Dr Catherine Wilkins of Fractology: How To Survive And Thrive As A Highly Sensitive Person
Respect is non-negotiable. Respect starts with respecting yourself. Accepting the system you have is the beginning of respect. Choosing to work with your system as it is to optimize it, rather than thinking you have to change the way you are, is the beginning of self-respect. It’s hard to feel it sometimes, I know, but your genius lies in your high sensitivity. If you try to deny that you’ll only end up trying to live with the kind of constant internal battle I lived with for years, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. It’s exhausting.
As a part of our series about How To Survive And Thrive As A Highly Sensitive Person, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Catherine Wilkins.
Dr. Catherine Wilkins, author of The Soul’s Brain, published by Hay House, is a skilled practitioner working at the leading edge of modern psychic healing. Her psychic gifts and a solid medical and metaphysical understanding of illness and the body enables her to work uniquely with healing energies. This means she can go directly to the source of mental or physical ailments, diagnose what underlies it and bring about healing by working both at a spiritual and practical level.
The practice she’s pioneered — Fractology — has taken healing beyond the usual limitations of traditional physical, as well as the more esoteric psychic healing, into a new realm. In her roles as healer, teacher and author, she’s making a major contribution to the healing arts and sciences.
She’s the one other healers seek out to improve their techniques or to trouble-shoot their skills. For nearly thirty years she’s been perfecting and teaching her unique system of Fractology, facilitating clients and students in developing their own conscious intuitive logic, and balancing the left and right sides of their brain.
In 2019 Hay House International published her book The Soul’s Brain: The Neurology and Logic of Your Intuition.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and what you do professionally?
That’s a question. You’re asking me to condense over half a century of life into a couple of paragraphs. It’s a challenge, and one that keeps growing as life keeps getting added. This is especially true when you’re highly sensitive, because one of the side-effects of that sensitivity is you keep growing without having to think about it.
So I should start by saying I have Aspergers. For those who don’t know, it’s part of the ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder) but it’s no longer really in the schedule but that’ s only because they can’t give you drugs for it. I’ve known for some time that was the way my brain was set up but I only recently had it officially diagnosed. I doubt that surprised many people. My dad was never diagnosed but he had aspergers. Mind you, male aspergers presents differently to female aspergers. His natural language was mathematics, mine is intuition. And that, of course, is where the problems started.
Science is cool, but when you grow up in a family where everything has to fit into that box and your natural language is intuition, things can get messy. When I got older that conflict continued daily inside me; my science-self constantly arguing with my intuitive-self. You can see that conflict going on everywhere in society. If I was less sensitive perhaps I could’ve shut one side of myself down and so resolved the conflict that way (and I did try that but it only made me unwell). My sensitivity, however, meant I could feel the pain of suppressing such a large piece of me. I was going through life as just half of myself. My science-self did some cool stuff. I trained as a veterinarian when I was younger and then later as a chiropractor, but if you’re only half-alive then you’re half-dead and I could feel that every day.
In working to resolve the conflict in me between my science-self and my intuitive-self I developed a system of awareness and healing called Fractology. My book, The Soul’s Brain (published by Hay House International) goes into the principles of this system and how they can assist us to be Who We Truly Are — ALL of Who We Truly Are.
Thank you for your bravery and strength in being so open with us. I understand how hard this is. Can you help define for our readers what is meant by a Highly Sensitive Person? Does it simply mean that feelings are easily hurt or offended?
A highly sensitive person (HSP) has a central nervous system (so your brain and spinal cord) which is more sensitive or more easily affected by physical, emotional, or social stimuli. In your brain you have something called the limbic system. It’s the part of your brain that filters out all the information your system may be picking up but you don’t need. So, in simple terms, HSPs have a limbic system that lets through a whole lot more information than the limbic systems of people who are more neuronormative (have a normal brain).
