Transcript

Emma: Hello, wonderful listeners, and welcome back to Positive Disintegration. I'm Emma Nicholson.

Chris: I'm Dr. Chris Wells.

Emma: Chris, today we're going to talk about your presentation at NAGC.

Chris: Yes, let's talk about NAGC. I was there last weekend. I've already had days to recover, honestly. It's Friday, and I got home on Monday. And it has taken all week to feel even a little bit recovered. It's so much socializing and interacting and peopling that it takes a toll on me, even though I really enjoy it. I love getting to see the people that I only see at NAGC. And I enjoy seeing other people who sometimes I get to see at other times as well.

But it was lovely. It was at Disney World this time in Orlando, Florida. I wasn't psyched about that personally. But my mom and my son came, and they did some Disney stuff. So that's nice. It was so cool to have my family there, too, at the conference, even though they didn't do the conference stuff. But to get to see them when I had downtime was really nice. We had a couple of meals together.

Emma: Even though they were off having fun while you busy doing the hard slog.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They got to have fun. And it was cool to show my son the room where I presented and to introduce him to what this conference stuff is all about because he's never really been exposed to it yet.

Emma: That is cool to be able to share it, but I kind of get where you were going with the whole I'm exhausted thing. And we were having a bit of a chat, and I was like, I'm not surprised because you care a lot about this stuff. I completely understand that you are investing a lot emotionally in it. And then, you know, you've got the whole having to meet people and do your presentation, but also, you know, answer people's questions and socialize with them to a certain extent. And I guess I want to ask you about that. Do you find that a lot of people were keen to talk to you about what you presented and introduce themselves and make themselves known?

Chris: Yeah, for sure. People wanted to talk about the session. And afterwards, I just kept running into people, even in places like the elevator, and they would say, Oh, I was at your session and give me feedback, which is so appreciated. But yeah, at NAGC, there's really no downtime. Unless I go in my room and carve it out, which I did after I presented. After I presented, I ended up eventually in my room for a few hours because, like you said, I'm very emotionally invested and passionate and so it does take a lot out of me and I just kind of have to write about it and reset after. But otherwise, every free moment I'm talking to somebody or I'm in a session.

I didn't get to go to as many sessions this time as I did last year. And it's because I kept getting into these long, involved conversations with people, which is fine, too. Sometimes it's necessary to talk to somebody for two hours and go over things and strategize and make plans for the future. It's really important. It's part of the work. There are a lot of people, unfortunately, that I didn't get a chance to see. I think that that was my biggest regret—that I had a list of people that I wanted to see in person and I didn't get to see all of them. And that's a bummer. But a lot of them I see online, on social media. So, we can connect that way. But still, I didn't do as good of a job as I'd hoped with finding everybody that I wanted to talk with.

Emma: This isn't your first NAGC, you've got a history of presenting and that's one of the things I know you covered off this year is looking at the journey that got you here.

Chris: Yeah, that's right. I did spend quite a bit of time thinking about the journey before NAGC this year because really the session I did this time was like the culmination of all of the other sessions I've done.

The first one was in 2017 and that one was so stressful, I think, compared to other ones, because I had never presented at NAGC. I had never attended before. I didn't know what it was going to be like. I wasn't sure if critics would show up and argue with me. That's never happened, by the way, which is interesting, too. I think that after that time, I kept wondering at subsequent conferences if that would ever happen. I'm sure that eventually it will.

The one in 2017 is interesting because it was based on this huge literature review that I did. It was so involved. I really went out of my way to read everything I could get my hands on by Dąbrowski and Michael Piechowski. and beyond them as well. In the overexcitability research, I coded Dąbrowski's original data. I reviewed and coded some of Michael's data. I did a lot of work. And then I went in and I had 30 minutes to talk about all of that, and it was a lot.

The next year I presented about my dissertation. Then I took a year off. And then I had three years in a row where I felt like I was defending the theory, defending its relevance in the field, defending it against claims of pseudoscience. It wasn't easy. Each time it felt stressful. It involved a lot of preparation, a lot of reading, a lot of talking with Michael and Frank about it and doing my best.

I think that one thing people might not realize about me compared to other presenters is that I am not backed by an institution. I don't work for a university or other school or organization. I've had to pay for all of this stuff out of pocket with the exception of one time. So, it's been expensive. Not only the cost of travel to the conference, the registration fees, clothes to present. It's a lot.

Emma: From what you were just saying, two things jumped out at me. And one was that obviously it's a hefty personal investment for you. Even from the flavor of this year's presentation, everything that you're presenting is that you're kind of having to defend the theory a little bit. And I guess I understand why you now find the whole process so exhausting, because if you're so heavily invested in it, both emotionally and financially, and also feeling like you're on the back foot, you said you were wondering if people were gonna come and argue, and the flavor of what you've been doing is having to defend the theory.

