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Beyond The Paradigm: The Skills of Limitless Human Potential A Series for the Caretakers of Humanity
By Valerie Thea Vandermeer
In this ongoing series Valerie presents some of the “Skills of Limitless Potential” which form the elements of her EarthWalk methodology for working with children. These specific skill sets tend to be natural attributes for children, but with varying degrees of expression. Although innate, they are often forgotten or weak from disuse and most adults must remember and re-learn them.
III: Sensory Differences
The human body is an extraordinary perceptive machine. It possesses a highly refined system that constantly draws in, discerns, sorts, prioritizes, and synthesizes an almost unbelievable array of stimuli. And that’s just the known attributes of the nervous system as understood by current biologic and scientific theory. Add to that the many layers of sensory experience which are less understood or yet unknown and you begin to realize that we exist surrounded in a virtual sensory soup of unlimited ingredients and flavours.
The typical nervous system filters out most sensory stimuli. This is why when you first move into a home you hear every car that goes by outside. Eventually, though, your brain realizes that it does not need to do anything with this information and filters it out of your conscious perception. The result is that you stop hearing the road noise even though it is still there at the exact same sound and volume. Our brain learns to simply stop paying attention to many of the sounds around us. It’s called habituation and it affects all aspects of our sensory processing, not just our hearing.
Since young children encounter new stimuli on a regular basis, their nervous systems spend a lot of time in this process of determining the nature of sensory input and how the brain will organize and relate to various events. This is one of the reasons why young children are generally more relaxed in their home environment – their nervous system is already familiar with and knows how to relate to most of the sensory stimuli there. Everything from the sound of the refrigerator and heating system to the feeling of the carpet on bare feet has been processed and organized and is largely ignored by the sensory system. These things are still heard and felt, but the child is not consciously aware of them because the brain has chosen to stop paying attention to those feelings.
In a new environment, new sensory learning must occur. Eventually the child will learn to recognize stimulus events as generalized rather than localized. The sound of a dishwasher may startle a baby at home until it becomes habituated, but that same sound may cause alarm when visiting a different home. Eventually the child learns a generalized idea of the dishwasher sound and habituates to it regardless of where it is heard. At this point the child has made an internal decision that the sound of a dishwasher is safe and does not require immediate action. By the time most children reach school age, they have habituated, or stopped paying attention, to literally thousands upon thousands of sensory events.
But many children being born today are not habituating to sensory stimuli in typical fashion. This is often called sensory integration disorder or dysfunction and is considered a problem with the processing mechanism of the nervous system. Any parent whose child suffers from sensory processing issues will agree that it can indeed have a tremendous impact on a child’s ability to function. However, we need to carefully evaluate what’s really happening before we assume that sensory processing differences are inherently dysfunctional. Do these children have a diminished capacity to habituate sensory events, or do they have a different relationship to sensory events and, therefore, simply need different tools in order to habituate properly?
I believe that rather than teaching these children to meet our standards of habituation, which basically requires them to stop paying attention to much of what is going on around them, we need to better appreciate that their degree of awareness and sensitivity is both meaningful and purposeful – and has been present as anomalous attributes in healers throughout history. The concept of “sensitive people” is not new. What is new is the phenomenon of so many sensitive children, all exhibiting similar reactions to sensory events.
It is a bit amusing to step back and examine ourselves as a culture. We are adrift in a sea of overwhelming sensory stimuli with noise and light pollution and new sounds, events, even fabrics, being invented and delivered to the market everyday. We are in an unprecedented era of almost implausible levels of near constant sensory stimulation. Yet our reaction to children who feel overwhelmed by sensory input is to assume they are “dysfunctional” and train them to be more shut down like ourselves! Can we consider the possibility that it is our culture and lifestyle that is dysfunctional, and not the children?
A huge clue to understanding the puzzle of sensory difference lies in understanding the underlying issues of “feeling safe” that drive the process. A stimulus is habituated when our nervous system is confident that we do not need to react or respond to the stimulus in any way to maintain our personal safety. But what if the “self” has an expanded concept of personal safety? If a child has a core conceptualization or inner knowing that we are all connected and our life energy, being, essence, potential, etc. is all interwoven as One, then “personal safety” is directly linked to “universal safety”. So “safe” becomes a more global, non-local sensation.
Typical children have little reaction to a schoolyard scuffle or an act of meanness if it does not directly involve them. But highly aware children react deeply because they feel the act personally as a sensory input. These children do not readily habituate to these transgressions because an act against another is an act against the collective One, and therefore against them. This is why many children barely notice a “minor” hurtful act and others will stand transfixed, feeling intensely alarmed. A child with an underlying consciousness of human connection will literally be engaged in an adrenaline response to distress in others.
Is this dysfunction? Excess sensitivity? Emotional debilitation? Or is it the healthy response of an aware being and, quite possibly, vital to our ongoing survival as a species? According to noted evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, “Sustainability happens when species learn to feed each other instead of fight each other.” Sensitive children have an underlying awareness of this profoundly necessary and deeply influential drive within our species and that awareness greatly influences how the nervous system responds to and categorizes various stimuli. If connection and cooperation is a means to our ongoing survival as a species, then activities which create separation and conflict are perceived as survival threats and not tolerable.
In order to support children with sensory differences, we must first appreciate the difference. It is not the difference that causes the dysfunction. The difference is likely to be highly functional from an evolutionary perspective. The reactions of sensitive individuals could hold vital clues about which of our human behaviors are life affirming and sustaining and which are destructive. Isn’t it, then, in the best interest of the child and the community for us to appreciate enhanced sensitivities and, in fact, cultivate them in others?
Despite this, aware children are often burdened by the emotional, social and spiritual toll of a life beset by near constant sensory reaction. Their ability to move through this world purposefully and fully engaged with joy and aliveness is hampered by being repeatedly bombarded with sensory stimuli for which they have no framework to understand or integrate. As care-givers we can provide deeply thoughtful tools to help children mitigate the stress and anxiety that comes with a high degree of sensitivity while still retaining their innate ability to perceive a broad spectrum of sensory phenomena. Next month, I’ll share several effective specific techniques to transforming sensory “dysfunction” into a high degree of purposeful functionality. © 2005, Valerie Thea Vandermeer To schedule a personal phone consultation with Valerie, click here. This article is the first in a series written by EarthWalk Founder, Valerie Thea Vandermeer, being published by Children of the New Earth Magazine Online. To read the rest of this series when it is first published or for more cutting edge articles on parenting, nurturing and educating today's children you can subscribe to CNE by clicking the link below.
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Copyright 2002-2005 Valerie Thea Vandermeer. All rights reserved. For problems or questions regarding this website contact valerie@earth-walk.net. Last updated: July 22, 2006. |
