I have spent the past decade inside this theory—studying the primary texts, working with researchers who knew Dąbrowski’s constructs, and tracing how the theory maps onto my own developmental experience. What I want to lay out here is what developmental choice actually looks like in Dąbrowski’s framework.

Seeing the Levels Within

Most people, most of the time, experience themselves as more or less consistent. They have preferences, habits, and reactions. They might describe themselves as “complicated,” but the complication is lateral—different moods, different roles, different contexts. It stays on one plane.

Developmental choice requires something else entirely. It requires the lived experience of hierarchy within yourself—the recognition that some of what you are is closer to what you could become, and some of it is farther away. Dąbrowski described this as the distinction between “more myself” and “less myself,” and he meant it phenomenologically. This is an experience: the visceral sense that certain reactions, impulses, or patterns of thought belong to a version of you that you are growing beyond, while others belong to a version you are growing toward.

This vertical perception emerges through the process Dąbrowski called multilevel disintegration—the breaking apart of a previously unified psychic structure into distinguishable levels. The dynamisms that drive this process are difficult ones. Astonishment with oneself—the shock of seeing something in yourself you didn’t expect. Disquietude, dissatisfaction, feelings of inferiority toward yourself, shame, and guilt. These experiences reveal the vertical dimension of the psyche. They are, in Dąbrowski’s framework, developmentally necessary. Without them, the individual never perceives the hierarchy within, and without that perception, there is nothing to choose between.

The Three Operations of Developmental Choice

Dąbrowski identified three operations at the core of developmental choice: affirmation, negation, and choice. These are distinct, and understanding their relationship is essential.

• Affirmation is the acceptance and cultivation of what is experienced as higher—what is “more myself,” closer to the emerging personality ideal. It is the recognition that certain capacities, sensitivities, and orientations represent the direction of one’s development, and the decision to invest in them.

• Negation is the rejection of what is experienced as lower—what is “less myself,” primitive, automatic, incompatible with who one is becoming. Dąbrowski described patients who experienced disgust toward certain forms of their own thinking and behavior. That disgust is negation at work. It is a developmental evaluation, a verdict rendered by one part of the psyche about another.

• Choice is the synthetic act that emerges from the tension between affirmation and negation. It is the discriminating decision that gives development its direction. Crucially, it is always vertical—always operating along the axis of higher and lower, always discriminating between levels rather than selecting among options on the same plane. When Dąbrowski calls the third factor “a dynamism of conscious choice,” he means choice that discriminates between levels.

These three operations are carried by the dynamism Dąbrowski called the third factor. He named it this because it represents a force in human development that is autonomous—arising from the individual’s own developmental process and progressively achieving independence from both biological endowment (the first factor) and social influence (the second factor). The third factor evaluates, approves or disapproves, accepts or rejects—and it does so in relation to both the inner psychic milieu and the external environment.

What Has to Be in Place

The third factor does not appear in a ready-made form. Dąbrowski was explicit about this: it requires that several other capacities have already developed to sufficient strength. Specifically, it requires the dynamism of subject-object in oneself (the capacity to observe yourself as both subject and object simultaneously), inner psychic transformation (the active process of reworking stimuli and experiences within the psyche), and the ability to distinguish what is closer to and farther from the personality ideal.

This sequence is important. Developmental choice is available only when the psychic structure has opened up enough to reveal the vertical dimension, and when the individual has developed the observational and evaluative capacities to work within it.

In unilevel integration—where the psychic structure is organized around primitive drives and intelligence serves instrumental purposes—there is no vertical perception and therefore no developmental choice. At unilevel disintegration—where the structure has loosened but the individual cycles through ambivalences and ambitendencies without vertical resolution—there are oscillations on one plane, shifts between “this” and “that” rather than “higher” and “lower.”

Developmental choice proper begins at spontaneous multilevel disintegration, where the vertical axis opens, and the individual begins to experience the hierarchy within. Even here, the dynamisms are more revelatory than organizing. They show you the levels; they do not yet give you the capacity to choose systematically between them. At organized multilevel disintegration, the third factor becomes fully active, and choice becomes conscious, deliberate, and increasingly coordinated with the emerging personality ideal.

This developmental gradient means that what looks like “choosing yourself” at different levels of development is qualitatively different. The person who “chooses themselves” by following their impulses is doing something categorically different from the person who chooses themselves by overriding their impulses in service of a developmental vision constructed through years of inner conflict and self-observation.

The Role of Prospection

This is where Dąbrowski’s account becomes most distinctive. Developmental choice is oriented toward something that does not yet exist. The personality ideal—the standard against which one evaluates one’s actual personality structure—is an emergent structure, shaped through the very process of development, becoming more distinct as the individual advances in their personal growth. In Dynamics of Concepts, Dąbrowski (1973) wrote that the third factor “is grounded in a prospective, developmental perspective; in the conception of man as becoming, rather than a readymade being.”

This prospective orientation involves both retrospection and prospection. Retrospection is the backward look—an awareness of what one was, of what has been overcome, of the developmental distance already traveled. Prospection is the forward look—an awareness of what one is becoming, of what ought to be, of the trajectory that the hierarchy of values implies. Dąbrowski described prospection as “seeing what ‘ought to be,’” and treated it as a necessary part of inner psychic transformation.

The implications are significant. If developmental choice is oriented toward what one is becoming rather than what one already is, then the self being “chosen” is a developmental trajectory. You are choosing the self you are in the process of constituting. The “more myself” that you affirm is still emerging. The “less myself” that you negate is still active, still pulling on you. The choice happens in the space between what is and what ought to be—and that space is maintained by the tension of ongoing disintegration.

This is why Dąbrowski insisted that the multilevel understanding of values allows one to discern their direction in further development, and gives ground for an “empirically justifiable system of hypotheses concerning the shaping of their structure in further development, ‘in prospection’”—including what they “ought to be.”1 The normative dimension emerges from the developmental process itself.

Choosing Yourself Again and Again

One of the most striking things in Dąbrowski’s work is the insistence that personality is chosen repeatedly. In Dynamics of Concepts, he describes “the repeated acts of choosing one’s personality many times until the moment of the final choice.” Each successive act of choosing narrows and deepens the field. What was once a broad range of possible selves gradually resolves into an increasingly distinct individual structure, until the central qualities become permanent—qualitatively stable, still growing, but with a core that holds.

A patient autobiography that Dąbrowski (1964) quotes in Positive Disintegration captures this vividly: “I have chosen my ‘self’ from among many ‘selfs,’ and I find that I still must constantly make this choice.” The patient goes on to describe the persistence of a “strange self” that remains strong—an ongoing pull toward patterns that are experienced as foreign to the developing personality, patterns that do not simply disappear because they have been rejected. The developmental choice is always made against active resistance from within, which is precisely why it has to be made again and again.

I find this one of the most honest things in the clinical literature. Here is someone who has done the work and chosen—and who must keep choosing, against a part of themselves that remains strong and refuses to yield. Most frameworks gloss over that ongoing struggle. Each act of choosing builds on the previous ones. The developmental trajectory accumulates weight. The individual progressively constitutes their own essence through these choices, until a point is reached where the choice is final—where the personality has achieved a coherence that makes reversal unthinkable. The person has become who they have been choosing to become.

Choice Against the Deepest Instincts

Dąbrowski pushed the logic of developmental choice to its most extreme implications. The examples he returned to most often—Father Maksymilian Kolbe voluntarily taking another prisoner’s place in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz, Janusz Korczak accompanying his pupils to the gas chamber despite having the option to escape—are cases where developmental choice overrides the instinct of self-preservation. These are the culmination of a long process of self-constitution through repeated acts of choosing, carried to the point where the personality built through those choices cannot be abandoned, even at the cost of biological survival.

Dąbrowski framed this as the “choice of one of two kinds of values”—the choice between self-preservation and self-perfection, between biological continuity and fidelity to the hierarchy of values that the individual has constructed. The activity of the third factor, he wrote, is “especially in the opposition against the most fundamental instincts in oneself and against primitive influences of the environment.”2

This is where the theory becomes most provocative. If developmental choice can override the survival instinct, then the self that has been chosen is a moral-developmental achievement that transcends its biological substrate. Dąbrowski was describing, in clinical and developmental terms, what it means for a person to have constituted themselves so thoroughly through acts of choice that their identity is no longer dependent on continued existence.

The Paradox at the Heart of the Third Factor

There is a philosophical puzzle in Dąbrowski’s account of where the third factor comes from, and he acknowledged it directly. The third factor must ultimately stem from either heredity or environment, since there are no other sources. But any strict derivation from one or both would fail to capture how it actually arises. His solution was Bergsonian: more can be found in the effects than in their causes. The third factor is emergent. It co-arises with the developmental process it organizes.

The agent of developmental choice is itself a developmental achievement. You cannot have the third factor without multilevel disintegration, and you cannot have organized multilevel disintegration without the third factor. This circularity is the phenomenological reality of development as Dąbrowski understood it. The self that chooses and the self that is chosen are the same self in different phases of its own becoming.

This is what makes Dąbrowski’s account fundamentally different from cognitive or behavioral models that treat choice as the operation of an already-constituted agent selecting among pre-defined options. In those models, the chooser is given; only the options vary. In Dąbrowski’s theory, the chooser is being constituted through the very act of choosing. Development is the process by which a self comes into being.

What This Means

The popular injunction to “choose yourself” gets the sequence backward. Developmental choice requires the disintegrative process that reveals the levels within, the capacity for self-observation that allows the distinction between “more myself” and “less myself,” and the prospective vision that orients choosing toward what one is becoming. The choice is hard-won, iterative, and never available without the suffering that makes vertical perception possible. It arrives late in the process, not at the beginning.

This also means that efforts to eliminate psychic distress—through medication, behavioral intervention, or cultural pressure to be positive—may be interrupting the very process through which developmental choice becomes possible. This was one of Dąbrowski’s most controversial claims, and one of his most important. Psychoneurosis, anxiety, depression, inner conflict—these are the conditions under which the vertical axis of the psyche becomes visible, and the work of choosing can begin.

The person in crisis who is experiencing shame about their own reactions, guilt about their own impulses, dissatisfaction with who they have been—that person is standing at the threshold of developmental choice. The question is whether the suffering will open the vertical dimension or collapse it. Whether they will find support for the difficult work of choosing who they are becoming—or be told to calm down, adjust, and accept.

Dąbrowski spent his career arguing that adjustment is a developmental dead end. The path to personality runs through the crisis, the choosing, and the willingness to keep choosing when the strange self remains strong, and the work is far from finished.

Three years ago today, we lost Frank Falk.1

He had been my mentor, collaborator, and friend for six years by then. He was the Director of Research at the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development and a co-developer of the Overexcitability Questionnaire-Two (OEQ-II), the instrument most widely used to measure overexcitability in the research literature.

In the last years of his life, he was the person I could bring my hardest questions to—about the theory, the field, and what it was costing me to remain inside a system that had drifted so far from the theory it claimed to serve.

Frank’s last wish was for me to finish his paper as co-author. It was the keynote he had delivered at the 2022 Dąbrowski Congress in Denver, titled Kazimierz Dąbrowski: The Existential Therapist. He had a draft, notes, and the copious archive of our work together, but he ran out of time.

That paper came out last year in Advanced Development. I want to say something here about Frank, and what our years together looked like from where I sat.

The shift

When I met Frank in 2015, he had spent decades doing rigorous empirical work on overexcitability. He described that focus in our April 9, 2019 interview:

“One of the things that intellectually I’ve done for a long time—almost all my career—I’ve taken on the measurement of difficult concepts, or new concepts, and tried to figure out how to get some way of empirically looking at them. That’s sort of a talent that I have, and it’s a skill that I have.”

He co-created the OEQ-II, OIP-II, and OEQ-IIc, and knew the instruments inside and out.

