* Thank you, Bee Mayhew, for editing this transcript!

Transcript

Emma: Welcome to Positive Disintegration, A Path to Authenticity. In this episode, we're going to be talking about Dabrowski through the lens of youth. We're going to be speaking to Lance Johnson, a college student who’s studied the Theory of Positive Disintegration and will speak to us through the lenses of someone who is young, overexcitable and gifted.

Now, a content warning exists on this episode, so we will be talking about some rather dark topics and subject matter, that includes things like suicidal ideation and depression. If you are sensitive to those particular topics, please be warned and take care of yourself.

Emma: Hello, listeners. Welcome back to another episode of Positive Disintegration. I'm your host, Emma Nicholson, and with me is co-host Dr. Chris Wells. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hi, Emma. Nice to see you again. How are you?

Emma: You too. I'm a lot better. As you know, I've had the damn ‘Rona, so that's been a fun week. I'm feeling a lot better and I'm happy to be back doing a podcast and something I love.

Chris: I'm glad that you're feeling better. And yeah, it's great to be back and recording again. We did take like a three-week break. So well, it's nice to have a break, too, to be honest.

Emma: It's always good to have a break, even if it's from something you like, because it refreshes you and sort of resets you, I think.

Chris: That's right. And I was at camp. I was at Yunasa this month. That's part of why we took a break from recording. It was wonderful to be there with the kids and the adults, and I miss them already.

Emma: And it would have been good for you to be exposed to a bunch of young minds and new perspectives on things?

Chris: It was wonderful. It was really great.

Emma: And it's kind of on topic because our guest today is a young college student, and so it's gonna be nice to get a fresh perspective on Dabrowski's theory.

Chris: Exactly. That is totally what I had in mind when I invited Lance to join us.

Emma: So for our listeners, today's guest is Lance Johnson. Lance is a college student in Steamboat Springs in Colorado, who's been studying Dabrowski's Theory for the past few years. Welcome to the podcast, Lance.

Lance: Thanks, it's really good to be here.

Chris: Yeah, we're so glad to have you with us, Lance.

Lance is Tina Harlow‘s son, that's how we met.  I've known them for three years. I met Lance when I came to visit here in Steamboat three years ago, and what we discovered while we were talking is that we have so much in common. Lance has overexcitabilities that really remind me of mine, especially their imaginational process.

I wanted to have Lance on the podcast to talk about their experiences of overexcitability, giftedness, positive disintegration, because they’ve studied the theory for the past few years, as Emma said in the intro. We're excited to talk with you because, I mean, no offense to our guests, but we haven't had many young voices. We're happy to have you here.

Lance: Yeah, no, like I said, I'm really excited to share and just to have a good conversation.

Chris: So to kick us off, talk about how your mind works and what it was like to live in a rural area, to be gifted and have this experience of overexcitability and not have mirroring from other peers.

Lance: Yeah, totally. Going way back like from a really young age I was really, really into reading, especially fantasy and fiction—it would really put me in my own world.  I would kind of start off with the world in the books that I was reading and then my imagination would kind of build off from that like platform and tie it into my own experiences. It really fed into my imagination… a big piece of that is that my imagination is largely verbal, I don't have a very strong visual imagination but most of my thoughts are out loud and in other people's voices.

That also meant that from a really young age, I was pretty good at language, good at reading, always pretty good at communicating. I always had a lot of questions, always really curious and wanted to learn new things, especially with that imaginal portion. I wanted to know if the things I was imagining could be real and things like that.

As Chris mentioned, I grew up right outside of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, as a matter of fact, which is even more rural. It's a school, K-8 school that I went to, had like 100 kids throughout the entire kindergarten through eighth grade. And so, having this pretty different internal experience from the people around me, I always knew that I was really different from my peers. It started out when I was younger as having it be a compliment—you know, “Oh, you're really smart.” But as it grew and grew, people became maybe more jealous or just understood that I was different and that we didn't necessarily relate as closely as the other kids that may have been more similar to one another. So I always felt pretty isolated there.

And then I'm also gay. I think I knew that when I was younger, but I didn't really come into my consciousness until I was in late middle school. But again, I was in a really rural area, really small school. So for the people, you know, everyone knew pretty much as soon as I did. Those that didn't support me made that very clear from the get-go. There were definitely a lot of feelings of otherness and just being really different from my peers. So that was really hard for me.

And mentioning, as Chris mentioned, the imaginational portion, I also had a pretty dark imagination, especially as I got further on into the middle school years. And it really scared me. I thought there was something deeply wrong with me. In fact, I actually thought I was like a sociopath or destined to become a serial killer in middle school because I was having these thoughts about like murder and horrific things about the people I love and about my friends at school. I really, I didn't understand that that was more just my imagination kind of riffing off my environment as opposed to an actual desire that I had inside of me. So for a lot of my early teen years, I really was pretty disgusted with myself and thought there was something really deeply wrong with me.