So, I'm honestly not surprised that you feel shattered now. But let's talk about some of the things that you did in your presentation and what you covered off this year. And before we launch into the nitty gritty, I just wanted to ask you what you felt was different in this year's presentation than some of the other years.

Chris: This year really did feel different. And it didn't feel like I was defending, which was so nice. It's hard to explain exactly what felt different there. But it's because last year we had this panel. It was me, Anne Rinn, and Erin Miller. It was so great to finally have that conversation in public where we just all talked about where we see this stuff, our perspectives on overexcitability and its relevance. And even though we didn't all agree with each other, we were able to be civil and polite. It just really changed things. Having that conversation out in public in the light of day, that alone somehow helped. It's hard to explain exactly what I mean.

I know that it didn't change everybody's mind. I'm sure there's plenty of critics still who walked away from that panel last year not seeing it differently, but it changed the climate. It changed things for me because after we had it, a lot of people came up and said that they appreciated my passion for this. They appreciated that I brought a different perspective and that I didn't just come in and try to defend the status quo. I'm clearly not trying to defend the status quo. I'm saying we do need to do things differently. We need to study this further. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered right now.

I think that that surprised people. They expected me to be a disciple of Michael's or Dąbrowski's and to just come in and say the same old thing. And that didn't happen. And so this year, I didn't have any of the feeling of defending that I've had other years. And it was such a relief, to be honest. It was really nice. At one point I was having a conversation with someone else and Erin came up and said hello. I really appreciated that. We can be friendly with each other. We aren't enemies. And it feels good to see that play out.

Emma: When you're passionate about something, I think sometimes people expect you to be highly defensive of it. And when you go out with it, oh no, I'm open to new perspectives. It kind of throws people for a loop a little bit. So let's get into some of the stuff that you presented on this year, because I know you talked about five myths about the theory. Let's go through and talk to some of that. And the first one that you had is that there's no empirical evidence. So do you want to talk to us about that for a bit?

Chris: Yeah, the first one is that there's little or no empirical evidence. I could literally talk all day about the evidence supporting the theory. And it's beyond Dąbrowski's own work, although that's the foundation of it. So, even Dąbrowski's own research, he did two dissertations because he had two doctoral degrees, one in medicine and one in psychology. I think of his formal research beginning with that first dissertation on the psychological conditions of suicide.

The next one was on “The Psychological Bases of Self-Mutilation.” Then he published a book in 1935 called Nervousness of Children and Youth that very few people have had access to, but that I have had the privilege of reading because Michael's translated most of it. In that book, it's based on his study and observation of 250 children in locked institutions. These were not gifted children. I think that some of them clearly were because there was a section called giftedness and mental work. But that book shows us that he was viewing nervousness and overexcitability as something that existed outside of the gifted and creative. He was talking about children who were institutionalized. So to me, that work in the 1930s, beginning with his first dissertation in 1929, is the beginning of the empirical evidence directly related to the theory of positive disintegration.

Then he had papers come out in the later 30s and the 1940s. He did research. There's lots of places to look in his work before he even met Michael and they did the work that became Volume 2 of the Multilevelness Project. That's another aspect of the empirical evidence. So, there's lots from Dąbrowski, then Michael—his work with overexcitability was the foundation of the overexcitability research in gifted ed. There's quite a bit of research to talk about just from our own community of people who have done work directly about the theory of positive disintegration.

But there's also a lot of work that supports Dąbrowski's beliefs that we have only seen in the past maybe 30 years. There's a lot of connections that need to be made between these things and they haven't been made yet. One of the things that I've been saying all along to counter this particular myth is, “Hey, we need help. I can't do everything on my own.”

We need to make these connections. We need to figure things out. We need to do more research. But to say that it just doesn't exist is wrong. There's really a lot of existing evidence, and it doesn't always support the common beliefs.

Emma: What I'm hearing from you is that this wasn't a theory that was founded in a bubble, and he used other people's research to inform the theory, so people that came before him, and there's people that have worked with a theory after him, like Michael, and also there's other studies that we can tie back to it. Personally, too, from a data perspective, when people say there's no empirical evidence, obviously that's incorrect, but if people aren't satisfied with the level of it, then the answer’s always got to be to collect more.

The whole theological argument of proving God's existence. Yes, there's no proof of the existence of deities, but there's nothing to categorically disprove it either. So, if you want to debunk the theory, it's not good enough to say there's a lack of evidence. You have to actually go out and get evidence to disprove it. Unless you're doing that, then your argument's a little bit invalid.