I know sometimes people say to HSPs “don’t be so sensitive” but that’s as ridiculous as saying to someone who hasn’t got such a refined level of perception “don’t be so insensitive”. We each have a system that works differently. If we all insist we work the same, not only does that cause a lot of unnecessary pain, it also means we’re missing out on a great deal of the richness of life. The trick is to work with our system the way it is to reach our optimal potential, not try to pretzel ourselves into something we’re not.
As I mentioned, it’s not just emotional or social stimuli that HSPs have increased awareness of. It’s also physical stimuli. For example, I used to think that ‘dog whistles’ were a joke. I thought people were kidding when they said they couldn’t hear them. I’ve always been able to hear them, but that’s because I have hypersensitive hearing, among other things.
Being highly sensitive isn’t simply feeling things more deeply, though it’s that too. It’s having a brain that’s wired to receive more subtle signals. It’s neurological. Think of the difference between a tractor and a racing car. A tractor is highly reliable but it doesn’t respond in split seconds to tiny movement of the wheel. A racing car does that but then if you oversteer in a racing car it can flip over. That’s kind of what happens to a HSP when their nervous system gets overloaded.
One of the principles of Fractology, which I talk about in The Soul’s Brain, is that of completion. By completing our cycles and communications it enables us to handle a lot more than we would otherwise. It helps to keep our systems balanced, even when we are highly sensitive, because when we complete something we can let go of it.
Does a Highly Sensitive Person have a higher degree of empathy towards others? Is a Highly Sensitive Person offended by hurtful remarks made about other people?
Not everyone’s experience of their high sensitivity will be the same. I can only speak for myself. Strangely, the increased sensitivity can sometimes cause people to appear less empathetic because the HSP has to protect themselves from being overwhelmed. That’s true of all of us. When we get stressed we need to pull back to look after ourselves.
Having said that, though, HSPs do feel more deeply what’s going on for people as a general rule but it doesn’t always translate into increased emotionality. Many HSPs have a degree of synaesthesia going on in their brain. That means, the central processing part of their brain takes one sensory stimulus and converts it into a different sensory form. You may have heard of musicians seeing different colours with different notes, or some mathematicians seeing the different numbers as different colours. Those are examples of synaesthesia.
So, yes, HSPs tend to pick up emotional cues from others that are much more subtle than many might pick up, which of course can hit them hard when the other person is upset or hurt. But it doesn’t always hit them as an emotion.
For example, I’ve a client who’s a HSP and her sensitivity is very kinaesthetic. She often feels other peoples’ emotional upsets as a physical pain. Until she learned to understand the pain wasn’t actually hers, it wasn’t coming from inside her own body, it was very distressing for her, as you can imagine. It made her very anxious, which can often accompany high sensitivity when we don’t know what to do with the awareness we get as HSPs.
Now that she’s putting the principles of Fractology to work, the ones I talk about in The Soul’s Brain, she’s able to understand where the pain is coming from and that it’s not hers. She’s as sensitive as she always was but she’s more able to use the awareness rather than be overwhelmed by it.
Remember I said I’ve got Aspergers. One of the traits of Aspergers that can make social situations awkward is that it’s as if all the comfortable little illusions that normally grease the social wheels don’t compute. There’s no value in illusions compared to what’s real; the clearer you are on what’s real the better your results will be. So in terms of your question, it’s not so much that I get offended, it’s that most hurtful remarks don’t make sense to me. If something’s true, then it’s true. Sure, the delivery mightn’t be good and it may be uncomfortable but it can lead to a better result so that’s good. But when people make stuff up just to be hurtful, because of whatever negative stuff is going on for them, that makes no sense. Now there’s more people who have negative stuff going on. That’s just spreading the hurt around and doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t even help the person who says it, actually, because they might get a cheap thrill for a few moments but then they either will feel lousy afterwards or they’ll have to shut themselves down to ignore the feelings of the person they’ve wilfully just hurt.
Does a Highly Sensitive Person have greater difficulty with certain parts of popular culture, entertainment or news, that depict emotional or physical pain? Can you explain or give a story?