Chris: Yeah, that really resonates with me. I also experienced that when I was, I want to say between like 13 and 14 years old, where I thought a lot about death. Not only my own death, but other people's death, like murder, and certainly thought that there was something wrong with me. That it was a personal failing, a character flaw. I also felt that dissatisfaction with myself around it. And so, you know, it's really interesting to talk about these things and see how these early dynamisms operate in your life.

Lance: Yeah, no, that was again—I also had the dissatisfaction and some guilt and shame around it just because a lot of it, even some of those imaginations, were me doing those horrific things. What I often had was running away from home (imaginal experiences) even though I had a good home life. I had this long-running fantasy of just going out into the woods and leaving everything behind, not leaving a note, stuff like that. I felt mostly a lot of guilt and shame around that, that I was thinking these things about hurting the people that I loved or trying to escape the people I loved, even though I really had nothing to escape from. Yeah, I had a lot of those low-level dynamisms from a young age.

Chris: Yeah, it's interesting to think about your mental imagery and how much it impacts your life. If it tends to be dark like that, then it can really bring you on a bad path. I know personally, I've said this to you before, that you're so ahead of where I was at your age because you have come to learn these things about yourself, and you have the Theory as a guide at this point. When I was your age, I was still really struggling with my imagination. It still felt so imposed on me and not like something that was within my control even. There was so much intrusive imagery and thoughts. I know that you also experienced intrusive imagery.

Lance: Yeah. That's something that I still really deal with, I would say. I can't remember exactly when this started but sometime in that middle school area, you know, I started feeling really depressed. Actually around eighth grade I thought I was bipolar because I would have these feelings of being really depressed for a long time and then for whatever reason, it would lift.

I would just feel this real, really manic energy and [be] really ecstatic and happy. But when I was in those depressed states, I would have just these thought loops of things like “you should go kill yourself” or, you know, “nobody likes you, you're a terrible person.” A lot of… kind of going back to that imagination, like creative ways of suicide. How to do it in an outlandish and original way, and again, it was intrusive. I still experience those thoughts, particularly if I'm having a rough day but sometimes, they just kind of come out of the blue: “Oh you should go kill yourself.” It took me a really long time for me to realize that it's not my ego thinking that.

I'm thinking it, but it's not a thought that I identify with as a person and as a concept. It really took a long time for me to realize that and to escape it. Because as I was feeling those thoughts, I mean, all I wanted to do was to escape it or to self-harm in one way or another. It was leading me down, like you said, a pretty dark, dangerous path.

Chris: Well, I'm glad that it's gotten better. That's for sure. I would say the same thing for myself, where it's gotten so much better in adulthood, at least, or the more I become aware of it. You don't have to identify with your thoughts or your feelings. You can just let them go. It's a big deal.

Lance: Totally. Yeah… It probably would have been maybe a year or two after I first met you and I'd really kind of wrapped my mind around the Theory a little bit more. If I do have those suicidal thoughts or something, I immediately kick in with, “No, that's not the case at all. I've loved my life. I have so many reasons to be grateful and I live in a beautiful place and maybe I'm even happy right now.” There's just a small part of my brain that's having these suicidal thoughts. And, like you said, I don't have to identify with them.

Chris: Emma, I think I have to assume that some of this is resonating with you as well.

Emma: Yeah, it is, particularly, and I didn't really think about it until you just mentioned it, Lance, but the whole fantasizing about running away from my life. When you've got a rich imagination, you go into all the details about what am I going to pack and where am I going to go and what's my new life going to look like? It sort of explodes in your mind.

What I wanted to ask you was about your experience, particularly when you're young, like being able or unable maybe, to make that separation between those thoughts and those feelings and those imaginings and your actual life. So for you, what was the process to be able to start making that separation?

Lance: That's a really good question. I'd say a lot of it probably did hinge on the Theory. I mean, as Chris mentioned, my mom is involved in the Theory, she's involved in the therapy, psychology kind of world anyway. So it was good that I had that person that could kind of explain some of these things to me. If I opened up about them, she could help tell me about it.

It was probably after high school started, maybe even midway through high school that I really kind of unidentified with it. Later, maybe? Obviously, things fluctuate, nothing's perfect, but I would say it wasn't even until COVID hit that I really had some time to spend with myself. I realized that I don't necessarily, I don't really have like, I don't identify with the term “mental illness.”

