This article, which is part essay and part conversation, explores the evolution of the field of gifted psychology and the role that depth psychology plays in deepening our understanding of holistic gifted development throughout life. InterGifted's founding director Jennifer Harvey Sallin, together with the Gifted Mindfulness Collective's founder Kelly Pryde, looks at how depth psychology opens doorways for us to come into right relationship with our giftedness, making space for and welcoming all of our ways of gifted being - the various forms of intrapersonal, interpersonal and transpersonal intelligence we inhabit that don't fit into the old stereotypes of the "academic genius", but that are essential to our humanity and our journey throughout this life. They discuss InterGifted's and the Gifted Mindfulness Collective's contributions and initiatives in building the field of an attuned gifted psychology and a field of gifted-specific depth psychology.
by Jennifer Harvey Sallin with Kelly Pryde
THE EVOLUTION OF GIFTED PSYCHOLOGY
When I came into the gifted psychology field after rediscovering my own giftedness in my late 20's, there was painfully little literature or resources about adult gifted development. I had been a gifted kid in a gifted education program, but that certainly did not prepare me for gifted adult life and dealing with all the challenges that can come with holistic giftedness development throughout the stages of life. After rediscovering my giftedness, I realized that this field of psychology needed to be built up for myself and for the countless other gifted adults I was sure were out there asking, like me, "Is it possible for me live a good life with this very unusual brain? And if so, can someone please show me how?".
Gifted psychology ideally studies the unique cognitive, emotional, developmental, social and educational needs of gifted people across the lifespan. Psychologists specializing in gifted psychology ideally offer gifted-specific support and guidance in career, social, cultural and lifelong identity and meaning development to their clients. However, understandings in gifted-specific psychology have historically focused on and been applied to the educational setting and the development of talent in service of high professional accomplishment. While that is a positive positive approach in some ways for some gifted kids, it has had some major downsides. First, it has left out the whole population of gifted adults needing gifted-knowledgeable support, mirroring and guidance. Second, it has presented an imbalanced view of what matters in a gifted life: giftedness is not only or even principally about high performance and high achievement; rather, it is a holistic phenomenon that affects and has gifted-specific needs throughout all the areas of one's life.
Third, a gifted psychology focused mainly or even exclusively on academic and professional achievement ends up excluding a lot of gifted people who are less privileged, who are from marginalized populations, who are living within oppressive cultural, social and/or political circumstances, who have additional neurodivergences or disabilities, and those who don't feel called to or otherwise able to express their giftedness in stereotypically expected ways.
Fortunately, as the overarching field of psychology changes, along with the culture within which it developed, we're seeing a much more holistic, lifelong and inclusive understanding of gifted needs and the psychological approaches that help us attend to them. With that change, notions of giftedness being mainly a "kids' thing", and mainly about talent, academic performance, and eminence or traditional "success" is falling away. This allows us to recognize, study and support giftedness in all its varied presentations, across ages, contexts and outcomes. As we are coming to realize that giftedness is a form of neurodivergence which has special needs of its own, we can study and support it holistically, helping to increase access to the deep and complex life meaning that it can bring with it, and avoid or repair psychological distress and turbulence that it can also bring.
BUILDING UP THE FIELD OF GIFTED PSYCHOLOGY
One of my missions in creating and cultivating InterGifted for the last decade has been to ignite, encourage and amplify these positive developments in the field of gifted psychology.
Specifically, my holistic giftedness model, which looks at intelligence across a variety of areas - namely, intellectual, emotional, creative, sensual, physical and existential intelligences - was created with gifted self-awareness and self-development in mind. The qualitative assessments which grew of that model, as well as our literature and advocacy about gifted adult psychological development and thriving, have brought nuance and opened up pathways for individuals, professionals, organizations, and the gifted collective. Our InterGifted community and initiatives are focused on supporting gifted adults in the understanding of their giftedness and gifted needs, and providing them with the knowledge, education, social networks, professional support, and specialized skills and resources required to meet their needs. And importantly, my first-of-its-kind gifted psychology trainings for psychologists, coaches and other support professionals have built up the field of gifted-specific support around the world. We're proud and honored to be an important voice and anchor in the field of gifted psychology.
If you want to explore more about gifted-specific needs and psychological development, read my article: Gifted Adults, Second Childhoods: Revisiting Essential Stages of Development
THE ROLE OF DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY IN OUR APPROACH
Along with other fields, including community psychology, ecopsychology, contemplative psychology and transpersonal psychology, the field of depth psychology plays an important role in how we at InterGifted approach the study, training and practice of gifted psychology. Depth psychology (think the work of Carl Jung, for example) is an approach to self-understanding and self-development that gives us tools to look into the unconscious aspects of the human mind, exploring and understanding the deeper layers of the psyche - those thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories that are not immediately accessible to conscious awareness.
