Imprisoned for my Sensitivity

Imprisoned for my Sensitivity

I am a ‘Born Again Highly Sensitive Person’ and I write this singing Hallelujah having discovered the Highly Sensitive Refuge on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

I say Born again because I was given a diagnosis of ‘Highly Sensitive’ by my first Psychiatrist at the age of 21 when I was hospitalised for two weeks. Eighteen years later at the age of 39 I was given the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder by my second Psychiatrist. So what had happened in those 18 years? I had repressed my sensitivity as men are meant to do. Repressing sensitivity in my case led to binge drinking and self medicating my sensitivity with cannabis thus leading to a drug induced psychosis.

Dear readers and fellow HSPs I have been imprisoned for my sensitivity.

On 7/7/2005 I was sitting outside a Coffee Shop in Amsterdam when the news of the bombs in London came through. I over reacted to this news as I had over reacted to other news stories in the past. I began a ‘Shamanic Trance Journey’ or as the medical profession would classify it ‘A drug induced psychosis’. The bombs in London triggered 18 years worth and longer of repressed sensitivity. You can imagine that I am writing this now with a huge sense of relief and gratitude in finding the highly sensitive refuge. Writing has been my salvation and the area to where I have sublimated my sensitivity. I no longer touch mind altering substances. I only have to watch the news to do that. I haven’t had a Television Set since 2005 and all my news is carefully filtered in bite size chunks through my Computer Screen. I am expressing in writing, here, my preference for the first diagnosis. I have not taken psychotropic medication for my ‘alleged’ Bipolar Disorder since 2008 so a full decade and I think that if I was a full blown manic depressive then I would have had a repeat of the symptoms which led to the Dutch Court and Justice System declaring me 'not guilty' due to insanity and the Psychiatric profession in the UK diagnosing me with Bipolar Disorder as opposed to Borderline Personality Disorder which was the preference of the prison psychiatric team in the Netherlands. That is an awful lot of diagnoses and disorders for a highly sensitive person. This highly sensitive person spent 114 days in a Dutch Prison between August 8th and December 9th 2005 because I had over reacted to the bombings in London but also because I had used threatening language in a bank. The fact that I had only a tattered shirt, dirty jeans and flip flops on when the police came to arrest me testifies to the ‘Walk of Cain’ that I endured between 7/7/2005 and 8/8/2005. A full month of madness sponsored by various credit cards. Needless to say when I came back to the UK I was a less sensitive person. I wrote a blog about my experiences which was then turned into a book by a mental health publisher. I have also subscribed to the idea that I am mentally ill but perhaps I have been highly sensitive all along. What if sensitivity became pathologized and we all ended up in the DSM V. Granted mine was an extreme case but it does make me wonder how many sensitive people have been misdiagnosed as mentally ill and needlessly medicated and poisoned. Highly sensitive people living in an insensitive world have to take great care. They have to become their own police. The policing of their own thoughts and reactions. Today 13 years on, I am a withdrawn highly sensitive person. I do not engage or take part in this world.

I utilise many avoidance strategies to stay safe and well. I am now 52 years of age and am a carer for my elderly parents. Although this role can be stressful it assists me in avoiding many outside commitments and responsibilities that can be a challenge for some with high sensitivity namely conventional work and romantic relationships. I tried these things in the past and they proved far too stressful for me. It has been very cathartic for me to write these words for possible publication on the highly sensitive refuge website. Writing is what I do now and what I wish to do in the future. My sensitivity allows me to write ‘clenched fist’ poetry, spoken word about politics and the issues that I feel strongly about. I have also started writing novellas about a protagonist called ‘Ken Frane’ who is ‘The Last of The Cardiff Docks Detectives’, crime fiction, urban noir is enjoyable to write but I find that they end up being an anti-detective novellas in the fact that they do not have standard, fulfilling and resolved endings.

I did not know that I was highly sensitive until I was 13 years of age when in school, I over reacted to an injustice, it was such a distressing and shocking over reaction that bore no relation to the injustice perpetrated but it left the residue or the seed for further over reactions in the future. I call them over reactions in hindsight. Perhaps they were the correct and appropriate reaction but in such a repressed and stiff upper lipped culture as the UK in the late 70s and 80s they appeared to be over reactions. I withdrew into myself as a teenager because I had been witness to treachery and betrayal and I realised what humans were capable of. Unfortunately this distrust has stayed with me but writing this is indeed an act of forgiving myself and for forgiving those others. Insignificant events all these years on but they lived in my head like repetitive intrusive thoughts for years. I bring this article to a close with a cautionary note to myself. I can now embrace my sensitivity which I repressed for so many years but I do wonder now what I will be able to do with it now. A middle aged man, past his best, his best years taken by a misdiagnosis perhaps, his best years taken by the repression of his sensitivity.  Thank you for reading.

YN GYMRAEG