How this got started: the old Austin HSP meetup

I got an email, asking how the Texas HSP group is listed as starting in December 2007, while I keep talking about the "Austin HSP group" and the year 2004.

Well, there was a previous Texas group for highly sensitive people which was active from 2003-06, and a group of Austin and Central Texas HSPs started a "meetup" out of that group. That group was partly made possible after Elaine Aron taught a weekend workshop at The Crossings in Austin, in the spring of 2004, based on her Highly Sensitive Person book.

With the combination of people from the workshop, the Texas group on Yahoo, and HSPs listing themselves as "interested in an Austin HSP meetup," we ended up with enough of a "base" to have local get-togethers. Fairly small, but none-the-less an HSP peer group in Austin.

The current group is an attempt to create something similar, but not as "Austin-centric," and hopefully with the outcome that there could also be local HSP groups formed in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, as well as in Austin.

So, that's the "short version" of the history behind this group.

As for the current "incarnation" of the Texas HSP Group, all things take time. The "old" Yahoo discussion group was active for 16 months before there was actually a get-together. I expect this group will also take a while to get going, even though the general level of awareness of high sensitivity as a trait is much higher in 2008, than it was in 2003.