The point of going beyond the superficial elements of what we can easily see and hear, down to the parts of us that are not immediately accessible - even to gifted people, who are aware of a lot of extras! - is to gain access to more areas of our intelligence, the ones that go down into deep body knowledge, intuition, imaginal and archetypal knowing. Depth psychology helps us to balance the very masculine aspects of intelligence that are so focused on in daily living and in the traditional approaches to gifted development - logical and analytical thinking, strategic planning, spatial awareness, competitiveness, decisiveness, objective problem-solving, and technical proficiency -, with the very feminine aspects of intelligence that are often viewed as inferior, unimportant, unproductive, untrustworthy and even sometimes threatening to the more accomplishment-focused views of intelligence that have dominated the social understanding of intelligence as a whole - emotional intelligence, intuition, communication skills, collaboration and teamwork, nurturance and supportive capacity, adaptability, and holistic thinking.
Gifted depth psychology helps us to reintegrate these feminine aspects into our conscious experience of our giftedness. It helps us re-humanize our giftedness, to expand our gifted experience into all aspects of our being. It reverses the tendency that many intellectually gifted people experience and express as being a "head-on-a-stick" or "a brain without a body" (something I know well!), inviting us to be gifted in our body and in our mind and with the world as it is - to access and experience the depths of our giftedness as a creative act of embodied participation in Life.
GIFTED DEPTH VIA OUR GIFTED MINDFULNESS COLLECTIVE
As part of our InterGifted mission, we formed The Gifted Mindfulness Collective (GMC) together with psychologist Dr. Kelly Pryde in 2019. Initially focused on teaching gifted development and gifted psychology through a lens of gifted-specific mindfulness, the GMC's offerings have naturally expanded to include many elements of gifted-specific depth psychology. The Art of Mindfulness for the Gifted Journey course (which is the next evolution of our classic 'Mindfulness Foundations Course') is coming in 2025 and carries themes of depth approaches, focusing on the development of embodied skills and awareness for coming into deeper relationship with our gifted experience. The community of practice for gifted women meets weekly to participate in contemplative work around the deep, complex parts of one's being, such as embodiment, intuition, emotion, the imaginal and the soul. The workshops for gifted women on gifted shame and gifted anger and rage take participants into the imaginal realms and through archetypal and mythical spaces to better contextualize and alchemize these powerful emotions. Embodied Depth Work offers personal support, blending depth psychologies with embodied mindfulness to remember parts of gifted being that have been inaccessible and are longing to be actualized.
For the past several years, these offerings have been tailored to gifted women, but we are working to open back up many of our offerings to all genders. Our next adventure, into dream tending, will be open to all gifted adults - Community Dreamwork, which we'll share more about in the conversation I have with Kelly Pryde below.
If you want to explore more about gifted-specific mindfulness, read Kelly's article: Mindfulness on the Path of Giftedness Development. Her contribution to the Advanced Development Journal, Vol 18, is also a great resource: Befriending Our Gifted Mind: Mindfulness and the Inner Experience of Giftedness.
AT THE INTERSECTION: A MINDFUL CONVERSATION ON GIFTED DEPTH WORK
In the rest of this article, Kelly and I emergently explore our work and leadership at the intersection of gifted and depth psychologies in a conversation. We both have a long history in contemplative psychology and mindfulness practice (you can learn more about our journeys in these fields in our recorded conversation from 2018 for the Gifted Mindfulness Collective), and are each trained in psychology and have practiced for over 20 years. We've also both recently completed additional psychological training in approaches that have amplified our skills, understanding and capacities in working skillfully within the depths of the gifted mind. I trained in Compassionate Inquiry, a holistic psychological inquiry approach created by Dr. Gabor Maté with the support of Sat Dharam Kaur. Kelly has trained (and continues to train) in Depth Psychology, in particular in the areas of applied Jungian studies and embodied dreamwork.
Join us as we explore our own paths to gifted depth work, our journey to and through leadership in this space, and the many doorways that are opening within the gifted collective (including our upcoming offerings within the Gifted Mindfulness Collective). If you're a gifted adult who has struggled, sought healing, searched for meaning, wondered how to go deeper, yearned to make sense of things in wider and more inclusive ways, wished to explore and embody the great depths of your own gifted mind, then you'll enjoy our conversation below and you'll likely find lots of mirroring, and even some gifted-specific guidance and inspiration.
