You have always known you 'marched to the beat of a different drummer'.
You are aware that you tend to 'think outside of the box'.
Yet, you never considered yourself to be sensitive or gifted.
To be gifted is to be sensitive - to attend to what is invisible to most. Your nervous system is affected by small amounts of input or change. With a low threshold for sensation, you are designed to have a passionate commitment to that which moves you - to things that many seem to ignore.
Your intensity, heightened perceptiveness, and your sense of being at odds with the world around you - these are all signs that you are both gifted and sensitive.
If you are sensitive to far more subtleties than your contemporaries, you may be highly gifted in imaginational, intellectual, emotional, sensory or physical realms. Your heightened sensitivity contributes to your unusually high capacity for creativity, intuition, innovation and complex thought.
You may often feel out of step with the world around you. You may judge your unusual experiences and types of cognition by the values of a culture that has no understanding of your modes of perception.
Discomfort and the Call to Evolve
For the gifted and sensitive person who carries expectations to be like others, to attend to what others attend to, to value what others value - life can be full of recrimination and self doubt. Freedom and ease come when you step fully into your gifts and learn how to take care of your unique interests and needs.
As a highly gifted individual, there comes a time when you have to shed the persona you adopted to live in a world that did not recognize, or was threatened by, the levels of awareness and ways of relating to the world that you exhibited. Part of the challenge of the gifted person is that your sensitivity makes you astutely aware of judgments and expectations of others. Untangling from the external pressures that have become internalized is one of the main pieces of initial work.
As individuals entering midlife or being called to transformation, there is often a dramatic crisis caused by the need to evolve to a more authentic existence. The gifts that had been trained upon adaptation and survival need to be revisited. These gifts are core places that inform how one lives and makes life choices. The focus becomes on inner realities, not the expectations of the external world.
When Therapy for the Past Fails to Provide the Tools for the Future ...
As highly complex individuals who function at multiple levels of awareness at once, finding a therapist or healer who can hold the whole picture, follow the numerous threads, and offer a peer level of sophistication often proves impossible. The highly gifted person often ends up having to limit what is shared and how it is shared so as not to surpass the “helper's” capacity to comprehend and synthesize. The gifted and sensitive person is often disappointed when practitioners fail to see the presenting symptoms as invitations for deeper levels of integration and further evolution.
The Journey to Belonging
I work with artists, healers, therapists and other gifted and creative individuals who are plagued by an absence of meaning or inability to fully engage in life. The inner discomfort compels them to step fully into awarenesses and ways of relating to the world that were previously unconcious or misunderstood. That which is not of the culture, that which does not "make sense" is allowed to take precedence, to have its full meaning.
I work with you as a transformative bridge between your rich interior life and your conscious understanding. In our work you learn to:
- identify your unique ways of processing
- release subtle expectations that prevent self acceptance
- live from your authentic core
Freed of despair and disorientation, you perceive and respond to that which is invisible to the dominant culture from a place of confidence and clarity.
