Josh's Crosstime Salute

The following questions are aimed at those who have a high sensitivity to others’ emotions, whether they use that sensitivity in any professional way or not. All answers on this page will be kept anonymous unless you expressly wish them not to be. Comments are all screened such that only I can read them, but in addition, if you want to comment anonymously that is an available option. LiveJournal may record your IP, but I won’t be checking them (even if they would tell me anything about the poster). I think I have turned off IP logging on the Dreamwidth account.

This information is going to be used by me in presentations I do and in work I do with adolescents and adults. While there is no immediate plan to formally publish it in any medium, I imagine that at some point I might, depending on (a) whether I actually learn anything worth sharing in that fashion and (b) getting out of my own way!

Preamble, preamble, preamble…

Please direct any inquiries to me: Josh Shaine, josh_shaine@yahoo.com.

Role: _____ Professional in a therapeutic field _____ Former professional in a therapeutic field
_____ Out of College (or school), not working in a therapeutic field _____ Still a student

Information that would be welcome, but which you may choose not to answer:
Race(s): ______________________________ Gender(s) __________________________Birth Year _____

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1. Was there a point in your life at which you either developed or suddenly discovered that you had a high degree of sensitivity to other people’s emotions or have you had it as long as you can remember?

2. Do you remember becoming aware of this being something you did and others did not do? If so, do you know how old you were when you had that realization?

3. Did you (do you) find yourself feeling overwhelmed by too much emotional input when you are in a group or a crowd, whether or not they are directly interacting with you? If so, what have you tried to do about it and has any of it worked for you? Are there particular situations or settings in which the overwhelmed feeling is likelier/likeliest to occur?

4. When you are working with an individual (regardless of whether this is in a professional capacity), do you intentionally seek to be more sensitive, to dive deeper or get a broader sense? If so, do you know how you did it and if it worked?

5. If it did work, have you ever tried that technique in reverse to be less attuned to others’ feelings? Did that work?

6. Have you experienced burnout as a result of your emotional sensitivity, whether or not you had been intentionally using it? If so, have you found an effective way to deal with those burnout feelings? What have you tried and what has worked?

7. Have you talked with any others about your sensitivity to others’ emotions? How did that go?

8. Are there any questions you think I should have asked you? If so, what question and what would be your answer?

(Today's blog entry is dedicated to the late Sharon Lind, a passionate defender of and guide for the gifted, whose succinct explanations of Dabrowski continue to echo in my head.)

For almost 25 years I have been hearing and reading about gifted kids and Overexcitabilities (OEs). Dr. Linda Silverman provided my first view of them at a conference run by the Hollingworth Center for Highly Gifted Children, then my second view of them in her (wonderful) book, Counseling the Gifted and Talented (Love Publishing, 1991).

The thing is that both of those presented me with the OEs but also with Dynamisms, Factors, and Levels, all parts of Dr. Kazimierz Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD). These days, as I read articles on Overexcitabilities, it’s a fortunate event when Dabrowski is mentioned and a pleasant surprise to see TPD mentioned even in passing. Dynamisms, Factors, and Levels do not show up at all and there is very rarely an intimation as to what is being disintegrated, why it might be disintegrated, and what the OEs have to do with any of it!

I understand the attraction of the OEs, really I do. They have a face validity to a substantial majority of parents who have gifted kids and almost as surely for themselves when they reflect on their childhoods or even their current daily lives. “Oh! That’s me!” comes almost as quickly and often as “That’s my kid(s)!”

Having a label for the twitching and bobbing, the sensitivities, the endless questions, the wild stories, the melt downs over seemingly trivial issues or unmanageably large issues, provides a degree of calm for at least a moment and a language for discussing these bits with other people where before it was almost always pure defensiveness. An honest–to-god theory that talks about this stuff?! Hooray!

I get it.
...

Unfortunately, the purveyors of Overexcitability information are largely doing you a disservice, in my opinion, by perhaps giving just a link to more information or, more often, not. There is so much more to the OEs than that first blush would suggest!

To get a small taste of what I am talking about, check out the beginning of Cait Fitz’s OE blog entry on My Little Poppies, where she dives deeper than most into the Theory of Positive Disintegration. (But then come back!)

The Rest of the Story (with apologies to the late Paul Harvey)

Welcome back. :-) Let’s start with a few basic background pieces that might be of interest, that might be obvious to many a reader, or at least won’t bore you too much:

• Before Dabrowski called it overexcitability he called it hyperstimulatability and then nervousness.


