Gifted Wounds, Gifted Healing

Abuse Recovery, gifted trauma, Giftedness, InterGifted, RelationshipsLeave a comment

Giftedness itself isn’t traumatizing, but the environments we grow up and live in often are. Because giftedness comes with unique developmental needs, sensitivities and social differences, it also carries particular vulnerabilities – especially in environments that misunderstand, minimize or exploit those differences. The resulting trauma can fracture our relationship with our gifted self, leaving us disconnected from our creativity, meaning and sense of existential belonging. In this article, Jennifer Harvey Sallin explores the nature of gifted trauma and what it means to heal it, by learning to create the conditions where it can be safely reclaimed. This article is an adapted version of the introduction to InterGifted’s recently published book ‘How I Healed My Gifted Trauma’, a collaborative exploration of how gifted people around the world are finding their way back to wholeness. 

Narcissism and the World

Climate Psychology, degrowth, Gifted Therapy, Giftedness, Healing, Narcissism1 Comment

At the core of structural personality disordering is a rigid coping strategy which was very functional for restrictive developmental environments, but which later in life causes all kinds of trouble for the person in contexts which don’t require that rigid form of coping. We all know narcissism from our own healthy narcissistic development as children, but we also know its more toxic forms from cultural/collective narcissism, and from any of the unhealed narcissistic wounds that remain alive in us as individuals, in our own relationship to ourselves and in our relationship to others and the world. Healing narcissistic wounds is available for many of us, and our individual healing contributes to profound systems change, as intergenerational, cultural and collective narcissistic wounds are crying out to be tended to and repaired. This article explores all this and gives resources for further discovery and recovery.

Supporting Gifted People: Guidelines for Therapists & Coaches (and Advice for Gifted Clients)

Coaching Process, Gifted Coaching, Giftedness, Healing, Psychology, Recommended Reading1 Comment

It is essential that therapists, coaches and other helping professionals know what giftedness is, how to recognize it in clients, and how to best support their gifted clients. Anyone helping a gifted person is, by necessity, helping a gifted mind – and gifted minds work in unique ways, have unusual needs, and grow in unconventional directions. Here are some guidelines for helping professionals and the gifted clients they support.

Actual vs. Theoretical Potential

Gifted Coaching, Giftedness, Personal Effectiveness, Potential, Procrastination, Tools for Positive ChangeLeave a comment

Visionaries aren’t just “people with lots of ideas.” Rather, a visionary’s brain has an astounding ability to make sense of seemingly millions of complex associations at lightning speed, working and reworking the puzzle of an uncountable number of infinitesimal factors, and seeing possibilities and obstacles that many couldn’t have conceptualized given a year’s time to reflect, research and plan. On one hand, it’s fun be a visionary! On the other, there arrives a moment when all of the speedy imagining must slow down: the connections have to converge in order for the brain and mind to focus on the attainment of a singular integrated goal. And for many visionaries and other types of global thinkers, this is the really, really hard part of life.

What is Giftedness? Its Meaning and Use in Coaching

Gifted Coaching, Giftedness, PotentialLeave a comment

As a coach for the gifted, I devote my work to supporting intellectually advanced and intense, or “gifted”, adults because I believe in the importance and potential of these unique, if sometimes overlooked or misunderstood, individuals. But I regularly encounter a lot of confusion about the subject, both in the general public and in “gifted” individuals themselves. What is “giftedness”? And why does it matter? And what is coaching gifted people all about?