Again, I’m coming from my own viewpoint here, but the best answer I can give is to talk about humour. Most humour is based on some pretty unfortunate stuff: pain, fear, embarrassment, fear of failure. I don’t find any of that funny. When ‘funniest home videos’ was a thing I never watched it. I thought it was one of the most evil shows on television because it was giving a message that it was okay to profit from other people getting hurt. There are some comedians who use this kind of humour but basically it’s just bullying being excused by a punchline.
Most of that kind of mean humour, watching other people fail or whatever, is actually a version of schadenfreude. It’s not expanding the joy in the world; it’s getting a kick out of other people’s pain. That’s a tiny bit psychopathic, don’t you think?
Which is quite telling when you consider those studies that show that a lot of our corporate and political leaders are psychopaths. That’s not a part of our society I want to support anyway.
Another of the principles of Fractology, which I’ve got space to go into in more depth in my book, The Soul’s Brain, is that of intention. It’s possible to use the increased awareness that comes with increased sensitivity to have a clearer perception of people’s intentions, not just of what they do.
There’s actually a lot of humour in the world that’s not schadenfreude. It’s warm-hearted or based on what’s ridiculous or congruous instead. For example, this morning when I was driving into the clinic for work I passed a van that had B&E Poultry written on the side of it. It had me laughing. No doubt B&E are actually the initials of the proprietors but my first thought wasn’t Bert and Ernie. All I could think of was chickens doing a breaking and entering job. It’s silly, but that’s my sense of humour, which you can see in my writing.
Can you please share a story about how your highly sensitive nature created problems at work or socially?
I mentioned how sensitive my hearing is earlier. It’s easy for my system to get overwhelmed if someone tries to give me too much information auditorily. This is especially true if I don’t have any visuals to anchor the information. One of my friends is highly auditory. She talks a lot. Occasionally I have to tell her to please stop because I can feel my brain getting overwhelmed. Unfortunately she just thinks I’m being really rude, interrupting and not listening. It’s hard to get her to understand just how much pain I’m getting from my central nervous system when it reaches that point. It’s caused quite a bit of friction in the relationship.
The more we all understand each other’s realities, the less this kind of thing will happen. There is a skill set involved in being able to set in and out of other people’s realities in a way that works positively for everyone. You’ll find that skill set outlined in the last part of my book The Soul’s Brain.
When did you suspect that your level of sensitivity was above the societal norm? How did you come to see yourself as “too sensitive”?
Pretty early on, thanks to my family. They kept telling me I was ‘too sensitive’ and ‘stop being so sensitive’ which was endlessly frustrating and confusing. If I dropped a heavy weight on your foot and that hurt you, would that make you too sensitive? Of course not. Most of the things I was reacting to or telling them about were real. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t understand.
From their point of view I may be ‘too sensitive’ because my sensitivity means I’m not prepared to put up with some of the things they are. It’s true that if I was less sensitive I’d probably be more willing to put up with dysfunctional behaviour, and that makes everyone more comfortable, but my family are meant to be scientists. So if what I’m telling them is more real than what they’re telling me I should accept, that makes no sense to me.
The truth is I don’t think I’m ‘too sensitive’, just as other people aren’t ‘too insensitive’. I simply have a system that’s more finely tuned to the world around me than what most people have. I think my sensitivity is my superpower. It gives me the awareness which enables me to be the healer and teacher of conscious intuition I am today. Without my heightened sensitivity I would never have developed Fractology nor written The Soul’s Brain.
Sensitivity means your system has to work harder to keep itself centred and balanced. It’s like you have to walk in a constant gale while everyone around you has pleasant summer weather. It seems like a lot but it also means that everything in your environment speaks to you loudly and clearly. When you can harness that awareness, it’s brilliant.
I’m sure that being Highly Sensitive also gives you certain advantages. Can you tell us a few advantages that Highly Sensitive people have?