INVITATION TO THE PATH
Jennifer:
To start, I wonder if we might want to share for our readers how we first became interested in psychology, and then later gifted psychology. And what led us to training in Compassionate Inquiry and Depth Psychology, respectively.
For me, psychology was a deep interest as a neurodivergent kid who struggled to understand how neurotypical people experienced the world. I was also undergoing some pretty serious developmental trauma at home, so by the time I got to university, I knew I needed to study psychology, in addition to wanting to, in order to make sense of what had happened to me and how I could heal. Like a good multipotentialite, I eventually skipped through other fields of study including education, music and neurology, and my dream of studying cosmology and astronomy, to settle on graduate training in psychology.
As I’ve said in many interviews, I struggled in my early years as a psychologist for neurotypical and non-gifted clients because there was something just fundamentally different in the way I processed the world. My meta-thinking was an intellectual challenge for my clients, and their step-by-step thinking was a challenge for me. My giftedness rediscovery in my late 20’s helped me solidify why I had that challenge, and also presented me with a solution: I was meant to work with gifted clients. For them, my meta-thinking is a relief. This, of course, led me to where I am today, as a leader in the field of gifted psychology.
As for Compassionate Inquiry, I originally found Gabor Maté’s work because of my struggles with an autoimmune condition. As a result of my trauma, I had all the signs of what Gabor calls “the autoimmune personality”: I was really good at taking care of everyone around me, while struggling to be as attentive to my own needs as I was to the needs of others. Gabor is a high+ gifted mind for sure, so I found his approach deeply resonant and something I could really learn and grow from. That was back in 2017 when his book When the Body Says No first came out. A couple years later, he and Sat Dahram created the Compassionate Inquiry training, and I was finally able to make the space to participate last year. It has been life-changing (and healing) to say the least.
What was your path?
Kelly:
Similar to you I grew up with a deep interest in psychology. I didn't know I was neurodivergent at the time and always had this sense of something being fundamentally wrong with me given my experience relative to the people around me.
Being a highly creative person, I was very in touch with my creativity; that was an important outlet for me growing up and so I actually found my way into university through dance. I was fortunate to be in a program that was a hybrid of the artistic element of dance and the psychology and kinesiology aspects of it.
Ultimately, I ended up doing doctoral studies in psychology I think largely because I was still trying to understand myself. I really wanted to be a counseling psychologist, but similar to you struggled with the mis-match in my perception and understanding of situations relative to the clients I worked with. I thought it was me; that I wasn’t cut out for doing that kind of work.
It wasn't until a decade or so later when I had kids that I discovered neurodivergence and gifted psychology through your work at InterGifted and really began to understand my inner experience. The intensity and complexity of that exploration is what led me to mindfulness meditation and contemplative psychology. It was the combination of gifted psychology and a serious mindfulness practice that allowed me to do a lot of healing work slowly over many years and to begin integrating giftedness and mindfulness in ways that could support other gifted people. I wrote about that for our community ebook, Embracing the Gifted Quest - and readers can find my article on our blog as well: Gifted Parenting: Three Treasures Along the Way.
At the risk of sounding cliché, depth psychology found me. Something I began to notice in my personal and professional life is that after many years of healing, reading and researching, meditation, taking courses, etc, there was still this lingering sense of something not yet resolved, which led to an intense stuckness and spinning of the wheels as I searched for this unnamed known. I got to this core that was very difficult to penetrate.
A major aspect of this core was shame and it showed up early one morning as a vision of a ghostly woman whose hair and face had been burnt but who was trying to fit into the time in which she lived – wearing a dress, pearls and rubber dish gloves, like a 20th century female version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Now, cognitively I understood this about my experience, emotionally I had felt and tended this shame deep in my gut for quite some time, but it was this image and my conscious awareness of and interaction with it, or rather her, that ultimately transformed it. I was so fascinated by this experience that I began researching how this might have come about and came across Carl Jung’s work around active imagination and complex psychology as approaches for getting in touch with the deeper parts of the psyche that are outside our conscious awareness. Jung was also a high+ gifted mind who influenced much of depth psychology, and so his work, along with many post-Jungians’ and a wonderful personal analyst, has been my focus for the last couple of years.
TRANSCENDING POLARITIES
Jennifer:
What strikes me as I reflect on your path and my own are the interwoven elements of femininity and shame as both sources of victimhood and catalysts for transformation.