Chris: It's true. It's interesting to me because, while I could talk about the research all day, I could also talk about the flaws in a lot of the research and the issues with it. I agree with you completely that we need more research. We need different research than we already have.

There are all these different aspects of it—where the criticism about the empirical evidence came from gifted ed and it was specifically about the overexcitability research. But overexcitability is still a part of the neuroscience literature, it's a part of the biological basis of autism and ADHD and synesthesia and epilepsy and all of these other kinds of neurodivergence. If you look at it from that perspective, you can see that overexcitability has been studied from different levels.

Emma: Well, let's talk about your second myth that the theory is a theory of giftedness and overexcitability can be used to identify giftedness. Let's talk about that.

Chris: Okay. The first part of that is easy enough to say, it's not a theory of giftedness, it's the theory of positive disintegration. He wasn't only trying to explain giftedness with his theory, it was a grand theory of human development. You can understand the whole range of humanity with this theory, if you want to.

He tried to explain these two different developmental processes, unilevel and multilevel, and the two major foundations of the theory are multilevelness and developmental potential. He wasn't trying to explain giftedness.

When it comes to overexcitabilities, well, they're not only for the gifted. They apply to other populations as well. But aside from his beliefs about overexcitability and giftedness, we have a whole body of literature in the field of gifted education that clearly shows that overexcitability shouldn't be used to identify giftedness. I would say if there's one thing we can take away from the existing research on overexcitability, it's that that's not the best application of this construct. Now, that being said, it does still apply to a lot of gifted individuals, and it still is really valuable for this population. Its value doesn't lie in identification.

Emma: That resonates very strongly with me, with my understanding of what the theory is about. So I've always seen it as a theory of explaining how psychological tension can lead to development, which clearly is not something that's only the realm of the gifted. And what you were saying also about overexcitability, it can apply too. Just because these things may resonate strongly with people who are gifted, doesn't mean that it’s not applicable to other people outside that realm.

The logic of using it as an identification tool is bad, clearly, because where you have applicability outside of that sphere, then obviously it becomes useless for that purpose. But that was never the purpose in the first place. What gives me hope about this is that it is more widely applicable and more useful and can help more people and more people can resonate outside of that sphere of giftedness but at the same time if there is that overlap, it also can be of use and help for people within that population.

I think a lot of the feedback that you get, or we get through the podcast shows that people are resonating with this stuff. And that's where the usefulness of it lies, is where people see themselves and their developmental journeys and their intensities, and they're able to identify and use it to help themselves grow. That was the whole point of the exercise, to help people develop.

Chris: I can understand why people wanted to use overexcitability to identify giftedness. When Michael introduced overexcitability to gifted ed, he suggested that overexcitabilities might serve such a purpose and that the theory could be, perhaps, a psychological model of giftedness. So, that inspired other people to check, to investigate, to see if it was true that we could. I would say that the answer is no.

And so, one of the interesting things about science is that it should be self-correcting. When we do research, then we should learn from the research we do. Well, this is one of the issues we face in gifted ed is that that self-correction hasn't come. Researchers don't get rewarded for going back and saying, OK, well, we studied this, and we found out that it didn't work. I don't think that anybody wanted to come out and say overexcitability shouldn't be used to identify giftedness. But I then need to be the person now to say it shouldn't. There's plenty of evidence.

Emma: And that thinking part is so backward from a scientific perspective. If you have a theory and it turns out that the evidence doesn't support it—that's still something that you know.

It's funny, I was watching the Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey Jr. a couple of nights ago, and he says that we should be always changing theories to suit facts and not the other way around. And to see having to change your hypothesis as a failure is just wildly inaccurate because it's not a failure. It means that you now know something that you didn't know before, and it gets you a little bit closer to the truth.

For Michael to step forward and say, “Hey, I've got this theory, let's test it out.” And then it gets tested, and it turns out not to be correct. That still helps us know a thing better. It's insane to me that people don't want to step forward and go, hey, we tested a thing, we found out the opposite thing of what we were thinking.

Chris: I think part of it is that it all happened over such a long period of time. He introduced the theory and made his statements in 1979, and I would say the first attempt at using overexcitability to identify [giftedness] happened in the early to mid-90s. I know that everyone was well-intentioned.

Now, in 2023, we have to admit and reconcile this. Unfortunately, I think another thing that's worth mentioning is that the reality is, when it became clear that overexcitability wasn't going to work out as a way of identifying giftedness, there were some people who were very much invested in it being for the gifted. When it wasn't the case, that was the end of their interest.

