Listen in for a podcast series of Conversations on Gifted Trauma with InterGifted founding director Jennifer Harvey Sallin and InterGifted coach & community leader Karin Eglinton. "Gifted trauma" is the trauma that gifted people can experience if they feel ridiculed, ignored, rejected, misunderstood, out-of-place, left out or left behind, pressured to conform, or excessively groomed or exploited as a result of their unusual minds. Gifted people's experiences of other non-gifted specific traumas are also unique, as their extreme mental and often emotional intensity and complexity bring so many extra questions to the "unanswerable why" of trauma. We explore all this - and hope and healing - together from a personal development point of view. Listen below or on anchor.fm.
CONVERSATION 1: SHAME
Episode 1 looks at what gifted trauma is, as well as the shame gifted people often feel for carrying their usually unidentified gifted traumas. Links and resources mentioned are:
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Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory
CONVERSATION 2: HEALING THROUGH (GIFTED) CONNECTION
Episode 2 explores what we need in terms of gifted-specific understanding and mirroring to begin to heal from our gifted-specific traumas. Links and resources mentioned are:
- InterGifted's community
- HEPG group
- John Cacioppo’s work on loneliness
- Karin’s Wholeness-based Relating course
- Gifted Coaching & Mentoring
- The Gifted Adult, by Mary-Elaine Jacobson
- Giftedness Assessments
- Gifted-specific Therapy
- InterGifted's Blog
- Wheel of Consent, by Betty Martin
- Peter Walker's Complex-PTSD book
- Peter Walker’s website
- Out of the Fog website & top 100 traits
- Living with Intensity, by Susan Daniels & Michael Piechowski
- Embracing the Gifted Quest
- Being Me
CONVERSATION 3: GIFTED TRAUMA & THE BODY
Episode 3 ventures into into the often underexplored territory of the relationship between (gifted) trauma and our bodies. It is a complex and sometimes daunting relationship, but also rich and hopeful in terms of the doors for healing that open through body-based approaches. Links and resources mentioned are:
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The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk
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Healing Developmental Trauma, by Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre
CONVERSATION 4: GIFTED NEEDS & SYMBOLISM
Episode 4 explores our knowledge (and lack thereof) of our gifted-specific needs. To do so, we explore how in response to gifted-specific trauma, we often use symbols to represent ourselves to ourselves, and thus we get distanced from a present-moment awareness of our gifted-specific needs. It's a negative feedback-loop, and here we explore how it happens, and how to exit the loop and become aware of and dynamically responsive to your own gifted needs. Links and resources mentioned are:
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Giftedness & Authenticity, by Silver Huang
- Gifted Adults & Second Childhoods: Revisiting Essential Stages of Development, by Jennifer Harvey Sallin
- Karin's compilation on Giftedness and Invisible Disability
- Karin's upcoming workshop: Legitimizing Your Gifted Needs
- Kelly Pryde's upcoming Embodied Mindfulness for Gifted People Course
- Marion Kee's upcoming Multipotentialites Group Course
- We no longer have our adolescents' group, but teens 16 years old and up are welcome to join our main group
CONVERSATION 5: GIFTED TRAUMA & THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY
In episode 5, we venture into an exploration of how gifted trauma predisposes us to strong and painful - and sometimes debilitating - reactions to the climate emergency. Karin shares her personal story of how she was affected by this and worked through it, and we explore together what a gifted person can do now to heal from the inside as well as contribute to the healing of the planet. It is a raw and real, and honest and hopeful conversation. Links and resources mentioned are:
- I Heart Earth
- Gifted Mindfulness Collective
- Gifted Therapy / Ecogrief Therapy Search
- Gifted Coaching & Mentoring
- Eric Windhorst - ecotherapy and coaching
- Wholeness Based Relating Course - email us if you'd be interested in joining: connect@intergifted.com
CONVERSATION 6: HEALTHY BOUNDARIES, PART 1 -- CULTIVATING ALIVENESS
In episode 6, we explore an essential topic to gifted relating and gifted trauma: cultivating healthy boundaries. Specifically, we explore the roles of aliveness, coherence, and organization in helping us create sustainable relationships with our gifted and non-gifted peers. In this discussion, we especially focus on our quality of aliveness; what it means and how it can become distorted through trauma, as well as how to (re)learn to cherish and value our aliveness and use it actively as a solid foundation for cultivating healthy boundaries. This is part 1 of 3. Links and resources mentioned are:
- I Heart Earth
- Ecological Intelligence & Ecological Giftedness, by Jennifer Harvey Sallin
- The work of the Heart Math Institute
- Emotions & Carried Emotions, by Jennifer Harvey Sallin