It’s interesting how we have ultimately benefited from the guidance of high+ gifted men (Gabor Maté and Carl Jung, respectively) who broke through masculine stereotypes to ultimately access and cultivate spaces that transcend the dualities of male/female, shame/pride, victim/perpetrator.
More specifically, the autoimmune condition I mentioned above affects my female biology. As a survivor of both sexual abuse and religious trauma, including purity culture, my femininity was linked to shame and polarization from my earliest of days. Not only my feminine body, but also my gifted mind, was a source of polarization throughout my life. Learning from an older man (I’m 44 and Gabor has just turned 80) who has been able to transcend the polarizations I was steeped in, and working one-to-one with a male Compassionate Inquiry therapist for the last year+, has been a huge homecoming to my feminine self. I have felt my gifted mind reconnect with and give a home back to my feminine body in ways that I had never been able to do previously.
I wonder how these themes have shown up for you.
Kelly:
Well firstly I'd like to acknowledge what you've just shared around feminine trauma – for you, for me, for everyone who is reading this, regardless of their gender. We have, and continue to, suffer greatly because of how the dominant culture has abused the feminine. And, of course, the masculine has also been abused.
I’m glad you’ve made this observation. That polarization between the feminine body and gifted intellect was also a major wound for me and I’ve been able to do a lot of healing around that with some wonderful women in our gifted mindfulness community. One of the catalysts for me in seeking out support through depth psychology came following this feminine homecoming when I became aware of an infected masculine within myself; another awareness that came through images in my meditations and dreams and was related to some unresolved childhood wounds. I will mention here that I had already done a substantial amount of healing work around these wounds, so my gifted intellect was like, “Seriously! This again?! I already know this.” Transforming my relationship with that default reaction has been crucial because it was preventing me from getting in touch with the deeper parts of myself necessary for advanced growth; it can put on a really good ‘smoke and mirrors show’!
In coming into awareness of this inner infected masculine, I actually went to a male depth psychotherapist initially to engage in this healing process only to discover after a few sessions that he had not done his own inner work around this. This is important to emphasize when we’re talking about transcending polarities because in order to transcend dualities, we have to tend and come into relationship with those opposites. We can’t just move beyond them as the word transcend might suggest which ends up being a kind of psychological by-passing.
Jung talked about the transcendent function in his work which is a creative process requiring us to bring inner opposing energies – masculine/feminine, mind/body, perpetrator/victim, etc – into our conscious awareness and hold the tension between them so that something new can emerge; something beyond what our rational mind is capable of figuring out. This obviously has a lot of overlap with Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration, but I found the emphasis on unconscious processes in depth psychology had been a missing ingredient, or perhaps was the next necessary ingredient, in my growth process.
INSCENDING INTO UNLIVED PLACES
Jennifer:
Psychological by-passing... my high+ gifted intellect could find infinite creative and highly complex roads around the real issues! So much of my inner depth work has been about getting real with life and using my gifted mind to help me go into the issues rather than around them. Of course, I know I’m not alone in this.
My body has been the grounding where no amount of psychological by-passing and mental magic could penetrate. As Bessel van der Kolk says, “the body keeps the score”, and mine certainly did. I used to joke that if I could just have my mind and not my body, things would be so much easier. I’ve heard this joke from many gifted people struggling with their own polarizations, and I think it’s a common feeling for people who are having difficulty in one area of life (i.e. daily physical reality) while having such high capacities in another (i.e. high mental complexity and abstraction). We wish we could enjoy being the winner or victor in one area without having to be the loser or the vanquished in the other. But this is a poisoned wish, because somewhere along the way, we got polarized against weaker or more vulnerable parts of our own authentic self, and by continuing to avoid or diminish them, we perpetuate their abandonment and neglect. We continue, in other words, to lose out on the richness of our full presence.
In your work through the Gifted Mindfulness Collective, you’ve talked about inscendence – the process of going into nature (our inner nature, including our body, and outer nature of the external world), into full experience, toward wholehearted participation. I think this idea is helpful in clarifying what transcendence really is. While developmentally, we transcend restrictive positionalities (i.e. the beliefs of your infected masculine or my beliefs of "good mind/bad body"), we simultaneously inscend into the reality that lies beyond or between those restrictive stories. What therapy has been about, in my case, has been finding a way to feel safe to both transcend (let go) and inscend (embrace).
Kelly:
Inscendence, yes. The F.L.O.W. process that I’ve been developing through the Gifted Mindfulness Collective begins with ‘Finding a groundedness of attention and presence’ – that’s the ‘F’ of FLOW.
