Elaine N. Aron

Hi everyone. I’m once again incredibly late writing my post for the #AtoZChallenge. Today, the reason is the fact that I’ve been hyperfocusing on other things. Anyway, I still have some time, so let’s get into today’s post. Today, I want to write about the concept of the highly sensitive person (HSP).

The concept of the highly sensitive person as something specific was first introduced by psychologist Elaine N. Aron in the mid-1990s. Her book, The Highly Sensitive Person and its companions about highly sensitive people at work and in love and about highly sensitive children, are still quite popular. I read The Highly Sensitive Person when I was about 20 and, though I related to a lot of traits of being an HSP, it felt somehow off too.

What are the traits of highly sensitive people? At first, I thought the concept referred just to being sensorially and emotionally more sensitive than others. It’s been nearly 20 years since I read Aron’s book but now that I look over the current ideas for these traits, I can see what felt “off” about them: they are highly desirable traits, but not ones I possess. These traits include:

• Being deeply empathetic and caring (on an emotional level).


• Cherishing reflection.


• Taking things personally a lot and/or having a hard time handling negative feedback.


• Being detail-oriented: you notice little things that others miss.


• Being deliberate and slow to make decisions.


• Being “in your head” a lot.

Oh well, I relate to about half this list, but I did this deliberately (the list is more extensive) and it’s actually the less desirable traits I relate to.

There are many people who claim that being an HSP is just a positive way of looking at being autistic. Looking at the lists of traits I find online, I can see how a high-masking, low support needs autistic person could relate to some traits (heck, even I do and I’m not high-masking or low support needs). Then again, even Aron at first estimated up to as many as 20% of the population would be highly sensitive. In other words, everyone is a little HSP. And for clarity’s sake, I do not believe everyone is a little autistic. Quite frankly, I don’t believe that many actually autistic people have most of the traits of being an HSP. Yes, there’s some overlap and my father actually used a newspaper article about one of Aron’s books to shame me about self-identifying as autistic, but autism remains a disability. Being highly sensitive is not.