Thank you, Bee Mayhew, for editing this transcript!

Transcript:

Emma: Hello listeners and welcome to Positive Disintegration. I'm your host, Emma Nicholson and with me is Co-host Dr. Chris Wells. Hi Chris.

Chris: Hello Emma. I'm excited to be recording an episode with just you today.

Emma: It's just us. We get to have a bit of playfulness today, which we tend to do when we don't have a guest on.

Chris: That's right.

Emma: It's even better because we are literally talking about a children's fairy tale today. So, hopefully there's a lot of playfulness.

Chris: Hopefully. There are certainly dark parts, but we'll be playful on the whole.

Emma: [laughter] I could say something terrible about that. Playful on the [w]hole. I'm going to leave it there though.

Chris: Just leave it.

Emma: We've gotten off to a cracking start. [giggles]

Chris: A cracking start, indeed.

Emma: We're actually going to talk about the tale of the Ugly Duckling today, and literary analysis isn't really our normal wheelhouse. But I posted about my exploration of this particular story on my blog, and broke down the tale, and actually looked at it through the lens of giftedness, and neurodivergence, and a journey of Positive Disintegration.

Chris: I have to admit that I had never connected that story with this experience of discovering neurodivergence, giftedness, and having that experience of self-recognition. I had never connected it with the Ugly Duckling. But it makes sense. I appreciate that you brought this story back into my awareness. I'm looking forward to breaking it down with you today and talking about it in some more depth.

Emma: Which is cool, this actually makes me quite excited. When I first found out about overexcitability, it was the exact sort of experience that I had. This was the story that jumped into my mind, even though I hadn't gone back and read it again with that particular lens.

It’s funny, I'd always wanted to do a blog post about that particular experience. And when I went back and read the tale again in full, it struck me that, holy shit, this is really a description of a disintegrative process. This character, this little Ugly Duckling, goes through a dark night of the soul and reimagines how he views himself, and none of that sort of significance jumped out at me at the time when I originally thought about it. But going back over, it's been a really good process. I guess in doing that, it's sort of highlighted for me all the connections to the experience of growing up gifted and being a bit different.

I think when it's spoken about normally (when the children's fairy tale comes to mind) it's always referenced – like in movies or pop culture or whatever – as being this aesthetic thing. A tale to tell kids when their ears are too big, and “don't worry kid, you'll grow into it”. It's always been that sort of surface level thing, and I'd never sort of considered this as an inner transformation story until I kind of went back and read over it again with that lens.

Chris: I have a lot of thoughts about this. I don't know if it's that for me, it feels like all of these things were so drawn out. For me, like, I had this whole history of seeing myself as mentally ill. I had these diagnoses, I'd taken these medications for so many years, and I think that that's an essential difference between us is that at least you didn't have the same entrenched negative beliefs. You had them, but mine were attached to being on disability for many years and that whole identity of being disabled.

I can relate with this story, the Ugly Duckling, but I have to admit that it doesn't have the same impact for me that it has for you. It was so much more than just finding my people. It felt like I was just as complicit as the people outside of me—I pathologized myself, I wanted a diagnosis. I chose this path of being disabled.

And so, when I came to overexcitabilities and this gifted language, it was different. I relate with this story, but in a different way than you do. You think in analogies to a much greater extent than I do. You're constantly like, what pop culture reference is this, or what can I connect this with?

For me, it's certainly a different process. I don't know if part of it is that I'm so ignorant about pop culture or what, but that could be part of it. My son says that I'm not fun. Or he used to say that— “You're not fun.” I am constantly working.

Emma: I've always had that analogy kind of thinking, and I don't know why. It's how I make sense of the world. I guess I have to match an idea with a similar idea somewhere else. Sometimes when the idea is more abstract, it actually works better. I actually do see some sort of similarity with the story and your journey, because it's that whole concept of feeling like you're defective. Even though my feelings of defectiveness came from a different place, 'cause you know, as we've talked about, I was in a relationship at one point that wasn't particularly good for me.

I was convinced that everything that was going wrong was my fault, that somehow it was because I was broken and I couldn't manage the relationship and I couldn't manage life. And fuck, I really wish gaslighting had been a term back then because it would have been really helpful, but it wasn't. When I found out about overexcitability, it helped me go, “Holy shit, I'm not defective. This isn't all just in my head. I'm not somehow broken”.

