Growing a Gifted Community

Jennifer Harvey Sallin started InterGifted in 2015 to connect gifted adults around the world. In this article, Jennifer shares her personal story of positive disintegration, giftedness rediscovery, and her road to founding and growing InterGifted's community and support network.  

by Jennifer Harvey Sallin

updated August 2023


REDISCOVERING GIFTEDNESS

I started my career as a psychologist and coach in the early 2000's, working in vocational psychology and career coaching and various leadership roles, and all the while feeling stifled by conventional life expectations. I was successful in my work, but I constantly felt there "must be more". While friends settled down into their lives, I felt myself yearning to continue exploring the world and expanding my mind, and I struggled to find peers who appreciated and mirrored my unusual way of being in the world. It was a turbulent time that led me to deeply question who I was, what was worth devoting my life energy to, and if I would ever feel that sense of belonging I saw others feeling but had never felt myself. Starting in my mid-twenties, I went through a period of Positive Disintegration during which I felt there was no other way to answer my questions than to disassemble everything I had built up in my twenty-five-plus years of life in order to hopefully reassemble it into something that felt more genuine, fitting and sustainable for me.

To aid me in my process, I began a dedicated meditation and mindfulness practice. After a couple of years of intense self-reflection, I decided to leave my work and my native country to get distance from my past in order to discern what I wanted to keep in my present and future. I lived like a vagabond for two years, spent a lot of time in deep study and healing work, and eventually felt I had reached some sort of core self that felt like a "me" I could continue to live with and build a life on. Reassembling my life based on my more authentic, but far less socially acceptable, values and needs was not easy. In spite of knowing better what my core values and needs were, I still struggled to find personal connections and social spaces that shared similar values, points of view, and the social nourishment I needed.

A lot changed when I remembered something I had long forgotten from my childhood. I had been identified as intellectually gifted in grade school, and had been in the gifted program. After the program had ended in fifth grade, no one had ever talked to me about giftedness again. I had skipped a grade for some of my school subjects, so I knew I was "ahead", but that had never translated to anything other than "quicker" or "more advanced" than peers my age. Even when I had been in the gifted program, no one had told me what giftedness really meant, nor that it would be a main driver of my personal values and my social needs -- nor that it would make those values and social needs so challenging to live out in a world that was set up by and for the neuromajority.

When I rediscovered giftedness, I went through a whole set of emotions and states of mind: excitement, denial, anger, acceptance, and a commitment to rebuilding. So much that I had struggled with for so long finally made sense, and that felt like both a huge relief and a big burden at the same time. I dug into the literature about giftedness, hoping to get direction for how to make the most of life as a gifted adult. For the most part, however, the literature and resources were directed to educators and parents, and talked about strategies for educating and raising gifted kids. Since I was in my late twenties, I needed more information specific to gifted adults trying to figure out how to get to know and thrive with our "gifts" in a majority non-gifted world. I also wanted to find a way to have more gifted people in my personal and professional life, and needed direction for how to make that happen.

STARTING A GIFTED COMMUNITY 

All of this led me to shifting my focus to working solely with the population of gifted adults. I turned my attention as a psychologist and coach to understanding the unique psychology of gifted adults: what resources and support did they need for self-understanding, healing, social nourishment, and thriving? In the next five years, I did an enormous amount of research on the subject and worked to support gifted adults all over the world in their personal development and thriving. Clients were immensely relieved to find support attuned to their unique minds, but one thing I couldn't offer them was an extended gifted community where they could meet their complex gifted social needs. I had been lucky enough to meet and marry a gifted man, and now that I was working with gifted clients all day, every day, I had plenty of my gifted social needs met on a daily basis. Watching clients struggle to create that for themselves was painful.

One day, a client asked me whether I'd be willing to connect him to my other clients, so they could be friends. I said no, due to confidentiality concerns. But he kept asking, for over a year. When other clients began asking as well, I felt I had to do something. I mentioned to some clients that I'd be willing to start a gifted community, and many of them eagerly volunteered to support me in any way they could. At the beginning of 2015, I began working on the idea, and by August 2015, we had officially launched.

To help me reach gifted expats, ExpatClic interviewed me about my life's journey as an expat and as a gifted person who had started a gifted community. In the interview, I shared what it means to need gifted-specific support and how people can recognize giftedness in themselves. I knew this was an important point since many gifted people don't recognize themselves as such. Many gifted women (and a fair share of gifted men as well) have learned to downplay their intelligence in the service of getting along. Many don't recognize themselves as highly intelligent because they don't love math or because their intelligence shows itself more in creativity or emotional complexity rather than in brilliance in academics. As I explained in the interview, giftedness is not a one size fits all concept. It's more like variations on a theme: the theme is "High Complexity", the variations are intellectual, emotional, sensual, creative, physical, and even existential.

Because of the format of the interview, it was important for me to talk about myself and my own giftedness, but that was really difficult. Although I talked about giftedness all the time in my work with clients, until that moment, I had hardly ever mentioned it outside of work. Publicly saying, "I'm gifted" in the interview brought up the social shame of feeling that by saying a basic fact about how my mind works, I was saying something arrogant. By then, though, I knew giftedness itself has nothing to do with arrogance.