- InterGifted Body Therapist Esther Goldinger
- The work of Dr. Rick Hanson on re-wiring your nervous system to "take in the good"
CONVERSATION 7: HEALTHY BOUNDARIES, PART 2 -- CULTIVATING COHERENCE
In episode 7, we continue our exploration on cultivating healthy boundaries by looking deeply at individual, social and collective coherence and its role in helping us to be generative and boundaried adults. This is one of our longer episodes, and it reflects the importance of this topic in our world of quickly compiling and accelerating crises and conflicts. This is part 2 of 3. Links and resources mentioned are:
- Conversation 6: Healthy Boundaries, Part 1: Cultivating Aliveness
- Our Inner Fire of Aliveness: Gifted Expression, Part 1, by Karin Eglinton
- The work of Katie Bowman
- Living with Intensity: Giftedness and Self-Actualization, by Jennifer Harvey Sallin
- Robert Greene's Mastery
- How Gifted People Can Reach Mastery: The Gifted Coaching Process, by Jennifer Harvey Sallin
- Minimum Viable Product (Lean Startup Movement)
- Simon Sinek on finding your "Why": How Great Leaders Inspire Action
- Polyvagal Theory
- Eric Berne's Games People Play (Parent - Adult - Child)
- Transactional Analysis
...
Thank you for listening. We will add additional episodes here as they become available.
We are no longer able to respond to all the emails we receive with listeners' feedback and questions, but if you write to us we may address your questions and reflections in a future episode. You are welcome to contact us at connect@intergifted.com.
ABOUT US
JENNIFER HARVEY SALLIN
Jen is the founding director of InterGifted. She's a psychologist, coach and mentor who specializes in providing training & mentoring for coaches and other helping professionals who support the gifted population. She also performs giftedness assessments and mentors profoundly gifted adults. She writes extensively on giftedness and self-development and you can find her articles here on InterGifted’s blog and on her own blog at Rediscovering Yourself. Her climate emergency initiative is I Heart Earth. She is based in Switzerland and works with gifted adults throughout the world. You can learn more about her here.
KARIN EGLINTON
Karin is InterGifted's community leader. She's a mentor, coach and teacher for gifted adolescents and adults, providing individual sessions, courses and workshops for gifted people who want to weave their gifted cognition into concrete and creative action, harness their potential, and thrive in the world. Her climate emergency initiative is I Heart Earth. She is based in Germany and works with clients around the world. You can learn more about Karin and get in touch with her here.
Andrea Pellegrino
Let’s see, where to start. I have had a very complicated question I’ve been pondering for years, and have asked several specialist Including geneticist and all but one blank stared me. The one who did not simply admitted she did not have an answer.
Through dealing with my own mystery of chronic health issues, and subsequently researching physiology & genetics, I learned that by enlarge metabolic processes regulate auditory processing & catecholamines regulate functions such as fluid reasoning and visual-spatial … from a battery of testing as a child I knew a tested low in auditory processing but very high both visual-spatial and fluid reasoning. I also knew from at home genetics test results cross compared to a whole slew of genetic databases that my COMT gene in theory produced a higher rate of catecholamines. …. so I started thinking about the genetic components of what actually made brains work “differently” or “quicker” and it also got me thinking about the whole 2e thinking and masking. and how strengths can hid weakness and vise versa and how some can both mask each other.
i have been tested for a collection of metabolic disorders because many of my systems appear to be related to fatty acid oxidation issues or glycogen storage … yet all the test have not show the algorithm results the doctors expect to see so things are dismissed.
I have also been aware of how I can hyper focus and almost get into a hyper engaged, hyper focused state of concentration where everything gets tuned out, and i am so focused and it’s so fun … but it drains me too.
It is not lost on me that both of these aspects deal with the way the body uses energy sources … particularly when it comes to Dabrowski’s theory of overexcitabilities.
The major question I have pondered and proposed to doctors is like how 2e traits can mask each other in terms of identify intellectual ability, can the same genetic components that control those aspects of a person mask what would be expected results in terms of physiological manifestation of diseases in the body as well.
Still pondering. Still waiting for an answer. But I LOVE that someone else is thinking about this stuff and talking about it! I thought o was alone!
Belonging to the World: Jen's Art | Mermaid Forest
[…] Conversations on Gifted Trauma, a podcast where we discuss the very real phenomenon of “gifted trauma” from our own experiences, that of coaching clients and gifted peers; […]