 And I think that's why I connected it with the story, and I know, Chris, you had a slightly different experience at first. You're like, “nope, I'm comfortable with my labels, and I'm not ready to get rid of them yet”, but for me, it was kind of like that lightning strike.

Chris: This is a discovery I made when I came to the gifted world. I didn't realize what was special about the way I think or what made me gifted. Part of the problem for me in my gifted journey is that people when I was young were like, you're so gifted. You're so talented. You have such a great mind. Things that people would say to me.

And I was like, what does that even mean? What is my talent? I had no idea what it was that made me special. And it wasn't until I discovered the Theory and discovered that first chapter from Michael, where he was talking about emotional giftedness. And I was like, “Oh my God, this is my talent.” This is my talent, but it had nothing to do with my IQ or what I could do on a test. I realized in that moment that my gift is that I have the ability to make this heart connection with people. And it's my emotional giftedness as much as my intellectual abilities that matter.

Emma: I think that's important to what we're going to talk to today, because part of the story (and I'll give a quick recap and we'll kind of get into it in a moment) is not seeing your strengths as a strength, as anything positive – until it's pointed out to you, either through, you know, mirroring, or by someone else that, “Hey, this thing that you can do, it's really a strength.”

We've got those strengths, we've got those gifts. But it's just how we see them, and how we frame them in our own mind. I think that's why that lightning moment can be so strong, because if in that moment – snap – all of a sudden, how you feel about everything that you can do is realigned… that's why it's big, such a big game changer.

Chris: It's such a game changer. We've already gotten feedback from people saying that they hear the podcast and it's given them that same experience. I think that that's one of the most special things about doing this and sharing our stories is that other people see themselves and they feel seen by what we're talking about.

I'm happy that we're doing this episode because I know that this has such meaning for you and I'm excited about it because you're excited about it. I think that this will be a great vehicle to talk about these experiences. So right on, let's do it.

Emma: I thought I'd start with a quick recap of what the story is. We're going to put a link in the show notes so that people can go off and read the original version by Hans Christian Andersen, which is important. You don't want the Disney retelling or anything like that, because they're going to cut out all the awful bits. At a very high level, the recap is: 

There's this little bird who is hatched in a duck's nest. As we all know, he's not actually a duck. He's a swan, but he doesn't know that, and his mother doesn't know that. Initially life for him on the farm where he grows up is quite difficult, because he obviously is different from the other ducklings.

However, interestingly enough, his mother doesn't think too much of it because when she gets him in the water, well, he swims really well. She comments that he's such a strong swimmer, actually maybe even better than the other ducklings. So, she's not worried about the fact that he looks a bit different, but the other animals in the farmyard are quite cruel to him. He gets made fun of and he gets kicked around and he gets bullied even by his own siblings.

After enough of this bullying, he decides to leave. He runs away from the farm, and he has some experiences with other birds out in the wild, particularly a pair of geese that he comes across. I like to call them the ‘wild geeks' because sometimes when you're gifted, you think you find your tribe, but you're not quite there yet. Maybe you're poking around in fandoms and whatever. But he finds these geese who say, “yeah, it's all right. Come along with us, you'll fit right in”. As he's having that conversation, a bunch of hunters start opening fire, and the geese get shot. And he hides under his wing and sits really still, and the hunting dog comes along and goes right past him.

The moment that stands out for me there is he says, “Oh, thank goodness. I'm so ugly that not even the dog will bother to stop and bite me.” That's where you were talking about your gifts and finally realizing that they are gifts. You know, sometimes we've got these strengths. He doesn't realize that because he's gray, he's camouflaged and the dog doesn't see him, but he just thinks it's because he's so ugly and he sees it as a negative.

He goes along and ends up finding refuge in a farmhouse with an old lady, and a hen, and a cat. But they question his worth and, well, “Can you lay eggs like the hen? Can you purr like the cat?”. And because he doesn't conform to their ideas of productivity, of what being a good member of the house is, they sort of shun him to the side and they don't really understand him. When he expresses to them this wish to go swimming and get in the water, they're like, “Don't be crazy! Why would you want to do a thing like that? Why can't you just learn to lay an egg?”. So, he doesn't fit in there either. For me, that kind of stood out as a parallel to the workplace.