I’ve already mentioned I wouldn’t have developed Fractology nor written The Soul’s Brain without my sensitivity, so that’s a huge thing.
I also mentioned that increased sensitivity, when you learn to harness the awareness that comes with it, enables you to be aware of other people’s intentions. This is such a useful thing in life and business.
Hypersensitivity doesn’t guarantee your intentions will be positive, of course, but because you can feel so much more keenly the consequences of your actions it does make it a more natural thing to want to have mutually expansive, mutually inspiring interactions with everyone. I’d much rather feel other people’s joy than their pain. That’s a really good basis for healthy relationships and for a co-creative, profoundly satisfying life. It’s easier to achieve that when you know how and the principles in The Soul’s Brain will give you a good handle on doing that.
Being highly sensitive also means you’re always going to feel your alignment in life as well. When you learn how to lean into that awareness it gives you a great way to navigate through life to increase its joys and lessen its upsets. It helps you tune into the most effective path possible.
Can you share a story from your own life where your great sensitivity was actually an advantage?
Apart from Fractology and The Soul’s Brain? Sure.
In fact I’ll give you two.
One is a story about a client. She’d been to Cambodia on holiday with her family and came to see me a couple of weeks after she got back. As soon as she walked into my room I could feel the pain in her foot and the strange way it was moving. It wasn’t just that she was limping. I could feel it. The feelings in her body were so intense I could feel it from across the room. As I’ve trained myself to be able to interpret the feelings I get from others, I said to her: “How did you break your foot? And why isn’t it in a cast?”
She’d been to the doctor and he’d told her it was only sprained. I knew it was broken. I — very gently — moved all the bones in her foot around. It confirmed what I knew as soon as she walked in. “Not only have you broken it, but it’s broken in three places.”
She had it X Rayed then, of course, and sure enough it was broken in three places. Without my increased sensitivity she may not have known until it was too late. The bones may have healed badly, or not healed at all, and then she would’ve needed corrective foot surgery which may have affected the way she walked for the rest of her life.
The other story is more of an everyday reality sort of thing. My sensitivity gives me a kind of ‘interior decorating superpower’. What I mean by that is that I can walk into a room and rearrange a few things (with permission of course) and the room will end up feeling so much more comfortable that everyone notices it, not just me. Often a room will have this odd tension to it but my hypersensitivity lets me know exactly what things need to be moved where to release the tension so everyone in the room can relax. That’s fun, and it’s also a really good tool when I’m doing renovation projects.
There seems to be no harm in being overly empathetic. What’s the line drawn between being empathetic and being Highly Sensitive?
I’m not sure there’s a difference in that being a HSP is more of a spectrum than a definitive state. I think empathetic people are on that spectrum, but their sensitivity tends to be more towards emotional stimulus and less towards physical stimulus.
The sensitivity is the threshold of stimulation you need in order for your system to respond. It’s not so much about what that sensitivity is towards.
One of the most important things when you’re a HSP is knowing your own system, it’s strengths and weaknesses. In The Soul’s Brain I’ve got more space to go into how you get to know your system a whole lot better.
One of the reasons this is important is it helps you work out the strategies you need to remain open and not shut down a big part of your system, and yet handle all the stimulation that’s coming your way. You want to lean into your strengths, while managing or working through any weaknesses. Being empathetic can be a huge strength, of course, but it can also be a huge weakness but either way it expresses itself more in the emotional area than in the areas of physical sensitivities, such as to sound, light and other things.
Social Media can often be casually callous. How does Social Media affect a Highly Sensitive Person? How can a Highly Sensitive Person utilize the benefits of social media without being pulled down by it?
It’s so understandable and easy, when you’re a HSP, to want to shut out the world. The problem is, if you shut the world out, you shut yourself in. By not engaging there’s a lot of opportunities we miss out on.
In other words, you don’t want a shield around you, you want a filter; some way to keep out the horribleness while letting in the good stuff. And how do you do that?