What he had yet to encounter was the rest of the early Polish record in Dąbrowski’s work: the 1935 textbook on nervousness in children, the 1938 paper, “Types of Increased Psychic Excitability,” and the 1949 paper on “Disintegration as a Positive Stage in the Development of the Individual.”2 In 2019, I was bringing him this material, and I watched him read it for the first time.

When we began exploring together what Dąbrowski had actually documented, something shifted in him. He told me once that the 1949 paper was the most informative piece by Dąbrowski he had read. He was revising his own understanding in real time, in the last years of his seventies and into his eighties, after a career of work on this theory.

During our interview, I watched him arrive at conclusions he had been circling for years. Asked about the reach and limitations of the OEQ-II, he was direct:

“Except for intellectual overexcitability, there’s no consistent finding with regard to giftedness and overexcitability.”

He added: “If we wanted to try to make it into a diagnostic tool, I don’t know what we’d do.” And then he named what he saw:

“The critical areas that I now see as so much more important are imaginational and emotional [OEs]. And trying to capture just those, alone, I think would be extremely difficult. Because of the breadth of it all.”

That is the co-developer of the OEQ-II saying that the construct is larger than what his instrument could capture.

He went further at our NAGC session in November 2021, the last conference presentation we gave together. During the virtual component we recorded, he told gifted educators, “Overexcitability is a medical neurological term. It is not a personality concept.”

He showed data from the ISAD database demonstrating that “the only overexcitability that continually shows up with regard to gifted is intellectual overexcitability.” He said plainly:

“You can’t even say that as people become more intelligent, as measured in IQ, that they become more overexcitable. It’s simply not true.”

And then came the line that I still recall so clearly:

“This is the kind of thing where those of us that create empirical data keep wondering what it is we need to do to get people to stop saying things which don’t fit with the data themselves.”

That was Frank at NAGC, saying publicly what his decades of measurement had shown him.

What we found together

The mentorship transformed both of us. In June 2018, while preparing to present together at the Dąbrowski Congress on “Overexcitabilities: The Drivers of Developmental Potential,” I wrote in my journal:

“Frank said that it is only now, doing this work with me, that he has felt like he understands the theory and it makes sense.”

A man who had studied Dąbrowski's constructs for decades was saying, in a room full of his closest colleagues, that our collaboration had changed what the theory meant to him. He was closing in on eighty. I was in my mid-forties and had defended my dissertation two weeks before. What passed between us did not move in one direction.

Our 2021 paper, “The Origins and Conceptual Evolution of Overexcitability,” came out of this work. It was the first systematic English-language account of where overexcitability came from, what it was before it entered gifted education in 1979, and what happened when it arrived. Frank’s name on that paper was significant because he was the one who had measured OE for decades. His reassessment was the reassessment of the person who had helped build the measurement apparatus.

The collaboration also produced moments that illustrated what happens when lived experience meets measurement expertise. In our interview, I raised the connection between sensual overexcitability and addiction that I’d been writing about based on my own history. Frank responded immediately:

“Your notion about sensual [OE] and addiction was so right on. As soon as you said that to me, I could relate immediately to every drug I’ve ever had. It is sensual, and it’s got nothing to do with your mind or your imagination.”

That kind of exchange, where a concept becomes real because someone with the right experience names what the data alone can’t, is what our collaboration was built on.

When I asked him in the same interview what impact Michael M. Piechowski had on his life, his answer was characteristically dry: “He’s certainly thrown me down the garbage path of overexcitabilities.”

Michael later heard this line and assumed Frank meant "garden path," but Frank had meant exactly what he said.

After our NAGC 2021 session, Frank wrote to me: “I think we work well together and I even enjoy the opportunity.” That even was pure Frank—the understated acknowledgment that something in him had been reactivated.

The last visit

The last time I saw Frank was January 4, 2023, at a Panera in southwest Denver. His wife, Nancy Miller, came, too. Frank had a new electric VW Tiguan with a sunroof he wanted to show me, so he had me sit in the driver’s seat and look up.

The weeks leading up to that lunch had been difficult. A paper had come out in Advanced Development that I strongly disagreed with, and the conversations that followed were hard on everyone involved. Through all of it, Frank stayed in steady contact, sending texts and calling me.

In the middle of the worst of it, when I told him how the conflict was going, he wrote back: “You have a strong personal involvement in the theory that few truly possess.” When I told him I didn’t know how to respond to something that had been published, he offered to write a response paper with me as co-author. That was Frank: practical and willing to put his name on what he believed.

As our lunch wound down, Nancy headed out, but Frank stayed, and we kept talking. I told him about the book I was trying to write—that I had gone on a deliberate search for a mentor years earlier, and that I now needed his guidance in shaping what the book would become. Frank had helpful things to say about it, and as we prepared to say goodbye, he told me he was proud of me. I had no idea that afternoon that it would be the last time we saw each other.

Within two weeks, Frank had sent a $500 donation to the Dąbrowski Center. He was also taking over as host of the Dąbrowski Study Group, which I had been hosting with my account for nearly two years and was stepping back from. When he got locked out of Zoom before the next meeting, I hosted from my account so everyone could get in. It was the last thing we did together as a working pair.

The inheritance

Frank had spent decades building instruments to measure overexcitability. In the end, he concluded that they were not adequate for what the theory actually required—that the construct was too broad, and too deep, to be captured by any questionnaire he or anyone else had yet devised.

He also came to see something more fundamental. The theory belongs to the people Dąbrowski actually studied—the ones who live with relentless anxiety and depression and obsessive inner worlds, the ones psychiatry diagnoses and schools pathologize. Frank gave me the permission to say that plainly and the trust to carry the work of returning it to them.

Every paper I publish now is shaped by what he taught me, and by his willingness to revise his own position in public when new evidence demanded it.

Three years gone, and the collaboration continues.

Thank you, Frank. I am still listening for what you would say next.

The historical record tells a completely different story.

What Dąbrowski Actually Documented

In 1935, Kazimierz Dąbrowski published Nervousness in Children and Youth1, a comprehensive textbook documenting his work with 250 children and adolescents who had a “normal mental level." These were young people whose nervous systems operated at higher intensities than their environments could accommodate. Giftedness was not his focus. He did note that talented individuals were overrepresented among these nervous children—but the sample was defined by nervous intensity, and the book's entire framework was organized around understanding that intensity, across the full range of mental ability.

Reading through Dąbrowski's detailed observational accounts—translated into English through painstaking work by Michael M. Piechowski—the patterns are unmistakable. His descriptions of psychomotor overexcitability map directly onto what we now call ADHD:

“When preparing a lesson, for example, of a native language, an individual with the above type of attention will start writing an essay that will interrupt in the middle, then start preparing literature, to review it briefly or partially, he finally takes to another task. In other cases, some individuals interrupt their work every 10-15 minutes to take a few steps around the room, or to deal with something else, even give in to the free current of involuntary associations.”

He also documented a pattern familiar to anyone whose child has been told they’re “inconsistent” or “not trying hard enough”:

“In many children and adolescents, I observed a great ability to focus attention in solitude, at home in their room, but great difficulty to focus it in the presence of other people.”

His accounts of sensual overexcitability, social difficulties, and rigid thinking patterns align with autistic presentations. His documentation of emotional intensity, anxiety, and rejection sensitivity describes experiences common across neurodivergent populations.

Dąbrowski observed these traits across his entire sample of children who simply experienced the world more intensely. He was documenting what we would now recognize as widespread human neurodivergence, before we had that language.

The Educational Reality Check

Dąbrowski’s observations about traditional schooling failures read like today’s special education battles:

“A math problem requires focusing attention for a minimum of time without being distracted; in nervous children it is most often difficult due to the strong mental fatigability and the tendency to yielding to the flow of involuntary associations.”

He found that 165 of his 250 subjects had literary abilities—and in the older classes, philosophical ones—with a strong preference for the humanities over mathematics and sciences. These children struggled in traditional educational settings, not due to deficits but because of mismatches between their neurological needs and environmental demands.

The Misdiagnosis Problem

Much of today’s confusion stems from Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults by the late James Webb and colleagues. While groundbreaking for its time, it drew a problematic line: if you’re gifted, you’re being misdiagnosed. If you have overexcitabilities, that’s not ADHD or autism—that’s giftedness.

This framework has aged poorly. It’s deeply out of step with what we know about neurodivergence, yet it’s still treated as gospel in many gifted education circles. We end up telling kids and adults—who may well be autistic, ADHD, PDA, or otherwise neurodivergent—that their neurotype is simply giftedness.

I can't tell you how many times I’ve personally been told by people in this field, “It’s your giftedness that matters,” while dismissing my history of mental illness and neurodivergence. The field has created a hierarchy where giftedness is treated as the explanation that overrides everything else. When giftedness is used to explain away other neurotypes, people lose access to accurate identification and appropriate support.

Dąbrowski's original work supports a far more nuanced view. He observed intensities across populations and understood them as developmental material—the raw substance of growth—rather than markers of intellectual superiority. His approach honored the full complexity of a person's experience rather than collapsing it into a single lens.

The Asynchrony Problem

This same narrowing shaped how we define giftedness itself.

Dąbrowski observed asynchronous development as a common human pattern—an uneven rhythm of maturation that shaped moral and emotional growth across many temperaments. When the Columbus Group recast it in 1991 as the defining feature of giftedness, the pattern shifted from a developmental descriptor to an identity marker. Heightened intensity became proof of giftedness rather than evidence of the diverse ways human nervous systems develop.

Contemporary neurodiversity research restores Dąbrowski’s original inclusivity. As Katy Higgins Lee noted in Positive Disintegration Episode 30, the uneven growth and sensitivity we call asynchrony appear across gifted, autistic, ADHD, and other neurodivergent populations alike. What differs is how society interprets the pattern—celebrated in one context, pathologized in another.

Recent empirical work confirms this reframing. A comprehensive meta-analysis published in Gifted Child Quarterly examined 20 studies on the relationship between overexcitabilities and giftedness (Olszewski-Kubilius et al., 2025). The findings challenge decades of assumptions: when researchers used rigorous, independent measures of cognitive ability to identify giftedness, the relationship with overexcitability disappeared. Emotional OE—the dimension most emphasized in practitioner literature—showed virtually no connection to giftedness at all.

The apparent relationships only emerged in studies where students were identified as “gifted” through program participation—exactly the conditions where OE characteristics had already been embedded in referral materials and identification checklists. This creates a circular system: OE is used to identify gifted students, those students are studied and found to have OE, and the conclusion drawn is that OE identifies giftedness. The authors conclude this sample bias has been artificially inflating apparent connections for decades.

This broader understanding expands access to frameworks that help anyone experiencing uneven development understand themselves. Dąbrowski’s original observations support this inclusive approach, documenting these patterns across diverse populations of young people whose primary commonality was living with intensity.

What I've Learned

Working across these domains, I can no longer count the number of friends, family, colleagues, podcast guests, and listeners who experience intense sensitivities, emotional flooding, motor restlessness, rich inner fantasy lives, and hyper-responsiveness to their environments.

They include highly gifted people, autistic people, people who are multi-exceptional, and people who are undiagnosed but deeply self-aware.

What they share is the intensity and complexity Dąbrowski described—and the transformative potential his theory points toward. My systematic analysis of Dąbrowski’s earliest work confirms he described what we now recognize as autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergence within his frameworks of nervousness and overexcitability decades before these neurotypes had names.

Restoration, Then

This work is about restoration: reconnecting overexcitability and asynchrony to Dąbrowski’s original, inclusive framework. These concepts describe developmental phenomena that gifted education adopted but did not originate. They belong to a broader understanding of human development. The preservation effort matters—the scholars who kept this theory alive when it might otherwise have disappeared did essential work. And the populations excluded from that effort deserve access to a framework that was always describing them, too.

