overstimulation.

Looking back, what sort of messages or feedback would have been helpful to you?

In hindsight, I would’ve liked it if someone had explained to me why I was “different” and how I could deal with that. I would’ve found a role model really helpful, especially when I was going through puberty. Someone who got my sensitive disposition and could’ve helped me find my place in the world. Maybe it would’ve also been good if someone had more clearly communicated to me that it was “okay” to be how I am and that I don’t need to achieve things to be recognized or loved even. On the other hand, the term highly sensitive wasn’t around back then. And my father, who knew about my sensitive nerves, gave me some little practical tips that I still remember to this day. For instance, before my driving test, he instilled in me that I should take it all really slowly.

What are the particular challenges that highly sensitive men face in our society?

I feel like society sees sexually successful men as being promiscuous and also expects that men want to be promiscuous. Because of my high sensitivity, I don’t find it easy to instigate cursory sexual contact. Not wanting to do it isn’t an argument, though: a “real man” should want it. In this regard, I don’t think that men have been successful at emancipating themselves completely from society’s expectations.

How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with other men?

This observation may be something that’s just a coincidence, but I feel that I get along really well with gay men. Two of my good friends came out after I’d known them for a while. Other than that, I tend to be friends with women. I don’t do very well with activities that are “typical for men.” I have a particular problem with competitive sports, perhaps because I know that I don’t have much of a chance in those sort of games. I am just better friends with women. My sense is that they are more communicative. I probably assume that men are going to be more shallow.

How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with women?

I think that high sensitivity makes friendships with women easier. Depth of processing at an emotional level means that you can have deeper conversations. In relation to sexuality, I think I’m a bit insecure when it comes to recognizing sexual interest, eliciting it, and to attracting women. I think you need to exude a really robust self-confidence for that, which doubt-ridden highly sensitive men often don’t have. In terms of romantic relationships, I lack a certain playfulness with women. But if I’m emotionally involved, it feels like the stakes are very high, because the threat of being deeply hurt is so high.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being highly sensitive at work?

I never felt like being highly sensitive played any kind of role in my professional life. Sometimes I’ll be asked how a highly sensitive person deals with the sort of antagonistic situations thrown up by legal fights, which you experience a lot working as an attorney. But this is only an issue if you believe that the aggression in those situations is real and not just part of the game.

My advice for other highly sensitive men … ?

Free yourself from society’s expectations about how you should behave, what your preferences should be, or how you define success or happiness. Accept that you’re going to be following a different set of rules.

CHAPTER 2

Understanding High Sensitivity: The Scientific Background and Why People Differ in Their Innate Sensitivity

YOU MAY WELL HAVE READ a lot about high sensitivity in other books or online, thought long and hard about the term high sensitivity, and already decided that you’re highly sensitive. Or perhaps you’ve read a couple of articles about high sensitivity, heard about it here and there, and wondered whether you, too, might be highly sensitive. Or perhaps you’re not highly sensitive at all, but you have an inkling that your spouse, your partner, your son, your son-in-law, your brother, your father, or one of your friends might be highly sensitive and you want to better understand what it means. Maybe someone gave you this book as a present or lent it to you because that person thinks that you could be highly sensitive. Whatever the reason is that you’re reading these pages, I’m really happy that you’re here. Because the more people who know about high sensitivity and really understand what it is, the better.

In this chapter, so that you get a really clear idea of exactly what high sensitivity is, I want to give you a compact but detailed overview of the academic research on the subject. This will increase your knowledge about high sensitivity and give you a firm grounding in the theoretical background. I will also explain the scientific context, showing how high sensitivity complements the better-known term introversion. At the same time, it’s important to me that you understand that the concept of high sensitivity is based on the results of numerous robust scientific studies from around the world and represents a serious field of scientific research. It is in no way some sort of “new age” phenomenon. One can get this impression when one sees the myriad ways in which people try to sell the term high sensitivity and the way it is sometimes presented in online forums. High sensitivity is neither a silver bullet nor some sort of sixth sense. Highly sensitive people haven’t traveled from another galaxy, nor are they necessarily gifted. It is not a psychological disorder, but a neutral temperamental trait that can help to explain many things, but not all things. It is also very important to differentiate high sensitivity from a temporary psychological sensitivity during stressful life events or a short-term period of feeling thin-skinned after, for instance, suffering trauma or during a period of depression or anxiety. High sensitivity is not a temporary state, but a constant trait that you are born with and will carry with you for the whole of your life.