The short answer is respect and awareness.
But I need to give you a longer answer to explain that. For me, respect is accepting someone else’s choice. You may not like their choices nor agree with them, but accepting that that is their choice is the first step. So I may not choose to be a troll but if someone else is choosing to be that, that’s their choice. The consequences are also theirs, whether they want to be accountable for them or not. If I can acknowledge that it’s easier to let it go and let ‘them do them’.
So start with respect and then add in awareness. This is where a heightened sensitivity can be an asset. When someone makes a choice it’s going to be coming from one or two places: it’s either going to be coming from Who They Truly Are, their soul or essence if you will, or it’s going to be coming from their issues, or what I think of as their incompletions. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious where people’s choices are coming from but even when it isn’t so obvious you can train your heightened sensitivity to be aware of it. This is so useful because if someone’s choices are coming from Who They Truly Are you’ll want to engage them with, even if they’re not what you might be used to or what is comfortable. When someone makes a choice from Who They Truly Are there’s always inspiration and other good stuff behind it. When we engage in that space the potential for mutual expansion is enormous.
And of course if someone is making choices from their issues you want to let it go, because you’re not their therapist. Or their punching bag.
How would you respond if something you hear or see bothers or affects you, but others comment that you are being petty or that it is minor?
Respect is non-negotiable. What I mean is it’s my choice what I do about what bothers me in the world. You don’t want to take it all on, of course, you need to pick your battles but if I choose to do something then I choose to do it. If others choose to not do something about it, that’s their choice. Sometimes it’s hard to live in that space, but when we make our relationship with ourselves more important than our relationship to other people it gets easier. Especially if other people don’t understand the way our systems work.
That of course is a more independent state-of-being than a codependent one but we all need to learn to respect our own choices if we’re to have any hope in reaching our potential. Again, the steps and skills needed to have a more independent life are outlined in The Soul’s Brain.
What strategies do you use to overcome the perception that others may have of you as overly sensitive without changing your caring and empathetic nature?
It helps to remember that most people think in terms of right and wrong. That’s what most disagreements are about — trying to decide who’s right and who’s wrong.
Systems thinking, which is integrity-based or purpose-based thinking, trumps right-wrong thinking every time. This is one of the primary tools I use to train my own highly sensitive system, and teach other HSPs how to train theirs. If to be more of Who We Truly Are is our main purpose, then it gives a focus to align the overwhelming amount of information that can come in. When we do that our sensitivity transforms from a huge liability to a superpower.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t have moments that are overwhelming or that other people don’t get, but it does mean we can appreciate the upside of our high sensitivity. Other people perceiving that I’m overly sensitive just means they understand my system is more finely tuned than theirs, but they think my system should be like theirs, which of course it’s never going to be. It does help, at least sometimes, that my highly sensitive system enables me to do the work I do and be as effective in my life.
And it doesn’t hurt that my high sensitivity means that I’m really good at picking presents for people they really love. They like that side of it, of course.
One of the principles from Fractology, which I discuss in The Soul’s Brain, is also a great help here. This is one of the first principles, that of acknowledgement and completion. It’s amazing what happens when I acknowledge my high sensitivity or my Aspergers up front to people. They deal with everything a whole lot better then. Try it for yourself.
Next time you notice people beginning to react to something you’ve said add ‘ . . . which is just the way I see it’ or something similar. Or you can acknowledge it in the beginning by starting with ‘You’re going to find this weird . . .’ or ‘You probably won’t like this . . .’
Acknowledging that what you say isn’t the norm can be really helpful for people.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a Highly Sensitive Person? Can you explain what you mean?
I’m not sure if these are as elevated as myths, but they’re definitely misconceptions. Neuronormative people tend to think that being a HSP means it’s either all in your head or that you’re weak.