I have behaviors and tendencies that some people might label as bipolar or ADHD or even obsessive compulsive—different symptoms there match different diagnoses, but I really realized that no, I'm just me and I can really choose which parts of my mind and my imagination I can identify with and which ones really aren't serving me. Yeah, I would say actually about COVID is when it went from an intellectual thing where I knew of the Theory and knew what it meant and what it was saying, to actually experiencing the Theory and auto psychotherapy and talking myself out of some of those really dark thoughts and ideas.

Chris: I do want to talk with you about the ways that you have explored and used auto psychotherapy and self-education in your life because I happen to know that you have done a lot of your own inner work and you've drawn on a lot of different resources to help yourself.

Lance: Yeah, I think the theory has been a big part of that. Some spirituality has been a big part of that too, particularly Buddhist ideas and like non-duality and things like that. things aren't always black and white. And if I really see my reality as, because that's a trap that I fall into fairly often, is if I'm feeling sad—it's the end of the world, it's terrible, like nothing will ever be okay again. If I'm happy, then that's it—this is the breakthrough moment for me and I'm never gonna have another issue, never going to have another down moment.

But then I really have to catch myself in those thoughts. Sometimes I do better with that than others, but I really tell myself that no, every second is a new second with a new opportunity for me to be the person that I want to be, and that I have to kind of separate myself from those really extremist perceptions of my reality, that things are a lot more nuanced than I thought they would be or that I may think they are. A lot of it centers around acceptance too.

There's gonna be thoughts that are looping kind of obsessively in my head over and over and there may be ways to distract yourself from it but at a certain point, you know, if you're laying in bed or whatever it is, you kind of just have to say, “OK, like this is just how my mind is right now. There isn't a whole lot I can do to change it.” So you can kind of just sit with it. What I found is the more you confront those thoughts and accept them and say, this is just what my brain is doing right now, the quicker those thoughts dissipate. Thinking back to like early high school, I really tried to run away from the thoughts and feelings that I was having and the more I tried to run away from them it seemed like the closer they got to catching up with me. It made it so much more intense and painful when those thoughts and feelings did catch up with me, because I had spent so much time trying to escape them that it was like this big tidal wave coming up behind me and as soon as I stopped running, it just, it would hit me from behind. So yeah, trying to catch those thoughts before it becomes that tidal wave has been a big part of my process.

Chris: That makes sense.

Emma: You talked about acceptance, and I know when I was around your age, a big part for me in accepting those sorts of darker thoughts was finding other media that kind of reflected how I felt about things. I realized that I wasn't such an anomaly. So for me, I listened to a lot of heavy metal music, which people have preconceived notions about, but a lot of the lyrics revolve around sort of inner demons and dark feelings.

And I also read Stephen King novels and stuff like that a lot when I was young. That helped me realize that, yeah, there are people out there with these dark imaginations thinking of these things and they're not necessarily serial killers but it's okay to have those thoughts. So for me, media was a big part of that acceptance. What I want to ask you from your perspective being young today is: with social media, I see a lot of people posing themselves on Instagram and stuff and trying to make their life look as bright and shiny as it can possibly be. Do you think that sort of has a different effect on you trying to cope through this now than it probably had during Chris and my time?

Lance: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Stephen King. Chris and I were just talking about yesterday like how that was something we had in common as we got older, like early teens. More emo music and like you said metal, and just the songs about the darkness and stuff definitely did help me. And yeah, seeing Stephen King was, I think, a huge part for me. He is imagining those things. He has all of those horrific things that just make your gut wrench as you're reading them, [that] came from his mind. It really was comforting for me to know that Stephen King wasn't a serial killer. He was a serial author. He really put all of those horrific things in his mind to good use.

Going back to your question with social media—I've gotten off of Instagram. I've never even gotten on TikTok now because of that exact reason. I can't possibly live up to those expectations that I see online, and it's exhausting for me to even think about trying. I don't want to put in the effort of finding the perfect filter to make my skin look glowingly radiant. I don't want to, you know, spend an hour trying to think of the perfect caption for my post or if I see a beautiful sunset, I don't want the first thought in my mind to be like, “Other people need to see this sunset. I need to catch it for other people.” I really want to appreciate reality as I'm experiencing it without the need to tell other people. I think I'm fortunate in that I was able to see that for myself and get off of social media because I know a lot of people that I think are pretty negatively impacted by it. 

It's so addictive, it's so hard. That's why I got off Instagram because I would get on it and my intent would be to just fill 10, 30 minutes scrolling and the next thing I know, I look up from my phone and it's two hours later and I feel like shit. It's the same thing with TV. If I end up sitting and looking at a screen for two or three hours, it doesn't feel good. That's not a kind of recreation that's leading to any sort of growth or self-satisfaction. It always just makes me feel like I've wasted three hours. I definitely think I've been fortunate in that I have been able to recognize that from this age because I think a lot of people my age and a little bit younger are really inexorably pulled into that whole scene and that our whole society is trying to push us there and that, you know, the future of business and the future of everything is on social media.

