You’re too sensitive!
Saturday was the 14-year anniversary of my move to the United States, and it got me thinking about my early days in New York. This was seven years after I got my 11 amalgam fillings placed. I was in the middle of a roaring case of mercury poisoning, but I didn’t have a clue.
I just thought I was wired differently.
Looking at the people around me, I could see that I had a whole nother emotional reality going on. Almost everyone I knew seemed to have this super-human strength to shrug off the slings and arrows thrown their way and move on with their sunny lives.
I wasn’t built like that.
When bad things happened to me–I mean little bad thing like missing a train–I would brace myself for an emotional storm. I had enough sense not to take it out on the world around me, but it was there on the inside, and it would go on and on and on. One minute late for the subway, and I would be in the darkest of foul moods for the rest of the day.
Was it just ‘moodiness?’ What was a ‘mood’ anyway?
Back then, I was dedicated to therapy, self-help books, support groups, anything that might give me some leverage in my battle to manage my emotions. I remember a group leader once making an important distinction in defining the terms we were using to describe our feelings.
“Moods,” she said, “are a background hum of feeling that color your experience but aren’t very intense. Moods can last for hours or days at a time. Emotions, on the other hand, are intense and hard to ignore. Emotions happen in the forefront of your experience and rarely last for more than half an hour.”
I went away from this group more confused than I’d gone in. What did you call a strong emotional experience like despair that dominated your consciousness and went on for days or weeks?
You called it ‘A Symptom of Mercury Poisoning’, that’s what you called it. But I had a long road to travel before I could make that connection.
Instead, at the time, I tried on different explanations. I adopted the identity ‘Highly Sensitive Person.’ I worked hard on resolving issues from my childhood, so that any overhanging trauma would stop coloring my adult life. I stopped comparing myself to ‘normal’ people and accepted that I was talented in my own way, even if it meant that I had to spend one day a week in bed staring at the wall, trying to process and calm the emotional jumble of the week.
Not once did it occur to me that mercury–or any physiological force–was the cause of my emotional sensitivity.
That blows my mind, because it’s so clear to me now. Having gone through detox, having watched every damn thing mercury did to me intensify and then disappear, I can see it all. Mercury was inside my head, screwing up my neurotransmitters, lowering my serotonin. It was slowing down my liver, filling my bloodstream with backed-up toxins that swam into my brain and made me insane. It was burdening my adrenals, causing my cortisol levels to fall, making me unable to cope with the everyday stresses of life.
But it was going to be a long, hard road before I figured all that out. In the meantime, I kept living in the emotional storm, harboring the enemy within for many years before I could name what it was and break free.
Mercury Stories 
That was your life? It sounds just like my life.
I had a lesson in just how powerful mercury is when I had a crown taken off and the underlying mercury removed. I had been feeling wonderful for months. But then the day after this procedure was done, I was driving and someone pulled out in front of me. I became enraged and began chasing them. I couldn’t figure out why I was suddenly so angry since I had been feeling so good, until I remembered the previous day’s procedure.
Wow, what a wake up call!
Chicken or egg? Being highly sensitive makes you more susceptible to mercury poisoning, or mercury poisoning makes you highly sensitive? I am / have both, but for me I think I was highly sensitive first, from birth, which predisposed me to mercury toxicity.
It is not easy living with either, that’s for sure.
@Mary Lu, I know exactly what you mean–strong feelings that come from nowhere that leave you thinking, “That can’t be me, it has to be the mercury.”
@Nicola, I wonder about that too. How much of the sensitivity I felt as a child was just my baseline genetics, how much was due to circumstances, and how much was heavy metals. It is chicken or egg, there’s no way to tease it apart. All I know is that today chelation has given me an emotional resilience that I didn’t think was ever possible for me. I wish I could cast it back in time and give it to my teen and childhood self.
Cool post. Touches the heart.
Now after detoxing mercury how is your emotional strenght? I like your description of ‘these super strenght people’.
When I take ALA I feel strong, stable mood and alert. But I do not know whether it is due to its detoxing effect or its antioxodant effect. I am not sure if mercury is my problem.
I have already detoxed and done a cutler hairtest which showed several lows and counting rules applied but this could also be caused by other things.
After detox, I feel very emotionally stable, and I’m so grateful that detox has done this for me. I didn’t expect that chelation would change my inner world this much. I thought it would bring me back to how I felt right before I got my amalgams removed. But it did so much more for me, and I get to live the rest of my life feeling this good–it’s like a miracle 🙂
I believe in the amalgam issues, and I’m weighing in on the ‘Sensitive, and then the amalgams didn’t help’ theory. Simply because I can trace the sensitivity gene through generations, but not the amalgams. The latest in a long line of sensitives in my family has been that way since birth, long before any teeth issues. But, I’m still getting mine removed because I know it’s not helping me at all. Seems I’m allergic to quite a few metals. So far: nickel and titanium dioxide. Why take risks and continue carrying this metal in my mouth?