What Follows Is the Transcript of a Soundstrue Interview Between Tami Simon and Elaine Aron. You Can Listen to the Audio Podcast here.

couple in a deeper way. My husband—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of, quote, the “36 Questions”? But he designed these to help people get closer in the laboratory, but they got on the Internet and went viral. But one of the studies he found was that two couples doing the 36 questions … what happens is you answer questions that are not very self-disclosing, but interesting. Like, “Who would you have dinner with if you could have dinner with anybody past or present?” They’re interesting questions. And then it gets into more, “Tell me about your relationship with your mother,” or “Name three things you like about the other person.” So it gets more intimate, things that build intimacy in the way of self-disclosure.

But he’s found that couples doing this with another couple also get closer not only to the other couple, but they feel better about each other. I think this gives people a chance to compare themselves to others, and they say, “Oh. I’ve got a pretty good partner, and we’ve got a pretty good relationship.” That’s probably even more important to sensitive people.

I think both of them tend to, maybe, consider their relationship their quiet home sanctuary, but that can get boring. And another thing that my husband and I have researched a lot is the importance of exciting, novel activities in a relationship. But just going out every Friday night to a restaurant or to a movie actually, in some cases, makes a relationship worse because they’re being bored by each other, than if they’ve come up with things that they’ve never done before. Not anything that’s scary, but maybe they’ve never been together to a baseball game, or they’ve never gone to the opera. Or they’ve never gone horseback riding.

So they try something that they’re both willing to do, and it makes them feel really good about the relationship. After all, when we fall in love, we’re expanding and growing. But then, after a while, that excitement goes, and then we need another way of getting that in. I think that would be very important for two sensitive people.

TS: Now I want to make sure that I understand something, Elaine. It seems like you’ve implied, and maybe you’ve stated it but I just don’t totally get it, that this trait of highly sensitivity has a lot of evolutionary value, and that’s why it’s in us as humans, but also in other species. Help me understand the evolutionary value.

EA: Well, it’s the choices we make. In animals, they actually did a computer simulation of how this works. If there’s a patch of good grass and there’s a patch of not so good grass, part of the simulation involves, “How much better is one patch than the other?” And then you have an individual that notices patch A is better than patch B, then proceeds in time and space to another place where two patches are different and, because of having noticed this subtle difference, is able to get good grass again.

Now, this doesn’t always work this way, because there’s not always enough difference, but I think sensitive people are probably the first people to be bothered by secondhand smoke, pay attention to additives in food, to be concerned about their weight, or various things that we’ve eventually found out are important for everybody, but maybe sensitive people noticed it more. They’re not always right. Sometimes they’re way off on their crazy health ideas or whatever, but that’s not always true.

I think raising children—I don’t know whether they have more or less children now that people have a choice about that, but if they can get their child safely to adulthood, even by a small percentage, that’s an evolutionary advantage. The simplest way I describe it is, if there’s a traffic jam and such a person has, just out of the pleasure of it, studied the local map, driven on different streets, explored, and when there’s a traffic jam that they know a shortcut and the other people don’t. If everybody knew the shortcut, it wouldn’t be a shortcut anymore. That’s why it being a minority is so important.

Now suppose you’re trying to get out of town because of a forest fire, and you know some routes other people don’t know? You’re not unwilling to share them, but you do know them and you take them, then there’s another survival advantage. I think it’s a little bit harder to see in humans, because we don’t have those kind of statistics. I laugh that sensitive people know where the fire exits are, but they’re considered OCD about that until there’s a fire.

So we might worry about a lot of things needlessly, but then we also might be doing things to protect ourselves from robberies, say, or a break-in, that is protecting us. But we don’t have statistics on that. Prevention is one of the hardest things to study, because if it didn’t happen, then you don’t know what caused it not to happen.

TS: Now can we address the highly skeptical person again? Is that OK?

EA: Oh, absolutely.

TS: You’re a researcher, so you’re comfortable with it.

EA: I’ve heard it all. I’ve heard it all.

