WHAT GOOD IS SENSITIVITY?
Sensitivity tells us when something is right or wrong with ourselves or others.
Sensitivity means sensing how we feel ourselves or how others seem to feel.
If we had no feelings at all, emotional or physical, we'd all soon let ourselves die.
There'd be no reason to avoid harming ourselves or others.
We wouldn't care, because it wouldn't hurt and we wouldn't care if anyone died or left us.
Natural pain helps persuade us not to harm ourselves or our loved ones.
Natural pleasure helps persuade us to improve ourselves and our surroundings.
As was stated in Lesson 1, when long exposed to misery, people become fairly insensitive.
We don't become completely insensitive usually, but fairly insensitive.
Our conscious minds can only hold relatively small amounts of experience.
Our subconscious can hold much more, so any repetitive experience tends to become subconscious.
That is why repetitive or ongoing misery makes us insensitive to the suffering of ourselves and others.
We can access much of our subconscious feelings, but it generally requires guidance and much practice.
Moral inventory of the 12 Step program can help access the subconscious.
This and similar practices can help restore our sensitivity to better understand ourselves and others.
MALE & FEMALE CULTURE (Deborah Tannen)
It is said that male and female culture tend to differ quite a lot, though some members of each have traits of the other.
The male culture is said to have been occupied largely with hunting in ancient times.
The female culture is said to have been involved with gathering food or gardening and with home life.
Effective hunting required that males be quiet and stealthy and suppress emotions so as not to scare prey off.
The home life of females benefited from talk and emotional sensitivity.
The frequent talk of women helped to keep away predators and pests.
Their emotional sensitivity helped women better care for the kids and adults of the group.
Males learned to cooperate thru hierarchy and competition, with the most experienced being dominant.
Females learned to cooperate thru sensitive talk and equality, but with some subtle hierarchy based on experience.
Male hunting abilities seem to have led them to learn war against other tribes, and to learn domination.
The traits of ancient times seem to remain largely in effect in modern time, but are in great need of modification.
It is responsible for everyone now to learn emotional sensitivity and try to understand each other's differences.
It is responsible for guardians to be sensitive to the conscious and subconscious feelings of dependents.
Parent Effectiveness Training and Moral Inventory greatly help to develop such sensitivity.
SENSITIVITY DIALOG (Thomas Gordon: Parent Effectiveness Training)
Love would cure much of the world's suffering.
Love means respect and respect means being sensitive to others' concerns and feelings.
This requires meaningful dialogue, but it doesn't mean solving others' problems.
Respectful dialogue usually helps others start their own solution process.
Acrtive listening is a simple way to show and build our own sensitivity and practice respectful dialog.
It is used when someone expresses, verbally or nonverbally, a negative emotion of fear, anger, sadness etc.
It involves paraphrasing what the concerned person expressed and avoiding roadblocks to communication.
Active Listening helps build understanding.
Effective Sharing is similar, but expresses our own feelings to others.
ROADBLOCKS TO COMMUNICATION (Thomas Gordon)
Roadblocks to communication with someone are roadblocks only when that person has a problem.
When the person doesn't have a problem, the same kinds of communication are less likely to be roadblocks.
Some of the Roadblocks are: criticizing, blaming, name-calling, questioning, reasoning, advising, commanding.
When a kid is frustrated because another kid won't play what he or she wants, you can say by Active Listening:
-Are you sad [or "frustrated," if old enough to understand] because X won't play your game?
-or: You seem sad because X doesn't want to play your game with you.
The formula for this kind of effective dialog is: paraphrasing The person's Feeling + What it's about.
This is called Active Listening and it can be in the form of a question or a comment.
Active Listening as a question is different from the questioning that becomes a Roadblock.
Questioning that doesn't follow the Active Listening formula is a likely Roadblock.
That is if it doesn't ask the person's feeling or what it's about.
Roadblock question examples would be: Why don't you find something else to play?
-or: Do you want to hear a funny story? -or: Who died and made you King?
Active Listening shows sensitivity, while Roadblocks show insensitivity.
Most of the time it takes only one Active Listening response to "solve" a kid's problem.
That's because their problem is mainly fear, which is due to lack of affection.
And Active Listening shows sensitivity, which shows affection, respect, love, or caring.
Much of the time adults aren't in the mood to be sensitive to someone else.
We're in a hurry to get something done and don't want to be interrupted.
Having grown up fairly insensitive, we don't appreciate the value of sensitivity to others.
To be responsible as adults is to be sensitive to ourselves and others, but it takes practice.
Adults [and kids] can have practice sessions pretending to have problems and using Active Listening for them.
LOVE IS POWER. (Jean Liedloff: The Continuum Concept; & Alcoholics Anonymous)
Emotional stress is fear; and Fear is a feeling and false belief of insecurity, which is confusion.
Affection, or love, is security and shortage of affection is insecurity, which is confusion.
The emotional or feeling part of fear is a warning that false belief is present.
Stress, or fears, or false beliefs of insecurity, can be relieved via moral inventory (12 Steps, Step 4).
Stress, fear and confusion are due to shortage of affection and are overcome by sufficiency of affection.
This is the Power of Love.
This is why it's necessary to come to believe in a loving higher power (Step 2).
Groups caring about individuals are expressions of such higher power.
The love of an individual is insecure, because individuals are mortal.
The love of a higher power is secure love, because higher power is immortal.
A group is a higher power than is an individual. A family or a class is a group too.
Loving Groups whose love survive thru generations are sources of secure [immortal] affection.
HIGHER POWER [William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience] [Step 2]
A Religion, charity, self-help group, caring organization [or God] can be one's higher power.
By sensing such secure love we get a realistic sense of security.
The sense of such higher power helps relieve stress, which helps clear up confusion.
Remember, "higher power" doesn't have to mean "God;" it's each person's choice.
Reducing confusion means clearer thinking, which make it easier to recognize and correct false beliefs of insecurity.
All negative emotions involve false beliefs of insecurity, which is fear.
Such false beliefs of insecurity cause us to condone wrongdoing.
Unselfish affection inspires us to correct our wrongs.
Fears tend to make us irresponsible. Affection tends to make us more responsible.
Sadness or depression is a false belief of aloneness.
Higher power is always with us, so we are never alone.
Fear of our higher power is due to false impression of our higher power [See LONELINESS in Lesson 3].
Religions sometimes call false beliefs darkness, while the truth is called light.
Seeing false beliefs as false then is shining light into darkness, so the darkness of false belief disappears.
This is what we can expect from doing Moral Inventory, described in the 12 Step program.
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