“What if the very thing that makes you gifted is also what makes life feel overwhelming?
In this episode of Notes to My Nervous System, Erin Vandermore sits down with therapist Gordon Smith to explore what it means to live in a gifted nervous system — especially after burnout, crisis, or long-term emotional overwhelm.
(This piece originally appeared as an article for the Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented. It is written for all of the parents who realized their own giftedness after their children were identified as gifted)
It’s Me: The Moment
My son was identified as gifted by his school. He was having sensory issues, and they couldn’t teach him anything. He kept acing every test without trying. He was disrupting the class, too, but anyway, we had him evaluated, and it turns out he’s got a GAI score of 146. So my husband and I started reading whatever we could find about giftedness. I was reading about Bore-Out one night when it hit me. My eyes didn’t blink for a full minute… “It’s me. That’s me.”
You were digging around to learn how to help your gifted child become as happy and as healthy as they could be. You read the books and listened to the podcasts. You attended the trainings and joined the organizations. You were on a mission to optimize all that intensity of theirs into a fulfilling life. You just want your children to live in their fullest expression.
This eight-week series beginning January 19, 2025 elevates and centers the creative and imaginational dimensions of your gifted consciousness. Forget every rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter thumping your English teacher forced upon you. None of that is central to poetry’s curative properties now known and practiced in psychology and clinical medical practice. Poetic Reasoning invites you to develop skills of surrender and to open doors of self-discovery.
Participants will engage and practice Poetic Reasoning in a safe, supportive, and critique-free community. We will practice and open to the use of poetry as a tool of exploration. You will transcend your resistances and perfectionistic habits. Wider perspective, intuition, creativity, and freedom from the neuromajority’s constraints on thinking comprise just a few of the benefits. Meaning, awe, wonder, and delight are others.