TS: You have? OK. So I’m imagining that someone’s listening and saying, “All of these qualities, it makes sense to me. But coming up with this as a label, as a category, do we know enough? Is there really enough science to support that? Or in 20, 30 years may we find that these characteristics were really better explained by some different model?” What would you say to that?

EA: Well, as a scientist I would say, “Yes, that’s the way science works.” We keep gathering research, and maybe the model gets changed. I have no problem with that. But after you’ve accumulated a certain amount of data, you also are supposed to start talking about that to each other and a little bit to the public if it seems the public wants to know, which this thing has taken off. I had no expectation that this would be—if you Google “highly sensitive person, ” to me it’s a nightmare out there, how much stuff is out there, some of it nonsense and some of it not.

I couldn’t stop that, but that’s something that some skeptics might find especially questionable, is what is all of this big to-do about this? But there are now over 80 studies published about the trait, not just by me, but by other people, with all kinds of different findings. Some of them, I would say, have better methods than others, but it would be wrong to deny it, certainly wrong to say, “The name I gave it and the way I’ve described it is perfect.” No, I expect that to change with time.

TS: And when you say it’s a “trait,” what does that mean, that it’s a trait?

EA: Well, I’ll say temperament trait is a better way to put it, because a personality trait we think is an interaction of a person’s life history and what they were born with. I’m talking about this more as something you were born with. In contrast to, say, PTSD, which can look similar, because people can become highly sensitive to certain stimuli, but not to all stimuli. Not to positive stimuli, and not from before the trauma. So there are differences, even though they have similarities.

For something to be innate, it’s hard to tease out in an adult, but not that hard. It’s something that people said about the child from almost the time they were born, whether it was in positive or negative terms, “This child was very sensitive.” We know children differ. What we term that, is—”shyness” we’ve used, “inhibitedness” we’ve used, “negative” we’ve used, because they cry more in some situations, but not in all.

TS: Now Elaine, you’ve written a book on The Highly Sensitive Child, The Highly Sensitive Person in Love—I mean, I think it’s fair to say that you’ve dedicated the last 25 years of your life to studying this trait of high sensitivity. I read that some people even call you the “Queen of HSP.” But here’s what I’m interested in knowing. What’s been the hardest for you, personally, about being someone that has HSP? What’s really challenged you the most?

EA: That’s a very good question. I might take it out of that. I suppose that, socially, I still wish that I had time for more friends. But even if I had time, I might not be as sociable as other people, and I’ve talked about extrovert envy. If it looks like people have lots of friends, even if they’re highly sensitive, and they enjoy getting together with other people, it looks to me like they’re having a good time. And I’m not of that sort, and it probably is as much from my childhood as my sensitivity, so it’s a little bit hard to sort out.

Like in a conversation, that thing I said about thinking about what people are saying and they’ve already moved on by the time you have something to say, I often feel that in conversations. I could have a good conversation one on one with a person, probably, given enough time with them, but I’m not as quick and skilled at it as I would like to be.

TS: Extrovert envy? That’s interesting.

EA: Yes. I have one son, so my son and my husband and I are together in the car, and they get going talking and I start to fall out, listening to them, but I realize that I’m not saying anything. I’d like to be engaged, but if it’s only one of them, then it works fine.

TS: As you know, Elaine, Sounds True publishes a lot of material that’s about spiritual wisdom and spiritual teachings. I’m curious to know if you’ve seen any correlation between HSP, being a highly sensitive person, and a real interest and commitment to spirituality? Is there any correlation?

EA: Well, I refuse to do the actual research study in which I find sensitive people are more spiritual. [Laughs] It seems like a really mean thing to do. I don’t want to do that. But I did find an article. The title of it—I actually got it out so I could say it—”The Evolution of Religious Capacity in the Genus Homo.” It’s in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. And these people talk about my trait—my trait? I mean my term. “Sensory processing sensitivity” is the term I use in research, and they say that they think of this as the sine qua non, the necessity for religion to have evolved in human beings, was for some of them to be sensitive.