After he leaves the farmhouse, he goes out and he actually sees a flock of swans. They're migrating for the winter, and he doesn't understand why, but it raises such feelings in him and he just wants to be with these beautiful, magnificent birds. He doesn't understand yet why that's calling to him so strongly, but he's too little to migrate. He gets stuck there for the winter and ends up getting frozen in a pond, the poor little thing. A farmer comes and saves him. When he goes into the farmhouse, the children there try to play with him, but because he's never experienced kindness or love, he thinks that they're trying to hurt him. He's got this trauma sitting with him now, in which he can't recognize love or kindness when he comes across it.

He runs away again, suffers through the winter, and goes through so much misery that even when spring comes back, his happiness can't come back. He's been through so much, and all he's known in life is misery, and he gets to a point where he basically gives up on life. He sees these swans on the lake swimming towards him. And he's like, “You know what? These birds are going to attack me because I'm so damn ugly”. And at that point he doesn't care. When he bows his head to look in the water, what a lot of people don't realize is in the original tale, he bows his head waiting for death. And he's like, “You know what? I'd rather be pecked to death by these beautiful birds than be kicked around the farmhouse, or told that I'm no good, or bullied, or harassed, or go through another winter like that one!”

So he's been through a dark night of the soul, and as he's bowing his head to accept the inevitable fate, that's when he sees his reflection in the water. And he realizes that he is a swan. After that, the swans welcome him to the flock. He realizes they're not coming to attack him at all, they're coming to greet him and he finds his happily ever after. The last line of the tale is him saying, “I never dreamed there could be this much happiness when I was the Ugly Duckling.” He felt glad that he'd been through his trauma and his suffering because now he had a new appreciation of happiness.

Chris: I was just writing a note to myself because I'm like, what did you just say? “I never dreamed there could be this much happiness” right? That's how I feel now. This whole experience of coming to the theory, and then like ultimately meeting you and now we have the podcast.

When I was younger and going through all of those times of suffering, you know, even into my forties, like honestly, I never knew that my life could be as good as it is now. It has far exceeded my expectations ever, which is an amazing thing to admit, and I realize there's a huge amount of privilege along with that.

Emma: I'm in the same boat. Even on my blog, a few times I've said, “one thing I never expected was to actually find this level of joy in my life.” Not that everything's rosy, but compared to how I used to feel about myself?

And it's not that my life was… it's been through some horrible bits, but it's not that life was always terrible. But even when it was good, I couldn't feel good about it because I had this very negative perception about myself. And now I'm starting to shed that, I can look at life through a different lens and it seems all the more happier. Not that I've won a lotto or anything, I'm just still living my normal life, but my appreciation of it is a lot better.

Chris: Yeah, I feel the same way. And I think that another thing that makes life so good right now is that I have relationships in my life that are so satisfying and also exceed my expectations on what I ever thought that I'd find in other people and connect with.

You know, when you spend so much of your life feeling different and alone and broken, it's kind of miraculous to find people and be able to have that huge lens shift away from ‘there's something wrong with me’ to ‘oh, I can actually learn to appreciate and love who I am’. And I see myself in these other people who are so amazing and wonderful. And like, wow, I wouldn't be in their lives if I wasn't bringing something to the table there, I must not be too bad. [chuckles]

Emma: I think that's one of the reasons why, when I talk about the story, I like to call the duckling, not the ugly duckling (‘cause I like to move it away from the aesthetic thing), but I call him the “aesthetically defective duck”. Because that's really the crux of this whole feeling like, you know, fitting in—being told continually that you don't fit, or you're not good enough.

It's that feeling of brokenness. You know, it's not so much that this little bird feels like he's just not good looking. He literally feels like he is some sort of defective duck, like there's something broken and wrong with him and that trauma follows him through his other experiences.

When he finally does find a place where he can feel love, he rejects it because he doesn't recognize it. And when he goes to the farmhouse, you know, his experience of what it means to be productive, he can't even fit into there, which for me spoke very strongly of workplaces where you can't fit into that mold and you're seen as nonproductive.

So he's still seen as defective. I'm sure he does have gifts (he's a really good swimmer), but they weren't applicable to that environment. It's this continuing feeling of being broken, whether or not it's because you're being told that you're broken, or you feel internally that you're broken. And so you can't manage a relationship, or you don't fit into a workplace in the same way. It's just these different manifestations of continually feeling defective and broken.

