Gordon Smith, LPC

23/02/2026

I know that a lot of you will have an interest in this offering from Patty and Youssef at Bright Insight.

Oh, this is exciting, and it has been a LONG time coming!

This is the application form to join an open, ongoing book and study group for Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration.

This is not a typical study group and not a typical book group. However, these are not typical books or group members.

This group is dedicated to the careful study of Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s original texts, rotating through primary works to deepen our understanding of his Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD). Readings will be intentionally brief. Dąbrowski’s work is conceptually dense, and short excerpts allow us to slow down, sit with the language, and explore ideas in depth. This structure supports meaningful participation, even for those with full and complex lives.

Our objectives are:

• Read Dąbrowski’s original writings to deepen understanding of his theory.

• Learn to recognize overexcitability, multilevel development, value hierarchies, dynamisms, and the role of inner conflict in growth.

• Apply his framework thoughtfully to lived experience without reducing it to labels.

• Engage in careful, text-centered discussion that builds shared understanding.

And please be aware, this is not about teaching the theory. While Bright Insight facilitators Dr. Patty L Gently and Youssef Sleiman are well-read and knowledgeable about TPD, this group is centered on shared experience and collective reflection in relation to Dąbrowski’s work. Expertise is not assigned here, and all who are drawn to serious inquiry, developmental depth, and thoughtful dialogue are welcome. It is not centered on self-diagnosis or simplified summaries. It is a space for engaging the theory as it was written and exploring its implications together.

The group will begin once it is filled, likely around April 2026.

Meetings will occur twice a month. Participants may attend one or both sessions depending on their schedules. Sessions will alternate every two weeks between:

• Friday evenings at 7:00pm Central (Saturday mornings AU); Time zone conversions can be found here: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Dabrowskians%21+US+Friday+Evening%2FAU+Saturday+Morning+once+a+month&iso=20260410T19&p1=70&ah=1&am=30

• Saturday mornings at 11:00am Central (Saturday evenings EU); Time zone conversions can be found here: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=US+Saturday+Morning%2FEU+Saturday+Evening+once+a+month&iso=20260425T11&p1=70&ah=1&am=30

A suggested yearly donation of $120 to $240 per year is requested to support the ongoing facilitation and infrastructure of the group. Participants are welcome to contribute more or less according to their needs and means. No explanation or minimum attendance is required.

If you’re interested in participating, please complete the form. All responses will be kept confidential. If you have questions, feel free to email Patty at brightinsightadvocate@gmail.com for more information! Or, REGISTER HERE: https://forms.gle/EGUXMKkkBa49LwFRA

18/02/2026

If I were to host a new Improv for Gifted Adults group in the next few months, would you be interested in being a part of it? I miss playing with folks, and I miss offering this one-of-a-kind vehicle for personal development. Who’s in?

(Here’s a poster from a group that decided to have a show!)

17/02/2026

If you're in Connecticut, I can now offer you counseling services. Thanks so much to a progressive Department of Public Health intent on expanding access to all the good people of The Nutmeg State!

Gordon Smith is now a licensed counselor in Connecticut. Specializing in gifted adolescents and adults.

16/02/2026

Gifted Adults have particular needs that are best served by counseling that is gifted-affirming and specialized. This systematic review and analysis of the research literature on gifted adults highlights some of the reasons why:

The research "...suggests the main challenges for gifted adults who seek therapy are addressing painful school and childhood experiences, high sensitivity, emotional intensity, existential depression, perfectionism, multi-potentiality, relationship difficulties..."

"Webb et al. (2006) suggested that more than 25% of gifted children may be misdiagnosed. This could be even greater for gifted adults, for while gifted children have their counseling needs provided by school counselors and child psychologists, gifted adults, often unrecognized, may seek out the counseling services of private practitioners, the majority of who are unlikely to be have any training on the subject of giftedness or may be pathology-focused (Bourdeau & Thomas, 2003). According to Alvarado (1989), a counselor’s failure to recognize giftedness, a lack of understanding of the issues related to being gifted, and evaluating gifted adults using normal populations as a baseline, complicates the problems of the gifted. These factors increase the risk of misdiagnosis as well as decrease the likelihood that gifted adults will receive the counseling that they need."

PDF | What happens when a gifted child grows up? Despite a slew of provocative book titles regarding gifted adults in the mainstream media, and the... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

13/02/2026

Last call for Gifted Adult Group Experience! We're getting started on Tuesday, Feb. 17 at 6:15pm for a six-week dive into exploring, understanding, and working with your gifted experience of living.

Prior to the initial gathering, you'll receive a narrative document containing LOTS of resources about giftedness as well as reflection questions to light you up. At that initial gathering, we'll begin to get to know each other, and you'll have the experience of being able to be in your full gifted expression in a room of other outliers. I'll pull together the themes from that first session, and the next week's document will be based on those themes - more info, resources, and reflection opportunities. We'll do this each week, iterating and co-creating an voyage into deeper understanding in a gifted-friendly community.

Lots more info and registration is at the link below!

This six-week group coaching experience is open to all gifted and otherwise neurodivergent people.

11/02/2026

From my newsletter that went out this morning: "When Erin Vandermore invited me onto her podcast, Notes to my Nervous System, her questions revolved around why giftedness can feel heavy. Answering this question necessitated a rapid explanation of giftedness itself - all dimensions - intellectual, emotional, imaginational, sensual, physical, and existential - and how intense, complex, and sensitive gifted people are barraged with stimuli all the time.