By saying ‘it’s all in your head’ they’re saying it’s psychosomatic but really they’re suggesting you’re reacting in the way you do for effect. In other words, they think you’re being dramatic about stuff. Paradoxically, most HSPs really dislike drama because it usually brings a heap of stimulus which is overwhelming for them. This, as I said, is a misconception. It makes as much sense as telling an oak tree it wants to be tall to show off or a jasmine vine that it wants to spread everywhere to be nosy. Our systems develop the way they do because that’s the template our brain has. And, yes, our brain is in our head but that’s not what people mean when they say ‘it’s all in your head’.
The misconception of weakness has a little more truth to it, though it’s something the HSP can learn to manage, depending on their level of sensitivity and a few other factors. When you have a highly tuned system it can be more fragile, that’s true. It’s why you can shatter a fine crystal glass with the right frequency, but you can’t shatter normal glass in the same way. It takes a lot of work, but it is possible for people to learn to be both highly sensitive and robust. By training their system to constantly reset to their own energy and own internal alignment, a HSP can learn to recover faster and faster from all the stimulus that is affecting them. It’ll always be work but it can get to a point where it feels good, almost like an energetic workout. Because HSPs have to work at being robust it’s possible for them to end up some of the strongest people around. You see that in a lot of the Fractologists I’ve trained. They’ve finely tuned their sensitivity but their system will automatically reset itself to their own centre, which gives them a lot of internal strength. Of course, it’ll always still be possible for the system to get overwhelmed if it’s too much but HSPs aren’t always as weak as people think.
As you know, one of the challenges of being a Highly Sensitive Person is the harmful, and dismissive sentiment of “why can’t you just stop being so sensitive?” What do you think needs to be done to make it apparent that it just doesn’t work that way?
Education is an answer for improving most things. I don’t mean schooling. Actually schooling can be detrimental for HSPs unless the school knows how to work with neurodivergent people. I mean increasing people’s awareness. Asking a HSP “why can’t you just stop being so sensitive?” is as useful as my asking neuronormative people “why can’t you just stop being so insensitive?” I’m sure no one would like to be asked that, and that’s because when people ask this question there’s an implied judgement there.
One of the best ways to handle that question is to ignore the implied judgement and not take the question as rhetorical. If you answer it from an educative point of view, such as ‘I can explain to you how my brain works differently, if you’d really like to know’, takes the sting out of the question and may turn into an opportunity to educate the person so they’re more open to different ways-of-being in future.
The implied judgement in this question is that being highly sensitive is somehow ‘wrong’. Once again, this is where purpose-based or systems thinking can be helpful. Once a HSP understands their own system and its advantages, especially when they know them well enough to be able to lean into them, they can explain why their heightened sensitivity is part-and-parcel of them being who they are, and what it gives to their own life and to the world. Again, it can be a long path to get to that point. Knowing what steps to take on that path can help, however, and those steps are outlined in The Soul’s Brain.
So, yes, I think education is the answer — educating HSPs on how to train their system and match their sensitivity with robustness, and educating non-HSPs about how different brains develop and what advantages there are in that. Some of that education is already happening, thankfully. Did you know there are computer companies that now have policies requiring people with Aspergers make up a part of their workforce? This isn’t charity. It’s because they’ve come to understand that this particular form of neurodivergence means they’ll pick up potential issues much earlier than anyone else. So education about the benefits of high sensitivity can help everyone, including the neuronormative. And there’s nothing like learning something is an advantage for people to start to appreciate it more.
Ok, here is the main question for our discussion. Can you share with us your “5 Things You Need To Know To Survive And Thrive As A Highly Sensitive Person? Please give a story or an example for each.
If I had to condense The Soul’s Brain into five main points for HSPs it would be these:
- Find your centre. Being a HSP means feeling like you’re living in a constant gale. There are stimuli on all sides constantly pushing you this way and that. When you develop a constant focus of internal alignment it will enable you to handle all of that much better. Importantly, it will mean you’ll be less likely to get lost in all the overwhelming confusion of the world. As a HSP you’ll probably want to change the world for the better. That’s a wonderful thing but you may not be able to change the world, there’s too many other people involved in that, but the most important thing is to not let the world change you.