Chris: And they're traumas that add up. I mean, in his story, like you're describing, he rejects love when he sees it for the first time, it's like that, avoidant defense against it.

I'm thinking of Jen's podcast, Conversations on Gifted Trauma, and how, when you have this experience, you have a lifetime of microaggressions as a gifted person where people are always trying to put you in your place or cut you down to size, you know, like tall poppy syndrome.

And there's like endless traumas that you are experiencing from this experience of being so different and being an outlier. It's hugely challenging. It's interesting how many layers you can see to this story. And I have to tell you, Emma, that it does not connect with me nearly as much to read that story as it does to hear you describe it. I'm getting so much more from this description from you of the story than I got from reading it, that it's kind of hilarious.

Emma: I’m like that crazy person, with the mind map, with all the little red strings connecting all the dots going, “here's all the connections that I see.” But yeah, ‘cause it's not just the gifted stuff that I see—I see that disintegration process as well. So him just going from worse to worse to worse, completely not understanding his place in life and getting to a place where all he knows is abject misery. 

I think when you're going through that dark night of a soul phase and you've got all those shitty disintegrative dynamisms kicking around your head of, you know, not feeling good enough and guilt and shame with it. That's really what he was experiencing in that. I'm like, “Wow, this, he's a bird and he's going through a disintegration”. On the other end of that, because he finally understands his place, he has the labels to put on himself. He understands that he does fit into the world somehow. He shows this remarkable level of humility and appreciation for life.

So rather than seeing life as a complete and utter shit show, he's now appreciating the beauty in it even more.

Appreciating even that experience and that process of going through the disintegration, in seeing the world anew. Which is kind of a wild concept to say, “I went through suffering, but now I have this growth from it. I'm actually when I'm actually glad I went through the suffering in the first place”

Chris: That's right. You just made me think of a quote from Personality-Shaping about where he says like “suffering, if experienced correctly, can lead to growth.”  I don't remember the exact quote right now, but it's interesting because that's something that Dabrowski made clear in Personality-Shaping, at least that's obviously the one that's coming to mind right now, that not all suffering has the same outcomes or the same impact.

If you're suffering and that suffering is imposed on you, if you're not making some kind of meaning from it, it's a different experience. What we're seeing with this story in our own lives is that the suffering makes you more sensitive to other people. It leads to the growth of empathy. It leads to the growth of your own empathy toward yourself.

So much of the transformation that you go through, you know, like that the suffering is what's actually causing the expansion of your heart and, but it's not growthful for everybody to suffer. I'm thinking of people who've been through significant traumas. It hasn't helped them develop. If you remain stuck, if you aren't able to examine yourself, if you can't reflect on your actions and wonder what your place is in them, then you're not going to grow from it.

Growth is not automatic. It takes work, that's something that Michael makes clear in his work. It's the work of inner transformation. It's not something that's automatic. It's something that you make happen. And that's why, you know, when you reach personality, it's self chosen and self created. It's hard won.

Emma: You were talking about that empathy component, and that's a thing that stood out to me. It's just one line in that story. So it's not that he just appreciated his place of where he was, he seemed to shed the resentment. This one line says, “Being born in a duck farm doesn't matter if only you're born from a swan's egg.”

You know, he wasn't, “Curse those ducks! I hate them.” He wasn't bitter or resentful toward it. It's like, you know what? None of that matters ‘cause now I know I'm a swan, I know where I fit in, my life is good now, and I don't have to hold on to that pain and that resentment anymore.

Chris: Yeah, it's interesting because in the book work that I've been doing… I'm working on writing this book, and the way that I've changed my story— I used to think about myself and my past in a completely different way than I do now, right? Now that I don't understand myself as having a history of mental illness. Now that I realize that I have this other lens and framework of positive disintegration to look at it, I have a different story. It's a very powerful thing to go through positive disintegration.

Another thing that I've been working on is, well, you know, we've been calling them quote collages, right? I've been sharing these retrieval documents with you. And one of the ones that I was reading, it was all the times that Michael used the word “disintegration” in his work.

They start in the 1970s and they go to the present. I stopped it with his paper from 2017. I need to update it over the past six years, but it led to questions between us, and [Michael states that] there's a lot of things that we don't know about disintegration yet. There's no one onset for it. Disintegration can happen at any time, at any age. Children go through disintegration, people who are old go through disintegration.