Chris: It's a real problem. I talk with a lot of people who really struggled to get away from their phones and they spend a lot of time scrolling, scrolling, scrolling hours of their lives. I try not to do that, but it's easy to get sucked into it.  I think that you're smart to just cut yourself off from it.

Lance: And I do want to say, like, I'm not gonna get up on my high horse. I have Snapchat and I spend far too many hours of the day Snapchatting with people or looking at the Snapchat stories that it gives me…  I won't claim to be all holier than thou, but I at least can recognize that some social medias are a bit more addictive for me than others and also have a much more unrealistic beauty standard and things like that. Snapchat for me is comedy usually, or cooking kind of stuff. I don't do it just to look at my friends so much. So I think that that's been helpful for me.

Chris: Not to sound old, but I've only used Snapchat a couple times. [shared chuckles] And so I'm just now learning about TikTok too.

Emma: It's like anything though. It's a tool and I think how you use it is important. If you're going on YouTube and spending hours laughing at other people's misery and fails and stuff, that's one thing, but if you're going there to learn how to cook or do a DIY thing or something, then you can actually get something out of it. It's like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build something or to destroy something.

Lance: Totally. That's right. Yeah. And I think that is one nice thing about the kids that are growing up with social media, you know, we've kind of been able to learn to adapt to it a little bit. It's our generation being able to grow up with those tools. Hopefully some of us, most of us, will be able to learn how to use it as a tool in an effective way and not just in a destructive way.

But then I also struggle—I don't fully feel like I'm using the tools to their full benefit. I use social media as more of a relaxation tool or a kind of distraction tool, so I'm doing it less, maybe, than most of my peers. I also know a number of my peers who are pursuing their interests really closely on Instagram and their feed is filled with… if they're artists, it's the kind of art they're into or the careers they're interested in, so I won't hate on all social media. Like you said, it is a tool and for the people that learn how to use it effectively, I think it can be a really good tool.

But it's so hard to use it effectively because there's so many people whose sole motivation is to try to extract capital out of you and get you on there as much as possible, seeing as many ads as possible, having to be aware of that is really hard.

Chris: You just reminded me that one of the things that I wanted to talk with you about, that I think is really cool about you—you've invested so much effort into learning about your special interests. One of the things we were talking about in preparation for this episode is how you use your imagination to imagine, ‘cause you're into permaculture, how your garden and backyard can be optimized and what you can grow back there and stuff. Do you want to say anything about that?

Lance: Totally. Yeah. So for those that don't know, just a brief introduction to permaculture, it's growing food plants and medicinal plants in a way that is very counter our modern agriculture practice. It's trying to build soil, build biodiversity, create food that's healthy for the people that are eating it, build a community around your agriculture operation. It’s a more holistic, healthy way of trying to do that. I really got into that (permaculture) again during COVID.

Since then, I’ve really started to learn more, that's where my imagination has gone. If I'm laying in bed right before I fall asleep, my mind is wandering off to thinking about.

In our own backyard, if I had infinite money and resources, where would I plant this tree? What construction operations would I do here? Would I move some soil? Would I put irrigation in certain places? And sometimes I really let it run wild and it's “imagine yourself a plot of land, perfect plot of land, with all of these different things?”

How would I deal with my waste? A lot of what I think about now is like, making use of…where to put a bathroom? To create, to funnel it down into a tank where I can ferment it into methane to be used as cooking gas and creating a whole system that uses all of the outputs from myself and from existence and putting it back into a productive use. [It] is so much fun because there's infinite creativity there. There are so many different ways you can do it and so much information out there about how different people have done that. There are some people that compost their waste, there's some people that, like I said, ferment it for methane and use that as cooking gas. There are people that maybe don't, they live on a property that had an existing plumbing system and so they just use that.

There's a lot of opportunity to use that imagination in this particular field, which is really what drove me to it as a career. I think Dabrowski's theory is ultimately what led me to that place. I did not have a lot of hope for most of my teen years about global warming and all of the horrific challenges that are facing our species and our world, really. For most of my life, or maybe not most at this point, but for a lot of my life, my imagination was going to horrific ways the world was going to end… Out of control storms and disease and death just racing across the world.

It's been really cool to replace that with a career and dreams and goals that I know are going to help directly, help those terrible scenarios and help with global warming, help with food insecurity and inequality, lack of community and all of these issues that our society is facing. It's been really meaningful for me to know that I can pursue what makes me feel happy and hopeful and what my own mind is best at, instead of trying to be the little cookie cutter person, like, “Oh, you're gifted, you should go into college, get some scholarships, get this degree, get a high paying job, get nice and set up, and then you can worry in your retirement, going to go homestead.” And I decided, no, that's bullshit. I want to do something that's going to make me happy and feel good about the things that I'm doing for the Earth as soon as physically possible.