Sensitivity, Introversion, and Extroversion

We are all different, and we arrive in the world with some of these differences. Anyone who has kids or who has friends and family with kids knows that newborn babies already differ from each other, even in their very first few weeks of life. Before we have been influenced by experiences, other people, our education, or any number of other factors that help form our personalities, we are already reacting differently to stimuli and consequently display different behavioral tendencies. “She’s a much worse sleeper than her sister,” “She cries much more than her brothers and sisters,” or “He feeds really slowly because he’s always distracted by things he sees” are just a few of the kinds of comments I’ve heard from parents describing and comparing their children. So children’s innate temperaments have a substantial influence on them and are observable from Day 1. And a child’s temperament also has an influence on its parents’ behavior, which, in turn, influences how secure the parent–child bond is. This means that differences in temperaments between parents and children can sometimes lead to problems in this relationship and that parents can sometimes become frustrated if they feel that their child has a “difficult” temperament. I can recall a highly sensitive client who was often yelled at and even punished by her stressed and overworked mother because, as a child, she cried far more often that her elder sister and her mother couldn’t bear it.

If we are going to talk about temperament, this, of course, raises the question of what the term temperament actually means. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460–375 BC) was one of the first Western thinkers to tackle the question of temperament, developing his own temperamental theory. Since then, countless writers, philosophers, doctors, psychologists, and academics have explored the idea of temperaments and defined a range of different temperamental traits. To this day, research into human temperaments remains an important area of developmental psychology.

Professor Silvia Schneider of Ruhr University, Bochum, offers a clear and easily comprehensible definition of what temperament actually is: “The word temperament describes a constitutional factor that is inherited and which predisposes someone to react to situations and people in specific ways. Temperamental traits can be understood as those that form the basis for the development of the personality, appear early in life, are stable over time, and which are influenced by biological factors.”¹

Simply put, our temperament is the basis of our personalities and the complex interaction between our temperament and our environment forms our personality.² Researchers disagree on exactly how stable temperamental traits are. There is, nevertheless, broad agreement on the fact that our temperament represents a relatively permanent tendency that affects how we react and interact with the world from early childhood onward.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was the first person to talk about “innate sensitivity.” Jung believed that around 25 percent of all people are born with a particularly sensitive disposition and that this sensitivity has a decisive influence on people’s worldview. Jung introduced the terms introversion and extroversion into personality psychology to describe two different natures that influence people’s perception, intuition, thinking, feelings, and behavior. According to Jung, introverted people are more inclined to direct their energy and their attention inward and toward their inner processes (feeling and thinking, for instance), whereas extroverted people are more strongly inclined to direct their physical energy outward.³ Since then, numerous researchers into personality traits, including Jung himself, have continued to develop the concept of introversion and extroversion.

One of these researchers was the German-born British psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck, who related Jung’s concept to Hippocrates’s temperamental theory and believed that there is a neurological basis for the differences between introverted and extroverted people. In 1968, he described the typical introvert as someone who is quiet, introspective, rather reserved (except with very close friends), and loves books more than people. Introverts tend to make plans in advance, be cautious, and not like impulsive actions. They don’t like arousal, approach daily life with a certain seriousness, and value a well-ordered life. Eysenck describes the typical extrovert as sociable, as someone who likes events, has many friends, needs people to talk to, and doesn’t like being alone. Extroverts crave excitement, are constantly making the most of opportunities, react spontaneously, take risks, and are generally more impulsive.⁴

As such, Jung’s concept of innate sensitivity began to shift to a difference between observable extroverted and introverted behaviors in people. Jung’s theory of extroversion and introversion continues to be hugely important, and it has had a decisive influence on research into both temperament and personality. In the most commonly used model of personality psychology, the Big Five, extroversion is included alongside openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And there continues to be widespread interest in the concept of extroversion and introversion outside of academic research, as evidenced by the success of books like Susan Cain’s brilliant bestseller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

Another researcher influenced by Jung’s theory of extroversion and introversion is Jerome Kagan, professor of developmental psychology at Harvard University. Based on the results of his longitudinal studies, begun in the 1970s, Kagan differentiates between two groups of children: inhibited children and uninhibited children. According to Kagan, these two types represent relatively stable temperamental traits that follow us throughout our lives and that can only be influenced by environmental factors to a limited extent. Schneider summarizes Kagan’s results as follows:

Behavioral inhibition can be defined as a withdrawn, cautious, avoidant, and shy behavior in new and unfamiliar situations, such as meeting new people or dealing with unfamiliar objects and environments. This behavior can already be evident at the age of eight months. In babies, behavioral inhibition manifests itself as an easily triggered irritability (for instance, crying or screaming), in infants as shy and anxious behavior, and in school children as socially withdrawn behavior. The stability of this temperamental trait into adolescence has been demonstrated in a number of studies.⁵

According to Kagan, around 20 percent of all children exhibit inhibited behavior. These children have a lower arousal threshold than other children, particularly in unfamiliar situations. This means that their sympathetic nervous systems respond in a more reactive way to these stimuli. The sympathetic nervous system is part of the autonomic nervous system, alongside the parasympathetic nervous system, which is involved in activities such as digestion when we are at rest. The sympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is involved in stimulating activities that affect our heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tone, and metabolism. When confronted with an unfamiliar situation or a new stimulus, inhibited children—in contrast to uninhibited children—will exhibit shy, cautious, and withdrawn behavior, while simultaneously exhibiting increased stress symptoms in their sympathetic nervous system, such as muscle tension and a heightened heart rate.

Numerous other researchers on temperament, including the psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, have developed a range of different categories and models to differentiate between various temperamental traits. In their longitudinal study on temperamental development, which ran from 1956 to the 1990s in New York, Thomas and Chess observed the behavioral characteristics of babies and defined nine new temperamental dimensions.⁶ They were able to assign a clear temperamental type to 65 percent of the babies: 40 percent were categorized as “easy” babies, 10 percent were “difficult” babies, and around 15 percent were categorized as “slow to warm up.” In a book on high sensitivity, you can probably guess that it is the babies who were “slow to warm up” that we are interested in. The babies in this group were withdrawn when they had to deal with new people or situations and needed more time to get used to them. This means that they were initially behaviorally inhibited, but they then particularly benefitted from repeated contact and increased familiarity with new situations, people, or objects.7, 8 Their activity levels were lower and their sensitivity to subtle stimuli greater, and they reacted less emotionally than babies with “difficult” temperaments.

What these scientific findings suggest is that Jung was probably right when he posited that “many people are more sensitive than others from birth onwards.” And it also seems to be the case that children described as “inhibited” have similar characteristics to those described in other studies as “slow to warm up”: a stronger physical and emotional reaction to new and unfamiliar situations and stimuli and withdrawn behavior. What research has also been able to show is that alongside visible differences in behavior, there are also underlying physical and biochemical differences between inhibited and uninhibited children, as well as between extroverted and introverted adults. Introverted people, for instance, display a lower pain threshold and generally react more sensitively to external stimulation, such as visual and aural stimuli.⁹ Both the British psychologist Jeffrey Alan Gray and the American psychiatrist C. Robert Cloninger have created influential models that suggest that personality differences between people can be explained by biological causes.¹⁰

For a long time, though, inhibited behavior among children had been judged negatively because it was connected with the development of anxiety disorders in adulthood. A sensitivity to new environmental stimuli was seen as representing a higher level of vulnerability or susceptibility and was thus judged to be a risk factor in the development of psychological problems, as well as being connected with shyness in both children and adults.

But could being more sensitive to external stimuli actually be advantageous? And could the same fundamental higher sensitivity be the underlying cause of all of these different behavioral characteristics, be they “slow to warm up,” “behaviorally inhibited,” “withdrawn,” or “introverted”? It was these questions that a series of researchers began to ask in the 1990s, with fascinating results.

The Advantages of Being More Sensitive to Your Environment

So we have now learned that research into temperament suggests that, pretty much from birth onward, people register information from their environment differently from each other and also that they differ in their observable reactions and behaviors. These differences in sensitivity are not only seen among people, but have also been observed to date in over one hundred different animals, including rhesus monkeys, mice, dogs, zebra finches, fruit flies, and fish.¹¹

Be it in a human being or a zebra finch, we can observe two distinct strategies when animals or people are faced with new or what initially appear to be threatening situations. One group behaves reactively, that is to say, they wait and become observant and cautious before they act. The other group, however, when faced with the same situation, reacts proactively, displaying daring and aggressive behavior and actively exploring the situation. Neither of these strategies is better than the other, both have advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation, so it seems that, for many species, it has paid off to retain both types.

