“His take was like, you don’t have ADHD – that’s crazy of you to think that. You’re just gifted.” Chris Wells
This audio is a brief excerpt from “Overexcitability with Chris Wells” (founder of The Dąbrowski Center) - a guest interview available to members of the Embracing Intensity Community by Aurora Remember.
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Chris Wells relates some of her turmoil and self-perception that many of us may find relatable; she says in the podcast interview (quotes from transcript in article below):
But regardless of all I had heard about being gifted, and even seen that in myself as a young person, the fact is, by the time I hit like, 20, or 21, I felt way more disabled than I felt gifted.
And so…by the time I was, I don’t know, a sophomore or junior in high school, I already saw myself as mentally ill way before anybody else did.
I saw myself as very reactive, anxious, the anxiety was never better in my life. Even I mean, I took Klonopin for years.
But it there was always too much energy for me. And so when I started doing my searches in 2014…I started doing an auto ethnography, because I was a doctoral student at the time in psychology.
And so even though I was working on my dissertation, I decided to do a separate research project just for myself like to understand better what had happened, what had gone wrong for me.
And now I had this kid who had a whole different set of issues than I had had. And so I was also trying to understand him better.
And so I came across the work of Michael Piechowski on overexcitability. And when I first read it, I did not love it. I came to it and I thought… I just I remember reading it and feeling so unsettled by what he was saying.
Because if he was right about overexcitability being what was going on with me, then it would mean that I was wrong about myself basically, that so much of what I had perceived as problematic and defective, was actually like a blessing in the framework of this theory he was talking about – this theory of positive disintegration.
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See much more, including the audio, transcript, and link to free resources from Embracing Intensity, in article:
How mental health symptoms can be reframed as positive - Chris Wells on Overexcitability
“The work of Kazimierz Dabrowski provides an excellent framework in which to understand the supersensitivity or overexcitability frequently found in the intellectually or creatively gifted.” Sharon Lind
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View selected episodes and articles with more resources: The Creative Mind Audio Podcast page on the main site.
How mental health symptoms can be reframed as positive - Chris Wells on Overexcitability