Chris: I think that's great. It's amazing. It's been so cool to watch your process and watch your unfolding path.

Emma: You were just sort of talking about those expectations of “go to college, white picket fence” and all that sort of stuff, particularly knowing about a theory as you do. What are your thoughts on the impact of socialization? Particularly as a young person? That's one of the things with theory that you've got to do—you've got to unravel all these things that have been put on you that aren't particularly your values, but you've been led to believe that they are.

So, for me coming to the theory later in life, I had to go down some pretty significant rabbit holes in order to undo some of that damage, but what's your experience of actually trying to unwind the socialization before it sort of occurs to you?

Lance: Yeah, that's a really hard one, especially going back to like social media and just the globalization that we have today. On the one hand, it's great because you can see tons of different people that are unique in so many different ways and it's cool that you can see that there are a lot of different alternative ways of just being in the world.

But then also as you see just person after person after person in all of these different ideal worlds, it really does give you a kind of preconceived notion of success. The vast majority of my friends are really techie and I'm tech savvy, but like I said, if I sit in front of a screen for more than a couple hours, I feel like, physically sick, mentally sick, just not right. So a hard one for me is knowing that about myself but also most of my friends, especially gifted friends, are really into video games and really into tech stuff. Trying to keep my sense of identity and trying not to force myself to be on a screen until I'm sick, to just to try to fit in with people…

 I do know that in our society, we need to make money somehow. That's something I haven't fully worked out, how I want to make income. I know that online kind of stuff might be the easiest way to do it. I haven't really reconciled my own reactions and reality with tech versus the necessities of our life. That's been a hard one for me.

Going back to like my sexuality, especially in a rural area, I remember there were definitely some homophobic comments made, but a big portion of the kind of the messaging I received from my peers, not from my parents, they've always been really supportive, but from my peers has been “you can be gay, but don't make it obvious. I don't want to know.” You know, like “be a man's man” just be, you know, just like men. That's something that is really deeply ingrained in me and I think is a big part of what I'm working through right now—how my gender expression fits in and how for most of my child/early teen years like I tried to make my voice sound deeper and tried to do more masculine things and work out more. I was okay with myself being gay. but I wanted to have the freedom to not be judged by everyone, that anyone just looking at me wouldn't necessarily know that about me. Part of my work right now is to not care as much and to just be whoever I want every day and not try to act more masculine around guys or whatever it is.

Chris: Yeah, the journey to authenticity is not easy. Well, it just feels like a constant peeling back of layers and digging deeper and facing yourself and questioning. It's tough.

Lance: Oh, yeah.       

Emma: It's funny, though, because we've had this come up with previous guests as well, that eventually, though, your authenticity is just going to find you, whether you like it or not. So I know from my experience being bi, I thought, I'm fine. I'll just hide. I'll just, you know, play straight. You'll be fine. And no one will know. But it's not true because I talked to people later after I've sort of come out to them and they're like, yeah, we kind of knew. Eventually it all sort of creeps up on you and you think that you're hiding and you think that you're masking, but eventually your authenticity is going to come to the surface and it's sort of that 50-50, Chris as you were saying, it's a peeling back of layers and trying to discover it yourself at the same time it's like almost leaking out like a sieve.

Lance: Yeah it's cool. Today I was at Steamboat's Pride Festival and I was thinking as I was hanging out with the friends that I went with—my voice does become higher and more energetic and almost slightly lispy or whatever. When I'm with people that are really supportive and particularly girls, oftentimes just because they, I think, bring some of that energy… with guys, I kind of mask more. It's always such a euphoric experience when I've been spending the whole day talking all fast and high and excited—it's kind of a like a manic feeling. I do wonder about some of [my] past experiences and thinking that I'm in a manic cycler/depressed.

I'd love to look back a little more closely and see—maybe I'm hanging out with people that allowed me to be my more authentic self and as a result I felt a much more ecstatic feeling? I'm just now thinking about that, so I definitely want to look back and think about that more deeply. I think it's probably true, like I find when I'm hanging out with guys and I mask well. I'm very good at fitting into just about any social situation, going back to the ‘since most of my thoughts are verbal’, it's oftentimes in other people's voices. It's very easy for me to put on someone else's voice while I'm talking to them. I do it kind of subconsciously. So when I'm hanging out with some really laid back, [voice slows downs and deepens] low voice dudes that are more conservative and talk like this, I do feel a little bit more depressed and more just shoved into myself and under the surface, for sure.