I wasn't embarrassed and I didn't feel arrogant to say I'm a woman, so I knew I needn't feel that way about saying, factually, "this is how my brain works". Giftedness describes something physiological that happens in our brains and nervous systems. It is neither "good" nor "bad", it's just the way one's mind works. It's a reality I wish I had known all along: it's not arrogant to be sincerely who you are. So I talked openly about my own gifted mind, without shame, and hoped it would encourage other gifted people to let go of their shame in turn. I want gifted people everywhere to feel free to be and talk about themselves as they are - not in arrogance, but in truth and authenticity.

GROWING OUR GIFTED COMMUNITY

Since 2015, InterGifted has grown from having 50 members in the early days to having nearly 1,000 community members. Our main community has nearly 850 members, complemented by the members in our other peer groups and programs. Learn more about our community and programs and events.

In our InterGifted Coaching Network, we have developed extensive services for providing qualitative giftedness assessments for adults, gifted-specific coaching for adults and kids, and gifted specific self-development groups, courses and workshops offered by our coaches. You can learn about those services here: assessments, coaching, groups & courses.

I've personally been training, mentoring and supervising many of our InterGifted coaches, as well as offering trainings, mentoring and supervision to therapists, coaches, psychiatrists and other helping professionals who support gifted people. You can learn about my Gifted Psychology 101 and Introduction to Giftedness Profiling training courses here.

I've written a lot about giftedness on our InterGifted blog. I've also been writing about giftedness and personal development since 2011 for my own blog Rediscovering Yourself. Together with our community, I've published several ebooks on the journey of gifted adults, which you can find at our bookshop.

Over the last years, many other important projects have grown out of my work and the InterGifted organization:

  • The Gifted Mindfulness Collective, with Kelly Pryde - a community and courses for gifted women
  • Our collection of community-written books about the gifted adult experience, which you can find at our bookshop
  • Conversations on Gifted Trauma Podcast - where I have important conversations about gifted trauma and healing with fellow psychologists, coaches and other gifted-specific leaders
  • I Heart Earth - is an important project where I hold public conversations with fellow psychologists, coaches, and activists on climate psychology, ecological reconnection and a return to wholeness at this time in our very complex world

Additionally, we are happy to be a partner of The G Word Film and The Dabrowski Center, and to support gifted initiatives around the world.

A NETWORK OF GIFTED OASES

I'm grateful to see, thirteen years on from the time I was struggling to find gifted friends and literature for gifted adults, a lot has changed. It's becoming far more normal for a gifted adult to say they're gifted and to believe they deserve to get their gifted-specific needs met. There's a global community of people - gifted, twice-exceptional, and multi-exceptional - who are looking for opportunities to heal their experiences of shame and confusion about being different, and to explore and create social connections that are nourishing for themselves and for others. It feels a bit like there's now a gifted oasis where there used to be a desert.

That has implications for the world, because if people with high intelligence are socially starving or otherwise struggling to meet their basic intellectual, emotional, social or other needs, they're not able to be consistently generative participants in the web of interbeing. With a gifted social oasis to refuel at, we have a better chance of meeting our unusual needs, and in turn being able to contribute to the health of our local and global social and physical ecosystems. As I've trained leaders via InterGifted, and have watched many of our members move into the gifted services domain, I can see gifted oases popping up throughout the world. I'm happy that I've been and continue to be able to be part of the "gifted oasis network".


About Jennifer Harvey Sallin

Jennifer is the founding director of InterGifted. She is a psychologist and coach who specializes in training and mentoring helping professionals who serve the gifted, and provides assessments for gifted adults and coaching and mentoring for highly, exceptionally and 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. Learn more about Jen here.

3 Responses

  1. […] interview with Aurora Remember Holtzman of the Embracing Intensity Podcast; you can also read my interview with Barbara of Expatclic about what led to me creating InterGifted; and stay tuned for my memoirs about growing up gifted and my own self-discovery – currently being […]

  2. Prasad
    | Reply

    If we have only one trait to identify giftedness then that is going to be the word “intensity” – gifted people are intense. And the important point to emphasize here this is natural and this is the way one is built- so it is not a matter choice. In some normal situations when we feel intensely about some things and discuss passionately it may sound weird for others but that may be the normal response of an intense mind. Intensity of passion, emotion, feeling, depth etc but the root word is intensity.

    Also people who are profoundly gifted may accomplish very little in life and may even remain anonymous as living true to their inner life is more important to them than being known. The biggest obstacle they face is the crises of meaning as they cannot apply their minds to anything petty or inconsequential. They are driven only by stuff that has some fundamental significance. And there will be no quick results when you explore basic questions of life and existence. The kind of pursuit has its own justification.

    The above is my personal opinion – people may have a different experience with giftedness

  3. […] interview with Aurora Remember Holtzman of the Embracing Intensity Podcast; you can also read my interview with Barbara of Expatclic about what led to me creating InterGifted; and stay tuned for my memoirs about growing up gifted and my own self-discovery – currently […]

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