Sensitivity is a divine gift.
Functionally, sensitivity is the capacity to register what is true in the relational field before it becomes obvious to everyone else. That means: a sensitive person feels the inflammation in the shared space, notices the quiet collapse of social interest, detects the early signs no one else has marked yet, and registers the small bids that are being missed.
In a healthy relational field1 (R-Field) this instrument serves life: it reports accurately so the whole can stay clearer, safer, and more reciprocal.
Like any instrument, however, it can be inverted (hi Ted!).
Instead of sensitivity serving the field, the field begins serving the sensitivity. People may begin to treat the feelings of discomfort as the primary danger. So, a sensitive person might take steps to avoid exposing herself in situations where she picks up critical signals, or other people organise themselves around protecting the sensitive system from distress.
This is how the godly early-warning system becomes a fragile centre that must be shielded. The making of “Moody Gods”: high-capacity or highly sensitive people whose emotional state becomes everyone else’s emergency, and whose special status quietly excuses them from ordinary reciprocity. With this kind of shielding the original risk is not removed and is often even increased.
There is a darker path still.
When the sensitive person continues to report accurately—especially about the distress or imbalance of others in the group—the field may respond by excluding (or scapegoating) them. The accurate report is experienced as an attack on the group’s comfort. The early-warning system is pathologized or simply pushed out. The person who wanted to remain and contribute is removed so the field can return to its previous level of numbness.
I must emphasise here that the person usually wants to remain and contribute, but they are forced out. A related but distinct outcome is reclusion, or self-exile. Here the sensitive person themselves develops a strong allergic reaction to contact. Traumatised by experiences of poor quality differentiation2 (demand, dismissal or overload, confused story about private vs shared etc) they begin to interpret every request—and eventually even another person’s simple presence—as an obligation they will be forced to meet.
The defensive shield of no-contact (literal seclusion, alcoholism or other forms of self-induced unavailability) is raised on their own initiative. They often carry a harsh private story about their own nature that justifies the isolation, which serves a protective function after the instrument was used, ignored, or punished too many times.
A necessary distinction remains.
True sensitivity reports what is actually present. It is essentially a neutral observation. And it is inconvenient precisely because it is accurate.
There is another pattern that looks the same only in cosmetic terms: the mind that generates elaborate stories and then treats those stories as perception.
In such cases, certain closed interpretive loops can track vast external narratives across time and space while remaining completely unconscious of the immediate relational field—a partner burning out beside them, the absence of simple care, the shared space falling into neglect. That is not sensitivity but invention substituted for contact.
The difference is practical.
When sensitivity is recognised as an instrument meant to serve, it stays clean and useful. When it is dismissed as overreaction, enthroned as something that must never be distressed, or punished until the sensitive person either leaves or walls themselves off, the field loses one of its most accurate means of staying healthy.
The gift remains divine only as long as it is allowed to do its actual work: reporting what is true so that life, not the instrument itself, remains the priority.
Footnotes
1 - Relational field
The living emotional and practical atmosphere created by the people who share space, responsibility, or ongoing contact. It includes the spoken and unspoken expectations, the flow of attention and care, the degree of reciprocity, and the nervous-system states that circulate among the members. Its quality is felt directly: a field can regulate and expand capacity, or it can drain, inflame, and concentrate load on the most sensitive or most responsible person.
Here as a side, since we already have M-fields (morphic / morphogenetic fields)—Rupert Sheldrake’s concept that there are non-material fields that shape form, habit, and collective patterns of organisation across time and space, I would propose:
R-fields (relational fields): the living emotional, practical, and nervous-system atmosphere that arises between people who share ongoing contact. Not as metaphysically ambitious as morphic fields, but very concrete and observable in daily life: the quality of shared space, the flow of bids, the migration of load, the degree of differentiation, dominant nervous system states, the presence or absence of social interest.
We are never just isolated individuals. We are always inside fields that influence what becomes possible.
2- Differentiation of self (Bowen)
The capacity to remain a separate self while staying in emotional contact with others. A well-differentiated person can think and act from their own principles even when anxiety is high in the field, without either cutting off or becoming fused with the emotions and demands of others.
Poor differentiation
A lower capacity for that balance. It appears as emotional fusion (taking on others’ feelings and responsibilities as one’s own), chronic reactivity, difficulty maintaining clear boundaries between private and shared space, or the opposite extreme of rigid emotional cutoff. In a poorly differentiated field, anxiety spreads quickly and load tends to migrate to whoever is still functioning.
Check my corner on the web: sskosmos.ee
More on the current of polyvagal cosmology:
A solid intro to the approach:
Triggered? Why You’re Anxious, Angry, or Numb: It’s Not Moral Failure, It’s Your Nervous System Running on Outdated Software
I’ve been reading up on some relatively fringe psych-and-consciousness materials for the past year, and found some interesting overlap that you might find quite useful for navigating your own emotional states and also not getting caught in the tornadoes of others.