A mother recounts early struggles raising neurodivergent twins, describing overwhelm, isolation, and guilt. She outlines a four-step process—awareness, validation, connection, transformation—and shares how founding Mothers Together and her podcast provided community, support, and personal growth for parents of neurodivergent children.
Gifted children often feel different and socially isolated, which can lead to overthinking, anxiety, and shame. Parents can help by creating shame-free environments, validating feelings, teaching coping skills like mindfulness and rehearsal, building calming toolkits, fostering independence, and seeking professional support when needed.
Gifted children often experience intense, frequent, and long-lasting emotions that adults misunderstand. Therapists, teachers, and parents should listen, validate, and join their feelings rather than dismiss them. In the author’s case, supporting a grieving, angry teen led to productive action—an environmental club—and improved functioning.
This article explains how picture books can help gifted children understand and embrace Dabrowski’s five overexcitabilities—intellectual, sensual, imaginational, psychomotor, and emotional. It offers strategies for parents and educators and curated children’s book lists to support each overexcitability and foster positive identity development.
Mark Hess argues gifted boys often experience intense empathy and sensitivity that, when guided, can develop into meaningful leadership. Using classroom examples, he suggests social-emotional lessons delivered in boy-friendly ways help boys belong, practice compassion, and redefine toughness as emotional courage and kindness.
In this classroom vignette, a teacher observes three gifted sisters, focusing on Lucy’s relentless energy and high abilities. The essay contrasts highly gifted intensities with typical gifted students, reflecting on how intense cognition and behavior can appear unusual yet be normal expressions of exceptional ability.
People resemble ecosystems—meadows, deserts, oceans, each valuable. Gifted individuals are like rainforests: complex, sensitive, intense, and creative. They can contribute significantly, but require acceptance and encouragement. Instead of cutting them down, we should nurture their curiosity, idealism, sensitivity, and insight to appreciate their lively minds.
Gifted children often feel intense, early fears and anxieties because their advanced understanding outpaces experience. Parents should validate feelings without dismissing them, offer perspective through information and preparation, limit distressing exposure, and foster helping behaviors so children build resilience and efficacy.
This post presents the BERRY Approach to help highly sensitive people harness emotional overexcitabilities. It outlines five strategies—Being With IT, Experience E-Motion, Recognize the Saboteur, Resonant Choices, and Your Compelling Purpose—and practical steps to accept, process, and channel intense emotions toward meaning, resilience, and creativity.
This post argues that vulnerability underlies creativity and that emotional overexcitabilities in gifted individuals, though often suppressed, are also the source of their strengths. Instead of forcing them to outgrow sensitivity, we should acknowledge, nurture, and encourage authentic expression so their gifts and connections can emerge.