Since the 1990s, a number of different models and hypotheses have been created to explain the individual differences in human sensitivity, including Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess’s differential susceptibility theory, W. Thomas Boyce and Bruce J. Ellis’s biological sensitivity to context, and Elaine Aron’s sensory processing sensitivity. Although these theories all have their differences, the Swiss psychologist and researcher Pluess uses the umbrella term environmental sensitivity to broadly describe all of them.¹² What all of these theories have in common, in comparison to the earlier temperamental theories outlined above, is that they foreground the term sensitivity, which they judge neutrally, sometimes even identifying advantages associated with this higher sensitivity. Numerous studies over the past few years have clearly shown that those people who react more sensitively to their environment, react more strongly not only to negative events but also to positive events.

This means that being highly sensitive does not, as had previously been thought, necessarily lead to an increase in psychological vulnerabilities or disadvantages, but that, on the contrary, in the right surroundings, it can actually be an advantage. Both Belsky and Pluess have been able to show that it is precisely those particularly sensitive children, whom we once called “slow to warm up,” “difficult,” or “behaviorally inhibited,” who most profit from a caring and loving relationship with their parents and consequently receive better grades and display higher social competencies than those children with “easy” temperaments.¹³ As Pluess said during a conversation with me, “We were able to show that children with ‘difficult’ temperaments developed better in positive, supportive surroundings than other children, precisely because their higher sensitivity meant that they reacted more strongly to positive influences.” This is what Pluess calls “differential susceptibility”—that being sensitive means you suffer more from being in a negative environment, but also that you thrive more in a positive environment.

Belsky and Pluess believe that there are biological and evolutionary reasons why differences in individuals’ sensitivities could be advantageous for a whole species when faced with uncertain conditions. If one strategy does not pay off, then the existence of the species could be assured by the alternative strategy. According to Belsky and Pluess, these differences manifest themselves in a more sensitive central nervous system and are influenced by genetics and prenatal and early postnatal factors. These individuals then react more sensitively to their environment and are thus more formed by it, a process that they can profit from.¹⁴ It could thus be the case that differences in the sensitivity of people’s nervous systems is a natural phenomenon.

Boyce and Ellis’s theory of biological sensitivity to context is also based on the idea that being more sensitive is not necessarily a disadvantage for those affected, and can indeed be an advantage. But this is only the case when these particularly sensitive children grow up in a caring, loving, and supportive environment. Then the advantages of their sensitive nature becomes clear because they profit more strongly from these positive experiences and relationships than those who are less sensitive, precisely because they are so open to and affected by external influences and thus are more influenced by them than less sensitive children.

Boyce, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, has been able to observe that around 15 to 20 percent of all children react particularly sensitively to their environment. He refers to these children as “orchid children” and calls all other children “dandelion children,” because, like robust dandelions, they can “grow anywhere” and have less “complicated care needs.” The orchid children, on the other hand, are more pliable and react more sensitively to their environment. Boyce discovered that orchid children react particularly strongly to negative factors in their surroundings, which he measured based on their heart rates and their levels of cortisol (which is sometimes called the stress hormone because it is released at increasingly high levels when people are stressed). These children tended to react more often with behavioral problems when faced with negative situations in the family, such as money worries, illness, or parental conflict, in comparison with the dandelion children. In later life, these orchid children were more susceptible to developing problematic behaviors and psychological problems, including drug abuse and depression. But if those same particularly sensitive and malleable children grew up in low-stress, loving, and supportive surroundings, then they were happier, more productive, and healthier than the dandelion children.15, 16

What becomes clear when we take a close look at these recent studies is that all of us differ in our environmental sensitivity. And while particularly sensitive temperaments were described in earlier studies only indirectly and often negatively—with researchers believing that being more sensitive could make people more susceptible to psychological disorders—current research suggests that high levels of sensitivity are an essential and completely neutral trait. In other words, being more sensitive can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage. This is completely dependent on which experiences the highly sensitive person has in the environment in which they grow up or live. The researchers whose work we have looked at in the second half of this chapter believe that natural selection led to the development of two discrete evolutionary strategies that guaranteed the survival of our species. The advantage of the reactive or sensitive strategy could be that organisms, whether human or animal, are more vigilant, sensitive, and adaptable when faced with potential opportunities and threats in their environments and social groups. Consequently, they are better able to adapt their future behavior to these new situations.