Dąbrowski’s theory offers tools for making sense of intensity. It offers permission to experience disintegration without shame and a framework for becoming, regardless of where we start. Honoring his vision means recognizing intensity as universal human potential—developmental material available to everyone who lives in high definition.

It’s time for our definitions to catch up with what we know about human development—and what neurodivergent people have been telling us all along.

The seven of us—Caitlin Hughes, Chris Wells, Emma Nicholson, Bee Mayhew, Sheldon Gay, Marni Kammersell, and Teena Mogler—sat down together to explore what podcasting makes possible that other forms of research and advocacy cannot. What emerged was a conversation about voice, belonging, lived experience as expertise, and the kind of knowledge that forms between people when they’re allowed to think out loud together.

Rather than following a rigid script, we were guided by five open-ended questions that Caitlin designed to hold space for relational dialogue and reflexive sense-making. We talked about the inaccessibility of traditional knowledge spaces, what it means to reclaim lived experience as valid and generative knowledge, and the truths that live in contradiction, tangents, and half-finished thoughts. We also explored how this kind of podcasting ripples outward into neurodivergent community and belonging.

The paper identifies nine resonances that emerged from the recording, including voice as epistemic repair, messiness as method, lived experience as expertise, multiplicity and difference as community, and humor and play as co-regulation. If you’ve ever felt like this podcast gave you permission to be unfinished, or helped you see yourself outside of yourself—that’s the ripple we’re talking about.

Read the full paper (open access): https://doi.org/10.1177/27546330261437265

Published in: Neurodiversity, Volume 4, Special Issue: Towards a Critical Turn in Neurodiversity Studies: Bridging the Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences

*A PDF of the transcript is available here

The podcasters in this episode:

• Caitlin Hughes (she/they) is a queer, nonbinary, multi-exceptional Australian social worker, researcher, educator, and advocate. Late-identified as Autistic, ADHD, Gifted, and PDA, Caitlin co-hosts the Divergent Dialogues podcast and brings a lived experience-led perspective to their work. They are committed to fostering epistemic healing through relational ethics, narrative reclamation, and accessible, lived experience–driven knowledge creation.

• Chris Wells (they/them) is a multi-exceptional, nonbinary, and neurodivergent writer, podcaster, and developmental theorist specializing in Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. They co-host the Positive Disintegration, cosmic cheer squad, and PDA: Resistance and Resilience podcasts, and are the founding president of the Dąbrowski Center and co-creator of the Positive Disintegration Network. Chris brings lived experience and a deep commitment to reframing neurodivergence through a developmental and relational lens.

• Emma Nicholson (she/her) is a neurodivergent Australian Senior Business Analyst, creative and advocate, identifying as gifted, Dyscalculic, with all five overexcitabilities (psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, and emotional), as well as bisexual and Heathen. She co-hosts the Positive Disintegration Podcast and serves as Vice President of the Dąbrowski Center. She is driven by an unkillable passion to demystify positive disintegration and share hard-won truths to help others feel seen and supported.

• Bee Mayhew (she/her) is a multiply neurodivergent (late-identified AuDHD, former gifted kid) writer, narrative collaborator, and communication coordinator for PDN Media. She co-hosts cosmic cheer squad podcast and has a background as a hospitality specialist and business owner. Bee’s work centers on collective narrative-building and neurodivergent storytelling through activist, community-rooted practice.

• Sheldon Gay (he/him) is a Black Gifted speaker and podcast host of I Must Be BUG'N (Black Underrepresented/Unidentified Gifted and otherwise Neurodivergent). Sheldon is guided by the belief that learning to deeply and wholly Love oneSelf, cape and kryptonite, is the path to finding, creating, and maintaining Love everywhere we go.

• Marni Kammersell (she/her) is an American late-identified neurodivergent (Autistic, ADHD, PDA, gifted) parent of neurodivergent children. She is an educator, researcher, writer, and consultant, and co-hosts the PDA: Resistance and Resilience podcast. Marni is dedicated to honoring neurodivergent experience through relational, self-directed, and nervous-system-informed knowledge practices.

• Teena Mogler (she/her) is an Australian AuDHD social worker, researcher, educator, and advocate, as well as co-host of the Divergent Dialogues podcast. As a mother to neurodivergent children, Teena is passionate about amplifying neurodivergent voices and disrupting epistemic injustice through lived experience-led, neuroaffirming, and critically reflexive knowledge practices.

Find the podcasters:

• Divergent Dialogues: divergentdialogues.substack.com

• I Must Be BUG’N: sheldongayisbugn.com

• Positive Disintegration: www.positivedisintegration.org

• cosmic cheer squad: cosmiccheersquad.substack.com

• PDA: Resistance and Resilience: pdapodcast.substack.com

Connect with us

• Positive Disintegration on Substack

• Visit the Dabrowski Center website

• Facebook

• Instagram

• The Positive Disintegration YouTube Channel

• Adults with Overexcitabilities group on Facebook

• The Tragic Gift blog by Emma

• Email us at positivedisintegration.pod@gmail.com

• Please consider donating to the Dabrowski Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

• Find Positive Disintegration Merch

If you enjoyed this episode on Apple or Spotify, please remember to click on the stars and leave a rating or write a review. Thank you!

For those who’ve followed my work, you know that Michael M. Piechowski—the scholar who brought Dąbrowski’s theory to gifted education—has been my friend and mentor for nearly a decade. He's 92. Last year, following the move from Colorado to Madison, Wisconsin, my partner and I decided to build a house five minutes from Michael’s place. I didn't know then how much that proximity would matter.

This fall and winter, it's mattered. In mid-November, he had emergency surgery for a blood clot in his leg—completely out of the blue. He was housebound for weeks afterward, and I stepped into a caregiving role. Near daily visits, errands, and presence. The things you do when someone you care about needs you.

I’m grateful I could be there—grateful we moved here, grateful for the timing. It’s what I wanted to do. But presence at that level doesn’t leave much room for other work. My energy went to showing up, not producing. The posts I’d drafted sat untouched. The podcasts continued because the episodes had already been recorded, and my co-hosts carried the weight. The academic work continued, but that's because sharing drafts and talking through ideas was part of being there for him.

Michael is doing better. I’m surfacing. Each day, I feel more rested, and my energy is returning.

The Mapping series

The final two installments of “Mapping the Emotional Landscape” exist. They’re written. And I’m not publishing them yet.

The later phases are too close to where I am now. The people are still in my life. More time has to pass before I can feel comfortable sharing them.

Emotional sovereignty, the capacity I’ve been tracing across this series, doesn’t mean saying everything you know to be true. Sometimes it means holding what’s true until the moment is right. Discernment is more important than disclosure.

The series pauses at Phase 3. Not because the story ends there, but because I’ve chosen to let it pause.

What I’ve been working on

Caregiving wasn’t the whole story. The silence here didn’t mean silence everywhere.

Two papers came out in Advanced Development in November. The first, “Kazimierz Dąbrowski: The Existential Therapist,” was Frank Falk’s final work—his unfinished paper that he asked me to complete as co-author before he died. The second, “Mentors, Meaning, and Metamorphosis,” traces my own journey with the theory through the mentorship of both Frank and Michael. Seeing them published together in the same volume felt like a culmination of years of work.

Beyond that, the scholarly pipeline is full. Papers on overexcitability and how it was narrowed when it entered gifted education. A paper on Dąbrowski's play Nothing Can Be Changed Here and what it reveals about his vision. Work with Caitlin Hughes to bring Mad Studies and positive disintegration into conversation. A collaborative piece on podcasting as neuroqueer methodology. Methodological writing on relational-developmental autoethnography. Some are under review, some are in revision, some are still taking shape—but the body of work is building toward something I've been preparing for years.

2025 was the most productive year of my scholarly life, and also the most personally demanding—not just logistically, but relationally. Moving into a new house. Launching two new podcasts. Losing Seph Johnson, a young person I'd worked with on the theory for years. Navigating health crises with someone close to me. Facing hard truths about relationships I'd long idealized. The work didn't happen despite all of that. Some of it happened because of it.

What’s coming

I have nearly twenty posts drafted and waiting. The podcasts continue, though I've stepped back from editing for the past two months. I'll return to that work in February. I’m returning to the rhythm of writing for this space.

I also have news about the direction of my work that I’ll share in a separate post soon. And some thoughts on what it means when the truth is out there, and the misinformation continues anyway.

For now, I wanted to name where I’ve been. Not trying to frame the silence as something deliberate or productive. Just telling the truth: I was caring for someone I love. Now I’m coming back.

Thank you for understanding.

Mattia shares their journey from misdiagnosis to self-understanding, the physical reality of nervous system shutdown, and why “do less” might be the most radical advice for neurodivergent people. We also get into the work question—why so many of us can’t stay in traditional jobs, the integrity trigger, and what it means to build a life around your actual needs rather than neurotypical expectations.

Links from this episode

AuDHD Flourishing Podcast

AuDHD Flourishing Episode 88 with Chris Wells

Do Less

Also mentioned:

• PDA: Resistance and Resilience Episode 7, Creative Resistance, with Marni Kammersell, Chris Wells, and guest Mattia Maurée

• Caitlin Hughes from the Divergent Dialogues Podcast

  ---

Connect with us

• Positive Disintegration on Substack

• Visit the Dabrowski Center website

• Facebook

• Instagram

• The Positive Disintegration YouTube Channel

• Adults with Overexcitabilities group on Facebook

• The Tragic Gift blog by Emma

• Email us at positivedisintegration.pod@gmail.com

• Please consider donating to the Dabrowski Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

• Find Positive Disintegration Merch

If you enjoyed this episode on Apple or Spotify, please remember to click on the stars and leave a rating or write a review. Thank you!

Both faced challenges this year, and both noticed something striking: they handled it differently than they would have before. The theory has become a real-time companion rather than a post-mortem tool—dynamisms catching in the moment instead of being identified after the fact.

They discuss:

• The shift from analyzing crises afterward to navigating them as they unfold

• How relational resilience and genuine listening matter (with gratitude to )

• What they’d do differently—never saying levels, prioritizing lived experience over expertise, better audio equipment

• Plans for 2026: more episodes featuring just the two of them, deeper dives into lived experience

• An announcement: they’re stepping away from the Dabrowski Congress to take a new direction

The episode ends where the theory always points: shedding what’s less like us and moving toward greater autonomy.

Resources from this episode

• Dabrowski 101 (YouTube)

• Ep. 56: Autoethnography for Personal Growth

• Ep. 72, Healing through Writing with Dr. Lil Jedynak ()

• cosmic cheer squad podcast

• PDA: Resistance and Resilience podcast

Connect with us

• Positive Disintegration on Substack

• Visit the Dabrowski Center website

• Facebook

• Instagram

• The Positive Disintegration YouTube Channel

• Adults with Overexcitabilities group on Facebook

• The Tragic Gift blog by Emma

• Email us at positivedisintegration.pod@gmail.com

• Please consider donating to the Dabrowski Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

• Find Positive Disintegration Merch

If you enjoyed this episode on Apple or Spotify, please remember to click on the stars and leave a rating or write a review. Thank you!

If Phase 2 was about learning to fight for my own voice, Phase 3 was about learning to listen to it—to trust feeling as information rather than interference. The years 2014–2015 opened a different register of emotional life—less about resistance, more about resonance. The anger and boundary-setting of the previous phase had cleared space for something quieter to emerge: a capacity to stay present with feeling rather than wrestle it into action. Emotional intensity began to reveal its deeper purpose—as a current carrying meaning.

In this phase, I started to recognize emotion itself as intelligence, a way of perceiving that could guide understanding as surely as thought ever had.

The Quality of Presence

The most striking difference between Phase 2 and Phase 3 shows up in the quality of emotional presence. Where Phase 2 emotions were often urgent, demanding immediate expression or action, Phase 3 emotions had a contemplative quality—deeper, more textured, carrying what felt like spiritual weight.