Chris: You're making me wonder about your visualization and the fact that you have more narrative thinking in your imagination. I know that one thing that we've talked about is kind of the mental rehearsal of imagination and imagining conversations, imagining how things might go in certain situations. And I'm not even sure where I want to go with that, but I know that you can relate.

Lance: No, totally, yeah… that's always been a huge thing for me. Sometimes it's a rehashing of things, of conversations, that have already happened, but I might even say the majority of the time it’s hypothetical interactions, maybe with people that I know, but it could be someone that's just straight out of my mind, I hadn't necessarily met them before. I definitely do a lot of that hashing out and practicing and repeating to myself what I'm going to say. I'll run through a conversation scenario, maybe like 10 different times, 10 different ways. and see how my imaginary conversation partner reacts to each way, and try to find the best, kind of fine-tune the way I interact with the world.

I struggle sometimes, particularly in more romantic relationships, in that I have the strong urge to escalate things really quickly, and I think a lot of that has to do with that rehashing in my head. I'm imagining a scenario and we're like sitting and talking with this person that I'm interested in romantically. Then very quickly in the mental scenario, it starts to go sexual. And then I think, you know, I want that to be my reality, or I expect that from someone else. For the vast majority of people, that's not the case. Most people aren't just like at the touch of a button ready to go and so it's been hard for me to remember that and to remember that my imagination is just that. Fantasies are just that, and that reality is definitely different than your inner experience. I have to deal with that.

Chris: That actually makes me think of another question that I wanted to ask you which is just around, you know, did you ever find that you had trouble mixing truth and fiction? That's one of the questions from the original overexcitability questionnaire, I think. Mixing truth and fiction is definitely one of the keys here, it's on the table of manifestations. That's what it is. It's one of the phrases that Michael has used when talking about imaginational overexcitability. What's been your experience with that?

Lance: Yeah, a lot of it's sometimes my relationships with other people. Someone who has otherwise been really nice to me, my whole life, I, for some reason, have this feeling that they're not [nice], that they're faking it and that they don't actually like me at all. In fact, I actually forgot about this through a significant, maybe like most of sixth grade, or maybe I shouldn't say most but a good portion of sixth grade I thought that I had special needs, that I was developmentally delayed and that no one had told me and that everyone was just acting nice to me.

I saw other kids at the school that were like that, and I was like “oh everyone's nice to me kind of like that”—like I wonder if just no one's told me that? Then I realized, wait, no, I can read a book faster than anyone else in my peer group. If I do have a developmental delay it's definitely not as intense as what I'm thinking I had. It's a lot of some kind of a level of paranoia around relationships. But then also with identity too, you know, sometimes I'll think about myself and I'll be extremely convinced that there is an aspect of myself or my identity that's set in stone, that it's a clear part of who I am. And then the very next day, as I'm thinking about it or talking to someone about that realization, I'm like, wait, no, that's exactly the opposite of how I really am or of how I usually feel.

So yeah, it can be kind of a confusion of identity sometimes and a confusion of my relationship with other people, but usually not so much reality itself around me, although sometimes that is the case, especially when I was younger. I was always a convincing liar, sometimes not even knowing that I was lying, you know. I improv a lot when talking to people. Sometimes someone would ask me a question or ask me why or whatever it is and I just kind of riff off whatever seemed to be the most plausible explanation for what I was thinking or saying and just cross my fingers and hope that I'm right. Or that if I am wrong, that no one's going to call me out on it. And it works a little bit too often. [shared chuckles]

Emma: One thing I wanted to know was what Lance's advice is for other people around their age who might have overexcitabilities or are trying to cope with them. Basically what are your hacks for dealing with it?

Lance: Oh that's a really good question. I'll probably have to think about that for just a second. I would say… find like-minded individuals, I think that that's a big part of it. Not just like-minded, don't hang out with people because they're who you want to be or because you think they're cool or things like that. Find people and hang out with them because you think they're cool, like on a human level, because you relate to them, you guys have similar experiences and, you know, maybe similar hopes and dreams and things like that.

It definitely helps to have someone that can relate a little bit more to your own experience, especially people that feel their emotions more intensely or that have that strong imagination portion or, you know, become really physically hyperactive. Whatever your particular manifestation is, it can be really helpful to find someone who's similar because you'll be on the same wavelength a lot and the conversations are going to be more meaningful and the activities you guys choose to do together are going to be more meaningful. It’s gonna be something that both of you want to do and aligns with your own sense of self and the things that you know are really good for you.

