“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 coaching group will be held weekly on Sundays – February 8, 2026 through March 15, 2026 from 1 – 3pm Eastern Time. It is…
This podcast appearance is a fun, deep dive into giftedness, neurodivergence, LGBTQ+ spaces, mutual aid, and consciousness. Dr. Matt Zakreski and Jake Noonan are dynamic…
One of the ways the InterGifted community helps gifted adults is through shepherding people’s individual experience out into the world through a careful, nurturing process of publishing. In InterGifted’s latest publication – How I Healed My Gifted Trauma – gifted writers and illustrators from around the world share their paths toward wholeness. I have a long poem included. It’s titled Brood XIV and was inspired by the 17 year cicada eruption that happened in western North Carolina this year.
“How I Healed My Gifted Trauma is a collective exploration of that journey, written and illustrated by gifted adults around the world who have faced, integrated and restored wholeness following gifted trauma. Together, we show how uniqueness, adversity, and purpose can be woven into a deeper sense of existential belonging.
Compiled and edited by Jennifer Harvey Sallin and Lil Jedynak, in 2025. This book includes 18 stories and many more illustrations from 14 contributors.”
Positive Disintegration Podcast has been a centerpiece of gifted information and community for over three years, and @Chris Wells and Emma Nicholson have been so generous with their time and insights. I had the pleasure of joining them for Episode 75 (and an epic vulnerability hangover that prompted another evolution for me personally). Have a listen, and please share with anyone you feel would be aided by it.
“Gordon shares how his rediscovery of giftedness helped him make sense of his life and deepen his work with clients. The conversation dives into the challenges of unmasking in front of others—especially family—and how the safety of group spaces can empower people to become more fully themselves. Gordon introduces his unique group offerings and the powerful “Magnum Opus” exercise that facilitates self-discovery through poetry and flow state.”
Poetic reasoning is a creative process rather than a scientific one. Whereas the scientific method insulates the subject of study from imagination and progresses incrementally toward a conclusion, the creative process starts with intense imagination regarding the subject and omnidirectionally guides both us and it through time-space toward deeper understanding of everything.
Whereas scientific reasoning values control, poetic reasoning values connection. Whereas scientific reasoning accumulates evidence, poetic reasoning explodes in the heart and deepens throughout a lifetime and beyond.
This article invites you into Poetic Reasoning and our eight-week course for gifted adults to explore creative consciousness. Begins Jan. 19, 2025.
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.
Once you’ve realized that your giftedness has everything to do with the way you interact with the world, the next, inevitable steps are toward recalibrating, reorienting, and living a life more aligned with who you are. This group provides gifted adults a space to explore their neurodivergences in a virtual room full of other outliers. In my years working with gifted people, I’ve seen that loneliness is the most common affliction of the uncommon, and People Who Get Me (PWGM) is designed to be a balm and a laboratory.
Gifted and giftedness definitions continue to evolve as our understanding does. This blog post gives a glimpse of my briefest working definiton.
Gifted adolescents and adults in South Carolina have a new choice for counseling. I’m now licensed there and can help.
Perfectionism is a function of the gifted mind that can foster defeat or success. It all depends on how you use it. Adaptively or maladaptively.
When was the last time you actually had fun at a workshop? Not that “organized fun” kind of fun, but the kind that really resonated…
Fourteen years old, gifted, autistic, gender non-binary – I remember the moment that they allowed spontaneity to happen. they went from nervous and tense to…
New Improv for Gifted Adults (I4GA) group launches on March 27, 2022! Click this link to register. For Gifted Adults, Improv provides a deep, moving,…