“My brain is so cool. Well, it’s cool, but harsh sometimes, in the way it processes things. I’ve been emotional lately, not just about Dr. B, but also Bob, my grandmother, etc. And I’ve cried, but never let myself really feel it and cry. It usually happens when I’m writing, so I have to keep going and write through the tears.” (May 7, 2014)

The shift came in learning to create space for feeling rather than simply managing it. One afternoon in the shower, something changed:

“I had a couple of scenes pop into my head. More like just images... Today I went to the death story. From a few different angles/perspectives. And I really cried, it was serious emotion, finally.”

This was active choice. Another morning, processing grief through worldplay, I noticed my own deliberation:

“Now that I’m paying closer attention to my worldplay, I find it interesting to see how much I guide it… [This morning] it was so emotional. I was crying and I was torn about whether or not to feed it and let it play out. Because it leaves me feeling so emotionally drained. I did choose to let it continue, and fed it with music.” (May 14, 2014)

I was learning to stay present with emotional complexity without needing to immediately resolve or escape it. The emotions seemed to carry information about relationships, about loss, about the nature of human connection.

The more I wrote and felt, the more I began to crave a framework that could hold such complexity—a theory that treated emotion as signal, not noise.

A Competing Framework Emerges

In March 2014, I had encountered Piechowski’s work on emotional giftedness and overexcitability. The theory had described experiences I’d never seen reflected anywhere else—the intensity, the depth of feeling, the sense of being fundamentally different. By September, despite difficulty accessing Dąbrowski’s original work and being put off by the resources available online, the theory had become inescapable. I was reading Dąbrowski directly for my literature review.

On September 10, 2014, something shifted. The theory wasn’t just intellectually interesting anymore—it was starting to do its work on my self-understanding.

“I’m working on my lit review, and Dabrowski’s theory and ideas are so familiar and upsetting. Piechowski’s, too. I think about the difference between the Menninger admissions—the list of positives and negatives—and I think of who I really am and how, at times, I was so terribly misunderstood. It’s painful to reflect on.”

The pain came from recognition. Here was a framework that suggested my experiences at Menninger—the intensity, the existential crises, the emotional turbulence—might have been misread. What had been pathologized as disorder might have been development. The theory offered a competing narrative, not replacing the pathology framework yet, but sitting alongside it, creating productive tension. That realization dignified my suffering, rather than erasing it. For the first time, I could imagine that pain had purpose.

That same day, I wrote about the trusted adults in a way that began to depathologize those intense connections, even while still considering myself mentally ill:

“And I’ve been emotional today. I’ve talked to Dr. B in worldplay. That’s what happens at times. I don’t usually notice it, but tonight it happened to occur to me that I was engaging in my head—like a daydream with him—and it was a satisfying thing. Not quite as good as the real thing, but close. That’s something that characterizes each of the trusted adults. The feeling that talking to them is practically like a drug. It changes me. Even now, any connection with the trusted adults is a gift. It feels good. It helps me somehow. There’s a quality in each of them that I never tire of, and I want it. It’s hard to explain. But that’s the key, I think, to the connection I had with them. Other adults I talked with were different—even when I really liked them.”

What had once seemed pathological was beginning to reveal itself as developmental necessity—the kind of connection that makes growth possible. The theory gave me language for experiences that had been illegible within psychiatric frameworks.

The Formal Beginning of Method

The deeper I went into feeling, the more I needed form. Method became the scaffolding that allowed emotion to speak coherently.

On February 28, 2014, something shifted fundamentally. What had been years of survival writing and reflective journaling became something else:

“My autoethnography has formally started. Today. It feels amazing to have discovered the best way to use my exceptional life story at this point in my journey as a researcher.”

I had begun treating my archive as data. I was scanning handwritten journals, coding them systematically in Atlas.ti, developing a codebook to track patterns in tone, self-reference, relational tension, and emerging insight. What distinguished this from earlier reflection was the integration of emotional engagement with analytical rigor. Beyond simply remembering, I was analyzing, categorizing, and interpreting across time.

“I did some serious code merging today. I’m trying to tighten up these quotations so that they group into themes effectively.” (April 10, 2014)

This methodological structure provided a container for emotional archaeology. I was excavating the emotional residue of formative relationships—particularly with the “trusted adults” who had shaped my capacity for attachment and growth. The research demanded emotional engagement at every level, but now that engagement had purpose and structure.

“It’s interesting that in my letter to Dr. N I’ve ended up talking about Dr. B. And I’ll likely send Dr. N’s letter to Dr. B. I want them to know about each other, because they were both tied to my soul in a different way than any other two professionals. Which is why it was so emotional, and volatile, at times.”

Preparing documents to send to Dave meant confronting what that relationship had meant:

“Writing that letter to Dave was so emotional. It makes me emotional to think about it... I’ve never said the words ‘I love you’ to Dave. But I have [loved him] since that spring/summer of 1990.”

The work itself became inseparable from my emotional development:

“[The trip to Connecticut] is going to be intense—emotional—and I’ll need to write about it along with the interviews. If there’s one thing I’m learning, it’s that the concurrent, reflexive nature of this work is helping me make connections and realizations.”

Phase 3 was about holding depth within a systematic framework. The research wasn’t separate from emotional development; it was the container for it. Each interview, each letter, each excavated memory became an opportunity for integration. My most difficult emotions often pointed toward my most important truths. This was relational-developmental autoethnography emerging as method.

The Eye of Sauron: When Intensity Recognizes Itself

One of the most striking developments of Phase 3 was the emergence of what I came to call metacognitive awareness—the capacity to observe my own observing. In late June 2014, wrestling with the overwhelming nature of sharing my archive with trusted adults like Dave, I wrote something that captured this reflective awareness perfectly:

“This shit with Dave—and Marcia had a way more extreme reaction—makes me feel like the people I share my story with are burdened with an Eye of Sauron-like intensity. Jesus. In order to deal with this realization I need to spread my thoughts about it to 2-3 people. Because I can’t put it all on one person. My intensity is a blessing and a curse. I need to figure out how to use it for good.”

The metaphor was apt: Tolkien’s Eye was an unblinking gaze that saw everything, missed nothing, and could burn with its attention. I had begun to recognize that my emotional and intellectual intensity created a similar effect—a focused beam of attention that could feel overwhelming to receive. This was not paranoia or self-deprecation. It was accurate perception of a real pattern, seen clearly for the first time.

What made this moment significant was the immediate pivot:

“But I suppose that’s what I’m currently doing. Using my gaze to make a difference through research. It’s the intense focus that allows me to take on these huge projects.”

I was watching myself recognize my own intensity, then immediately asking: How can this be used for good? This is what Dąbrowski called subject-object in oneself—the capacity to stand outside your own experience and evaluate it, to see yourself as both subject and object. The very intensity that made relationships challenging was also what made possible the depth of analysis required for this work.

The entry continued with stunning self-awareness:

“It’s a handicap when I’m not doing well emotionally. I’ve spent entire years of my life not being able to control the focus, and getting stuck with a negative stimulus. Like crack. Or Dr. B. Or gambling. So many things.”

I could now see the pattern across time: the same cognitive intensity that enabled marathon research sessions had previously locked onto destructive targets. The mechanism was identical; only the object had changed. What distinguished Phase 3 was not the disappearance of intensity but the development of structures that could direct it.

The passage closed with something I’d never felt before:

“This is the first time in my life that I believe in my heart that I’m working to my potential. That I’m doing my best and it’s for something meaningful. Meaningful on multiple planes. I’ve never felt that my brain was firing on all cylinders, so to speak, until recently... This is flow. It’s a window of opportunity that I can take advantage of—finally—to do my life’s work.”

The overexcitabilities had generated the raw intensity, but something new was happening inside it. Awareness had turned inward, able to see itself—to recognize, name, and redirect the energy that once burned unchecked. The Eye of Sauron image captured that shift: intensity no longer consuming, but illuminating. The capacity to watch myself in motion, to understand and guide the same forces that once controlled me—that was the dynamism emerging from the overexcitabilities themselves.

The Paradox of Emotional Exhaustion and Inner Expansion

One of the most fascinating aspects of Phase 3 was how emotional exhaustion and psychological expansion seemed to occur simultaneously. The deeper I went into feeling, the more drained I became—and yet, something was opening.

“It’s 10:52 am and I’ve processed more emotions and solved more serious problems than most people do in a week.”

The intensity of emotional processing was unlike anything most people experienced in their daily lives:

“I’m actually pretty exhausted... It’s emotional to do this. I shouldn’t let myself get overwhelmed. Which is much easier said than done, that’s for sure.”

I was learning that emotional depth has its own ecology. Like any powerful current, it required respect, boundaries, and recovery time. But within that exhaustion was a kind of meaningful emptiness, which allowed space for something new to emerge.

Retrospective Understanding

Phase 3 also brought the capacity to look back at experiences that had been illegible in the moment and find their patterns. Working systematically with my archive, I began correlating symptom presentations with environmental conditions—particularly chronic stress. This kind of retrospective phenomenological analysis, using emotional memory as data, would become central to my methodology. I was learning that my capacity to recall the subjective quality of different mental states with precision could serve research purposes.

Worldplay as Emotional Laboratory

During this phase, my imaginational overexcitability took on a new function. The worldplay that had once been escape became a laboratory for emotional processing and integration.

“I’ve got some worldplay going on tonight, the emotional kind. It centers around guardianship, and feeling loved. And I thought of how just one person was truly necessary in that world—Richard. In this world, it took so many people to help me make it.”

The imaginal world became a place where I could safely experience and process emotions that were too intense for daily life. It was a bridge between my inner reality and my capacity to function in relationship with others.

Attunement as Burden and Gift

The same sensitivity that animated my inner world also tuned me acutely to others, which was a gift that often felt like too much to bear.

One of the most difficult aspects of Phase 3 was developing what I can only describe as emotional hypervigilance—an acute awareness of others’ emotional states that was both gift and burden.

Before encountering the framework of giftedness and overexcitability, this capacity had felt like pathology:

“Before I learned about the characteristics of 2e/giftedness, it never made sense to be so much more emotional than other people—what was wrong with me?”

But the capacity itself remained challenging, regardless of how I understood it:

“One of the problems of being attuned to people’s emotional reactions is to detect inauthentic ones. To really know when people lack empathy is terrible. It’s an awareness that people don’t understand.”

This was a form of emotional intelligence that could see through facades and perceive the authentic emotional reality beneath social presentations. It was simultaneously isolating and deeply connected.

The Integration of Grief and Gratitude

Perhaps the most psychologically significant development of Phase 3 was learning to hold grief and gratitude simultaneously. The deaths of important figures—particularly Bob—became opportunities for integration rather than just loss.

“It was just shy of a year ago that I reached out to Bob with information about my project. And we were in Kansas—Manhattan—when his wife called. I circled the parking lot while she described how ill he was. When I finally parked the car, I got out and was able to sit and cry, and write, about Bob.”

I was learning that the deepest emotions—grief, love, gratitude, loss—often arrive together. The capacity to feel one fully often meant feeling them all. This was emotional maturity.

Dynamisms as Lived Experience

What’s remarkable about Phase 3 is how clearly it reflects what Dąbrowski described as Level III dynamisms—particularly dissatisfaction with oneself, guilt, and the development of inner hierarchy. But these weren’t abstract concepts; they were lived emotional realities.

“I’m tearful this morning. Extra emotional. I’ve outed myself to the world at multiple times during my life. As a teenager, a mental patient, student, social worker, and now doctoral student.”

The capacity for self-reflection had deepened into something approaching self-transcendence. I could observe my own emotional patterns with both compassion and discernment, seeing them as part of a larger developmental process.

From Personal to Universal

By the end of Phase 3, emotional intensity was becoming a tool for understanding universal human experience. My capacity to feel deeply was revealing itself as a form of research methodology, a way of knowing that transcended intellectual analysis.