• The Polish word that Dr. Dabrowski used for this set of traits, nadpobudliwość, is now one of the translations for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.


• Just as it is the first part of TPD to catch most people’s eyes, it was the first to catch Dabrowski’s attention.


• From a Dabrowskian perspective, OEs exist for several reasons; the reasons vary with the specific OE and one’s Level of Personality Development. (More on this later.)


• One specific purpose, at lower levels, is to create conflict in one’s world. The stronger the OE the greater the chance and degree of disruption and, as Cait pointed out, Dabrowski was a great believer in the “no pain, no gain” school of thought.


• Where there is an individual with more than one OE, there is an individual whose OEs do not exist in isolation from each other. For example, children with both imaginational and emotional OEs might be distraught on behalf of the last leaf of a tree, feeling its loneliness and fear deep in their being.


• With the Intellectual OE seems to travel a ‘sense of justice,’ that looks at unfairness beyond how it might serve or offend one's personal needs.

These points are important and largely disagree with most of what I read:

• There were times when Dabrowski felt a client’s Overexcitabilities might indicate the need for medication and/or psychotherapy.


• Dabrowski believed that the development of inhibition of expression of the Overexcitabilities was appropriate and necessary for development of Personality.

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To say that the gifted seem to show more OEs than the average person is not exactly true, though you will read statements to that effect all over the internet. Sensual and Psychomotor OEs seem to be spread out across the population, with no particular regard for giftedness. It’s harder to be sure with Emotional, Imaginational, and Intellectual OEs because a) there is conflicting data and b) our instruments are largely inadequate, at best. (That also means that all those internet questionnaires that purport to tell you how much OE you or your child has are not worth the electrons they are not printed with, because they have not been normed or validated in appropriate ways, IMO.)

I noted above both the conflict function and that there are other uses for OEs according to the Theory of Positive Disintegration. One example of that is Psychomotor, which provides the energy and impetus for growth. Without that energy, a traumatic, potentially transformative experience is likely to result in an individual’s settling back into a familiar life, rather than disintegrating.

Huh – there’s that word again! Disintegrating is a description of the process of growth in personality through a series of transformations in world view:

1. Primary Integration: No sense of alternative world views, no sense of hierarchies of values. A substantial number of Level 1 individuals are about self-aggrandizement. No internal conflict, just external.


2. Unilevel Disintegration: Recognition of alternative world views, but still no hierarchization. (Hence unilevel.) Dabrowski represents Level II as very unstable for the majority of people there. Internal conflict and external conflict as well.


3. Spontaneous Multi-level Disintegration: The realization that some values are higher than others, with the nearly crippling conviction that they are unattainable. Predominantly internal conflict, increasingly so as one develops.


4. Organized Multi-level Disintegration: Generally living without much external conflict, but usually an ongoing drive to grow. Living far more closely in accordance to one’s ideals.


5. Secondary Integration: Personality Ideal; living for the purpose of making the world a better place. Self-promotion is no longer a valid self-concept or goal.

It’s all well and good to list these as if they are clear, distinct ways of being, but one can have a foot in more than one. And even the concept of “being in one” is not really valid because one progresses within each of these, as if there were dozens of steps along the way, even though they are not commonly identified as such in Dabrowski’s works, with the exception of Level 1 for which there is a beginning exploration of the shades of “oneness” one might have gone through or at least which one can identify.

Some brief points about the Levels and how other pieces of TPD and of life fit with them:

• The chances of going past Level 1 or Level II (which seem to have 60-80% of the folks) depend on “Developmental Potential,” again as Cait noted. The more and the stronger the OEs, the more likely there will be progress. But no Psychomotor means reduced chance of development from lower levels.


• Self-Shame and Self-Astonishment and other modes of internal dialog/awareness (referred to as Dynamisms) reflect and affect the growth of the individual. (Dynamisms could be a year of blog posts all by themselves!)


• First Factor is one’s genetic component. A strong first factor is important. A weak one may be impossible to overcome. Second Factor is environmental. More feasible to overcome a weak Second Factor, but it is hard. Third Factor is autonomous drive – to this author’s mind, one of the most poorly defined elements, but dealing with the internal push toward self-perfection.