So the next time that you as a highly sensitive man find yourself in a full, loud, and sticky train car and feel unwell or tense while your traveling companion appears to be calm, can concentrate on the newspaper despite the noise, and is even able to order a hot coffee, just remember that your sensitivity is not just a disadvantage, even if it feels so in moments like this. Because it’s likely that you’re reacting more strongly not only to the negative aspects of this situation but also to the positive: the golden field of flowers that the train is speeding past, the colors of the sunset, the trees and the shrubs, some good news in your friend’s newspaper, or a funny or loving interaction in the family sitting opposite you.

Elaine Aron’s Concept of High Sensitivity

One of the researchers investigating sensitivity during the 1990s was Elaine Aron, and she was the first to observe and identify the phenomenon of high sensitivity. Aron sees high sensitivity—or sensory processing sensitivity, to use the scientific term—as a neutral, innate temperamental trait. Highly sensitive people observe things in great detail exhaustively, think longer and more deeply before they take action, and generally react more emotionally to positive as well as negative occurrences in their surroundings. This can be observed externally as a pattern of behavior in which people are more hesitant, “slow to warm up,” or “behaviorally inhibited.” But Aron believes that the underlying cause of this observable behavior is that highly sensitive people process stimuli more deeply. Using the questionnaire that she developed during her research—the Highly Sensitive Person Scale—Aron was able to show that highly sensitive people react more strongly to both positive and negative images, that they register small visual details more quickly, and even that they benefit more strongly from therapeutic interventions than non–highly sensitive people.17, 18 Using brain imaging technology, Aron was able to show over the course of numerous studies that there were differences in the brain activity of highly sensitive and non–highly sensitive people. In highly sensitive adults, the areas of the brain connected with information processing, consciousness, empathy, and activity planning, such as the insular cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus, are all more active than in individuals who are not highly sensitive. The psychologist Bianca Acevedo summarizes the results of these studies as follows:

Collectively, the present results support the notion that sensory processing sensitivity is a trait associated with enhanced awareness and responsiveness to others’ moods, as it engages brain systems involved in sensory information processing and integration, action planning, and overall awareness. These findings highlight how the highly sensitive brain mediates greater attunement and action planning needed to respond to the environment, particularly in relevant social contexts.¹⁹

Aron’s early research from the 1990s shows that around 15 to 20 percent of all people are highly sensitive, although Pluess suggests that the most recent research, in which Aron was also involved, estimates this figure to be around 30 percent. Pluess has also shown that there are three, rather than two distinct sensitivity groups, as previously thought, on a sensitivity continuum: a high sensitive group (31%), a medium sensitive group (40%) and a low sensitive group (29%). So not just “orchids” and “dandelions,” but also “tulips.”²⁰

Aron differentiates high sensitivity from introversion and has been able to show that around 30 percent of all highly sensitive people are, in fact, extroverted.²¹ This means, of course, that around 70 percent of all highly sensitive people are indeed introverted. Aron believes that high sensitivity can exist alongside a range of other apparently contradictory temperamental and personality traits, such as “sensation seeking.”²² The term sensation seeking was coined by the clinical psychologist Marvin Zuckermann, who has been researching this characteristic since the 1960s. He uses the term sensation seeking to describe people who seek out variety and new experiences, and, according to Zuckermann, it is a trait that is inheritable in 60 percent of cases.23, 24 This characteristic tends to be connected to behaviors that can be described as “adventure-, risk- and excitement-seeking.” Sensation seekers are more quickly bored than other people and thus seek out variety and potentially risky activities more often than other people. They tend to be restless when they find themselves in situations that offer little stimulation or variety. Zuckermann suggests that more men than women are sensation seekers and that those behaviors that accompany this trait tend to be moderated by age. Having a tendency to seek out risk, variety, and excitement, while also being highly sensitive, is something that Aron often compares to having “one foot on the brake, the other on the gas.”²⁵