Emma: Which in a way is kind of understandable because they were hoping it was going to give them the answer that they specifically needed. And when it turned out the answer wasn't the one that they wanted, well, I'm done with this. But it still doesn't invalidate the thing itself for other purposes.

Chris: No, it doesn't. Although I'll admit that I find it very unrelatable that I would only care about it if it could be used to identify giftedness. I personally have found so much value in it—in explaining my own developmental path—that it's been just critical for me.

Ultimately, that's where the value comes from. We know from doing the podcast how valuable people find the theory and its constructs. I think part of what made it easy for me to walk into NAGC this year compared to any other time and feel so confident about the usefulness of this theory with this population is that I've had another whole year of feedback from people.

That's how I started the presentation off. I talked about it in the newsletter post I made on Substack. I used four examples that we've received from listeners, or one was an example from a kid from Yunasa. We know that the theory is valuable because we get really an enormous amount of feedback from people who have said that it's changed their lives.

Emma: Yeah, and maybe that's the thing that the usefulness eventually presents itself and with enough people resonating with it and being helped by it, then retrospectively one day we'll be able to look back and go, aha, here's really what it's good for. You and I have talked about the use in mental health and again that's another theory that we've got, a hypothesis, but the comments clearly show that people find it useful and just because it wasn't useful for the thing that someone else wanted it to be for doesn't mean it's completely rubbish.

Chris: The fact that it's not only for the gifted doesn't mean it's any less valuable for this population. We have to get away from the black and white thinking that is so prevalent when it comes to these issues.

Emma: It actually gives me more hope to think that this has an application beyond giftedness. I mean, considering the amount of the population who is gifted, like it'd be a pretty big waste of a really good fucking theory if it only applied to that tiny population.

Chris: I agree. I don't mean to laugh, but it is funny.

Emma: Here's another mind block. There's a lot of people who might be gifted and say, oh, you know, people don't understand me and my experience of the world is different. Well, guess what? You might have a common ground with a lot more people than you think. And that common ground could be through the theory. Let's talk about putting things in pigeonholes and talk about myth number three, which is that overexcitability can only be understood within the theory of positive disintegration.

Chris: This myth, in my opinion, came about because of personality issues in our Dąbrowski community and because certain people wanted to undermine the research. Which I realize is a controversial thing to say. And yet I have quite a bit of evidence to support me. So, I'm not afraid to say it.

I didn't realize this until I had to present in 2021 with Frank. We did a session on distinguishing science from pseudoscience. And so that meant we dove into the philosophy of science literature and really explored what is science and what is pseudoscience. When I was reading about pseudoscience, I was blown away to see that one hallmark of pseudoscience is called the mantra of holism. This is when you argue that scientific claims can only be evaluated within the context of broader claims and not judged in isolation.

When I saw that, I thought, oh, here's something we've seen from two particular people in our Dąbrowski community. I believe that these two people—there are two places where you can see these claims. One is an interview that was done in 2009, and it was Bill Tillier who said that “The idea that the construct of overexcitability is independent is faulty,” and made this claim that it can only be understood within the context of the theory.

Well, that doesn't make any sense. Overexcitability came from nervousness. It existed for many years before Dąbrowski. He's the one who took it, differentiated it into five types, and really built his theory around it. In the book that I mentioned earlier from 1935, he wasn't even using the word disintegration yet. He was calling it disaggregation, but he was talking about overexcitability. Overexcitability predated the theory. It can be understood without the theory. It can be measured without the theory. It’s misdirection, and frankly, bullshit, to say that it can only be studied within the context of the theory.

Unfortunately, though, this statement has been uncritically repeated many times in the literature, and has caused real problems. And it's part of why the theory was considered pseudoscience or being called pseudoscience. Well, I have to thank the critics for forcing me to dive in and dig deep into all of this, or I never would have had the easy response to this that, oh, no, what you're saying there, that's pseudoscience.

Emma: From what I've read from what you've sent me, it existed well before. The question of how does it contribute towards development and how does it play a part in positive disintegration? Yeah, you've got to understand the broader theory to get the why does it plug in together bit. But to say it can't be understood as a separate thing, it just doesn't make any sense to me. It's like saying you can't understand apples outside of the context of a fruit salad. If you want to understand fruit salad, yeah, you've got to understand the concept of apples and the different components that go into it and why it's appropriate to put apples in a fruit salad and what their value is to it. But it doesn't mean that you can't just say apple and have that be valid.

Chris: Right. The other side of this is the theory does provide so much explanation for why overexcitability matters, how it manifests in different ways at different levels of development. Dąbrowski did talk about overexcitability at different levels.