As we come into awareness of our body’s presence and contact with the ground, this shifts us out of all the thinking and churning in the head, all the gifted mental complexity and abstraction, and into the ground of our physical reality. We feel the ground, the earth, supporting us very unconditionally. There’s an open invitation here to rest and come home to the fullness of the ground and the body. With this felt sense of being grounded and supported, it becomes more possible to open and let go of the internal pushing and pulling often going on in the intense gifted mindbody so that something new and more creative can emerge.
When I first started engaging in my meditation practice this way, images of being immersed in the earth, melding with trees and being tended by lush green foliage began to arise. It was a very intimate, embodied experience of nature that engendered a felt sense of belonging and healing. This was quite different from my formal Zen training where the goal is enlightenment as transcendent wisdom and emptiness. This was a full-bodied, soulful kind of experience and I began embracing the definition of enlightenment as “intimacy with all things” that comes from Dogen-zenji (the founder of Soto Zen).
The embodied dreamwork training I’ve recently completed is grounded in the Focusing approach of Eugene Gendlin, and something that has resonated for me very deeply is in Gendlin’s observation that through dreams and images, the living body offers us what is needed, unlived, or missing for wholeness. In other words, when we inscend and become more intimate with the living body it will reveal to us the unlived places trying to come into conscious awareness so that we can live more fully and authentically.
I experience this as a process of coming back into right relationship which has been a kind of homecoming for me to psychology and its roots in the study of psyche or soul in the way depth psychology approaches it with a reverence and responsibility for the whole – both the conscious and unconscious, at both the personal and collective/transpersonal levels. I know these have been important themes in your development and work in the gifted community. Do you want to say a bit more about that?
RIGHT RELATIONSHIP TO OUR GIFTEDNESS
Jennifer:
“It will reveal the unlived places” – yes, that truly describes the essence of depth work: finding that life force within that has been suppressed, repressed, neglected, exploited, or otherwise distorted out of its authentic existence, and reconnecting with it consciously to give it the space to live without distortion.
When I think of “right relationship”, I think of upholding the energetic fields of honor, respect and justice around the authentic essence of a person or other life force (including the self). Where those fields are compromised and distorted, life seems to call us toward the restoration of those fields to allow access to and creative expression of the depths of the individual.
In your case, to oversimplify, you’ve had to come back into right relationship with your inner masculine; in my case, I’ve had to come back into right relationship with my inner feminine. And we’ve both had to come back into right relationship to our full, undistorted gifted minds. For me, I can say that the distortions are like complex knots, and to a degree I’m still working on elements of the disentangling process.
This is how I’ve learned to approach the field of gifted psychology as well, focusing on coming (back) into right relationship to our giftedness, on an individual level, within the gifted collective and in relationship to the non-gifted world. This takes us out of the common distorted duality of "us vs. them" (gifted superiority or inferiority, or one-up/one-down dynamics), out of static, eminence- and privilege-driven models of giftedness to more holistic- and needs-based models. It also takes us out of perfectionism and other dualistic posturing that doesn’t allow us gifted people to be human and have complex mixtures of high capacity and lower capacity, not to mention wounding and trauma that needs our care.
Right relating when it comes to giftedness offers us crucial repair for any gifted-specific wounds: it restores our human story back to ourselves, reminding us that our story is embedded in other human stories, in turn embedded in a world and universal story far more complex than any of our individual stories. In other words, it restores us to a deep, fundamental belongingness, inclusive of our more local and relative cognitive differences.
Psychology in practice is about resolving dilemmas and obstacles toward thriving; gifted psychology then is about resolving gifted-specific dilemmas and obstacles toward gifted thriving. Any good approach toward gifted psychology will help us in creating and restoring right relationship to our giftedness, which is a process of gifted transcendence and inscendence, as we've explored above, and ultimately a homecoming to our real authentic here-and-now gifted selves. It is further an affirmation and embodiment of the fact that we belong here (no, we are not an alien) and that we are not ever as alone as we might sometimes feel.
Kelly:
I really appreciate your description of right relationship, Jen. It puts words so beautifully to my experience and our work in the GMC. On a personal level, following on what you’ve said about right relating and its gifts of repair and restoration, particularly through story, this is where I’ve found dream life to be incredibly helpful.
Dreams have played an important role in the development of depth psychology as the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, but of course have their roots in indigenous wisdoms. In dreamtime we have these rich, complex stories playing out that are pointing us to what most needs attention in waking life in order for us to be in right relationship. This can be anything from mirroring an attitude that’s creating issues for us, revealing a wound in need of tending, offering a resource to support us, providing guidance for places we feel stuck, and so on. It’s the psyche’s natural process of seeking its own healing and development.