So yeah, I would say find a good peer group. Going back to acceptance too, you're not a horrible person or there's nothing wrong with you. You may be weird but that's not a bad thing, [laughter] definitely be happy with what makes you unique and individual because that's what's ultimately going to make you successful. Whatever your idea of success is, is gonna be your uniqueness and individuality. If you just try and fit in and be everyone else, then all those jobs, everyone else is taken they're, they're already, that job is taken. So if you go and try and be the same cookie cutter person that surrounds you, then you're going to end up realizing that there's far less room for you in the world that you've chosen than if you had just chosen to be yourself. You can really fill the niche that you were meant to fill in society.

Chris: Michael said that Dabrowski used to say, “Be authentic and be empathic.”

Lance: Yeah.

Chris: I mean I hear you saying both of those things to some degree.

Lance: Totally.

Chris: Another thing that I just happen to know about you is your psychomotor overexcitability, I feel like you've done a good job of figuring out how to harness that and deal with it well.

Lance: Yeah, I mean that I largely attribute to martial arts. I started taekwondo in seventh grade. That has been huge for me both as an outlet for psychomotor overexcitability. I mean, one to two hours twice a week of really intense exercise that really challenges my proprioception and figuring out where my hands are in relation to my body and how to move quickly, but also deliberately, having good balance and things like that.

Then also being able to, as the need arises, still your body and kind of let the excitement and overexcitability sit for a second and then channel it later—not necessarily feeding into every second that you're feeling this urge to go do something, but to kind of save it.  Not to bottle it up and just let it bottle and bottle and bottle until something breaks, but to save it up to a more appropriate time. That really started my love of exercise.

I love to bike and hike, and I've started working out more recently at the gym and that has been hugely helpful for me both on a chemical level… like endorphins and everything on a body image level. On the psychomotor level I feel much more calm and with it and less anxious in the rest of my reality when I've gotten that exercise and gotten that psychomotor excitability kind of out of my system.

Sometimes I really don't give into it. If I'm getting really anxious in class sometimes, I'll get up and go around but sometimes a lot of it is to just sit there and like focus on my breathing and sometimes even just fully tune out of class… and be like okay as overexcitable as I am right now, I'm feeling antsy and ready to move. I'm not going to remember what's going to happen. I'm not going to follow the class anyway right now. So I might as well just focus on my breathing, get myself back down to a more grounded space. And then from there, I can decide, OK, now I really need to go walk around the building. Or I can say, “OK, I've reset myself and put myself back to the task at hand.”

Chris: That was so me as a student walking around and not being able to sit easily in class.

Lance: And I still struggle. I think it's part of the reason I struggle with screens so much is I can't sit still for that long, but screens make me want to sit still for that long. Then I'm kind of just forcing my body to sit in a position that it really doesn't want to keep. I definitely have to make sure that I'm taking breaks from work. It may be productive, but sometimes it's also recreation and either way I need to, every couple minutes or every half hour, get up, move around, at least get a snack, maybe go outside.

Definitely as you get older, a lot of the work is by yourself and finding what works for you. I definitely think it's really important to have—on a parental level—being able to see in your kid those overexcitabilities. I think that was really helpful for us as a family unit to know what each of our overexcitabilities was and that it wasn't something wrong with us. It wasn't lack of self-control. That it’s just that we all have different ways of being in the world and that we had to kind of accept that. So, I think it's definitely important for parents to see that.

Even before you can really do a questionnaire, your kid could be two, but you can tell what makes them tick, what makes them smile, what makes them really energetic and things like that. I think you can get a good idea of what your child needs and then trying not to stifle it too much. And like, yeah, we all have to be members of society, but that looks different for everyone. The less you can change your child to fit the mold of what society wants, the better they're gonna feel, probably—you're gonna be better off as a parent because you're not going to be constantly fighting your kid to fit into this box or whatever.

Chris: Yeah, I know that your mom really relies on helping families that she works with understand each other's overexcitabilities and how important that is. I've seen that in my own work, in my own life too. It does matter. It's important to know that, especially if you have one family member who's a certain way and you have somebody who has kind of opposing overexcitabilities, it can be really challenging.

Lance: And that's where, like, my mom and I, we clash fairly often because we have very similar overexcitabilities. I think we potentiate and sometimes make [things] worse…if we're spinning off and not in a very good place, those emotions bounce off of each other. Those psychomotor overexcitabilities bounce off each other and we're moving—it can definitely spiral itself up. So finding ways to decompress those overexcitabilities, get them satisfied so that you don't have members of the family just spinning each other up and up and up until things break down.

Emma: Finding the Theory, obviously, made a big difference to you and how you navigate the world and how you cope with your overexcitabilities and how you deal with disintegrations and stuff. What would you say to people who might suggest the Theory is a bit too difficult or not suitable for teenagers? What do you find is the importance and the value in the Theory for someone your age?