The theory provides a lot of great context for understanding it and working with it and living with it. But it's not required to understand it or measure it. Dąbrowski himself said that overexcitability could be measured outside the context of development. So, yeah, this one—myth number three—very easy to debunk.

Unfortunately, it exists in the literature and is just going to continue being cited and people will keep repeating this. Hopefully they'll read what I write or listen to this, but something has to be done. I do want to write a paper to try and combat this problem in the gifted literature because it's—even if I do that, it's not gonna be enough. It's like a zombie issue where it's just gonna keep happening for years.

Emma: Yeah, and there's there are two real good reasons to tackle this and people might be wondering why you're so passionate about you know combating this particular myth, but the first one is that when you start saying we know anecdotally that overexcitability for a lot of people is like the gateway to the wider theory. Because they identify with it, they resonate with it, they get it because they're living it, right? And to say that, well, you can't understand this without the context of the theory is flying in the face of saying, well, I do get it because it's in the context of my life and I'm living it. Now, I have that stepping stone from which to start to explore the theory and get into my personal development.

It's almost a form of gatekeeping when we say to people, oh, you read about overexcitability, but you don't get it because you haven't understood it within the theory. It's almost saying you shall not pass. I see it as dissuading people from getting excited about the fact that they have all of a sudden for the first time in their life seen themselves mirrored and finally understand something about themselves.

The second reason why it's a problem to me is that when people have this misunderstanding and we get into the thing of the theory pseudoscience because people can't reconcile this thing that arguably doesn't have any basis in the truth, it encourages people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They just go, you know what, the whole thing's trash and we're getting rid of it.

Which is detrimental because we know that the theory helps people. We know that the notion even of overexcitability helps people when they resonate with it, when they see themselves, when it gives them a framework to understand their own experiences and to tell people now that this is rubbish and we're ripping away the one framework that has helped you make sense of your life is a huge disservice to people.

Chris: I agree. I think the other thing that's sad about this particular myth is that it came about because people wanted to undermine the work of someone else or multiple other people in the same community. And that instead of working together, it was all about undermining. That I don't think can be forgotten when we're talking about this one.

We have kind of a sad history in the Dąbrowski community. This is part of why people have said that the Dąbrowski community is a cult.

Emma: All I want to say is, it's a cult? You know, where's our robes?

Chris: Well, people have said that because Dąbrowski can't be questioned, according to some people. There's this constant pointing back to the past. It's turned a lot of people off, for one thing. But this particular myth is more about personalities and egos than it is about research and science.

Emma: And straw manning. If you want to understand Dąbrowski's work, yes, close read Dąbrowski's work, that's obvious, but he was not the only person to ever observe this phenomenon. Positive disintegration is an experience that people have, but it's not just limited to one window in the space-time continuum.

People have been going through this shit probably as long as human beings have been developing. And Dąbrowski, yes, gave us a language and a framework to start hanging this very real human experience upon it. If you want to understand his work, read it closely. But if you want to understand the phenomena, the human experience, the thing that's happening out there in the world, that's not the only place to do it.

And to continually bring us back to this one thing of literature, to this one thing as though there is canon and you can only read work from this one author, it's just crazy. It's crazy, because that one author only existed in one point in the space-time continuum. If we want to continue to understand this human experience, other people are going to have to get involved eventually.

Where would Dąbrowski have been without the people that came before him? And so for that same token, why should the work stop with him and why can't it continue in other places? It would be like studying philosophy and saying, you can only read Aristotle and that is it. That's the only thing that you can read, and you can only understand philosophy from this one author. People who have studied philosophy for their degrees and that would just look at you like you're bonkers.

Chris: It's true. For those who don't know, who are listening, here's some insight into problems with the Dąbrowski community. I would just like to say, though, that when I did my first presentation at NAGC in 2017, I was making these same arguments at that point. Because when I came to all of this, I had to figure out, like, who are the personalities involved? What is happening here? Why are these people trying to undermine each other? What is going on? And a lot of realizations came on Facebook. It was enough to make me think twice about involving myself in the theory. But I decided to do it anyway.

Emma: They're that eager or thinking, and I guess maybe because I'm not an academic, it just baffles me. And that actually leads me to wanting to talk about your fourth myth, which is that overexcitability is the same as openness to experience. And the five-factor model can replace the theory of positive disintegration, which like this one, It blows my mind because I first of all don't see them as the same thing, but it's like, why are we getting so black and white? You can only have one way of understanding the thing, Aristotle only.

