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My early teenage years were some of the most difficult, painful and confusing years of my life. I was completely shut down and miserable and my loving mother took me to all kinds of experts to try to figure out how to give me the support I needed.

I wouldn’t have been able to express it at the time, but being a quiet, sensitive, intuitive, deeply feeling person, I was very aware of how different I was from other people and deep down felt this nebulous sense that I was fundamentally flawed in some way that I hadn’t yet been able to identify. So much of the struggle I experienced in my younger years was because I felt so different. And because that difference was pointed out to me so often, I felt the need to hide, to protect myself from ridicule and rejection while I figured out what was wrong with me, so I could have a chance to fix it before anyone else noticed.

I went through a plethora of evaluations and tests and was ultimately labeled and put into 5 different boxes. I was an introvert, I had anxiety and depression, ADD, and a “delayed retrieval” speech/language disorder. At the time, part of me was grateful to have some kind of concrete answer to what was wrong with me. At the same time though, another part of me saw these results as evidence that I truly was fundamentally flawed as I had feared, and I was doomed to live a life of struggle. So I did my best to suck it up and put my best foot forward.

The thing is, if I had known more about what high sensitivity was and more about what it meant to be introverted, I might have better understood the labels that I was given and seen them in a different light. Knowing what I know now, I can confidently say that all of the diagnoses I was given as a young teenager can all be chalked up to temperament and to living in a world that doesn’t understand or value the qualities of temperament that are not the cultural ideal.

Before I say more, I need to say that I’m not a doctor and these observations are only in regards to myself. Anxiety, depression, ADD and speech and language disorders could present very differently for other people and be attributable to more than just temperament. I encourage anyone to whom this applies to have a conversation with your doctor to discuss the possibilities I lay out below because they might apply to you too.

Let’s take a look at anxiety and depression. Having an obscure sense that there’s something wrong with who you are, but not really knowing what needs to be fixed or how to fix it, can be deeply corrosive to a person’s mental and emotional well-being. It effects everything. That kind of pervasive shame, self-consciousness and fear of rejection would give anyone anxiety and depression. Suppression of natural self-expression has been directly related to depression. Anxiety is a level of fear that comes from what you believe and how you think, based on past experiences. Most of my past social experiences had given me subtle messages that I wasn’t normal and that I needed to be different to be loved and accepted, so I rejected who I was, stopped sharing myself, and lost myself in my efforts to be different, which resulted in anxiety and depression. Introverted and highly sensitive people are the majority of the population that seeks psychiatric care. It’s not our temperament that causes the mental illness, it’s the result of being an underrecognized minority, living in a world where we’re the outliers, a world in which our differences and how we’re apparently lacking are constantly brought to our attention.

When it comes to ADD, there are two factors to consider. One is that highly sensitive people physiologically have fewer filters in our brain to help us filter out extraneous information. While most people’s brains filter out irrelevant information and allow only what’s most relevant to enter in and be processed, highly sensitive people’s brains comparatively, take in external information more like a firehose, we get all the subtle details and nuances as well as what’s most relevant or obvious. There’s a lot more to process and sort through. We can become overstimulated much more quickly and require more time to process information, draw conclusions and complete tasks.

When we take into consideration the fast pace of our social environment and the emphasis on efficiency and productivity, most specifically our educational and working environments, it’s no wonder we have so many people being diagnosed with ADD. Introverted, highly sensitive people aren’t built to thrive in this kind of environment. Physiologically, because of the way we’re wired, we have a longer pathway to traverse to be able to retrieve information in long-term memory. We do our best work when we have time, space, peace and quiet to process and reflect. Because we make up less than 20% of the population and many of our natural traits and strengths are mistakenly seen as weaknesses, and therefore not the social ideal, many of our needs and the structures that would have us thrive, haven’t been taken into consideration as the social infrastructure has been created. We’re constantly overstimulated and don’t have the time we need to process what comes in, or to operate from our strengths. When we’re overstimulated, it makes it very hard to focus on anything.

Because of the way we’re wired, we’re capable of entering into deep states of concentration, but when we’re disrupted and taken out of that deep state, it can take a lot of time and energy to regain that level of focus. It doesn’t take much to disrupt us because of how alert and aware we are to the subtleties in our surroundings. Even the subtleties of internal factors, like cold, heat, hunger, physical discomfort, or needing to use the bathroom can have more effect on us than the average person and be more of a distraction.

The second factor to consider, that’s related to overstimulation is that it activates our fight/flight/freeze response, which cuts us off from our higher thinking and puts us in a reactive mode, which can result in poor performance and make it seem like we’re distracted and have a hard time focusing. Because of the way we’re wired physiologically, the experiences that would pleasantly stimulate non-sensitive people, can trigger highly sensitive people into fight or flight. In addition, when we know we’re being watched, monitored or evaluated, it can effect our performance and we often don’t exhibit our true capacity for handling whatever we’re doing. We can appear to be distracted or unfocused.

The Speech-language disorder of delayed retrieval can be explained by all of the above.  1.Introverts have a longer pathway in the brain to retrieve information in long-term memory. It always takes us longer to retrieve information because pretty much everything we take in is processed at the level of long-term memory. 2.Under the pressure of being evaluated and being more self-conscious, the fight or flight response can be activated and reduces access to areas of higher thinking. 3.Most of the evaluations I was given were timed, so aside from the fact that it naturally always takes me longer to retrieve information, there was the added pressure of being timed that influenced my performance. 4.With the mental and emotional intensity of all the testing, I was overstimulated and fried. 5. I was so concerned about hiding who I was that I didn’t have the regular social practice that most people have. I was afraid to share myself and hardly said anything at all, so conversation was more of a challenge.

I share this story for those of you who avoid either therapy or self assessment because you don’t want to be labeled or put into a box, or because you don’t want to discover that you really are as inadequate as you might fear (which is never true.)

Assessments of temperament and personality are different. They identify patterns in how you tend to respond, which can be very helpful to show you how you might be limiting yourself without realizing it. These assessments aren’t telling you who you are or what you’re capable of, they simply point out your tendencies. Neither who you are nor what you’re capable of could ever be put into a box, the possibilities are too vast. Self-assessment is a helpful way to see your patterns, which actually gives you more control and more freedom because you know what you’re working with. Without knowing where you are, it can be very difficult to identify or control where you’re going. Without self-discovery you can be unconsciously controlled by these patterns your whole life. I don’t know about you but that’s not the kind of life I want to have.

I also share this story to spread the word to friends, family and care-givers of introverted, highly sensitive people. The awareness of high sensitivity is much more prevalent these days but efforts are still needed to spread that awareness. When I was a teenager, the research that discovered high sensitivity had just been conducted and was not widely known. The clinical researcher who first identified high sensitivity is Dr. Elaine Aron. Another physician who’s made great contributions towards understanding what it means to be highly sensitive is Dr. Judith Orloff. Both of these women are highly sensitive introverts themselves. They have both written several books, all of which I highly recommend.