• OEs (remember them) change in manifestation as one develops, shifting from running an individual’s life to providing some background richness. Where Psychomotor was vital before, the others become far more important for development.


• Everything else in life changes, too, as one becomes less caught up in the regular human/rat race – and the theory includes explanations of just what those look like along the way.


• Yes, there is such a thing as Negative Disintegration. No, no explanation tonight!


• Along the way, as you look at yourselves or your kids, keep an eye out for Positive Maladjustment – when you go against your immediate community or group because what they are doing feels wrong to you. The opposite, negative adjustment, is when you go along to get along, even though what is being done is hurtful and/or inappropriate.

Some of Dabrowski’s material is available currently, though not a lot of it. More is on its way, however!

To get more of my sense of Dabrowski and the Theory of Positive Disintegration, check out either of these links: From overt behavior to developing potential: The gifted underachiever was written in the 1990’s and reflects my first real exploration of the OEs in application. Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration - A Narrative Overview was written in 2010 and is a more comprehensive look at TPD.

For far more material, wander over to Bill Tillier’s site, www.positivedisintegration.com



Acknowledgements and Credits

This blog article is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page Blog Hop on Overexcitabilities. I thank my friends at Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page and elsewhere for their inspiration, support, and suggestions. In particular, I would like to thank Linda Silverman, Cheryl Ackerman, Bill Tillier, Patti Rae Miliotis, Leslie Forstadt, and always Susan Shaine for their parts in this journey into Dabrowski.

Please click on the graphic above (created by Pamela S Ryan–thanks!) to see the titles, blog names, and links of other Hoagies’ Blog Hop participants, or cut and paste this URL into your browser: http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/blog_hop_overexcitabilities.htm

(And stay tuned for a few big announcements in the next few months on this topic!)

One of the questions that arises along the way is "Are gifted children at risk?" Inevitably, the question brings the reply "At risk of what?"

Dropping out, depression, drugs, delinquency, and death (self-inflicted) are the answers. 4 of these five are pretty commonly discussed within the gifted lit - and often researchers seek to support or refute them. There are lots of stories and fewer statistics - and what stats there are may be misquoted, misremembered, or misremembered.

For the moment, I am going to focus on delinquency. I've been reading one of the studies that set out to disprove the notion that violent adolescents are any likelier to be gifted than the general population: High intelligence and severe delinquency: Evidence disputing the connection, by Dewey G. Cornell, in Roeper Review, May 92, Vol. 14, Issue 4.

Dr. Cornell had 157 violent offenders to examine and he did a pretty thorough job of illustrating his general point. Of the 157, "only 2 subjects obtaining scores greater than 130, and 2 more scoring greater than 120" on their full scale IQs (WISC-R or WAIS-R). He took it further, correctly observing that prison populations are known for higher performance scores than verbal.

"There were 13 subjects with Performance IQ's of at least 120. This included two subjects with IQ's greater than 140 and two more with IQ's greater than 130. In contrast, there were only 3 subjects with Verbal IQ's of 120 or higher, and all 3 had equivalent or higher Performance IQ's."

13 out of 157 is not overrepresented for 120+ (9% is the expected percentage.)

He talked a bit about race, and looks at the fact that the 'minority' members of the 13 above 120 performance IQ group were only 31% (4 of 13) vs. being 75% of the below 110 population. From there, he continued to explore his 2nd question, "Do highly intelligent delinquents differ from other delinquents in their social background and prior adjustment?"
*******

And that is where I think Dr. Cornell made his mistake.

The white population of the total 157 group was 44, or 28% of the whole. The number of whites who scored 120 and above on the Performance Scale was 9, or more than 20% of the white population, when 9% would have been expected.

Cornell wrote, in conclusion: "The results of this study provide evidence that high intelligence is not associated with severe delinquency. In fact, the majority of delinquents are of below average intelligence, and only a few delinquents obtained scores above the high average range. While it is possible to identify delinquents with high intelligence, it is not reasonable to infer a connection between delinquency and high intelligence."

I think he missed a vital segment of his population.
********

This is hardly conclusive to prove risk, let alone to be as definitive in the opposite direction from Cornell. But it does at least raise an unanswered question: Might there be a greater risk for gifted (high performance scale) white adolescents to become seriously delinquent than for the norm?

The literature on giftedness, what it is, how to raise and/or teach and/or counsel these children, is fairly extensive. It goes back more than 100 years ago, and about 90 years ago, they had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't.