- Stay present. It’s overwhelming enough when you’re sensitive enough to pick up every little thing from the environment, without letting old stimuli hang around in your system for days or months or even years. When we let old stuff hang around in our space it means we have even less reserves and it’s even easier to get overwhelmed. The more you can acknowledge and let go of things, small things as well as big things, the more reserve you’ll have to face each day.
- Trust yourself and learn to speak your own language. If you’ve not already trained your system, it may not seem like it right now, but your high sensitivity is your superpower. Your sensitivity enables you to do things others couldn’t. The trick is that your system isn’t ‘normal’. I know you know that, but what I mean is your system is unique to you. That means it works in unique ways, as if it has a unique language. When you learn to interpret it, to understand how all the information your system is giving you about the world serves you, you’ll be able to work with it in more expansive ways.
- Lean into your strengths. So much of what’s said about being a HSP focuses on the negatives; the stress and how it makes you weak. If you let that control you, it’ll unfortunately increase the stress of all that stimulation and it won’t help you develop the robustness that enables your system to reset itself. This robustness is the key to unleashing the superpower that lies hidden in your high sensitivity. Your system is streaming you information about the world constantly. I’m sure there are times it’s difficult to believe, but your system is giving you that information because you need it. When you understand the purpose of your high sensitivity, what it is you can do that no one else can do, and lean into that you’ll discover a whole new level of personal value. It’s the key to your personal genius.
- Respect is non-negotiable. Respect starts with respecting yourself. Accepting the system you have is the beginning of respect. Choosing to work with your system as it is to optimise it, rather than thinking you have to change the way you are, is the beginning of self-respect. It’s hard to feel it sometimes, I know, but your genius lies in your high sensitivity. If you try to deny that you’ll only end up trying to live with the kind of constant internal battle I lived with for years, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. It’s exhausting.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I’ve mentioned a few times that most people are stuck in right-wrong thinking. This is a way of thinking that comes from codependency. When we’re stuck in our codependencies the world is polarised between the good guys or rescuers and the bad guys or persecutors. It’s a simple way of looking at the world but really it’s used to enforce conformity. Obviously the more everyone is able to embrace diversity the better it will be for those who are neurodivergent or highly sensitive.
One of the reasons many people aren’t comfortable with diversity is because they’ve got all these skills around enforcing conformity but they don’t have any skills around how to deal with difference. That skill-set is what enables us to lead more interdependent lives.
So what I’d love to see in the world is perhaps an organisation or movement that teaches the systems-thinking and mutually expansive exchange that are a big part of the skill-set that enables us to work with difference. Interdependency is more than just a nice philosophy or theory. It’s a practical skill-set that enables us to work in co-creative ways for the mutual support and expansion of everyone and everything — by which I mean the environment as much as everyone involved.
Who knows? Perhaps we may one day see a system of co-creative certification for everyone, in the same way that our organic food or fairtrade goods are certified. If businesses were certified for the level of mutual expansion they achieved it would go a long way to helping people to understand the benefits of working with diversity. Only with diversity are we going to realise the brilliance of everyone’s genius.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can find my book for purchase online: The Soul’s Brain: The Neurology and Logic of Your Intuition at www.fractology.info/thesoulsbrain or wherever you normally get your books.
If you’d like to learn more about Fractology check out https://fractology.info/ While you’re there join my email list for more insights.
I’d also encourage you to sign up to my YouTube channel, Living Intuitively with Dr Catherine Wilkins. I post new videos there about intuition, which is one way of training high sensitivity, nearly every week.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjERReRWSPQLxh64QTm0j5g
If you’d like to know more about me personally check out www.drcatherinewilkins.com
I’m also on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcatherinewilkins/
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Dr Catherine Wilkins of Fractology: How To Survive And Thrive As A Highly Person was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.