In this episode, Jennifer Harvey Sallin talks with clinical psychologist Kael Cockcroft about the origins of personality disordering, what it's like when giftedness and personality disordering overlap, and therapeutic and personal paths to wholeness. Personality disordering is about getting stuck in limited strategies for relating and surviving, due to restrictive emotional and relational environments as a child. Giftedness is about high intellectual and often emotional, creative and...

In this episode, Jennifer Harvey Sallin and gifted therapist, coach & improv instructor Gordon Smith explore how humor and play are essential elements to our healing path. Healthy humor and the authenticity and spontaneity of playfulness allow us to connect to ourselves and to others in unique and deeply grounding and meaningful ways. We explore Gordon's journey from gifted kid to gifted therapist and why and how humor became a key focus in his work with the gifted population. You'll hear...

In this episode, Jennifer Harvey Sallin talks with psychologist and founding president of The Dabrowski Center, Christiane Wells, on the topic of giftedness, positive disintegration and mental health. Chris became an expert on Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration after learning in her 30's how much the theory positively reframed her experiences as a child and young adult struggling with what she thought -- and was told by mainstream psychiatry -- were various mental illnesses....

In this episode, Jennifer Harvey Sallin talks with Dutch giftedness specialist, coach, lecturer, trainer and author Lotte van Lith. Jennifer & Lotte explore the types of loneliness a gifted person can experience, including intellectual, emotional, family, social, physical, existential, creative, physical and more. Giftedness is about exchange, and when we cannot share our giftedness, it can feel as though it isn’t real or doesn’t exist, and that can lead to feelings of deep isolation from...

In this episode, Jennifer Harvey Sallin and ecotherapist & coach Eric Windhorst explore our connection to our inner & outer nature, as well as to fundamental consciousness. When fragmentation caused by trauma keeps parts of us disconnected from what is true within us and around us, we can provide conditions to welcome the fragmented parts back home. Time in outer nature, compassionate attention to our inner nature, connection to fundamental consciousness, and importantly, support from...

In this episode, we conclude our three-part episode series on healthy boundaries by exploring the cultivation of inner organization. Particularly important in this discussion are educational trauma and various dominant ideologies which, when unnamed and unnoticed, make it difficult for us to show up in the world in an organized, generative and well-boundaried manner. We explore the process of self-reeducation and unlearning that many of us must commit to in order to recover our inner...

In this episode, 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 in our cultivating healthy boundaries episode series. You'll find links to resources mentioned in this episode...

In this episode, 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...

In this episode, Karin and Jen 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 can...

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. Here's a part of our episode that...

In this episode, Jen and Karin explore the effects of gifted trauma on the body - shock to the brain, muscular and neuronal holding patterns and physical blocks, illnesses, disability and other longer-term bodily effects.  All of these, in turn, affect our ability to self-care, to be healthy, to be fully present in our relationships, to be in touch with our intuition and to feel hope and a sense of clear purpose in life. They also affect the way we feel able or not able to access and enjoy...

Gifted trauma is often about disconnection from the world, due to feeling socially out of place, misunderstood, unappreciated or exploited. Thus, healing often requires forming nourishing and healing connections with others (especially others who are gifted and share similar minds, needs and experiences). But that is of course the paradox - how to find nourishing and healing connections with others in a world where you haven't been able to find them? We explore how you can know who to connect...

 A series of conversations on Gifted Trauma with InterGifted (www.intergifted.com) founder & director Jennifer Harvey Sallin and InterGifted coach Karin Eglinton. "Gifted trauma" is the trauma that gifted (highly intelligent) people experience because of being ridiculed, ignored, rejected, misunderstood, out-of-place, left out or left behind, pressured, or excessively groomed as a result of their unusual minds. Gifted people's experiences of other non-gifted specific traumas are also...