Chris: This particular myth came first in a dissertation. There were two papers, but based really on this one study that put forth this idea that overexcitability and openness were the same. I want to connect this myth with the one we just discussed because when you read these two papers, especially the one from Gifted Child Quarterly, you can see the connections with the misdirection from myth number three.

These things were included in the papers on openness and overexcitability, too. That there's little empirical evidence for the theory of positive disintegration and that overexcitability has been “misused” in gifted education, or taken outside of the context of the theory. This flawed paper came from these flawed arguments from other people. That's the problem with having this kind of error in the literature, or errors, plural.

Emma: And what you're saying about two papers based on one study? One study seems a bit of a precarious thing. You're putting all your eggs in literally one basket there, which doesn't seem like good science.

Chris: I have said multiple times that it's really an indictment on the whole field of gifted education that people were so willing to take these two papers, this one study, and be like, oh, this is it. But the reality is, I think, that people wanted overexcitability to be gone, and they jumped at the opportunity to say it was really openness to experience, and that we should be talking about the five-factor model instead.

It was exactly what some people were hoping for, and they went with it. It took a long time for the paper to come out in 2021 from Barry Grant. That is a critique, and it's a good critique. And all you have to do is read the headings from the paper to get the story, which I included in my post.

Emma: The thing that's always bugged me about this particular one, apart from the fact it's based on one study, is that when you look at what the five-factor model is, it is a personality taxonomy based on behavioral leanings. Which is absolutely not the same as overexcitability, which explains a difference in experience based on a person's reaction to internal and external stimulus. To me, they're like apples and oranges. To say, throw out all your apples and replace them with oranges, we don't need the apples anymore—I'm like, how? Why?

Chris: Well, and for people who want more on this particular myth, listen to our episode with Shelagh Gallagher, Episode 16, because she talks about it. We can understand more about giftedness by looking at both overexcitability and openness to experience.

Emma: Yes, different lenses, different perspectives.

Chris: So that's myth four. We shouldn't have to keep talking about this anymore. And yet, it is going to continue in the literature. It's really frustrating to think about how difficult it is to turn the tide when it comes to problems like this. They are very intractable.

Emma: Well, then let's not give it any further time and move on to myth five.

Chris: Yeah, that's the one that's most important to me. It's my favorite of the myths.

Emma: Go for it.

Chris: Well, it was hard to even think about the right way to word it. Honestly, I tried a few different things. At first, I was sharing them with Michael and he was not loving the wording. I ended up landing on “Overexcitability can be differentiated from ADHD and autism.” I felt like that captured it.

So, this myth is easy to understand. When the theory was introduced to gifted education in 1979, autism and ADHD didn't even exist the way that we know them now. DSM-III hadn't come out yet, which included attention deficit disorder for the first time. It wasn't called ADHD until 1987. People were learning about ADHD, I think, in some cases, after already knowing about overexcitability. This is something that is clearer to us now, [those of us] who came to this later. It's hard to explain what I mean.

I knew more about ADHD than I knew about overexcitability when I discovered overexcitability. Well, that wasn't the case for the people who originally studied it in the 80s. Our modern understanding of ADHD and autism is evolving.

First of all, think about the fact that we already have a very flawed understanding of ADHD and autism if we're only going by the DSM. Those of us who really care about these neurotypes or types of neurodivergence see them from a different lens than people who adhere to the pathology paradigm. ADHD and autism have historically been studied by people who aren't ADHDers or autistic, and so it's like trying to figure something out by looking at it from the outside in.

Well, we have that problem in giftedness too, to some extent. Not all of the work on giftedness has been done by people who are gifted. So, all of these problems were behind why people thought maybe that they were different things. I have my own history of figuring out where I come from or where I land on this issue.

It was really thanks to Elizabeth Mika. She's the one—it was in her work that I began to see the connections. She published a paper in 2006 basically saying that our modern understanding of psychomotor overexcitability directly connects with ADHD. I forget how she worded it. I'm trying to think of it. But when I saw that, I was like, wow, is that really true?

When I came to overexcitability, I thought, oh, well, they're saying that it's really this and not ADHD. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is a misdiagnosis, too. But I've come to accept that it's not like that. Let's just take psychomotor OE for an example. Psychomotor overexcitability encompasses a lot, and it encompasses different levels of psychomotor overexcitability, where at a higher level, this is your energy for planning and organization. At a lower level, it's more like hyperactivity and restlessness. It can look different based on different levels of development, based on whether or not it's been transformed into something else.

Because another thing to remember is that overexcitabilities are raw material that can produce dynamisms. So, there's a lot to all of this. It took a lot of detective work to figure out these connections with overexcitability and types of neurodivergence. There were a lot of aha moments. I should really write a whole post about how I came to some of the conclusions I've come to based on discoveries in the literature, based on conversations with people like Elizabeth, and try and pull it together for people.