Lance: For me, like the minutiae, the specifics and the dynamisms and which level they occur at and you know, that's all good stuff to know and I think there's definitely a place for it, specifically for people like Chris and people like you Emma. It's something that you really study and really dive deep into. For your average person I think the really big takeaway is things break down before they get built up. I mean, you see it everywhere, it's a common theme across the whole universe. Things fall apart and deconstruct before they reconstruct.

So if you're looking with this fatalistic view of “I'm so depressed right now”—things are terrible, I'm falling apart at school, my room's a mess, my relationships are a mess, that’s not the end. If you know all those bad things are really just the dirt from which the new you is going to grow, It's all really about seeing the good in the bad, you know, kind of the yin yang quality. It's such a universal theory to me. It fits into Buddhist philosophy and it fits into certain Christian teachings, and it fits certain Hindu teachings. I think that's the important takeaway—is that this is, for teenagers too, I think on a small scale, all humans have some level of developmental potential there that we're born with.

When we go through puberty, for the vast majority of people, that's an uncomfortable experience. You're changing, things are weird, it's awkward, you have weird social situations. and some people who have higher overexcitabilities are going to have a much stronger experience than others. I think being able to see in everyone that the horrors of puberty are necessary for us, to grow into the human beings that we're going to grow into.

Chris: It's true that that is a major developmental period that we all go through, just the typical life cycle developmental periods that we all go through. And it's true that, I mean, for everyone, it's a struggle, even though we all have different levels of developmental potential. It's true. But I agree with you that we need to do more searching for it in everybody, rather than trying to be exclusionary or looking from that angle instead.

Lance: Yeah. I think there's plenty of people—there's the people who have strong overexcitabilities in a way that makes them maybe better than average at certain skills, but I think there's plenty of people who are perfectly average and that's kind of their dynamism. That's the source of their shame or their dissatisfaction. Like, “I'm not extraordinary enough” or whatever. There's definitely something to be said there, that everyone, wherever you fall on the spectrum of overexcitabilities has their own negative experiences and emotions and dynamisms that they can grow from.

Chris: That's right, we can all grow. There's no doubt about that.

Lance: Yeah, I'll say I somewhat disagree with Dabrowski that it's set in stone that everyone has to be, that most people are gonna be level one. I think in a perfect world where we really have taken full advantage of the Theory, I think there's gonna be a lot more people in higher level disintegrations because more people are gonna realize that their pain or their neuroses are something to grow from and something to learn from.

Chris: That's the goal. That's what we wish. That's the dream, I should say, is that people could see that. I mean, I have to say that as an American, I'm extremely discouraged at the moment with that potential, but it's a lovely idea.

Lance: Yeah, well, and that's the same thing. I try to see it as, for those who aren't familiar with American politics, women's rights are not explicitly in the Constitution, apparently, there is an amendment that has been around, but has yet to be ratified. All it takes is one more state to ratify it that would put women's rights explicitly in the constitution. Right now, what I'm hoping is that this disintegration of taking away abortion rights, as a right, is going to be the catalyst to say, no, we need to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and say explicitly in the constitution that women and the LGBTQ+ community deserves rights explicitly in the eyes of the entire government.

Chris: Right, yeah! That would be a good thing to come out of this bad thing.

Emma: That was beautiful! I was clapping behind my mute button when you were talking about oh growing from the dirt and stuff I'm like yes! [shared laughter]

Chris: Well thanks so much for joining us, Lance. It's been great having you and it's just fun and refreshing to have a young person with us to have this conversation. I mean, not that everybody's been old or anything but it's nice. I've so enjoyed getting to know you and having conversations. I knew that I wanted to have you on the podcast, and I appreciate that you joined us.

Lance: Yeah, no, I'm glad I did, we always have such good conversations that are, you know, all really similar to what we just did. I think it's cool to get those out to a larger audience, because I think we do reach some cool conclusions, or at least always get good ideas and thoughts out there. It was a really cool experience. I'm glad you guys had me.

Emma: Yeah, thanks heaps Lance. It has been great to have a young voice on the podcast and new perspectives and it's probably left me and Chris feeling decidedly old. Thank you. Thank you, Chris, always a pleasure to have you on with me.

Chris: Well, thank you, Emma. I feel the same way. It's always a pleasure.

Emma: And thank you to our listeners because we appreciate you too. Thank you for joining us on another episode. The Positive Disintegration podcast is funded by the Dabrowski Center. If you like what you've heard, please consider donating through the link in the show notes. And if you're listening to us on Apple or Spotify, give us a rating or leave a review. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email positivedisintegration.pod@gmail.com or find us on Twitter or Instagram. And until next time, keep walking the path to your authentic self.