It can happen anytime, and it doesn't just happen once. When you look at my story, I went through many disintegrations over like a decade. For me, it was like 1989 to 1999—full of disintegrations and then the next decade meant fewer, then I have different patterns now in my forties. There's so much we don't know about disintegration. We don't know much about shifting from unilevel disintegration to multilevel disintegration.

There are still so many questions. Everybody who comes to this has their own individual experience of it. So, when we can have a story like this that you're sharing in this episode, it's cool because anytime that we have kind of a guidepost to what it looks like that people can see themselves in, I think it's really useful. We don't have nearly enough of them for the theory.

Emma: To your point of what you're saying about kids, both you and I went through disintegrative dynamisms quite young. It's horrible to think that a child would go through some sort of disintegration, it's awful to think that anyone that young could be feeling that level of pain, but the point is, it happens.

And the good thing about this particular story is, you know, it's not an adult novel. It's not an R rated movie. You can give this to children and hopefully talk to them about their experiences, whether or not it's because they're going through some sort of disintegrative dynamism, or because they're gifted, or because they're neurodivergent, they're not feeling like they're fitting in. I think that's one reason why I got really excited about this particular story because it's so widely applicable.

Not only that, but when you say “The Tale of the Ugly Duckling” it's not like some obscure book that no one's ever read. Like, most people have heard a version of this thing, and even when you go off and read it, it's only a few minutes to read it. It's short, and it's concise, and it's widely known, and it's very accessible, so that's really what was exciting to me about the whole discovery of this.

Chris: Right. Yes. I know that that is an important aspect of this too. And now you're making me think of the notes that I took before we got started, because we've set the stage here for the connection with this story to giftedness and neurodivergence.

But I know that the experience of discovering overexcitability for both of us was huge. That moment of discovery is like the first bit, right? Where you're like, “Oh, I have found the words to describe this phenomenon that I experienced. Holy crap.” Then you have that recognition in yourself.

Emma: It’s kind of a three part process, the way I see it. I touched on this in one of the videos that I did, but there's three elements to this.

First of all you gotta know what a swan is. So, for the Ugly Duckling, if he didn't see those other swans or realize there was some other bird that looked like this and he'd seen his reflection, he wouldn't have had any context. He would have gone, “Oh, I look different to what I remember” but it wouldn't have triggered to him that he was a swan. So he has to actually have a concept of what a swan is, that there are other birds that look like this.

Then he has to actually see himself in the water, because he's seen swans before, but he didn't put two and two together that he was one of the group.

So he has to know what a swan is, he has to see himself as a swan, and then the third part of that is finding community.

Before we started recording, we were talking about this and I said, “look If you had some label, like ADHD, but there was no one else in the entire world that had that label?”… if you know you're a swan and you see yourself as a swan and you know everything about that, but you can't find any other swans to flock with, it's still going to be a lonely place to sit.

So for him, that was also part of the journey, was finding his place among a community of birds who were like him. So I think that's the three elements that I've narrowed down.

When we talked to the first one, like you have to know what a swan is. That's the ‘knowing what overexcitabilities are’ component of it because you're never going to have that recognition until you actually realize there's this thing. I think that's why you and I are both being quite passionate about getting the messages out there.

Chris: Yeah, definitely. I know that it was such a powerful discovery for me that I wanted to bring it to other people, but I also wanted to bring a new updated version of it to them.

You know, I saw myself in overexcitabilities and that was a powerful experience, but I also saw that there were problems in the way that it was understood. There had to be a modernizing of the construct in light of all that we know about it, and based on lived experience. There's a lot to all of that, but it was a big deal, and it took me time to process it. It's really interesting to reflect on how much time it took me to work through it all.

Emma: I think part of the stuff, like, you do when you go out and speak it, and you write papers of reestablishing the legitimacy of overexcitability, really helps. We did that episode that it's not pseudoscience, and I think that helps establish the message. I know there's that second component of you have to see yourself as a swan. So, I mean, to translate that to us (particularly for me) it's like I had to do the mental gymnastics because I could only find things that were relevant to children. And so I had to say, “Well, what does this look like upscaled to an adult life?”

I think trying to say, “here's how it can manifest in adults” is important. But also then getting that mirror (that little reflective bit of water that shows people that they are a swan) out in front of the right people is also important. I know that's obviously what we try to do with the podcast and the videos and stuff, and we're trying to think of how can we get this little mirror in front of the right audiences?

