Sunday, June 15, 2008

You are too sensitive, or, are you?

Saw Yun's post yesterday and it makes me think of the question:

How do you decide whether a person is too sensitive to something?

As you can read from my comment on Yun's post, I think that it is very difficult to decide without bias.

Many people are born with various kind of allergies and phobias. To name a few, some people are allergic to seafood, some are allergic to weather; some are scared to death when they are trapped in an elevator and some think that spiders are as scary as monsters.

We are much more forgiving in these situations because we know the causes of these symptoms and we know that they don't have a choice.

Sometimes our friends are sensitive to things that we deem very normal and we think that they are just too sensitive.

Is that so?

While the causes of allergies and phobias are physiological, sensitivities usually have psychological roots.

For example, if you break up with your lover at some chained restaurant, you may never want to go to any of them again. It is very normal for you to do that but you friends will find it hard to understand if they don't know the story behind it.

And the thing is, we, naturally, seldom want to tell people about our sad stories because we don't want the bad feelings to come back. To my mind, this is one of the reasons why they are so many misunderstandings in our world.

My high school friend once said

"Everybody has a story."

Next time you find your friend's sensitivity hard to understand, attribute it to a story behind his/her back. Maybe you never have a chance to know what the story is but it would make it easier for you to forgive :)

Related post: Do you really see the reality?

2 comments:

  1. 其實我想說﹐你是一個好人。但呢個世上很多人都不是這樣。如果我能像你那樣為別人著想﹐那固然好。但如果我不能﹐我也並不覺得一定是壞。只是各人想法不同。但我必須同意一樣野﹐在知情的情況下﹐不要傷害人。我往往是事後才知。那我有甚麼辦法呢﹖小心D﹖儘量吧。但說了﹐如果我不是也就裝不來。

    (但我會努力的。謝謝你。)

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  2. yun: Yup, I agree that we should avoid hurting others when we know that they're sensitive to certain thing.

    As a matter of fact, I'm a victim of that also. I'm very sure that I destroyed some friendship because I said something that's completely okay to me but totally unacceptable to my friends. Alas, I still want to tell them that I didn't intend to hurt them after all..

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