30. Find Hope and Joy with Aileen Kelleher! The gifted and 2e therapist for families based in Chicago
Aileen Kelleher is a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in Chicago. She specializes in working with gifted and twice exceptional children, adults and families.
TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:
Being able to have some distance from your thoughts, being able to not over identify yourself, your sense of self with the thoughts that come into your head and knowing not everything you're thinking is a fact or the truth.
Mindfulness practice can help you to start to observe your thoughts without judgment.
Giftedness often comes with one, two or more overexcitabilites (OEs) as defined by Dabrowski as intellectual imagination, sensory, psychomotor, and emotional intensities.
Children with imagination intensities for example can find an escape in video games where they create whole new worlds.
Gifted children often times are treated by adults or by parents as if they are on par with adults. They are being treated as if they have the ability to manage their emotions the way adults do. But they really don't. If anything, as we know, through asynchronous development, gifted kids probably have less capacity than other kids at their age to manage their emotions sometimes.
As a gifted adult you sometimes have to peel back the layers or undo some of the things that you've developed as coping mechanisms that are no longer serving you because you had to get through a world and a system that wasn't built for you.
Gifted people often set very high standards for how they believe they should perform or how they believe they should act.
Gifted kids can feel like they're wrong because they're different as opposed to they're just different.
If you are a parent of a gifted kid, get involved in the gifted community in your area because parents are a wealth of information.
It is important to get the whole family involved as intensities and sensitivities of all family members should be addressed.
When the parents start to heal, the children start to heal and vice versa and everyone kind of relaxes around one another.
It is difficult for 2e children to find an educational fit.
The main issue of why this idea of being different is so hard for kids and adults, because we want to fit in. We're wired to connect and to belong.
Social perfectionism, which means that you feel like you have to look perfect in social situations in order to be accepted. But the way people connect is often through their vulnerabilities.
Most of the families don't like the term gifted, it causes an insecurity because what if you don't live up to that standard?
Trauma stores and manifests in the body.
If you are a gifted adult know that you are worthy of love and belonging the way you are! You don't have to earn it. You don't have to be smart enough. You don't have to be talented enough. You don't have to be creative enough.
Show your vulnerability! As your vulnerability is an asset and their sensitivity and intensity are assets. There’s not something wrong with you! 💝
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Aileen Kelleher’s website: aileenkelleher.com and Instagram: @aileen.imagines
Overexcitabilities by Kazimierz Dąbrowski
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