An example I can share related to my own gifted growth is around addiction. Addiction runs in my family, and while I don’t struggle with substance abuse, I’ve been coming into deeper awareness through my dreams of how addiction to creativity and learning are issues for me, much more than I consciously realized. This plays out during times where I’m engaged in a creative or learning adventure that in waking life feels stimulating and important to aspects of my gifted self, but then I begin having dreams about intoxication, dark trickster characters enticing me to partake in the “festivities”, or where I’m driving dangerously fast and getting into car crashes. In tending these dream stories with reverence and a responsibility to honor what they reveal, I’ve been able to not only receive these as warning signs of burnout, but also develop an embodied awareness of these darker, trickster energies and how they can lure me out of right relationship with my creativity.
This is one of the ways I’ve continued to disentangle those complex knots you mentioned while also getting in touch with the deeper parts of my gifted self trying to express through me.
What is beautiful to me about dreamwork through the lens of right relationship is that every element and being within the dream is witnessed as an autonomous life force worthy of its place in our personal and collective tapestry, and that we get to choose how to be in conscious relationship with. That means for these darker shadow aspects that show up, we can respect their existence, get to know them if it’s safe to do so, and choose to keep them at arms’ length or even not to engage with them at all. This is important inner work that can also be a rehearsal for setting boundaries with, or changing the way we see, certain energies in our everyday waking life.
These are just a few examples of the possibilities dreamwork offers for exploring our gifted depths and deepening right relationship. To my knowledge, we don’t really know that much about dream life in the field of gifted adult psychology.
THE GIFTED COLLECTIVE'S DEPTH WORK
Jennifer:
You’re right, the gifted adult psychology field is so new (or newly named and framed, I should say), that those of us bridging conscious exploration of adult giftedness to exploration of unconscious and/or transpersonal processes are feeling around somewhat in the dark - an apt phrasing for the gifted collective’s depth work.
As leaders in the field are bringing adult gifted psychological inquiry into their other areas of specialty, we’re just discovering important links between gifted development and other forms of psychological inquiry.
It’s interesting that giftedness has been linked to the Theory of Positive Disintegration for a long time, but seems to have gotten stuck in that space for years. TPD is a great framing for many in understanding gifted developmental experiences, but I’m happy to see gifted psychology branching out into other areas to provide an even more holistic understanding. Indeed, gifted development doesn’t look just one way: it looks forward to the future, back to the past, inward to the self, outward to the collective, materially to the body and earth, non-materially to the soul/psyche/higher self and the energies beyond what we can physically measure. As I mentioned in the intro to our conversation, InterGifted itself links gifted psychology to other important subfields of psychology: community, contemplative, transpersonal, ecopsychology, and depth psychology as we’re discussing here.
Your example from your dream life - and thanks for sharing it with us - is a poignant illustration of the value of widening the understanding of gifted adult psychology and development to a broader and more inclusive view of “self” and “mind”. If we too narrowly define gifted development as “reaching talent potential” or “eminence” or some of the old views of what giftedness is and what and who it is for, we don’t reach those other knowings and ways of knowing, those other energies and realities within us and around us that provide a more accurate mirror of what and who we are, and our place in the context of where we are.
In leaving out aspects of our whole self-in-context through restrictive frames, we keep planning our life based on incomplete information, and keep feeling fragmented or un-whole. I’ve always found it rather paradoxical that many giftedness definitions and models have been so contrary to the basics of giftedness itself in some ways - in contrast to the unending curiosity and complexity of giftedness, definitions and models have often felt so restrictive and lacking curiosity and space for more complex and more holistic perspectives on gifted life. Tending to dreams, to somatic knowing, to collective and transpersonal knowing (including indigenous wisdom), opening up spaces, accepting nuance and individually and together resisting the urge to collapse developmental probability waves into prematurely fixed particles… these are all things that branching out allow us to do while inhabiting our giftedness throughout life.
As we’ve hinted above, we might say we are collectively bringing the idea of gifted development back from a toxic masculine approach into a more balanced masculine-feminine way of knowing giftedness. To know it means to keep allowing it to expand into itself. It’s an attitude, really, rather than a rigid blueprint toward a specific pre-determined outcome or expectation. Allowing the being and becoming, as well as the belonging, of our giftedness, just as it is but not limited to what it is today.
Kelly:
As you’re describing this, I’m reminded of the concept of entelechy from the Greek word telos which is usually defined as “the fulfillment of potential” or “a vital force directing growth to become all one is capable of becoming.”