That intensity of experience puts a strain on our nervous systems that, over time, can have psychological, physical, and medical manifestations that create complications for gifted people. Couple those manifestations with loneliness, and the consequences get severe.

So what to do? We have the opportunity to explore ourselves and understand our inner matrices. What are your abilities, capacities, traits, and characteristics in all dimensions of your giftedness? What do you need to nurture all parts of yourself? How can you expand your nervous system’s capacity to contend with the intensity of being who you are?

These are fundamental and profound inquiries. Each of us can attune to our inner experience. Each of us can practice teaching our nervous systems to calm and to accommodate and integrate our experience. Self-knowledge leads to self-understanding. Self-understanding leads to self-acceptance. Self-acceptance leads to self-advocacy and self-care. From this place, life gets bigger, richer, fuller.

Practicing all of those steps in isolation is daunting for many, so I invite gifted adults to explore themselves in community with other gifted and otherwise neurodivergent people. The experience creates a new anchor state of felt-sense safety that reverberates through our nervous systems and helps to rewire old patterns built over the course of our lives."

When Erin Vandermore invited me onto her podcast, Notes to my Nervous System, her questions revolved around why giftedness can feel heavy. Answering this question necessitated a rapid explanation of giftedness itself - all dimensions - intellectual, emotional, imaginational, sensual, physical, and e...

09/02/2026

The Gifted Adults Group Experience begins its next iteration on Feb. 17. You're invited into a virtual room filled with other intense, complex, sensitive, gifted people to explore what it means to inhabit a neurotype that diverges from neuronormative society in countless ways. You'll learn, connect with others, and find new perspectives on who you are and how you might live.

Please share the info with anyone in your network who might feel at home here.

This six-week group coaching experience is open to all gifted and otherwise neurodivergent people.

09/02/2026

We are wild beings. We create with our life's energy. Our intellect is *part* of that energy, but certainly not *all of it* and definitely not the *master of it*. We arrive from all directions - past, future, present; spiritual, physical, metaphysical; ephemeral, emotional, informational. We become in the cauldron of these directions in interaction. Our intellect can and should serve our existential creativity, but it should not be given the role of capturing, taming or controlling the greater existential intersection of our selfhood.

All things in good measure, as the saying goes.

03/02/2026

"This reframes neurodivergence entirely. It is not a mistake in the code, but a variation maintained because in unstable times it matters more than social cohesion."
[...]
"If neurodivergent traits were purely dysfunctional, they would not persist.

Importantly, this is not only a historical argument. Selection pressure is not frozen in the past, but acting in real time. Late-stage industrial civilisation is already exerting negative selection pressure on boundary-sensitive cognition within institutions, while simultaneously favouring those same traits outside them.

Burnout, exclusion, and withdrawal are not evidence of dysfunction, but signals of a changing adaptive landscape. That which doesn’t fit the dominant system may still be well-suited to the conditions emerging beyond it."

https://adrianlambert.substack.com/p/if-collapse-is-inevitable-why-does?r=rwkqq&triedRedirect=true

(hat tip )

The evolutionary role of Neurodivergence in a collapsing world

02/02/2026

In a group of other intense, complex, and sensitive gifted people, you can access deeper self-awareness and self-understanding while also teaching your nervous system a new sense of safety in community.

You’ll meet other neurodivergent people, each in their own experience, and each showing up ready to connect and learn.

Some themes that have emerged in previous groups are:
Multipotentiality and multidimensionality
Multi-exceptionalities (2e+)
Embracing the Neurodiversity Paradigm
Finding community
Self-knowledge -> self-acceptance -> self-advocacy
Releasing shame
Expanding self-concept
Grief, Trauma -> Integration, Healing
Trust and safety as precursors to fun and play
Unmasking: all of the layers of this
Unburdening and Expansion
Theory of Positive Disintegration

This six-week group coaching experience is open to all gifted and otherwise neurodivergent people.

01/02/2026

"The "Greensboro Four" late in the afternoon sat on four bar stools at the segregated lunch counter and asked for coffee. When they were refused service, they remained at their seats until closing. The next day over twenty students returned with them including some from the all female Bennett College. The third day included over 60 persons followed by over 300 on the fourth day. With promotion of the sit-ins in the media, the sit-in tactics spread to other cities in North Carolina and eventually throughout the southeast. This Greensboro sit-in is credited as being the major and most influential sit-in of the civil rights era."

February 1, 1960, four young North Carolina A & T State University students began the nations most momentous sit-in of the Civil Rights Era in Greensboro, NC.

30/01/2026

Gifted Trauma is about all of the rejections you experience and/or internalize throughout your life. Your giftedness is a neurotype, a way of being, a consciousness that encompasses all that you are. When that simple truth is negated again and again by people and systems, we gifted people can develop distorted self-concepts and internalized shame for being who we are. We can contort, camouflage, shrink, and desperately try to conform our expression in order to receive approval, acceptance, connection, and love. The aggregate of this rejection by a thousand cuts is at the heart of gifted trauma.

Enter Narrative Medicine and the wild reaches of creativity. Gifted Trauma Alchemy is a six-week experience designed to elevate and celebrate your creative consciousness. Through this process, you will see yourself with new eyes and begin to unwind all the damage done. If you’ve been writing for sixty years or you’ve never done any creative writing at all, Gifted Trauma Alchemy is an unconventional avenue to gifted personal development.

It begins Feb. 8, and it will help you come into a new relationship with yourself as you release the weights laid upon you when you were younger.

Gifted Trauma Alchemy - This six-week series elevates and centers creative consciousness in your gifted personal development.