Aron also differentiates between high sensitivity and neuroticism—the tendency to react anxiously or depressively. Aron believes that highly sensitive people only have a higher risk of developing anxiety, depression, or shyness in life if they had a childhood that involved significantly negative experiences and an environment that badly clashed with their temperaments. The particular malleability of highly sensitive children again plays a decisive role here, specifically the question of how well the attributes, expectations, behaviors, and challenges of a child’s social environment fit their temperament—what in psychology we often call “goodness of fit.” If the fit is good, or good enough, then, according to Aron, highly sensitive children will develop just as well, if not better, than children who are not highly sensitive, which tallies with the research of Boyce, Ellis, Belsky, and Pluess. It is, of course, completely possible that a highly sensitive adult will experience a depressive episode or other psychological problems in life, despite experiencing a safe and loving childhood, but what we can say is that high sensitivity in itself does not automatically lead to an increase in the likelihood of suffering from depression or anxiety.

SUMMARY

My hope is that you now feel that you have a broad enough knowledge about the academic background of high sensitivity and that you are better able to place the concept scientifically. Since the 1990s, high sensitivity, or sensory processing sensitivity, has represented a specific and active field of research that underpins the scientific basis of what Jung was already describing in 1913 as “innate sensitivity.” Around the middle of the last century, this innate sensitivity was described using an array of different terms. High sensitivity has a biological and evolutionary explanation, can be demonstrated in measurable differences in brain activity, and has recently been connected to a range of genetic variations, including in the neurotransmitters (the messengers of our nervous system) serotonin and dopamine.26, 27 For a long time, sensitivity was believed to be equivalent to introversion, despite the fact that we now know that high sensitivity and introversion are two separate things. These two phenomena do often go hand in hand, however, but we also know that around 30 percent of all highly sensitive people display extroverted behaviors in social settings. According to Aron, high sensitivity is a temperamental trait, whereas introversion and extroversion are personality styles that develop over the course of one’s life and describe our social behavior. She thus believes that we are born highly sensitive, whereas introversion and extroversion are learned.

For the sake of our quality of life, our happiness, and our psychological health, it is very important that we are able to recognize whether we are highly sensitive or not. This is the question that we will be addressing in the next chapter, while tackling the typical characteristics and difficulties that highly sensitive men have to deal with in daily life.

Darryl: “For me, the positive aspects of my high sensitivity outweigh the negatives; the advantages and disadvantages are two sides of the same coin.”

Darryl is in his early thirties. He is a musician and is training to be a masseur. His story illustrates how high sensitivity and the characteristics connected to it can be assets. He’s found that aspects of his temperament are useful in his work as both a musician and masseur. And he actively seeks ways to accommodate his temperament; I like that he is seeking out other musicians to play with onstage rather than allowing his stage fright to force him offstage completely. In the interview, Daryl mentions a diagnosis of “social phobia,” and it is important to mention here that there is a difference between high sensitivity and social phobia, because the latter is a psychological disorder, not a temperamental trait (see chapter 4). Social phobia is a distinct fear of being the center of attention in social situations and is accompanied by symptoms of anxiety, avoidant behavior, and distress. This is not necessarily the case with high sensitivity. Of course, it is possible for highly sensitive people to pick up and react more strongly to subtle social stimuli or develop social anxiety more rapidly in the face of negative social experiences than less sensitive individuals. It is also possible to be both highly sensitive and also socially anxious.

When and how did you first notice you were highly sensitive?

In 2008, my cognitive behavioral psychotherapist—who I was seeing about my social anxiety—pointed out that I might be highly sensitive. I believe that my high sensitivity contributed to the development of my social anxiety, but only in interaction with some unpleasant external influences from my childhood. I then read a few books about the subject and was immediately convinced that my therapist was right, because I saw myself in so many of the highly sensitive characteristics described, which I hadn’t previously had any explanation for and which didn’t seem to be completely explained by social phobia.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being highly sensitive?

For me, the positive aspects of my high sensitivity outweigh the negatives; the advantages and disadvantages are two sides of the same coin. The “advantages” for me are my rich inner life, my strong fantasies and creativity, my feel for aesthetic things, and the ability to be on my own without feeling bored. I’d also say that I have a very clear sense of justice, that I’m very empathetic, thorough, and conscientious. The “disadvantages” are that I get quickly overstimulated, I’m a perfectionist, I tend to doubt myself and be very self-critical, and I’m sometimes quite hesitant and not very spontaneous. It can also sometimes be a problem that I need time out, to protect myself from too much stimulation, and that I often feel emotionally overwhelmed.

