Are You a Highly Sensitive Person?

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Moral sensitivity means noticing the ethical weight of a situation quickly and profoundly..

The pain of being a morally sensitive person is caused by the silence of everyone else.

With moral sensitivity, what is missing is the person who sees what you see and is willing to say it out loud.

We cannot change how much you do see, the only thing under your control is where you spend energy.

Having heightened moral sensitivity means noticing the ethical weight of a situation more quickly and more penetratively than most people do. For some, it also means that witnessing injustice hurts more. Perhaps you saw somebody being spoken to with contempt disguised as banter, or someone who cannot afford to complain being treated badly. You cannot help but see it, and hours later, sometimes days later, you are still churning it over, while most of the people around you either did not see it or dropped it long ago.

Values you hold dear have been violated, whether it is fairness, honesty, kindness, or the ordinary decency people owe each other. The unease of having seen something wrong and being unable to do anything about it lodges in you and will not settle until something is done.

All of that is painful in itself, and what hurts more is looking around and finding that nobody else wants to speak up. The pain of being a morally sensitive person is not just caused by the wrongdoing you see. It is caused by the silence of everyone else who saw it, and by what happens to you when you break that silence.

When you were younger and unaware of your heightened moral sensitivity, you thought everybody worked the way you did. You assumed that people minded fairness, that they saw what you saw, that they were as bothered as you were. You may even have assumed people would........

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