19 Jan 2019

Conversations on Gifted Trauma Podcast

Listen in for a 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, and find our updated episode resource lists below.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

 

JENNIFER HARVEY SALLIN

Jen is InterGifted's founding director. As a psychologist and coach, she now specializes in providing qualitative giftedness assessments to individuals and professional training to coaches and other helping professionals who support the gifted population. She writes extensively on gifted self-development and you can find her articles here on InterGifted’s blog and on her own blog at Rediscovering Yourself. Learn more about Jen on our leadership page.

 

KARIN EGLINTON

Karin is InterGifted's community leader. As a coach and mentor, she provides qualitative giftedness assessments and intuitive coaching for gifted individuals, as well as professional development mentoring for gifted coaches, therapists and other developing gifted leaders. You can learn more about her and her work, and contact her via our leadership page and her website Mermaid Forest.

 

3 Responses

  1. Andrea Pellegrino
    | Reply

    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!

  2. Belonging to the World: Jen's Art | Mermaid Forest
    | Reply

    […] 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; […]

  3. Integrating Our Intuitive Selves as Gifted Adults | Mermaid Forest
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    […] clients all over the world. You may also want to listen to my podcast with Jennifer Harvey Sallin, Conversations On Gifted Trauma, particularly our episode on the body. Externalize through your creativity: There are many ways to […]

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