Chris: That's what I'm trying to do right now with writing this book too. Every way that I do my work, I hope to hold up a mirror to people and help them see themselves in these experiences and constructs. Yeah, with the podcast, I think that this has been really special. I feel that way about my positive disintegration group too.

The third part of what you were talking about, the community aspect and realizing that there's others like you. I mean, when I came to the gifted field, we talked about this a bit in the episode with Michele Kane… I felt so warmly welcomed in the gifted world.

I could see that people understood what I was talking about, and that was amazing. I had never had that experience of people being like, “Oh yeah!” You know, that happened in a variety of ways. It's really interesting to me, the nuances of understanding the gifted experience, the profoundly gifted experience. These are things that just had completely eluded me until I discovered the gifted community, and the Dabrowski community is like a subset of that.

Now, in my work, a big part of what I'm trying to do with the Dabrowski Center, as you know, is to build community for people to know that we are sharing this knowledge with them and this information, and we're creating a place where it's safe for them to be authentic and to share and be vulnerable. These are sensitive people. We know that because we are too. So we're trying to create places where there's the chance for connection with other people who get you and to make it accessible, not to make it too expensive, you know, to really make sure that we are open to whoever needs us, you know, that's an important part of the mission.

Emma: Absolutely, that was why I started doing videos in the first place, even when I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I just got to a point, I'm like, fuck it, I have to try, because I can't be the only person out there… like, working a 9 to 5 job, doing the average Joe thing, not being an academic who could benefit from this information… I'll just make my own clumsy attempt at trying to explain this stuff to other people in a place where they can find it.

You know, that accessibility thing's really important because we've got to get it out of the spheres of academia and also of gifted education. I hate to say it, but there's limited scope there. And particularly with adults, [our] education days are well behind us and I really see the applicable place being in the mental health sphere – where people maybe they forgot they're gifted, they don't identify with that label anymore, maybe they're struggling. Like, if you were feeling all these like disintegrative dynamisms and you know, you've got forms of depression and anxiety that you don't fully understand, and you always feel different and like you can't fit in, what are you googling on the internet? Damn well isn't gifted education. It's fucking mental health.

That's the place where people are looking when they're struggling. And for me that's a really important place that we've got to try and kick the door down somehow. Get our foot in there, because all we gotta do is hang our mirror up there alongside the other ones. And hopefully people are gonna look into that and see themselves, and see that little swan staring back at them, and say “holy shit!”, and have that same fucking lightning moment that you and I had.

That's what I want to share with people. And that's why I think, you know, getting in the right communities, getting in the right spaces with that mirror, is drastically important.

Chris: Well, I agree completely that it is important, but it's a challenge because, you know, the theory has lived in the field of gifted education for such a long time that part of what we have to do now is encourage people to do research that brings it into these other fields and I want to do that myself. I have my own research agenda, or publishing agenda, in the academic world in the future. But also one of the things that I am very passionate about at this point is trying to figure out how we can extend what we're calling gifted education is really, or should be bigger than, gifted education.

We don't have a gifted field in mental health. There is no gifted subset of psychology. There's people who study intelligence. That's not the same thing. In a way, I think that we're tasked with creating a field of adult giftedness and I know that other people are also working in this area. Maggie Brown is an example of someone who I know is very passionate about giftedness and mental health throughout the lifespan. There are plenty of other people doing this work. We know that we're not the only ones. It's just that, you know, we're lacking so many essential elements of making a legitimate field of what we're talking about.

It's interesting to me because part of what we need to do is have solidarity to come together and say, okay, we're representing the experience of being gifted adults. We deserve our own field. There's no endowed chair for studying gifted adults, you know? There's no academic specialty in studying gifted adults or giftedness throughout the whole lifespan. There's only the study of gifted children so people in the field of gifted education are constantly invalidating the experience of being gifted and saying, “Well, this is just a label for services. It's not a meaningful difference.” Well, it is a meaningful difference, it creates a different experience of reality. And so we're in a weird unilevel phenomenon of recycling issues and not actually making any vertical jump out of that. It's unfortunate.

Emma: That whole “gifted is only useful for services”—I really wish our listeners could have seen how hard my eyes rolled into the back of my head. I hate that.

Chris: I know.

Emma: I fucking hate that. Pardon my shitty pun, but it's a bit “Which came first? The swan or the egg?” kind of thing.