Entelechy has been connected with gifted drive over the years and I find it to be a helpful naming for the intensity of this lifeforce. At the same time, this idea of “becoming all one is capable of becoming” can be detrimental when it’s lived only through these limited ways of knowing. Here again we come up against that poisoned wish as we try to move toward wholeness without tending to and being in touch with these various branches. I say that as someone who has spent many years, decades really, being under various spells of that particular poison.
What I’ve found helpful through the lens of depth psychology is an understanding of telos as an instinct toward wholeness and part of a self-regulating intelligence that doesn’t need nearly as much of our control and direction as we’ve been conditioned to believe. It’s ironic that this balanced way of knowing giftedness actually requires a great deal of Not Knowing and surrendering to this deeper intelligence. This is worth mentioning here, because it can be easy to dive into depth work with the enthusiastic intent of exploring all of these branches and bringing hidden parts into conscious awareness. But it is really more about showing up with an attitude of Not Knowing – a humility – and a willingness to bear witness to these energies and realities within and around us so that our gifted growth is unfolding in relationship with this telos.
The curious paradox is that wholeness is something that we already are. We’ve only forgotten and been cut off from it through cultural conditioning. So this instinct toward wholeness is really more of a remembering than something we’re trying to attain. Another derivative of the word telos means to sojourn, move around and dwell, which engenders a much more soulful way of being on the gifted journey and in our lives. I often joke that it’s such a relief to not have to get to some ultimate endpoint in our development because as gifted people, what the heck would we do once we got there?!
This feels like a good place to talk about some of the ways gifted adults might begin to find their own doorway(s) into depth work. What comes to mind for you when you think about ways to start exploring the inner depths on the gifted journey?
INDIVIDUAL & COLLECTIVE DOORWAYS
Jennifer:
What comes to mind when I hear your words is how we are somehow separated from our wholeness in culture and then returned to our wholeness in culture. By that, I mean that depth work requires a certain sense of safety-in-culture.
Till about a decade ago, a gifted adult culture barely existed, and when it did, it was, as we've discussed above, often around achievement - the telos was tied to lopsided cultural scripts about what giftedness is and who and what it is for.
As we together cultivate a gifted adult culture around a much wider and deeper frame of knowing, opportunities open up to us, both together and individually, because we are supported and surrounded by a safe belonging. We have a sense that if we go to the depths, we’re not abandoning hope for relationship and we’re not going to be left out to die on our own. Like the child who looks back to its parents to be sure that it is safe exploring the unknown, we look back to our culture to know whether we’re safe going into our own and our collective unknowns. Having a holistic gifted adult culture to reassure us that we’re not walking to our deaths if we explore into the depths makes that exploration possible in a way that it wasn’t before.
In this context, the doorways into depth work for a gifted adult are myriad - as many as the gifted adult culture we’re building will support. Circling back to our earlier themes of sexual abuse, religious trauma, illness and the infected masculine, as well as the one you just brought up about additions showing up in dreams, each of these things is a doorway into the depths of self and the collective. And I can speak for myself in saying that knowing about my giftedness and having a safer gifted collective to look back to and reconnect with has allowed me to go into the depths of my own portals in ways that I had never been able to do before.
When I could stop masking, stop feeling shame for showing up as my gifted self; when I was finally able to connect with others who gave me gifted-sized space to be, I was able to take on these much more challenging journeys into some pretty horrific, but simultaneously, deeply healing and meaningful personal and collective territory. I used to curse those doorways and thought life was cruel for having put them unavoidably in my path . Depth work, especially in the context of gifted community, has shifted my perspective and my embodied experience of those doorways. Of course, my giftedness itself has been a doorway… and I would guess the same to be true for many, if not all, of our readers!
One doorway I’ve been working with a lot in the last few years is the doorway of leadership, both within myself and together with the gifted leaders I train, teach, and mentor around the world. Leadership gives us countless opportunities to notice where our unconscious material, especially the unconscious material tied to our gifted experience and gifted wounds, could use some light, attention, space and healing. This extends to the transpersonal process of conscious engagement with the whole collective energetic ‘field’ of gifted adult culture, including the darker sides of its history and its collective process of becoming and belonging within the whole of life.
There is an analog process in my other fields of focus: developing gifted community, training gifted psychologists and coaches in gifted-specific psychology, and working with gifted activists in the ecological and metacrisis spaces. All of these fields, which are on and sometimes beyond the edge of the known require a fair amount of openness and desire to dig into the depths of our personal and collective psyche.