Doesn't mean that they did it at any point in the intervening years or that there are many places doing it now. Merely that the failure to do it well is from a failure to do one of a few things: 1) Research; 2) Believe what you read; 3) Learn from your mistakes.

This is the generous view of it...

On the fictional side of things, there are only so many plots that are out there.

The first breakout is that you have one gifted kid or you have a bunch of them. The Odd Johns of the world - both IRL and fiction - are plentiful. The groups are less common, excepting only the super hero genre of comic books and novelizations.

Wilmar Shiras wrote about Children of the Atom years before the X-Men (or the Tomorrow People) came into being. A brilliant boy doesn't quite fit in without calling attention to himself and gets found out by a psychologist. Together, they seek out more like him, find them, and pull them together, only to discover that society is not ready for these kids to be working together. But, they are good kids, and want to make the world a better place.

Stephanie Tolan's Welcome to the Ark tells a similar tale, though there is more to these children than just intelligence.

The X-Men are mutants and, originally, gifted youngsters who need to learn to use their powers. The bigotry against them, as mutants, is usually blind and without regard to circumstance. It doesn't help that not all mutants are altruistic. Some are 'merely' self-serving and/or opportunists. Some have the urge to dominate and control others. Some just want to tear things down.

This, then is the crux of the issue: How do we know that if we have kids with these powers, that they will use them for the good of humanity, or at least our nation?

John Brunner's Children of the Thunder asks that question and suggests that not only do we not know it, but that if there are some of these kids with noble objectives and others with more self-centered goals, that all other things being equal, the negative approach will win out.

There is another wringer to be tossed in here - perhaps the most common type of tale that explores this stuff even slightly seriously. What if the institution that is training the children is corrupt, regardless of the original plan? John Brunner addressed this before he ooked at the other - an individual gifted person, escaped from his school where he felt he was mistreated. Much of the novel is spend following our protagonist as he eludes capture in a world made up of plug in employees.

Jarod, in The Pretender, a TC series, has a remarkably similar path - escaping from The Center and adopting a variety of guises and careers to find out about his background while being a do-gooder everywhere he goes.

James Patterson's Maximum Ride series takes the perfidy of mad scientists and the evil institution and combines them with kids who are not merely gifted in their thinking. They have wings - and they have escaped from The School, whose owners and directors do NOT have the kids' best interests at heart.
*******

But in many ways, the questions asked, the puzzles shown, are consistent from book to book and show to show. How alone am I? How do I connect with others? If I run, where will I run too? What happens when my friends discover just how weird I really am?

Why am I so alone? And often, What is wrong with me?

1. Enrollment in Relation to Age and Grade

Two of the very easiest facts to observe and record about the pupils in any school are age and grade. If they are recorded as in Table 1 on the following page, even these simple items tell much about the working of the school in question. Thus, looking at each vertical column, one sees at once the enormous variability in age of those who reach the same grade or educational standard. In the third grade in Connecticut in 1903, children were reported as young as four years old and as old as seventeen. To include nine tenths of the children in this grade, a range of five years is required. Over three years are required to include even three fourths of them. In the fourth grade, only a quarter of the children are of the so-called "normal" age of ten; a fifth of them are twelve or over; in a class of forty there will usually be one child fourteen or more years old and four children eight or less. In the elementary school, even in the lower grades, there are many adolescents, beginning to be moved by the instincts of adult life. In the high school are many boys and girls under fifteen who, though intellectually gifted, are physically, emotionally, and in social instincts little children.

(from page 3.)
Educational Administration: Quantitative Studies (1913) By George Drayton Strayer, Edward Lee Thorndike
*****

As I noted elsewhere (I think), "With all of its defects the country school of a quarter century ago was strongest in caring for the unusually gifted children. These were given great freedom in thought, in rate of accomplishment, and in the materials assigned. The graded system with all of its improvement has decidedly narrowed the range of opportunity of the gifted child."

Thorndike's work, both then and later, provides a lens through which one can examine educational practice today, not only of the gifted, and see some of the places in which we fall terribly terribly short.

Historical events appear to have been much more potent in leading races to civilisation than their faculty, and it follows that achievements of races do not warrant us to assume that one race is more highly gifted than the other.

Dr. Franz Boas, from:
Human Faculty as determined by Race, in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1894.

Isn't it amazing how far we have come from there?