Like, the way I see it is, there's no… there's no place there right now. The way that commerce works, unfortunately, is there needs to be an identified market, there needs to be a need for anyone to want to do something in a particular space, because otherwise there's no commercial motivation. So, we go, “Oh, well there's no audience there”.

It's because they don't know who the fuck they are! Like, so we've got this real problem of, we're going to have to shake gifted people, and gifted adults, and overexcitable people, out of the woodwork first. You know, people experiencing positive disintegration. We're gonna have to shake the tree and find them. But it's problematic, ‘cause they don't know who they are. They're going through these things, but they don't know what the experience is, or they don't have the words to put around it. I say this as, “You know, we're looking for needles in an 8 billion person, human haystack…”

And that's highly problematic. But even if it's a percentage of the population, that's still a fuck-ton of needles that could use some help, and use a place. So it's not like if we found the people, there wouldn't be a market. But at the moment we don't know who those people are. They don't know who they are. And so arguably there's no market. We know they're there, but we just can't identify who it is.

We have to get that mirror, which is like the “needle magnet” in as many places as humanly possible, and unfortunately convince people of the need to have it there. Convince people of the need to talk about overexcitabilities, to talk about giftedness, and to talk about positive disintegration, when we haven't yet identified the people who it is that we're trying to talk to.

It's a pretty fucked up scenario.

Chris: Yeah, well, and it's made complicated by the fact that people are repelled by the word gifted, you know, or they just reject it. I see very often people who are gifted are like, “Oh, that's just an elitist term, that's not me.” Well, it's because there's such misunderstanding around what it means.

These are real problems that we're facing. We're doing the best we can to hold up this mirror. We're taking it upon ourselves to try and do something and help in the best way that we can. And I think that that was a huge part of our motivation for doing the podcast.

Emma: I think it's a huge motivation for everything we do, really.

Chris: Yeah, it's true.

Emma: We've had that Ugly Duckling moment. We've seen ourselves in the water. We know how powerful it is. And all we want to do is just share that with as many people as we can, ‘cause we know the happiness of being a swan. We were Ugly Ducklings once too and we know, as he says, “I never thought there could be this much happiness” when I was the Ugly Duckling.

We can see the other side of that journey and how much a difference it makes, and we know there's got to be other little cygnets running around out there thinking they're defective little ducks. Trying their best to quack and wondering why they're not doing it successfully, and [thinking] “What the hell's wrong with my big long neck?”

“Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it. You're just a swan. It's cool.” We know the power of that message. That's exactly why we want to get it out there.

Chris: We do. It becomes clearer to me all the time that I feel like I'm on the right path and it's amazing. Now that I feel so sure about what I'm doing and that I'm moving in the right direction with this work, and that we're moving in the right direction with the podcast, it shows me that until I had this feeling that I have now, how hard it was to not know that I was moving in the right direction.

I knew for so long that I wanted to help people, but I just didn't know how to do it. You know, it's so complicated to take this theory and to try and work with it and apply it and to bring it to other people. It's a completely different thing than trying to explain it theoretically or write an academic paper about the theory, or do research. There's a major difference between the documents and arguing over the old books and applying these things in real lives and seeing people, getting feedback from people, that we are changing their lives with this podcast and by sharing the theory is the most incredible experience.

I don't know what in my life has been more incredible other than the biggest events of my life—like having a child or, you know, marrying Jason. It's right up there, knowing that this theory really does make a difference in people's lives, is incredible.

Emma: Just for the record, listeners, keep sending them because we do read them all, and they do mean a lot to us and they keep us going.

Chris: They mean so much.

Emma: Every time I get those, it's validation of that. I'm gonna go back to the story again, ‘cause my mind's still in analogy mode. That moment the little Duckling has when he looks up and he sees a flock of swans migrating – and he just feels this thing in his guts, this absolute pure joy at seeing these beautiful birds flying.  

Before you even get into doing this stuff, you're like, I know in my gut how helpful this theory has been. I know it's got this magical property to it, that when applied properly with the right people, that it's going to help transform their lives as much as it did mine. You're just like, all right.. okay… so how do I do that again? Like – and it's a bit of a test and learn kind of exercise – but I think if you trust in that power of the theory, then eventually it'll kind of come out in the wash.

