Many gifted people struggle with shame related to the ways they don’t fit into normal expectations, or the ways their “gifts” are a “bother” to others around them. In this very personal story, I share how unidentified “gifted shame” impacted my own life and how I worked my way toward self-acceptance as a gifted adult. How has your “gifted shame” impacted you?
Many of our emotions are self-experienced; however, sometimes our emotions are carried emotions — emotions that we do experience but that are not ours. These emotions have been given to us by others (our parents, our culture, etc.) and they make us feel like we are living someone else’s life. In this article, I explore the difference between self-experienced emotions and carried emotions, and show how gifted people can gain conscious control over their inner emotional lives.
How many years do searchers of peace spend looking, but never finding it? And how many conclude that, just maybe, it’s not possible at all, resigning themselves to isolated moments of peace within a more general state of chaos and inner inquietude? Peace is possible, but seems impossible until you find it. We in some way expect to find it as an external “thing,” some physical object found in our outer environment, or as a lifestyle that provides an inner security. But once found, we are often surprised to learn that peace is different than we thought it would be. It is not external. It arises as if spontaneously from a more internal process – a self-catalyzing end-process that springs from an inner “organized” chaos. Thinking about collectively autocatalytic systems helps understand why this is the case, and how we can encourage the seemingly spontaneous arousal of peace in our lives.
Intense inner disharmony can sometimes accompany the experience of giftedness. But rather than framing this disharmony as mental weakness or illness, Dabrowski looked at it as a catalyst for advanced personality development. Learn about Dabrowski’s Overexcitabilities, Theory of Positive Disintegration and the climb toward gifted self-actualization in this article.
Many of us conceptualize “struggle” as “bad.” In our limited view, we consider that to struggle means to be in pain, and that to be in pain is bad. But it is exactly this reasoning that has caused so many of us to fall repeatedly into cycles of struggle recreation (often called self-defeating behavior patterns): to avoid struggle is to short-circuit a natural and necessary growth process, keeping us in a “Groundhog Day” pattern of personal and relational problems. How can we resolve this dilemma?
I often work with clients who want better life balance – better balance between work, personal, and family priorities. Difficulty with this issue could perhaps best be titled the “Syndrome of Too Many Priorities,” and I try to help clients resolve the dilemma by teaching them to practice regular questioning, self-honesty and self-kindness. How do these practices help restore life balance?
I spent last summer in America and one of my favorite things to do whenever I’m there is listen to audio books – there’s such an amazing selection of audio books in English. During that period, I was deeply involved in my studies of neuroscience, brain plasticity, and the power of the mind in trauma and…