The emotions carried information not only about my own development, but about the nature of attachment, trauma, growth, and healing. They were becoming a bridge between personal experience and transpersonal insight.

The Meaning-Making Nature of Feeling

What distinguishes Phase 3 most clearly is the recognition that emotional intensity is a form of deep sensitivity to meaning. The capacity to feel deeply was revealing itself as a capacity to perceive profound dimensions of human experience.

This was a deep respect for feeling as a form of intelligence, a way of knowing that could access truths unavailable to purely rational analysis.

The silence of Phase 1 had broken open into voice in Phase 2. Now, in Phase 3, that voice was learning to speak beyond personal truth to universal truth—the kind that emerges only through deep feeling and profound presence. More than that, the emotional and imaginational intensity that had generated the voice was now becoming its own object of study. The overexcitabilities were giving birth to dynamisms, and those dynamisms were learning to recognize and name the very intensities that had created them. The movement of intensity observing itself—emotion studying emotion—became the engine of everything that followed.

In the next phase, complexity deepens again—emotion and grief intertwine as the long work of repair begins.

If this work has been meaningful to you, I invite you to support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Writing and podcasting about Dąbrowski’s theory, neurodivergence, and lived transformation is my full-time work. Every paid subscription helps cover the time, energy, and research that go into each post and podcast episode.

If Phase 1 was about enduring, Phase 2 was about emerging. The years from 2007 to 2013 marked a fundamental shift in my relationship with emotional intensity—from something that happened to me to something I could finally engage with. More than the end of overwhelm, this was the beginning of agency.

The transition wasn’t coincidental in its timing. In 2006, I became a parent—an experience that cracked me open in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. Suddenly, I had someone depending on my emotional availability, someone whose well-being required that I learn to be present with feelings rather than fleeing from them. Parenthood made emotional avoidance impossible and emotional growth necessary.

“In the shower, I was thinking about the postpartum depression part of my story. How hard that was—incredibly hard. And how shocking it was to experience being that mentally ill after several years of relative stability. I honestly thought about walking away… and disappearing. Just becoming homeless and giving up everything. The overwhelming emotions—the desire to hurt myself, throw and smash things. The mood swings.” (November 22, 2007)

This was the breaking of the silence. The beginning of Phase 2.

Finding My Voice Through Story

The most striking difference between Phase 1 and Phase 2 shows up in how I wrote about emotions. Where Phase 1 offered fragments and distress signals, Phase 2 reveals someone actively working to understand and articulate emotional experience.

Writing became my primary tool for emotional archaeology. I developed what I can only describe as a somatic relationship with story—my body would tell me when something needed to be written:

“Such an emotional story came to me while I was in the shower. It was when I worked at JCH and Bill asked me if I was ok. Man that was rough. I wrote it up and posted it on LiveJournal. Any time a story makes me cry, I know it’s time to write it up.” (February 25, 2010)

This was excavation work. I was digging up buried experiences and giving them form, learning that putting words to emotional reality could transform it:

“I am so drained emotionally… I just wrote about Grammie, which made me cry so hard. Whew... Because I never finished the first draft. It was too painful and too emotional to move past Grampie’s death. To tackle all the difficult things that came later.” (April 5, 2010)

The most difficult stories often yielded the most relief. I was learning that emotional processing had its own rhythms and requirements.

Learning to Grieve

Phase 2 was marked by significant losses that forced me to develop new capacities for processing grief. When my father died in 2009, I documented the unfolding of mourning with a precision that would have been impossible in Phase 1:

“My father died yesterday. I am still in shock. It’s hard to believe he’s really gone… Today I was really out of it. I’m hoping to take the week off. Maybe work a little. I just need to grieve and let it sink in. It’s been a really long time coming. It feels weird to only have one parent left. And now my mom is free. Free to live her life in peace. I know that each day this coming week or two I’ll probably go through many more emotions.” (October 25, 2009)

The next day, I could feel the emotional reality shifting:

“Tonight I was looking over old journals and it occurred to me that in the [imaginal world], my father has been dead for 26 years. In real life, it’s just two days. But now he’s gone in both worlds. It’s weird. I was less in shock today and more emotional.” (October 26, 2009)

Weeks later, I was learning to accept professional guidance from my therapist about the healing process:

“Tonight I saw Mark to talk to him about how I’m doing and what to do about work. He doesn’t think I should go in this week. He’ll give me a note to return on Monday if that’s what we decide to do when I see him on Saturday. We talked about complicated grief and the way the emotions I’m feeling have both surprised and overwhelmed me. I cried for the first time in a session with him. I hate to do that, but there was no stopping it. He said it’s not good to hold tears back, that it just interferes with healing.” (November 17, 2009)

These entries show someone learning to anticipate emotional needs, to make space for grief, and to track the subtle changes in feeling across time. The progression from trying to return to work immediately to accepting that grief required time and space demonstrates a crucial shift. I was developing emotional literacy—not only the ability to feel, but the capacity to observe and articulate what I was feeling, and to accept professional guidance about emotional healing.

The Laboratory of Relationship

Phase 2 was when I discovered that emotions are fundamentally relational. The breakthrough came through examining my relationship with Dr. B, a psychiatrist who became something like a father figure during my early twenties:

“I was just up in our room looking at journals again. I clearly liked Dr. B telling me what to do. He sure did enough of it... I have to write about what it felt like when I saw him. It was a very distinct feeling. It was like, all was right with the world in that moment. I smiled involuntarily. It’s really tough to put into words. I liked him from the beginning, but the more I saw him, the more I liked him. He was funny and perceptive. I started to feel really safe talking to him. And his office was the safest place I knew. I had been so stunted emotionally that once I felt safe with him, I became a kid with him. A teenager.” (February 26, 2010)

But that safety came with complications. The very feelings that drew me to Dr. B also triggered patterns I couldn’t yet control:

“I definitely think the next thing to write about Dr. B is how much I liked him and how much it seemed like I didn’t [like him] to observers. It was really frustrating and inside, I felt shame for being an asshole to someone I liked and respected so much. It was like being a kid and throwing a rock at someone you like. I was not mature enough to handle my emotions. Was it manipulation? Or was it getting my needs met? I still struggled with anger, and I felt safe enough to get angry with him. It turned out to be the beginning of a very healing relationship for me.” (February 17, 2010)

This is what Dąbrowski called ambitendency—the simultaneous pull toward and push away from what we most need. I was drawn to Dr. B’s presence and care, yet my immature emotional capacities made me lash out at the very person I most valued. The closer I felt to him, the more volatile my behavior became. This wasn’t manipulation in any conscious sense; it was the paradox of someone who desperately needed connection but lacked the developmental structures to receive it safely. The relationship could hold this tension, and in that holding, something began to heal.

This became my first real laboratory for emotional development because it could hold complexity. With Dr. B, I learned what it felt like to be truly seen, even in my most difficult moments:

“For now, I think I’ll keep moving forward with the journals and making notes about things that strike me. When people got to me—really made a connection with me—it was so hard to talk to them seriously. It was such a pattern. I wanted so much to really talk, but I couldn’t. It took so long to let down my guard with people. Here I’m speaking of Mr. Harrison, the Holms, Pat, Chris, Dave, Dr. N, Dr. B. There were plenty of people and shrinks that never had a chance to get through to me. The times when I actually got emotional with these people were watershed moments. Real trust.” (February 4, 2010)

What strikes me now is how I understood, even then, that emotional growth required the right conditions. It was not enough to just feel—I needed safe containers, trusted witnesses, relationships that could hold the intensity without breaking. The paradox was that feeling safe enough to express difficult emotions, even destructively, became part of the healing process itself.

Professional Integration: Choosing to Engage

During this phase, I made a conscious decision to move toward emotional complexity rather than away from it. I chose to study child welfare in graduate school and work in child protection—essentially building a career around the very dynamics that had once nearly destroyed me.

I was learning to transform my wounded knowledge into professional expertise, my personal experience into a source of insight that could serve others.

The work was often overwhelming:

“I have so much shit to do at work—that’s definitely one of my problems with being there. It’s overwhelming to me during this emotional/stressful time. I find my emotions to be very labile. I’m all over the place.” (November 4, 2009)

But I was developing the capacity to hold emotional complexity professionally, to be present with others’ pain without being destroyed by it.

The Exhaustion of Growth

One of the most honest aspects of Phase 2 is how thoroughly it documents the labor involved in emotional development. This wasn’t a gentle unfolding—it was intensive, exhausting work:

“I have an appointment with Mark tonight and I’m already burned out emotionally. I cried for about a half hour while showering, thinking of interviews. Two with me and one with Richard. It was tough. And it wasn’t bad stuff, but sometimes good stuff makes you cry, too.” (March 17, 2010)

These weren’t literal interviews—they were scenes unfolding in my imaginal world, where I was processing relationships and experiences through narrative. The emotional reality of that inner work was as demanding as any external processing. I was learning that imaginational overexcitability creates vivid mental experiences while generating real emotional labor that requires real recovery.

I began to understand that emotional processing had its own rhythms and requirements, regardless of whether it happened in response to external events or internal narrative. I needed recovery time after particularly intense imaginative work. This was a crucial lesson that I hadn’t learned in Phase 1: emotional work is real work. It requires energy, attention, and recovery.

The capacity to feel deeply is a gift, but it’s also a responsibility—to myself and to others who depend on my emotional availability.

From Victim to Witness

The fundamental shift of Phase 2 was from being at the mercy of my emotions to becoming their witness and interpreter. I wasn’t yet their master—that kind of sovereignty would come later—but I was no longer their victim.

“I really grew up during my time with Dr. B. First, it was him, when I was incredibly immature… He spent a year filling in like a parent, giving me exactly what I needed. And then he was there for me, as a back up really, when I was growing up the hard way. I knew I could call on him, and that felt good, but I didn’t. I made it through on my own, and it ended up changing my life. He gave me enough tools emotionally to handle myself. And I took it from there.” (March 19, 2010)

I learned that emotions could be studied, understood, and worked with. They had patterns and purposes. They carried information. Most importantly, they could be shared with others without destroying either of us.

During this phase, I also began to notice shifts in how my mind processed difficult experiences. The rich imaginative world that had once served as escape was gradually transforming into something else—a capacity for creative integration, for finding new ways to metabolize and transform painful material. I was learning that the same mental processes that had once protected me through dissociation could evolve into tools for healing and meaning-making.

The Emergence of Purpose

By the end of Phase 2, something new was emerging: a sense that my emotional intensity might have purpose beyond personal survival:

“I got a little emotional today thinking about the story of the book. That I had such a promising future as a kid. Everyone always expected me to do great things. Then I have my first manic episode at 18 and write the book. I start to deteriorate at 19-20, and it’s like hell for almost 7 years. Even then, it takes me a long time to stabilize, but I do. And the potential at school is fulfilled. It takes time, but I get to where I am now. It’s hard to remember what it was like for everyone to be like, you’re brilliant and you can do anything, to going in and out of mental hospitals. Eventually giving up on myself. But then pulling it together. Getting stability with Jason. It’s amazing, but it was hard. I’ve had a tough life, but a good life, too.” (April 12, 2010)

This entry reveals how thoroughly I had internalized a pathologizing narrative about my own experience. A clinician had convinced me that my first book—written during what I now understand was a period of intense creative flow—was the product of a manic episode. I carried this reframing for years, well into Phase 3, allowing it to reshape my understanding of one of the most significant achievements of my young adulthood. Only much later would I recognize that what I had experienced was not mania but multiple overexcitabilities in full bloom.

Even while accepting this misinterpretation of my own experience, I was learning to trust that my emotional reality had value, that it contained knowledge worth sharing, experiences worth understanding. The silence had broken open, and I was finding my voice as someone who had survived emotional intensity and transformed it into insight, relationship, and eventually, service to others who were still learning to speak their own truths.