Trying to simplify this stuff, as you sort of alluded to, it's not the same as doing academic papers and stuff. I think we're kind of like treading into new ground a little bit (which was sort of said) so we're going to fuck it up every now and then. We're not going to get it right. But the more people tell us like, “Oh, that made a difference and it really made sense!” the more you're like, “Okay, maybe this idea wasn't as crazy as it first sounded when I sort of said it to myself”.

Chris: I agree. I mean, I think that what can be missing at times, is giving each other grace, and realizing that we're all human and fallible. You know, we're never going to get it perfectly all the time, but we have a lot of heart and we're trying to do the right thing and help people and I think that that is what matters at the end of the day. I know that a lot of people agree.

Emma: You're either stuck in this place where (and I've said this to you a couple of times), I sometimes feel like I don't know what the hell I'm doing and I don't know enough about the theory. But what do I do? Wait for 15 years until I think I'm at a place of knowledgeable perfection (which is a load of bullshit anyway), before I start trying to get things out there and make content and try and help people?  Or do I just do it, and then accept the fact that I'm gonna stuff things up? I'm gonna get things wrong, I'm gonna have to correct myself, and that's part of my learning journey as well.

You know, any time that you get carrots and sticks, sometimes people say, “Well, that was rubbish”. Sometimes I even go back and read my own blogs and go, “Well, that was a bit of shit. I need to fix that up”. But, you know, as you said, it's giving yourself grace to say that I'm gonna make mistakes but this can't wait. It's too important. That's what keeps me focused on it, and keeps my embarrassment at bay a lot of times with sharing personal things, or worrying too much about whether or not I've really got a handle on this part of the theory.

If there's people out there suffering and struggling and we don't do something now? That's, in a way, that's back on us, because we're sitting on this tool that can help people. Our fear of stuffing up, our fear of being ridiculed or nitpicked at or any of that stuff, has to come second to the bigger picture and bigger goal of helping people who are suffering today.

Because I've been in that shitty, fucked-up dark hole. I've been like that little swan, bowing his head and going, “You know what, I've had enough of life. It's shit. I cannot handle another winter”. I understand the urgency of the problem. People can criticize me all they want, but it's not going to stop me because there's too many swans out there.

Chris: I agree and I think that it's important to remember that we're not always going to agree with everything other people say who study the theory or work with it—we're going to have, we all have come from, different values and we all have different perspectives. The most important thing is to have grace with each other and realize that we have the common goal of helping people.

And if that's not your goal, then maybe you should rethink why you're dealing with the theory and maybe, you know, ask yourself some tough questions.

Emma: Absolutely, and always bear in mind that the more perspectives are coming at a thing, the more angles we can view a complicated thing from, the better. The more richness it adds to our understanding overall of a thing. If we're all just looking at things from one perspective or one angle, we may as well be looking through a bloody keyhole.

Chris: That's right, I know you're thinking about your tiger. Yeah. Yeah, we'll have to link to that.

Emma: So if anyone doesn't know what the tiger is, I just recommend that rather than looking from one side of the cage, go around all sides of the cage and view the tiger from multiple angles… and yeah, we'll put a link and you'll figure out what that's about.

Speaking of perspective, I guess that's our perspective on the Ugly Duckling, and what the experiences that it talks to, and what it can tell us about discovering the Theory.

Chris: Yeah, I'm really glad that you wanted to do this. I wasn't sure how it was going to go, but it's been really interesting. There's so many more layers to the story than I really realized. Honestly, you really brought it to life, so I appreciate that! I've had feedback from some people that we should do more episodes, just the two of us. And it is fun to sometimes not have a guest. It just feels like less pressure.

Emma: Yeah, I can say the word “fuck” as many times as I like and not have to worry about offending someone. It's great. [laughter]

Chris: That's right. No, it was good.

Emma: I'm glad we got a chance to talk about this because, as you know, I've been quite passionate about it. I'm hoping that when our listeners go out and they read the story, they can see some of the things in it. And maybe even find a useful tool to talk to others about the theory, or talk to their kids about their different experiences, and I don't know… maybe it will help.

Chris: Yeah, I think it's possible. So thank you.

Emma: Oh, thank you. Always a pleasure, but today was extra fun!

Chris: Agreed. Thank you.

Emma: And thank you to you too, listeners. We always appreciate you coming along the journey with us, and we'll be interested to hear your thoughts and feedback on how you find the story of “The Ugly Duckling.”

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.