Emma: Yes, you should. The thing that I always think about when I think about this one is Katy Higgins Lee and her Venn diagram, because humans are complex individuals, and these things are different lenses with which to view a complicated human. It may be the case that a human can be overexcitable and can have ADHD and can have autism and can be gifted. There's no reason why that can't apply and there's no reason that the things that are being observed can't exist in more than one space at one given time.

If we want to talk about, as you said, psychomotor overexcitability or even someone being highly sensitive, those things don't have to go in one pigeonhole at one time and can't belong anywhere else.

Chris: The language that I used in my session… I said that there's no strict line of demarcation between these things. It's really impossible to know where one of these things ends and another begins, or what's what. I mean, this is just the messy reality of being human, like you just said. We're very complicated.

I agree—for anybody who wants more on this particular myth, for sure listen to Episode 30 with Katy, where we talked about her Venn diagram and the issue of misdiagnosis. Because we need to come together somehow and rethink how we're talking about overexcitability beyond the gifted—we're being more inclusive of these other neurotypes, these other populations. There's huge overlap between them.

I don't know the statistic off the top of my head, but I can say that a lot of people who meet the criteria for ADHD also are autistic and vice versa. There's huge overlap there. Then you throw in things like dyslexia, central auditory processing disorder. It's very hard to know with certainty what's what. I have really leaned into calling myself neurodivergent because it's the easiest thing rather than saying, I feel confident that I'm ADHD. I also resonate with PDA and autism. I don't want to have to go through all that, but I can tell you that I'm neurodivergent for sure.

Emma: Some of the things that I've learned along the way from doing the podcast is it is this nebulous overlapping thing and probably even more than a Venn diagram, it's probably a three-dimensional set of intersecting bubbles.

But for every human, they're going to have a different profile. And to say, well, all these humans have to fit neatly into this one bucket, and these other humans have to fit neatly into that bucket. As you said, neurodivergent is probably the best way to describe it because everybody's individual flavor of that is going to look different.

While the labels can help us make some sense of the world and help us find other people who may have some things like us, The one thing that I've learnt from being in the overexcitability group in Facebook is that everybody's flavor of that looks different. You know, there's no one-size-fits-all solution or labeling convention. It's not neat.

Chris: No, it's very messy. It's messy. And people don't like messiness. People want answers and clarity. But guess what? It's not coming in this area. And we have to learn how to deal with that.

Emma: Yeah, and the two truths can exist at the same time that it is not clear-cut, and it is messy. But also that the descriptions and the label and the ability to build communities and find commonalities with one another is also useful to humans. They don't have to be one or the other.

Chris: No, no, exactly. It's never going to be black and white. It's messy. From this point in my session, it was a move toward, well, what now? What are the best practices for working with overexcitability? How do we introduce this to kids?

My experience of talking with kids, gifted kids, about overexcitability has come at Yunasa. Now, I've had four years of talking with the kids about overexcitabilities at camp. One thing I've learned is that I have to be really clear with them up front that not all gifted people have overexcitability. So, if you don't see yourself in them, if you don't come out with high scores on the instrument, it's okay. It's no reflection on your giftedness.

We do need to come up with ways where we introduce this construct with kids who are gifted and say, okay, well, you're not all going to resonate with this, but the ones who do are the ones who need it the most. These are the ones who also need to understand the positive disintegration part, and that the overexcitabilities can be the cause of suffering. They're not only a blessing, they can be disabling.

I talked about that. I talked about overexcitability as disabling for the first time in this session. I don't think that there's ever been a presentation I've done where I talked about it the way I did this time. It's an uncomfortable thing to address because people haven't thought of it this way. It's been so much talked about as a blessing or a superpower even that I think it's tough for some people to wrap their heads around the idea that it can be disabling. But that's my experience.

Emma: I hate that term superpower. There's a reason why Dąbrowski called it tragic gift. There are two sides to every coin. And I think that way of thinking also, too, it's the reverse of ableism, to be quite frank, to say that it's just othering people and trying to form a hierarchy.

But what you touched on with people resonating with it—you may or may not resonate with this. That's really the value of all these things, of all these tools, of positive disintegration, of overexcitability, of talking about giftedness, and even talking about the five-factor model. Any tool that you use helps you get a little bit of insight into yourself and may help you find fellows that perhaps resonate with things in the same way or a similar way to what you do.