Looking back, what sort of messages or feedback would have been helpful to you?

“If you’re different from other people, that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you; it means you’re special.”

“Always listen to what your body and your intuition are trying to tell you and stick with that.”

“Your sensitivity is really important for society as a whole. You can do a lot of good.”

“The particular way you see the world is an asset.”

“Feelings are never right or wrong; (we can just deal with them well or less well).”

“It’s completely fine if you’re shy, quiet, or withdrawn.”

What are the particular challenges that highly sensitive men face in our society?

I think as a highly sensitive man I have traits that might be seen as “feminine” and other traits that would be seen as “masculine.” Sometimes I’m quite reserved, quiet, and need harmony in my life. I think a lot about my emotional life, practice yoga and meditation, and am interested in spiritual things. I react sensitively to physical violence or shocking images in, for instance, films. I’m also not very interested in cars or technical things, and my physical build is quite slim. At the same time, I also have lots of “manly” characteristics and preferences, like football and drinking beer. I like to exhaust myself physically and can also be dominant and strong-willed. Generally, my sense is that many women, but also men, actually really value this mixture of “feminine” and “masculine” characteristics.

How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with other men?

I have as many male friends as female friends and don’t see many differences in those relationships. In terms of my relationships with men, it could be a disadvantage that I have a strong need for harmony, have difficulties setting boundaries, and am not interested in competition among men. However, one advantage in the way I relate to other men is that I often pick up on things that they don’t notice about themselves, like particular feelings. For instance, my brother and my father—they both have a real flair for analytical thinking, but I would say that they find it hard to access their feelings, like anger or sadness. I feel like I’m sometimes able to help them by acting like a kind of “emotional mirror.” At the same time, I do think I have to be really careful with them and make sure I’m “speaking their language,” because I think I’ve been addressing my feelings in a far more direct way for a lot longer, including with two therapists. I’ve noticed that men who are comfortable with themselves and with their masculinity don’t have any problems with my high sensitivity and, in fact, are able to value it. On the other hand, men who have problems with their self-worth, if, for instance, they don’t acknowledge the shy or introverted sides of their personality, tend to demean highly sensitive characteristics in other men. I’ve experienced that myself regularly, also with women.

How does your high sensitivity affect your relationships with women?

I am often reserved and cautious when it comes to approaching new people and need a lot of time to open up. When it comes to talking to attractive women, to flirting and initiating intimacy, I’m often very hesitant and tense. In my experience, highly sensitive and shy men have a far harder time when it comes to all of that, because in our society it’s sadly still the case that people expect men to make the first move, to “bowl women over,” and to actively initiate sex. Because of that, I’m still quite unhappy with my sex life. But the moment that I’ve got past that first stage, then everything’s great, and I’m sure that my high sensitivity plays a role in that. I can have very intense, deep conversations with women about feelings, about spiritual topics and about relationships, and I find it easy to put myself in my partner’s shoes. I also experience sex with a woman very intensely.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of being highly sensitive at work?

I recently started the training to become a masseur. My high sensitivity helps me to intuitively notice things about my clients. I’m very perceptive when I work and often need to process that, usually by taking a little break between clients. As a musician, my high sensitivity really helps my creative process: intuition, empathy, a feel for aesthetics and details, but also for the bigger picture, conscientiousness, and the ability to really immerse myself in my art. At the same time, my precision can also quickly turn into perfectionism. If I have to be the center of attention, have to present myself and sell myself (whether online or onstage), then I feel very inhibited and often get very nervous, especially if I have to stand on the stage on my own and sing. Because of this, I haven’t performed very much, which has held me back professionally. I’m currently looking for other musicians to play with me to help me deal with that.

What’s your advice for other highly sensitive men?

Unconditionally accept your own personality, your past, and your life story, as well as your present situation in life. Research your high sensitivity by reading books and talking to other people about it. I also think that positively reinterpreting life events from your past and your characteristics with your newfound knowledge about your high sensitivity is also really important. At the same time, you need to organize your own life according to your highly sensitive nature and stop trying to constantly fulfill everyone else’s expectations. Pay more attention to the signals that your body’s giving you and to your intuition, by practicing mindfulness meditation, for instance. And last but not least: take a walk in the woods—barefoot is best!

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