Vachon Imagined

When sensitivity becomes the devil, people are often patronized, demeaned, and made into the problem for feeling too much. Yet what is being rejected rarely exists in the other person alone. It exists first in the one doing the rejecting.

A person who finds emotions impractical, inconvenient, or threatening will often experience others the same way. When another person’s feelings invite them to look at life more deeply—to examine their own creation, their own wounds, their own humanity—they resist. Rather than turning inward, they turn outward, locating the problem elsewhere.

This is a form of self-rejection. A resistance to being human. And human beings possess a remarkable ability to make themselves right. We justify what we see. We defend what we have become.

I once heard a father explain that demeaning his son was necessary, that there are times when belittling a child is appropriate. Yet he could not understand why his son had become belittling himself. What was invisible while it lived within him became visible once it entered the world. The act was repeated, solidified, and eventually returned to him in another form.

In the realm of possibility, all things may have their place. There may indeed be a time for firmness, correction, even conflict. But once something is brought into the world through our actions, it becomes part of creation. Others encounter it, learn from it, justify it, imitate it, or suffer from it.

To know ourselves is also to know others. We recognize anger because we have known anger. We recognize agitation because we have felt agitation. We recognize fear, shame, resentment, and love because they live within us too. Sensitivity is not merely the awareness of our own emotions; it is the bridge through which we perceive the emotional lives of others.

When we feel another person’s anger or agitation, patience allows us to hold what we perceive without immediately reacting to it. We can acknowledge what is present without becoming it. We can hold others accountable for the way they are acting. We can correct them. We can walk away. We can choose whether or not to participate.

What we must not do is deny what is there.

Denial is often the first form of spiritual blindness. It begins as a refusal to see and gradually becomes a refusal to know. Repeated often enough, blindness becomes character. Character becomes identity. Over time, a person can become so committed to the image they have built that they no longer recognize life beyond it.

A statue is not dangerous because it is evil. It is dangerous because it cannot move. It cannot learn. It cannot be corrected. It cannot receive anything new. The tragedy is not that such a person cannot be saved by others. The tragedy is that they no longer desire transformation themselves. They have mistaken certainty for truth and rigidity for strength.

We all do this to some degree. We all make meaning from what we see.

But to make emotions irrelevant is, in some sense, to make people irrelevant. Emotions are not obstacles to life; they are one of the ways life speaks. They guide us before thought arrives. The body responds before the mind explains. Feeling is not the enemy of wisdom but one of its sources.

To demean, dismiss, or ridicule a person for being emotional is not a sign of strength. It is often a refusal to learn from one of the deepest forms of knowledge available to us. In doing so, we do not create stronger people. We create blind spots. We create ignorance disguised as certainty. We create weakness masquerading as control.