What Phase 2 Taught Me

Phase 2 established the foundational truth that would guide all my subsequent development: emotions are relational, and healing happens in relationship. The safety I found with Dr. B, the trust I learned to extend to others, the capacity to be witnessed in my vulnerability—these became the building blocks for everything that followed.

This phase also taught me that emotional overexcitability operates as more than feeling intensely; it involves feeling more accurately. My emotions were carrying information about my experiences, my relationships, and my environment that I needed to learn to read. The exhaustion I felt was evidence of the real work happening—the work of integration, of transformation, of becoming.

Most importantly, Phase 2 showed me that my intensity could serve others. Whether through my professional work, my writing, or my willingness to be vulnerable in relationship, I was learning that what had once felt like a curse could become a gift.

In the next post, I’ll explore Phase 3: the years when emotional intensity revealed itself as a form of intelligence—when feeling deeply became a way of knowing, and my emotions began carrying information not only about my own healing, but about the universal nature of human connection and growth.

If this work has been meaningful to you, I invite you to support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Writing and podcasting about Dąbrowski’s theory, neurodivergence, and lived transformation is my full-time work. Every paid subscription helps cover the time, energy, and research that go into each post and podcast episode.

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This conversation invites listeners to think about how we relate to ourselves and others when we step outside of convention. Heather’s insights bridge psychotherapy and lived experience, showing how awareness, compassion, and honesty can transform the way we love, communicate, and grow.

Topics include:

• Rethinking monogamy, non-monogamy, and ethical relationships

• The overlap between giftedness, neurodivergence, and relational complexity

• Gestalt therapy as a practice of awareness, authenticity, and co-creation

• I-Thou relationships and the ethics of seeing others as full humans

• The role of language in communication and self-understanding

• How Buddhist psychology and radical acceptance inform Heather’s work

Heather also shares moving reflections on loss, love, and the lifelong process of learning to “accept pain without turning it into unnecessary suffering.”

Resources from this episode

Heather’s website

Humans of Gestalt (website)

Humans of Gestalt (YouTube)

Connect with us

• Positive Disintegration on Substack

• Visit the Dabrowski Center website

• Facebook

• Instagram

• The Positive Disintegration YouTube Channel

• Adults with Overexcitabilities group on Facebook

• The Tragic Gift blog by Emma

• Email us at positivedisintegration.pod@gmail.com

• Please consider donating to the Dabrowski Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

• Find Positive Disintegration Merch

If you enjoyed this episode on Apple or Spotify, please remember to click on the stars and leave a rating or write a review. Thank you!

If Mapping is about how emotional overexcitability evolved across time, this piece is about the practice that made that evolution possible—writing as ritual, prayer, and initiation. Together they form two views of the same terrain: one chronological, the other methodological.

Over the last eight years, I've written millions of words. My journals alone add up to 300–500k words each year. Add another 130–150k in emails, and the scale becomes hard to fathom. Year after year, I’ve produced volumes of writing—an ever-expanding archive of my life. Right now, as I write this, we’re preparing to move (again), and I'm surrounded by stacks of identical notebooks. I've filled more than a hundred of them with the same Pilot pens. The consistency matters. When everything else in my life was changing, these materials stayed constant.

At first, the numbers seemed almost absurd: over a million words in three years from 2018–2020. But this volume was part of the alchemy—and some days it felt desperate. I remember mornings when I couldn't start my day without filling at least a few pages, evenings when I wrote past midnight because something was trying to emerge, and I couldn't stop my hand from moving. The scale was necessary for the shift from writing as a coping mechanism into writing as a practice of organizing my growth.

The Container of Consistent Practice

Writing as transformative practice begins with how you approach the process. Over eight years, I learned that the difference between journaling and transformative inquiry lies in the quality of attention you bring to the work itself. Though it took me years to understand this distinction.

What Dąbrowski called the third factor, the autonomous force within us that drives authentic growth, required cultivation through consistent practice. Writing had been part of my life since I was young, but here it took on a new quality that I can only describe as sacred. Usually at my desk, in the same chair I've used for years, with those black Moleskine notebooks and Pilot pens.

Some mornings the writing felt compulsive, driven by anxiety—an urge to fix, manage, or force clarity before it was ready. I could tell the difference in my handwriting: tight, pressed hard into the page, trying to solve something through force of will. Other times, something shifted. The page became a space where truth could surface on its own terms, even when it was uncomfortable or disrupted what I thought I knew. Those pages looked different too—the ink flowed, my hand felt guided.

When I approached writing this way, I wasn't trying to figure anything out. I was making myself available to whatever wanted to unfold. I consider this active patience, and I learned to trust it even when I couldn't see where it was leading.

From Coping to Method of Inquiry

Writing didn't begin as a conscious transformative practice. In my youth, it was a survival strategy. When I didn't know how else to hold myself together, I wrote. But during the eight-year period I describe here, the practice took on a different character: it became a crucible where survival gave way to deliberate transformation, and where documentation evolved into active imagination and meaning-making.

This aligns well with how authentic growth works: we often begin in crisis, using whatever tools we have available, and gradually discover that these tools can become vehicles for transformation if we approach them with the right attitude.

Writing became my primary method for what Dąbrowski called the subject-object process: that crucial ability to observe and reflect on my own mental life. Through writing, I could step outside immediate emotional experience and examine it with increasing sophistication. The page became a space where I could engage in the kind of self-analysis and self-evaluation essential for higher-level functioning.

I began to receive insights that went beyond what I consciously knew. Connections would emerge on the page that I hadn't planned. Understanding would arrive through the writing process faster than my analytical mind could track. This was the natural result of creating conditions where deeper levels of processing could engage with complex experience.

The Crisis: When Writing Demands Courage

There came a point when writing shifted from being something I controlled to something that demanded courage to follow where it led. I believe this corresponds to what can be described as the transition between levels: when familiar ways of functioning break down and new capacities begin to emerge.

This phase required what spiritual traditions call ego death, but which we might better understand as the dissolution of lower-level organizing principles. I had to be willing to question everything I thought I knew about myself, to write things that challenged my existing self-concept, and to trust the process even when I couldn't see where it was leading.

The writing tracked my growth not despite conflict, but through it. Every challenge, every disappointment, every moment of disintegration became material for integration. I learned to write my way through rather than around difficult experiences, discovering that the alchemy of transformation happens in the inquiry itself, not after it.

I could sense when the writing was coming from a different level of functioning. Sometimes I noted that my pen felt guided. It had a quality of inevitability, like water finding its way downhill. These passages, emerging from what felt like deeper intelligence, later proved most valuable for understanding my own growth patterns.

Writing as Inner Mentorship

One of the most significant aspects of my practice became what I call inner dialogue: engaging with guidance figures that represented higher levels of functioning than I had yet achieved. When external mentors couldn't match the intensity of my needs, I discovered I could create what amounted to internalized mentorship through active imagination and writing.

It's not right to think of this as compensation for what was missing. It was initiation into autonomous growth: learning to go beyond receiving guidance to generating the relationship I needed. Writing became the laboratory where I practiced inner mentorship and discovered I could access wisdom beyond my current level of functioning.

This requires careful discernment between genuine insight and wishful thinking. The key indicator became whether the guidance challenged me to grow rather than simply confirming what I wanted to hear. Authentic dialogue pushes you toward greater complexity, responsibility, and integration: never toward easier or more comfortable positions.

I began to notice when the writing carried a different quality of understanding (more patient than my ordinary voice, offering insights I wouldn't have generated consciously, holding space for my struggles in ways I couldn't hold it for myself). This dialogue taught me to trust what I came to understand as the instinct for growth: the inner intelligence that knows the direction of authentic transformation.

The Recursive Nature of Growth: Working with Your Archive

What made my writing practice genuinely transformative was that it became recursive and analytical. Beyond merely recording experiences, I returned to them, studied them, and recontextualized them through evolving theoretical understanding. Every entry became data for analysis, retrieval, and growth.

But the recursiveness began with a simple daily ritual: each morning, I sit down and type up what I wrote by hand the day before. This goes beyond transcription to the first layer of reflection. As my fingers move across the keyboard, I’m already processing, sometimes catching patterns I missed in the initial writing. Each month, I read through everything I’ve written. Each quarter, I revisit the entire quarter’s worth of entries. This rhythm keeps me in constant dialogue with my own words, allowing me to track patterns and themes as they emerge and evolve.

I developed what I now call relational-developmental autoethnography: a way of studying your own growth in relationship with theory, with others, and with the creative dimensions of experience. The practice became a form of longitudinal self-study that showed me exactly how transformation happens (not in straight lines, but in spirals of increasing depth and integration).

Working with the archive revealed patterns I couldn’t see while living them. I could track the increasing complexity in my entries over the years, watch myself move from reactive functioning to autonomous functioning. The writing became a mirror that reflected back my own evolution with unprecedented clarity.

The real breakthrough came when I began to work with past writing as a source of insight for present challenges. I would search my archive for entries that might illuminate current growth tasks, and repeatedly found that earlier versions of myself had received exactly the understanding my present self needed.

This taught me that transformative work creates its own field of meaning that transcends linear time. Every insight, breakthrough, and moment of clarity gets preserved in the writing. The archive becomes a repository of your own wisdom: a library of your soul’s knowing that you can return to whenever you need a reminder of your authentic trajectory.

Learning to Become Your Own Guide

Perhaps the most profound aspect of writing as transformative practice was learning to generate my own inner authority. My relationship with Michael M. Piechowski (documented in over 130,000 words annually) was a developmental relationship disguised as an intellectual exchange.

When his outer availability couldn't match the intensity of my inner transformation, I discovered that this limitation was itself part of the process. I was learning to become my own guide: exactly what authentic multilevel growth requires.

This is what I call growth through constraint: learning not through perfect mentorship, but through having to generate internally what isn't sufficiently available externally. The mentor I needed didn't exist yet in my outer world, so I became them through the very process of writing my way toward integration.

Michael served a function he may never have consciously chosen: he became my reluctant initiator, catalyzing growth not through what he offered, but through what he couldn't provide. His inability to match my intensity became the very condition that forced me to claim my own authority.

The imbalance in our correspondence (my 130,000 words to his 40,000 annually) was about more than personality differences. It forced me to learn to trust my own process, to value my own insights, and to become the kind of mentor to myself that I once sought in others.

For this, I remain grateful: that what felt like absence was the very condition that revealed my inner teacher.

From Survival to Service: The Evolution of Purpose

Looking at the data now, I can see clear phases: the flood years of immersion (2017-2019), the consolidation period when I learned to integrate experience with theory (2020-2021), the resurgence with deeper synthesis (2022-2023), and now what feels like sovereignty (2024-2025). Less need for volume, more capacity for distilling and sharing what I've learned.

The flood years taught me to trust the process even when I couldn't see where it was leading. The consolidation period showed me how to integrate emotional experience with theoretical understanding. The resurgence revealed how writing could become a form of service to others' growth. And sovereignty brought the recognition that I had become capable of offering what I once sought.

All those private words were preparing me for public transmission of understanding. Writing taught me to receive insights beyond what was in the books, to sense what theorists were reaching for even when they didn't fully articulate it. It gave me language for what others feel but can't express. It prepared me to hold space for transformation in others: not just intellectually, but experientially.

The practice showed me that I was moving beyond protecting or explaining existing theory. I was evolving it, translating it into new applications, learning to embody it publicly. The years of private labor through writing were preparation for becoming what might be called a catalyst for growth—someone who can support others' authentic transformation.

Practical Guidance for Transformative Writing

For those called to writing as transformative practice, here's what eight years of sustained inquiry taught me:

• Start with consistency over intensity. Better to write for ten minutes every day than two hours once a week. Momentum builds through repetition, not marathon sessions.

• Create structure around the writing time. Use the same materials, same location, same general time. Your nervous system needs to recognize when ordinary functioning is shifting into deeper inquiry.

• Write before you think you're ready. Don't wait for insights to arrive before you start writing. The insights emerge through the process of writing, not before it.

