Chris Wells, PhD, LSW

Dr. Chris Wells studies Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration, and she founded the Dabrowski Center to provide a home for the theory and to support her work. She serves as the CEO & President of Dabrowski Center, and she is an author, speaker, consultant, and the co-host of the Positive Disintegration Podcast. 

I came to the work I’m doing now thanks to a deep exploration into my own past. In 2014, I undertook a research project to understand the intersection between giftedness and mental illness, and that’s when I discovered Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. At first, I didn’t embrace the theory because I had spent so many years thinking of myself as mentally ill—I was not looking for an alternative framework. The work that I do as a researcher and clinician is intertwined with my lived experiences as an extreme outlier. My graduate degrees are in social work (MSW) and psychology (PhD), but I spent years in mental health treatment as a patient before pursuing those degrees. 

When I was young, I was identified as highly gifted, but I did not fit the expectations that came along with that label. My passions were never fed from schoolwork and academic achievement. By the time I was in high school, I was sure that there was something wrong with me, and I began to search for answers in psychiatry and the DSM. I spent years—decades—of my life on medication and feeling like an outsider because of my status as mentally ill. When I returned to school and began studying social work and psychology, I struggled to feel like I could contribute because I was so accustomed to perceiving myself as defective and broken. I feel grateful to have discovered Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration and the liberation I’ve found in his words.

Growing up, I was different enough from other kids to feel like an alien. When I discovered the literature on the qualitative nature of giftedness and positive disintegration, I finally felt like I had answers. It helped me make sense of my experiences better than psychiatry ever had. There are aspects of my mind that are special and extraordinary, and my work in gifted education has been exploring the nature of giftedness. 

I founded the Dabrowski Center because I want to provide a home for the theory of positive disintegration. I believe that there’s power in this work that can help alleviate suffering. 

Chris Wells

Chris is no longer accepting new therapy clients. She is focusing on consulting work and speaking engagements while building the Center. If you’d like to meet with Chris or hire her to speak, send an email to chris@dabrowskicenter.org. 

Chris is a member of the American Psychological Association, National Association of Social Workers, National Association for Gifted Children, Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology, and SENG.

Published work (PDF downloads)

The Origins and Conceptual Evolution of Overexcitability by Wells & Falk

The Primary Importance of the Inner Experience of Giftedness by C. Wells

Reexamining Overexcitability: A Framework for Understanding Intense Experience by Piechowski & Wells 

Other media and appearances

Chris’s keynote at the 2022 Dabrowski Congress

Chris and Emma joined host Abbie VanMeter on the Stories Lived. Stories Told. Podcast.

Chris joined host Jay Swords and history buffs Brett Monnard and Rick Sweet on Relevant or Irrelevant. There is also a podcast segment available here. 

Human Range: My Life, My Journey with Dr. Lin Lim, Finding Me/Us

Chris joined Jen Harvey Sallin for Conversation 12: Giftedness, Positive Disintegration & Mental Health on Conversations on Gifted Trauma Podcast

Chris and Emma were on the Our Gifted Kids Podcast with Sophia Elliott, Episode 048: Why You Need Dabrowski

Innov&Crea Podcast with Anne-Julie Vallée, Positive Disintegration Theory VS Creative Process with Chris Wells

Een Intense Reis (An Intense Life) Podcast with Marije Hofland, The Theory of Positive Disintegration as a framework to become your authentic self; a conversation with Chris Wells

Unleash Monday, with Nadja Cereghetti, Episode 33, When Learning About Overexcitabilities Changes Your Life! with Chris Wells

Embracing Intensity Podcast with Aurora Remember Holtzmann, Episode 111, Shining the Light on Positive Disintegration with Chris Wells

Some of Chris’s favorites from Dąbrowski:

"Transformation and development in the individual with imaginative overexcitability often occur. Indeed, a person of this type has the potential for considerable development. Through positive disintegration he will deepen his imagination and at the same time enlarge his sensitivity to the external world of nature and of social life. He will develop tendencies to evaluate and limit his impetuous, incorrect observations. As he enlarges his sense of reality, he will increase the degree of organization of his psychic structure. This form of transformation will permit him to build a heterogenic psychic structure in which intellectual, psychomotor, emotional, and sensory elements will help to deepen his imagination."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"With respect to death, individuals with a deeply developed process of disintegration, with a clear personality ideal, with a broad experience of life, and possessing a strong tendency for retrospection and prospection, prepare themselves for it, almost from childhood, in the world of the imagination. The thought of their own death often conditions the direction of their work, their deeds. Hence, in the actions of these individuals the foremost place is occupied by supersensual aims and by aspirations for immortality (fame, greatness, perfection). Such men are usually capable of unselfish, sacrificial, and heroic acts. Their attitude toward life includes the need to work for a better future, the tendency to create imperishable, everlasting works; it also includes the belief that deeply felt individual bonds will outlast death; and, finally, it includes the pursuit and realization of lasting cultural goods, in which the “eternal or universal man” comes to be expressed."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"In states of depression a man does not always aim at removing the conditions that brought it about, but at a deeper association with them (in contrast to the stereotyped advice that one should change his conditions of living immediately after the death of a close relative). In relation to phantasy, dream, exorbitant prospections, there is a tendency, not to diminish their strength and scope, but to mentally elaborate and deepen them. In relation to dreams during sleep one does not come to a belief that they reflect suppressed wishes or are manifestations of an archaic structure, but one asks the question whether they are not a reflection of a widened consciousness, beyond the actual sphere, and of the moral reshapings of personality. This is an attitude of frequent seizure by the consciousness of the developmental inner life, which overruns the framework of actual reality, a reality consisting of a narrow system of stimuli and receptors, and of the framework of biological causality."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"The attitude of good will towards others is an expression of reflective syntony. The degree of syntonization arrived at through multilevel disintegration activates the memory of one’s own experiences and makes their translation to others possible. By drawing from the storehouse of one’s own experiences and suffering one can understand and help others who undergo similar trials. Such manner of identification with others is the only possible one: it grows from self-acquired knowledge in the developmental of personality. It is a manner of seeing others as individuals with a potential for inner growth."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"In individuals who are richly endowed and talented the same influence leads to psychoneurotic creative processes which, although rich in their content, are described by the social milieu and the physicians as pathological. Such a label is, of course, detrimental to both the psychoneurotic individuals and the society. In this, way the path of collisions between psychoneurotics with their creative components and the environment takes shape. The path of these collisions is a hard road of liberation for creative individuals, it is a path of suffering—not always necessary and not always useful. It is a path which does not quickly lead to finding one’s own road of development because of the strong inhibitions and frequently high suggestibility of these individuals."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"I have read—I do not know how many times—Kafka's novels. Yes, he was definitely schizophrenic, but one who built schizophrenic worlds with much more positive complexity and a higher moral content than the worlds of everyday reality. And more. Only from these worlds could he elaborate the "normal” worlds in their sense and absurdity. And what appeared? It was a method which discovered and verified the atrocity of the normal worlds. Only the worlds of dreams and visions and creative fear allowed him the possibility of observing and valuing "real worlds” from a wide perspective. It was probably the contacts between these realities, the tensions in their relations, and their distance, their terrible conflicts and collisions which allowed him even further conquest of the world of dreams and visions."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski (as P. Cienin)
Kazimierz Dąbrowski (as P. Cienin)