I think you can see the logic in that in many different ways. If you process things more deeply, then you’re going to think about life and death, and where it comes from, where it goes to. You’re going to notice differences in states of consciousness in yourself and in others, and perhaps begin to notice how to cultivate higher states. I think they were naturally the shamans, and later on, what I call the “priestly advisors.” In the European cultures, there’s warrior kings and those who advise them, and I think the sensitive people were probably often the advisors. Astrologists or astronomers who noticed how seasons worked and had knowledge about medicine and all of that, they just naturally fell into that, so I expect them to have an interest in that now.

When I was doing my interviews, they were two-hour interviews. I don’t know how I ever survived them, but I was younger then. Two, two-and-a-half hour interviews, and I had questions in order, and the spiritual ones were the last. But people always talked about their spirituality before I got to the end. And all kinds of things—seeing angels, being devoutly religious in their religion, being devoutly atheist but having a strong feeling about it. It goes in all directions.

TS: It’s interesting having this conversation with you, Elaine. One of the things that I sense is that you’re a highly intuitive person. You haven’t used that word to describe people who have HSP. What do you think about high intuition and HSP?

EA: Well, I think it’s a natural, because if you are noticing subtleties and processing them—not all processing is conscious. We don’t know quite what to call the processing of a fruit fly or a pumpkinseed sunfish, yet those pumpkinseed sunfish knew how to avoid a trap. What were they doing with that information they were gathering, watching the scientists put those things in the pond? We don’t know.

But I call intuition knowing things without knowing how you know them. Carl Jung called that one of the four functions that humans have. You can know things wrong with intuition, just as you can know things wrong with thinking or feeling or sensing. But it is a way to know things.

TS: Elaine, just one final question. I’m wanting to support the transformation that you went through in your life and listeners’ lives, which is moving from, “All of this sensitivity has me feeling like, perhaps I don’t fit in. Perhaps how I am doesn’t work?”

EA: “There’s something wrong with me.” Right. Right.

TS: Yes, “There’s something wrong with me.” Moving from that to a sense of, “I am part of an evolutionary type of exquisite knowing that’s moving us forward.” What can you say here at the end that can support people in having that view of HSP?

EA: Well, first, believe it’s real. It’s really important. You can just read the research on my website. You can use Google Scholar to bring up the study. “Sensory processing sensitivity” is the term there. You need to meet some other sensitive people, and there are events where that can happen, so that you also get a sense that it’s real. I think that’s probably the most important thing. As you get the sense of it being real, you get the sense of the positive qualities that are there. If there are negative parts that are coming up for you, that probably means that one needs some healing.

Also, reframing your childhood, because you can look back and say, “Gee. Why’d I do that, and everybody said this?” Or even in your adulthood, “Why didn’t I take that job?” Or, “Why did that relationship fail?” Very often you can see it in terms of your sensitivity, and then that changes how you view yourself. It’s helping a lot that it’s becoming better known, and therefore when you do bring up the subject, a lot more people are understanding. Then you have better answers for the skeptics if you have a better understanding yourself. It’s going to take time, but I do think that we have real potential to lead in the world.

If we’re supposed to be the priestly advisors to the warrior kings, we had better see that we’re listened to and not just ignored because we seem like we have some difficulty and we’re scared to speak up. We need to speak up about the things that we see, or problems. Whether it’s secondhand smoke or a climate crisis, we’ve got to speak up.

TS: I’ve been speaking to someone who’s been dubbed the Queen of HSP, Elaine Aron. She wrote the book on the highly sensitive person and, with Sounds True, has created a new audio learning series called The Highly Sensitive Person’s Complete Learning Program: Essential Insights and Tools for Navigating Your Work, Relationships, and Life. Elaine, thank you so much for the conversation. I think I might be more sensitive than I thought I was.

EA: I think you might be, too. I think that we’re right on that. I’ve never met an interviewer who wasn’t—well, I’ve never met a good interviewer that wasn’t highly sensitive, and you’ve shown a lot of sensitivity. I do want to mention that we do have a new movie coming out, Sensitive and In Love, and that’s premiering in New York City in January, but it’ll be available shortly after that. I have a book on The Highly Sensitive Parent coming out in April.

TS: Wonderful. Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. And also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.