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discouraged, or if all else fails, ridiculed.

      What is the ideal in our culture? Movies, advertisements, the design of public spaces, all tell us we should be as tough as the Terminator, as stoic as Clint Eastwood, as outgoing as Goldie Hawn. We should be pleasantly stimulated by bright lights, noise, a gang of cheerful fellows hanging out in a bar. If we are feeling overwhelmed and sensitive, we can always take a painkiller.

      If you remember only one thing from this book, it should be the following research study. Xinyin Chen and Kenneth Rubin of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and Yuerong Sun of Shanghai Teachers University compared 480 schoolchildren in Shanghai to 296 in Canada to see what traits made children most popular. In China “shy” and “sensitive” children were among those most chosen by others to be friends or playmates. (In Mandarin, the word for shy or quiet means good or well-behaved; sensitive can be translated as “having understanding,” a term of praise.) In Canada, shy and sensitive children were among the least chosen. Chances are, this is the kind of attitude you faced growing up.

      Think about the impact on you of not being the ideal for your culture. It has to affect you—not only how others have treated you but how you have come to treat yourself.

      SHEDDING THE MAJORITY’S RULE

      1. What was your parents’ attitude toward your sensitivity? Did they want you to keep it or lose it? Did they think of it as an inconvenience, as shyness, unmanliness, cowardice, a sign of artistic ability, cute? What about your other relatives, your friends, your teachers?

      2. Think about the media, especially in childhood. Who were your role models and idols? Did they seem like HSPs? Or were they people you now see you could never be like?

      3. Consider your resulting attitude. How has it affected your career, romantic relationships, recreational activities, and friendships?

      4. How are you as an HSP being treated now by the media? Think about positive and negative images of HSPs. Which predominate? (Note that when someone is a victim in a movie or book, he or she is often portrayed as by nature sensitive, vulnerable, overaroused. This is good for dramatic effect, because the victim is visibly shaken and upset, but bad for HSPs, because “victim” comes to be equated with sensitivity.)

      5. Think about how HSPs have contributed to society. Look for examples you know personally or have read about. Abraham Lincoln is probably a place to start.

      6. Think about your own contribution to society. Whatever you are doing—sculpting, raising children, studying physics, voting—you tend to reflect deeply on the issues, attend to the details, have a vision of the future, and attempt to be conscientious.

       Psychology’s Bias

      Psychological research is gaining valuable insights about people, and much of this book is based on those findings. But psychology is not perfect. It can only reflect the biases of the culture from which it comes. I could give example after example of research in psychology that reflects a bias that people I call HSPs are less happy and less mentally healthy, even less creative and intelligent (the first two are definitely not true). However, I will save these examples for reeducating my colleagues. Just be careful about accepting labels for yourself, such as “inhibited,” “introverted,” or “shy.” As we move on, you’ll understand why each of these mislabels you. In general, they miss the essence of the trait and give it a negative tone. For example, research has found that most people, quite wrongly, associate introversion with poor mental health. When HSPs identify with these labels, their confidence drops lower, and their arousal increases in situations in which people thus labeled are expected to be awkward.

      It helps to know that in cultures in which the trait is more valued, such as Japan, Sweden, and China, the research takes on a different tone. For example, Japanese psychologists seem to expect their sensitive subjects to perform better, and they do. When studying stress, Japanese psychologists see more flaws in the way that the nonsensitive cope. There is no point in blaming our culture’s psychology or its well-meaning researchers, however. They are doing their best.

       Royal Advisors and Warrior Kings

      For better and worse, the world is increasingly under the control of aggressive cultures—those that like to look outward, to expand, to compete and win. This is because, when cultures come in contact, the more aggressive ones naturally tend to take over.

      How did we get into this situation? For most of the world, it began on the steppes of Asia, where the Indo-European culture was born. Those horse-riding nomads survived by expanding their herds of horses and cattle, mainly by stealing the herds and lands of others. They entered Europe about seven thousand years ago, reaching the Middle East and South Asia a little later. Before their arrival there was little or no warfare, slavery, monarchy, or domination of one class by another. The newcomers made serfs or slaves out of the people they found, the ones without horses, built walled cities where there had been peaceful settlements, and set out to expand into larger kingdoms or empires through war or trade.

      The most long-lasting, happy Indo-European cultures have always used two classes to govern themselves—the warrior-kings balanced by their royal or priestly advisors. And Indo-European cultures have done well for themselves. Half of the world speaks an Indo-European language, which means they cannot help but think in an Indo-European way. Expansion, freedom, and fame are good. Those are the values of the warrior-kings.

      For aggressive societies to survive, however, they always need that priest-judge-advisor class as well. This class balances the kings and warriors (as the U.S. Supreme Court balances the president and his armed forces). It is a more thoughtful group, often acting to check the impulses of the warrior-kings. Since the advisor class often proves right, its members are respected as counselors, historians, teachers, scholars, and the upholders of justice. They have the foresight, for example, to look out for the well-being of those common folks on whom the society depends, those who grow the food and raise the children. They warn against hasty wars and bad use of the land.

      In short, a strong royal advisor class insists on stopping and thinking. And it tries, I think with growing success in modern times, to direct the wonderful, expansive energy of their society away from aggression and domination. Better to use that energy for creative inventions, exploration, and protection of the planet and the powerless.

      HSPs tend to fill that advisor role. We are the writers, historians, philosophers, judges, artists, researchers, theologians, therapists, teachers, parents, and plain conscientious citizens. What we bring to any of these roles is a tendency to think about all the possible effects of an idea. Often we have to make ourselves unpopular by stopping the majority from rushing ahead. Thus, to perform our role well, we have to feel very good about ourselves. We have to ignore all the messages from the warriors that we are not as good as they are. The warriors have their bold style, which has its value. But we, too, have our style and our own important contribution to make.

       The Case of Charles

      Charles was one of the few HSPs I interviewed who had known he was sensitive his whole life and always saw it as a good thing. His unusual childhood and its consequences are a fine demonstration of the importance of self-esteem and of the effect of one’s culture.

      Charles is happily married for the second time and enjoys a well-paid and admirable academic career of service and scholarship. In his leisure time he is a pianist of exceptional talent. And he has a deep sense that these gifts are more than sufficient to give meaning to his life. After hearing all of this at the outset of our interview, I was, naturally, curious about his background.

      Here is Charles’s first memory. (I always ask this in my interviews—even

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