You’ve been talking about the usefulness within giftedness and that, if you are gifted, maybe this also applies to you with overexcitability. And if overexcitability applies, maybe positive disintegration does apply to you. But they don't necessarily have to all fit together. To me, it's like when you go on Netflix or something—you enjoyed watching this. You might also enjoy watching this next movie.

What movies people do and do like and what speaks to them is going to be individual, but it does sort of give you a way of saying, well, if you're gifted, maybe you might also like this particular way of viewing yourself as well. I think that's the way of using this stuff in the future, saying, “Hey, toolkit. Here's all the parts of it. Try them on, see what fits.”

Because at the end of the day, what is meaningful in this is you being able to make sense of yourself and your experiences.

Chris: Exactly. I mentioned ableism and touched on that as one of the issues at play in all of this. I believe that ableism is a part of why there was such a desire for so long to say, “Oh, no, this is overexcitability. It's not ADHD or autism.”

I would love to do an episode about ableism at some point, and write more about it because this is a real issue that doesn't get named, and doesn't get examined. People—it's just not on their radar, but it's important.

Emma: This has all been excellent food for thought and I'm wondering what last thoughts that you can leave us with to take away.

Chris: Well, one of them, following up on what we just said—overexcitabilities are not only for the gifted, and not all gifted people have this difference. And overexcitabilities, in the theory, still have enormous value for this population. They're both true.

Be aware that politics, personalities, and personal agendas have led us off track. We observed a failure of scholarship by ignoring the foundations of the theory.

It was Michael who gave me that wording—failure of scholarship—and I thought it was dead on when he said it. To say that there's no empirical evidence for the theory or that there's very little, it shows how little effort people have put into exploring this. All of this information has been available to anybody who cared to look for it, but very few of us have done the digging to figure it out.

Despite its limitations, the OEQ-II has been valuable, and we need an updated instrument that reflects our updated understanding. We especially need an instrument that isn't so positively weighted. The items on the OEQ-II—they don't capture the challenges or the struggles of overexcitability as well as they could, and that is something that Frank really wanted to do something about.

The next one is offer resources about the overexcitabilities to students who have them, or anyone who has them, regardless of whether or not they've been identified as gifted. Give people the chance to see themselves through this lens. The theory changes lives.

The final point that I would say I wanted to share is we must stop denying and invalidating the experience of giftedness. The theory of positive disintegration provides mirroring for this population that can't be found elsewhere. So, again, even though the theory wasn't created for this population specifically, the things that Dąbrowski wrote about provide beautiful mirroring for many gifted people. When they see themselves in it, they have the realization that they're not broken. And that is a beautiful thing, I say from experience.

Emma: And it's well said.

Chris: Well, thank you. I pointed people in a few different directions for more, but it's mostly stuff that our listeners already know.

Emma: Thanks for this, it's been good to not only allow you the chance to debrief but to catch up on what you were talking about at NAGC. Hopefully, for anyone who didn't attend, this can also give them some food for thought. I think particularly too if you are a person who resonates with overexcitability, or finds comfort in the theory of positive disintegration, that if you do stumble across some of these myths out there in the wide wild world, you can feel a little bit better about it.

Chris: Yes, that's right. Well, thank you. I'm so happy that we had a chance to talk about it. I wrote a post and published it today. It took me all week to do because again, it was quite the period of recovery for me. Some people are able to just leave NAGC and go back to work on Monday and I say, wow, that's impressive.

I realized that this is why I identify as disabled. I don't have the same recovery period. I don't have the ability to jump right back into work. Other people seem to have. It's just been something that I've learned to accept about myself. I used to beat myself up about this and wonder what was wrong with me. Now, I don't look at it that way anymore, which I think is a real blessing.

Emma: I'm going to challenge you with something I said way back at the beginning of this episode insofar as I think you often fail to recognize the level of personal investment that you put into this and the level of care. I see it with how much preparation you do. And xI see it with how you talk about this. You care a lot. To paraphrase Faith No More, you care a lot.

Chris: Oh my god, that's exactly what I was thinking. I care a lot.

Emma: You care a lot. And I don't think you factor that into the equation sometimes. And you see other people getting along with their day-to-day thing And for me, this spookily echoes my experience with overexcitability because I used to look at other people getting along with their lives and saying, why can't I adult like them? I failed to recognize all the factors of my difference because I didn't know about it. And I think sometimes you fail to factor in the fact that maybe you just care a little bit more.

Chris: I do. And now I have to go listen to Faith No More.

Emma: Me too. Well, on that happy note, thank you very much for sharing and thanks for recording with me. It is always a pleasure.

Chris: Thank you. It is always a pleasure.

Emma: And thank you to our listeners. I hope that you've found some comfort in the ideas and got as much out of this conversation as we have.