• Learn to recognize different levels of functioning in your writing. Your analytical mind sounds different from your deeper intelligence. Your fears have a different quality than your authentic knowing. Practice discernment by paying attention to what level of yourself is engaging.

• Return to your writing as archive. Don't just write and leave your words behind. Go back to old entries with present questions. You’ll be amazed at what insights your earlier writing contains for your current challenges.

• Trust what wants to be written. If something seeks expression, write it—even if you don't understand it immediately. Transformative practice requires courage more than comprehension.

• Let the practice evolve. What serves you in early stages may not serve you in later ones. Stay responsive to what your growth needs rather than forcing the practice into a fixed form.

The Labor of Self-Becoming

The numbers tell a story, but what they really document is consciousness writing itself into higher levels of integration. Writing has always been more than simply recording the events of my life. It was engaging with transformative processes, creating meaning from fragmentation, and preparing for the work of supporting others' authentic growth.

What I’ve learned is that the volume was never the point, but it was necessary. I wrote to survive early stages of disintegration. I wrote to integrate complex experience with theoretical understanding. I wrote my way from fragmentation to sovereignty, from seeking mentorship to offering support for others' transformation.

And in the end, all those private words prepared me for this moment: when I could step forward and offer what I'd learned through the sustained labor of writing myself into authentic growth. The reluctant initiation is complete. The growth through constraint has done its work. What remains is the joy of sharing what writing has taught me about becoming who we're meant to be.

Your own writing practice will be different from mine. The form matters less than the intention. What matters is approaching the page as an act of trust in your own process, creating conditions where deeper intelligence can engage with your experience, and allowing the writing to teach you what you need to know for authentic growth.

Your growth has things to say. The page is waiting. And somewhere in the space between what you plan to write and what actually emerges, transformation is always possible.

If this exploration resonates with you, I invite you to support this work by becoming a paid subscriber. Writing and researching about Dąbrowski’s theory, neurodivergence, and transformative practice is my full-time calling. Your support makes it possible for me to continue sharing these insights freely while sustaining the work itself.

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What I didn’t know back then is that what felt like a flaw was actually a form of intelligence. That emotional overexcitability wasn't evidence of disorder, but a sign of potential development. A force that could overwhelm and destabilize, yes, but also one that could guide. If tended carefully, it could become transformational.

This series traces that transformation across five distinct phases of my life. Over the past several years, I’ve been reviewing decades of journals, revisiting old memories, and compiling what I call retrievals: curated collections of search results from my archive that track the appearance of specific words or phrases over time. These excerpts help illuminate how my emotional self has evolved, revealing patterns, shifts, and insights across different phases of my life.

What began as qualitative research has become something more intimate—a kind of emotional archaeology. And now, I want to share what I’ve uncovered.

These five phases emerged through the lens of relational–developmental autoethnography (RDA)1, the method I introduced in my recent paper and post. RDA is a practice of tracing growth through lived experience, especially in relationship. By working with my personal archive, made up of journals, letters, interviews, and more, I’ve charted how emotional overexcitability (OE) developed across distinct periods of disintegration and integration.

Emotional OE is an intensified sensitivity to feelings, both one’s own and those of others. It shows up as heightened responsiveness in relationships, a deep need for connection, and strong emotional memory. For me, it has always been relational in its expression: my emotional life came alive most vividly in connection with others.

When it isn’t supported or understood, emotional OE can look and feel like anxiety, depression, or rejection sensitivity. That’s one face of it—raw, overwhelming, and often mistaken for pathology. But in other circumstances, it becomes something else: a developmental force. The same intensity I once misread as mental illness was also the source of deep self-reflection, moral awareness, and transformation.

This is why Dąbrowski considered emotional OE so important. It’s not simply “feeling too much.” It’s a way of experiencing life that, depending on how it’s lived, can either overwhelm or become the very fuel for growth.

Across the series, I’ll walk you through each of the five phases to illustrate how emotional OE changed and evolved over time, and beyond that, to show what it taught me about attachment, rupture, grief, ethics, and love. In each post, I’ll share brief excerpts from that phase and reflect on what they reveal with the help of Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration.

Here’s the trajectory we’ll be following:

• Phase 1 (1989–2006): Emotional survival, fragmentation, and suppression

• Phase 2 (2007–2013): Anger, boundary-setting, and the awakening of moral agency

• Phase 3 (2014–2015): Reflective depth and the integration of insight

• Phase 4 (2016–2022): Complexity, grief, and the long arc of repair

• Phase 5 (2023–2025): Emotional sovereignty, spiritual clarity, and service

I offer these not as stages to be copied or idealized, but as one map among many. If you’ve ever been told you’re too much or felt like your emotions disqualify you from belonging, I hope you’ll find something here that resonates.

Below, we begin with Phase 1—the longest period chronologically, and the quietest emotionally. The phase of barely holding on. The phase of almost disappearing.

Phase 1: When Feeling Is Too Dangerous

This phase spans the longest stretch of my life—seventeen years from 1989 to 2006—and yet, when I gathered emotional excerpts from those years, they filled only five pages.

That scarcity spoke volumes. It’s not that I didn’t feel deeply. I did. But I didn’t have the tools, the safety, or the self-trust to stay present with what I felt. My emotional life during these years was intense, overwhelming, and largely inaccessible. I wrote around it, intellectualized it, numbed it, and sometimes tried to destroy it. In many ways, I was documenting a life I couldn’t yet bear to feel.

This insight came through the retrievals. When I searched my archive for the word emotional, the results shed light on how I described feelings, reactions, sensitivities, grief, and inner states. A related retrieval for emotions offered a slightly different lens—one that revealed more about my efforts to regulate, analyze, or recover emotional experience.

The Ache of Knowing Something Was Wrong

In 1990, I already knew something was deeply wrong, even if I couldn’t name it. At seventeen, I wrote:

“Life is very cruel. And I guess I was never taught how to properly cope with my problems. I don’t know if that is my fault. For two years drugs like alcohol and pot were absolutely a part of my daily routine. No one knew or cared enough about me to do anything about it. I guess I kept it to myself pretty well. Unfortunately, I suppose, it hurt me in the long run. What was my reason for living supposed to be anyway? I wasn’t happy. I was angry and lonely. I had many friends, but I was always alone. No one could reach me. I am my own best friend. I have no really major influences…When I’m a little older, or at least a little more mature, hopefully I won’t have such depressing problems.”

The bluntness of these lines reveals the despair of a teenager who already sensed isolation was the core wound. I had friends but felt entirely unreachable, cut off, left to be “my own best friend.” My only hope was that maturity might somehow rescue me from problems I couldn’t face.

That summer I added:

“I have a myriad of emotions that I need to sort out. I'm pretty confused. I wonder why my life is so fucking difficult? I wish I could just do my high school years over again. In fact, how about starting at 12. It was around there that everything started to get screwed up.”

Here I could locate the timeline of collapse—“starting at 12”—but not its causes. What comes through most strongly is the sense of confusion and futility: that my life was already spoiled beyond repair before it had even begun.

The Paradox of Clarity and Chaos

Even in avoidance, I showed flashes of insight. I wrote:

“It must be a signal to Bob [therapist] the way that I change the subject away from my parents or my childhood. I inadvertently do that, usually because it takes too much emotional energy to drag up those memories. I hate putting the effort into something that is bound to be painful.” (July 1990)

This is the paradox of Phase 1: I could see what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop it. I had clarity about my patterns, but no safe way to break them.

By 1997, I was describing the effects of coming off medication:

“It's Friday and not a fucking minute too soon. Thank God this week is over. I feel really funny today. I haven't quite identified what it is yet. I don't know what to do with myself. So I figured I'd write in here, because that gives me something to do. I feel much more emotional than I do on the Tegretol. Or Depakote or lithium. I think it's going to take some getting used to. Right now, I have all the time in the world. I haven't thought about killing myself since yesterday afternoon. That's a good sign.”

Here again, I could narrate my inner shifts with striking precision, almost clinically, while still measuring progress by how long it had been since I last thought about suicide. I could map my inner world in detail, but I was still swallowed by it.

The Hunger to Feel, the Terror of Feeling

A constant thread in Phase 1 is longing to feel fully while also fearing the consequences. I wrote:

“I realized tonight that I really want to cry, but I can’t. I cannot do it. The last time I even came close was last year while I was talking with Dave. I wonder if I can be that emotional with him now.” (1990, age 17)

This captures both hunger and inhibition: I wanted tears, but I couldn’t easily access them, even with someone I trusted.

When I did gain access to stronger feeling, I clung to it as proof that I was alive:

“My session with Phil [therapist] was interesting. He doesn’t like the real me—because I don’t sit there in a depressive stupor now. I tell him what’s on my mind, and I don’t settle for anything less than what I want. Phil said, ‘We used to have nice conversations.’ I’m not interested in having pleasant conversations with the man. He’ll just have to get used to this—the way I am. He tried to argue that it isn’t the real me, it’s me with a chemical imbalance. I beg to differ. I’m not the person I was with my mind trapped by that restrictive drug. I’m willing to take the extra emotional intensity that comes with my illness. It’s my burden, not his.” (1997, age 24)

Here, I defended my intensity fiercely. I didn’t yet see it as developmental, but I knew it was part of my identity and resented anyone who tried to medicate it away.

Pressure to Breaking Point

When feelings couldn’t be contained, the pressure erupted in self-harm:

“I cut my arm. To relieve the emotional tension that's inside of me. While I was looking for a Band-Aid I ran across a bag with a tiny bit of pep in it. I dumped it onto this notebook, thought about it for a minute, and blew it on the rug. Man, what temptation. I'm just a fucking mess right now. I can't believe I cut myself. At least no one can see it. Life is killing me.” (1998, age 25)

Later that day:

“I hate myself right now. I really do. I feel terrible. I feel guilty, angry, hurt, sad, and pathetic. My mind won't leave me alone, either. Cutting my arm did not provide me with any relief. Thank God I didn't do that pep or I'd really feel like shit right now. I don't know what to do. I truly feel like an emotional wreck. I wish Dr. B would call, but it's Sunday. I'm such a fucking asshole. A needy asshole.” (1998)

These entries show how quickly intensity turned into desperation. When nothing else could contain it, I turned it inward. The cycle was predictable: unbearable pressure, an act of release, immediate shame, and longing for someone else to rescue me.

The Relational Lifeline

What distinguishes emotional OE from general emotional volatility is its fundamentally relational nature. Even in my darkest periods, connection could break through the numbness:

"183 days clean today. I had a most excellent day today. The first thing I did was go to see the Holms2 and it was great. I made amends to them finally. While I was talking to Mrs. H about the guilt I felt, I started crying. I feel so good about it... I don’t think I ever cried face to face with her. I’m human now. I feel and have emotions." (1991, age 18)

This entry reveals something crucial: the emotional breakthrough didn’t happen in isolation but in the context of a trusted relationship. The Holms were among several adults who served as emotional lifelines during this phase—people who could mirror back my humanity when I’d lost sight of it myself.

Glimpses of the Developmental Force

Even in the depths of Phase 1, moments of insight emerged that pointed toward what emotional OE could become.

In 1996, I wrote:

“I cried hard earlier. I just needed to release some mental anguish. That pain that Bob always said was holding me back. Well, I’m sick of being held back—if it takes crying, so be it. I have to allow myself to feel the whole range of emotions, not just through some selective process. That’s the only way I can hope to develop my real self.” (1996)

Two years later, I recognized the same truth with even more clarity, linking it directly to risk and choice:

“I have a different perspective on things now. I don’t feel like a failure. I feel like I finally do have a future—as long as I maintain my sobriety and some emotional stability. I realize that I’m taking a big risk going off Tegretol, but I want to experience my full range of emotions. I can experiment with myself—I’m going to be as safe about it as I can possibly be. I’ll continue to chart my moods in my mood journal. I have faith that things will continue to get better. I’m doing the right thing, I’ve to keep it up, that’s all.” (1998)

These entries show the seeds of what would eventually become developmental dynamisms: dissatisfaction with myself, the drive toward authenticity, and the recognition that growth required feeling fully rather than selectively.