"Psychoneuroses based on enhanced excitability of imagination are often characterized by deficiency of the reality function on a low level (everyday needs and occupations) but its strength on a higher level (life of inspiration, ideas, creativity and experience of other dimensions of reality), imaginational obsessions, richness of dreams, ideas, inventions, creativity, which in the eyes of others usually have an "unreal” character."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"Experiencing the new in the form of deeper problems and of wider scope is a critical experience (meaning crisis) usually related to the experiencing of a hierarchy in the levels of interests and goals. This “new,” “different” and “deep” as a rule mobilizes creative forces. This is practically a universal phenomenon for individuals endowed with positive developmental potential. A deep experience of sadness and depression as a response to some kinds of reality activates powers affirming the existence of a higher reality together with powers needed to come to the realization of that higher reality. Such depression is often followed by creative excitement, and contains elements for bringing to completion a creative effort. Representative types of this condition are, among others, Saint-Exupéry and Wladyslaw Dawid (1935)."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"Individuals endowed with positive developmental potential utilize, so to speak, the nuclei of their depressive and manic states as modes of their personality growth. The depressive states are the means of "purification” of one’s tendencies. If the individual at the time of his depression is capable to activate a state of sadness and distress in relation to others, then in the hypomanic state that follows after, he is able to mount considerable power of help and protection to others. By this he is safeguarded against adevelopmental forms of depression and hypomanic states. The manic states are a means of developing creativity, enthusiasm, inner movement "upward.” If, therefore, there exists some positive developmental endowment, then, give appropriate environmental conditions, we can find in hypomanic-depressive conditions all the necessary defensive and immunological factors protecting against more severe mental disorders."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"A child who is emotionally sensitive, has a vivid imagination, is shy and manifests a preponderance of inhibition; a child capable and ambitious but with a dominant tendency for withdrawal will tend to be ambivalent: on one hand, it will be his desire to be noted, to gain strength, and on the other hand—and often more distinctly, he will tend to retreat in thought and imagination to a world of undisturbed joy, sincerity and spontaneity, which characterizes many a childhood period. There, he regains resources and energy to measure up to a more "grown up” world."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
“Although this may be only vaguely understood or intuitively apprehended, nearly all indications of nervousness, inability to adapt or adjust, psychoneurosis and mental illness in general, are related in some way to the experience of a broader, deeper, more distinctly human reality. Those who have realized in their own experience the relationships of maladjustment and other symptoms of mental illness to higher realities are morally obligated to dispel the ignorance of the general public regarding the “mentally ill.”
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"Nervousness, neuroses, and especially psychoneuroses, bring the nervous system to a state of greater sensitivity. They make a person more susceptible to positive change. The high psychic structures gradually gain control over the low ones. The lower psychic structures undergo a refinement in this process of inner psychic transformation. This transformation is the fruition of the developmental potential which makes these states possible and makes possible their further development. The components of the development potential like enhanced overexcitability, nuclei of the inner psychic milieu, and special abilities and talents play here an active role. Through multilevel disintegration there occurs positive evolution, making possible the achievement of a high level."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"For a great number of artists and those who strive for self-perfection the realities of intuition, dreams, and fantasy are much higher, much more understandable than the reality of the senses. It is easier for them successfully to deal with the problems of this reality than the reality of everyday life. This reality is in the center of their concerns and inner experiences. In practical matters, however, they may perform poorly and be outclassed by the practically-minded people."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"A child or youth who suffered a trauma, a pain or failure, who finds it difficult to adjust to actual conditions, who requires soothing and sincerity, returns in his thinking and imagination, and—in cases of understanding on the part of his parents—also in reality, for a shorter or longer period of time to the family environment or something similar. The child or youth wishes to experience another atmosphere than that by which he is surrounded."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
"Sometimes positive regression may become a permanent state. This means that the individual, on the one hand, is capable of fulfilling his tasks, his developmental program, his work imposed by the requirements of daily life; while, on the other hand, "half” of his inner self lives in positive regression from which source he draws the strength to be active in daily chores, and even creative dreaming, always in the atmosphere of fantasy and security. For some individuals, this is reality at a higher level, a condition sine qua non of adjustment to the everyday life."
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
Kazimierz Dąbrowski
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The Dabrowski Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the Theory of Positive Disintegration through advocacy, education, and innovation. Our 501(c)3 Federal Tax Identification Number is 87-4818928.

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