Lost In Our Reactions

"If the dimension of presence or awareness is missing, then you are lost in the reaction. Then you become the reaction, and you don’t know who you are." - Eckhart Tolle

Being very reactive to life, with high sensitivity, can be a distressing and disorienting experience. Probably starting when we were too young to have the cognitive ability to sort it out, many of us learned that identifying ourselves as sensitive (at least privately, not to others) helped make sense of the turmoil.

But some writers such as Eckhart Tolle warn about losing our authenticity with identity labels we give ourselves, or accept from others.

In her article Every Blessing and Curse is a Choice. Choose the Blessing!, Jenna Forrest writes about being highly sensitive as a child: “I would bet that a lot of us were fully prepared for our own funerals by about age seven, figuring that we were soon going to die from sensory overload. From the very beginning, the world was stirring me like a whisk.

“Life in general felt upside down, inside out and backwards. From my three-foot tall childhood viewpoint, my city looked littered; the music in our house was too loud; chemical cleaners and detergents smelled too strong; and cars sped too fast. Sensing the bad mood of every stranger walking down the street didn’t help.”

Jenna Forrest is author of Help Is On Its Way: A Memoir About Growing Up Sensitive.

Elaine Aron, PhD (author of The Highly Sensitive Person) addresses one of her newsletters to sensitive teenagers, explaining why at this period of life people may be hiding their sensitivity even more than at other times.

She notes, “Persons your age may score lower than others on the sensitivity self-test and still be highly sensitive. This is because adolescence is the time in life when people born with this trait are often the least sensitive, especially to noise and having to do more than one thing at once.

“Also, there are as many baby boys born who are highly sensitive as there are girls. By your age most males score lower on the self-test. The reason is obvious. It is so difficult to be highly sensitive in this culture if you are a man. So most sensitive men and boys are trying to hide their sensitivity.”

From newsletter article by Elaine Aron: For Highly Sensitive Teenagers, Part I: Feeling Different (on her site www.hsperson.com).

As adults, we may still be sensitive to other people and situations that cause distress. But there may be value in distinguishing reactivity from sensitivity.

In his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose Eckhart Tolle writes about spiritual development and gaining awareness of our real identity and calling.

A viewer of Oprah and Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth Online Class, Tenisha asked about reactivity, first quoting Tolle from his book: “What is reactivity? Becoming addicted to reaction. The more reactive you, the more entangled you become with form. The more identified with form, the stronger the ego.” (From the article "Eckhart Tolle On Sensitivity," an excerpt from the class transcript.)

Tenisha continued, “I’ve always related being reactive to being sensitive. And being sensitive allows me to be very passionate about things, allows me to connect with other people and be emotionally available to my friends and family.

“So my question is, how can I retain sensitivity and be passionate about things and keep that, but not allow my ego to get stronger?”

Tolle responded, “Well, reaction may appear to be a sign of sensitivity, but actually reaction is not sensitive. Reaction is a conditioned way of responding to a situation… all reaction really comes from the past because it’s part of the way in which you’ve been conditioned. And because it comes from the past, it is never totally adequate to the present moment.

“So sensitivity is actually lost when you’re reactive, and true sensitivity comes when you are absolutely present in a situation and see, This is how it is, and you totally face the situation as it is.”

Being truly present, even in the middle of a stressful experience, is the challenge. We can still keep and make use of our sensitivity to be caring and creative, if we aren't overwhelmed with reacting.