Essentially, doorways surround us, and are found in every circumstance of our life - the challenging and painful, inspiring and exciting, personal and professional, individual and collective, grandiose and mundane. The question is more: which of those doorways do we feel safe and supported enough to walk through?
As we come to a close in our conversation, maybe you want to share some more about the specific doorways you and your community of practice members and students are walking through in the GMC?
Kelly:
What you’ve described about safe, supported belonging centered on a deeper frame of knowing is one of the foundational tenets of the GMC. That basis in concert with the gifted-sensitive mindfulness skills we cultivate opens up all kinds of doorways that we have and continue to walk through both personally and collectively.
Our Community of Practice has really sewn the seeds for these possibilities and the embodied depth work we’ve been doing. For context, this community is a weekly gathering space where a small group quietly contemplates a theme for a time and then mindfully shares reflections on their experience. The praxis here is grounded in a compassionate spaciousness for what arises from the psyche (both personally and collectively) when each person is given uninterrupted space to explore and express their gifted self and to be fully witnessed in that process. The impressions, feelings, images and namings that come into conscious awareness through this practice offer not only incredible insights and healing, but also new doorways for us to walk through.
One of the most potent doorways that has revealed itself through the GMC and has been guiding most of our recent offerings is the imaginal. The imaginal is an integral aspect of depth psychology as a field that bridges the conscious and unconscious, and is connected to the vast storehouse of possibility and entelechial forces we’ve mentioned. In this way, it offers a lot of guidance for remembering wholeness through a language of symbols, sounds, images, patterns, feelings, and rhythms that are rich with potential and meaning; it’s a language that unfolds quite naturally for many gifted people when they have the opportunity to mindfully engage with it.
One of the ways we’ve explored the imaginal beyond more traditional mindfulness practice is through contemplative storytelling, art and poetry as doorways to/from the unconscious. In our most recent community writing and art project Retrieving the Bones, for example, we journeyed into the imaginal together to restore archetypal and mythical wisdom and retrieve the voices of gifted ancestors that were exiled from or never found a place in our personal and collective consciousness. What emerged through this collective field was deeply moving and transformative. There are threads and themes that continue to work on me all these months later.
More recently, we’ve begun mindful explorations of dreams as a portal to the unlived parts of our gifted selves and the transpersonal. This is an avenue that is readily available to most adults and, as I mentioned earlier, offers surprising and important opportunities for learning where we’ve been separated from our wholeness and life-forward energy, as well as how we can reconnect with it. In one of our upcoming offerings, we’ll be exploring embodied dreamwork in gifted community – learning experiential approaches for engaging with dreams, attuning to their unique language, and gaining insight into shared themes and collective unconscious elements that arise – all in a safe gifted field we’ll create together.
I find imaginal mindfulness to be a very exciting doorway: it furthers the richness of the gifted imagination, as well as other aspects of gifted intelligence, and it cultivates the skills we need to be at the edge of the known/unknown and explore the depths of the psyche in ways that are in service and care of right relationship. That’s the doorway we’ll be continuing to explore and weave into our GMC offerings.
Jennifer:
As we are just at the beginning of our conscious explorations into the world of gifted depth work, I'm sure this conversation will continue. Thank you, Kelly, for exploring with me here and sharing your valuable perspectives.
EXPLORING OUR DEPTHS TOGETHER
We want to invite all of our gifted peers who are ready to dive into the depths of their own gifted minds, to join us:
- Become a member of our InterGifted online community
- If you'd like to get involved in our Gifted Mindfulness Collective (gifted-specific courses, community, one-on-one depth sessions with Kelly Pryde)
- We've included lots of links in our conversation above for you to continue to explore on your own
- Mindfully map out your gifted mind via our qualitative giftedness assessments
- If you'd like to continue exploring depth psychology, we recommend the podcast This Jungian Life as well as the following books:
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- Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections
- Sharon Blackie's The Enchanted Life and If Women Rose Rooted
- Bill Plotkin's Soulcraft and Nature and the Human Soul
- Toko-pa Turner's Belonging
- Marion Woodman's Dancing in the Flames
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Title photo thanks to Lukas Rodriguez via pexels.
About Jennifer Harvey Sallin
Jennifer is the founding director of InterGifted. She's a psychologist, coach and mentor who specializes in providing training for coaches, therapists and other helping professionals who support the gifted population. She also performs giftedness assessments and writes extensively on giftedness and self-development. You can find her articles here on InterGifted’s blog and on her own blog at Rediscovering Yourself. Her climate psychology project is at I Heart Earth. She is based in Switzerland and works with gifted adults throughout the world. You can learn more about her here.
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