The Silence as Self-Protection

These entries weren’t reflections—not in the way I understand that word now. They were distress signals, fragments of emotional overwhelm that had no developmental structure around them. Most of what I wrote kept a protective distance. I was describing what had happened to me, while not yet locating myself within it.

In Dąbrowski’s terms, this is what unilevel disintegration often looks like. Emotion floods the system, and there is no structure to hold it. There’s no inner hierarchy to say: this is more meaningful than that. No developmental direction has yet taken hold. There is suffering, but no synthesis.

And yet, the seeds were there. Even in my most fragmented states, I was reaching for connection, meaning, and truth. Looking back, what strikes me most is not how broken I was, but how much I endured without breaking entirely. The silence was self-protection. My emotions had gone underground, waiting for safer conditions.

This is also where my journals reveal something that seems to be missing from the way OE is usually described. Across these five phases, my emotional overexcitability itself reveals levels. In Phase 1, it was raw, overwhelming, and fragmenting—an unrefined intensity that destabilized more than it guided. Later, that same intensity would transform into discernible dynamisms: dissatisfaction with myself, responsibility, and empathy. In other words, what began as emotional flooding eventually differentiated into developmental forces. Overexcitability was the raw material; the dynamisms were its products.

In the next post, I’ll turn to Phase 2: the years when I started fighting back and finally began to listen to my emotions. But I wanted to start here, with the silence and the ache beneath it, because this is where the story truly begins.

If this work has been meaningful to you, I invite you to support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Writing and podcasting about Dąbrowski’s theory, neurodivergence, and lived transformation is my full-time work. Every paid subscription helps cover the time, energy, and research that go into each post and podcast episode.

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• Part 1 – From Gifted Child to Chronic Mental Patient

• Part 2 – Surviving Disintegration and Forging a New Path

• Part 3 – The Value of a Non-Pathologizing Framework

At the time, I wasn’t sure how people would respond. What I discovered is that telling the truth about stigma and internalized ableism resonated far beyond anything I expected. Today, I want to look back on that series, reflect on what has unfolded since, and honor the ripple effects it continues to create.

I’ve also gone back and improved the audio quality of the recordings for all three posts in the series. If you prefer listening, you’ll now find clearer versions of those recordings alongside the text.

When I published the series in August and September 2023, I was nervous. But in the lead-up to creating these posts, I realized they were a necessary part of my journey.

The Courage to Share

Publishing was much more than simply disclosure. It was a reframe. In those same journals, I wrote:

“This material needs to be shared. This is a huge breakthrough for me. I’m finally overcoming my self-stigma and internalized ableism. It’s a process, but this feels like a turning point.”

That intuition proved correct. The series became a bridge between my private healing and my public mission. I had already been studying my life through autoethnography, creating distance and naming patterns. Publishing that work transformed it. It stopped being only my medicine and became something others could use.

More Than Memoir

Two years on, I see that the series became more than a personal story. It demonstrated a method. It showed that anyone can examine their life through a non-pathologizing lens, reclaim their agency, and treat their story as valuable data.

Autoethnography, once tucked away in academia, moved into lived practice. The series democratized it. It invited others to become researchers of their own experience, to see their lives as both personal struggle and part of a larger map of human neurodiversity.

The emails I’ve received from grateful readers who’ve discovered my work over the past two years directly fueled the work I’ve done since to produce a paper about my methods. I will continue sharing about autoethnography on Substack and beyond.

The Ongoing Process

I knew, even in 2023, that this was only a beginning. My journals from that summer show me wrestling with definitions of stigma and ableism, exploring disability justice, and realizing that I could finally stop seeing myself as "characterologically flawed." I wrote of how progress had been made—that it was easier to talk about mental illness now than in my youth—but also of how deeply I still carried the weight of internalized narratives.

That tension, the sense of ongoing work, has proven true. What started as three posts has since expanded into a thriving community of people reframing their lives through Dąbrowski's theory.

A Testament to Transformation

Perhaps the deepest legacy of the series is that it shows transformation without erasure. My story doesn't pretend away the teenage journals, the hospitalizations, the years of medication, or the cycles of addiction. Instead, it reframes them within the larger arc of disintegration and integration.

I moved from "chronic mental patient" to scholar, from self-stigma to self-acceptance, from isolation to community. But the past remains part of the story—it isn't denied; it's integrated.

Looking Forward

As I've written since: "My job now is to carry this message to others and let them know they're not broken." The self-stigma series marked the moment when that personal healing became inseparable from a public calling.

Two years later, its impact is still unfolding. Each time someone finds those posts, recognizes themselves, and begins to loosen the grip of internalized ableism, I see the ripple widen.

The series remains what it was always meant to be: a bridge away from the medical model toward a richer understanding of human complexity. It's a testament to the power of reframing, of refusing deficit-based narratives, and of discovering the gifts hidden inside struggle.

And so, two years later, I'm grateful—for the courage it took to share, for everyone who has joined me in this work, and for the community that continues to grow around a simple but radical truth: we're not broken.

If this work has been meaningful to you, I invite you to support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Writing and podcasting about Dąbrowski’s theory, neurodivergence, and lived transformation is my full-time work. I don’t want to put these reflections behind a paywall, but I rely on reader support to make them sustainable. Every paid subscription helps cover the time, energy, and research that go into each post and podcast episode.

Subscribe now

All Episodes Now Available on YouTube!

We have big news: all 79 episodes of the Positive Disintegration Podcast are now available on YouTube! 🎉

Whether you prefer to watch, listen with captions, or simply want another way to access our content, you can now find our complete catalog on our YouTube channel. This milestone represents nearly four years of conversations about the theory of positive disintegration, and we're excited to make our content even more accessible to our community.

📝 New Transcript Batch Added

We've also just added a new batch of Positive Disintegration transcripts to the Dabrowski Center website. If you like to read alongside listening, want to quote key insights, search for specific concepts, or revisit transformative ideas, these transcripts are designed with you in mind.

What's new:

• Episode 79 — Crisis, Connection, and Fractals of Transformation with Richard Edelman
  Systems-level disintegration, interpersonal neurobiology, and why integration matters—plus “toxic enculturation,” cycle breaking, and the stakes of our current polycrisis.

• Episode 78 — Polyvagal Pathways to Connection, Part 2 with Autum Romano
  Neuroception, cues of safety, PDA, and practical top‑down/bottom‑up ways to support regulation in relationships.

• Episode 77 — Polyvagal Pathways to Connection, Part 1 with Autum Romano
  A grounding tour of polyvagal theory, the three states, and how it intersects with positive disintegration.

• Episode 75 — Authenticity, Community, and Creative Unmasking with Gordon Smith
  On unmasking in community, gifted shame, and creating safe spaces—plus a therapist’s journey into TPD.

• Episode 28 — Positive Disintegration in Organizations with Kate Arms
  What disintegration looks like in orgs, parallels with levels, and living systems thinking leaders can use.

• Episode 26 — Experiences Being Profoundly Gifted: Part 2 with Nth Bar‑Fields & Joi Lin
  Part two of a conversation on the PG experience: health differences, OEs, belonging, and mirroring in community.

We hope to have edited transcripts for the entire catalog available by the end of 2025. Thank you for your patience!

How to Access Everything:

• YouTube: Find all 79 episodes with captions and easy sharing options

• Transcripts: Available on the Dabrowski Center website for searchable, quotable reference

• Audio: Continue listening on Substack or through your favorite podcast platform

These resources reflect our ongoing commitment to making the theory of positive disintegration accessible in multiple formats. Whether you're a more visual learner, prefer reading, or want to share specific moments with others, we now have you covered across platforms.

As always, thank you for listening, watching, and reading with us. Your engagement and support make this work possible and meaningful.

🎙️ My Other Podcast Adventures

This year, I’ve co-launched two additional podcasts exploring themes that intersect beautifully with my work on Positive Disintegration:

• PDA: Resistance and Resilience (co-hosted with ) just released Episode 6: Traveling with PDA on September 2nd, featuring a conversation with Becca Campbell about travel, autonomy, and neurodivergent families. They explore how travel can amplify PDA responses, the tension between adventure and predictability, and practical strategies for maintaining autonomy on the road. Becca, an ADHD PDAer and founder of Matching Sweaters Travel Company, shares insights from her experience parenting and traveling while neurodivergent.

• cosmic cheer squad (co-hosted with ) released episode 9: from open water on August 27th, discussing toxic professional dynamics and the courage required to extract ourselves from harmful systems. Following up on Chris's Swimming with Sharks piece, they explore recognizing corrosive patterns, the grief and relief of stepping away, and building new forms of belonging that resist illegitimate authority. They also discussed the relationships that made the difficult times bearable.

Both podcasts offer complementary perspectives on autonomy, resistance, and authentic living that will resonate with our Positive Disintegration community.

If this work has been meaningful to you, we invite you to support it by becoming a paid subscriber. Every paid subscription helps cover the time, energy, and effort that go into each podcast episode.

Subscribe now

In my recent post, Becoming a Witness, I wrote about the shift from seeking recognition to offering it—how, over time, I’ve become someone who can hold space for others in ways I once longed to be held. This piece is a natural continuation. It's about what happened when the inner world I had lived in for decades, the one that helped me survive trauma, loneliness, and spiritual hunger, began to transform as I no longer needed it in the same way. This is a story of integration, connection, and learning to inhabit my own life, fully and honestly, for the first time.

I used to live in two worlds.

There was the world of waking life, of school and work and family and friends. And then there was the other world—the imaginal world—a fully immersive internal reality that unfolded inside my mind for over three decades. That world was vivid and completely real to me. I had relationships, I played out scenarios, I processed trauma, and I constructed alternate selves. The imaginal world allowed me to make meaning, endure emotional torment, and remain connected to ideals that real life couldn’t support.

And then, one day, I realized it was gone.

I didn't stop it on purpose. There was no dramatic goodbye, no conscious decision to dismantle it. Instead, the world faded as I grew. More precisely, as I developed and moved toward integration. That integration, the seamless fusion of my inner and outer realities, happened through a relationship.

The World I Built

To understand what disappeared, I need to help you understand what was there. The imaginal world was so much more than idle daydreaming. It was a structured, consistent alternate reality with its own timeline, characters, and emotional logic. For over thirty years, I could slip into this world at will—sometimes by choice, sometimes compulsively.

It wasn’t a fantasy world where everything was perfect or idealized. It was a place of emotional intensity—often tormenting, sometimes comforting. It wasn’t escapism, exactly. It was how I stayed connected to my soul when the external world offered no mirrors. There, I could hold grief, rage, longing—emotional truths that had nowhere else to go. The imaginal world gave me companionship, containment, and a kind of coherence that my waking life lacked. It was both a survival strategy and a spiritual refuge. It helped me stay alive. And it helped me stay honest.

But I need to be honest about what "tormenting" meant. In my early years, worldplay wasn't something I chose—it happened to me. I would slip away not because I wanted to imagine a better life, but because I couldn't bear the one I had. My worldplay was compulsive, not creative. For years, I couldn't even name it without feeling like I was "completely insane," as I wrote in my journals. I would change my thoughts to avoid acknowledging its existence because the very fact of it terrified me.

By 1996, I was writing:

"My dream world is slowly disassembling itself from my brain... I hate using the phrase 'dream world.' There must be a better word for it."

In 1998, at age 25, I tried to write about the imaginal world for a therapist who pathologized it. I wrote:

“Some of the stuff I just can’t bring myself to write down. It’s even more absurd than what I just wrote, and I like to keep it up in my head where it’s safe.”

Often, the language itself felt pathological, shameful. It took years to develop the compassion, and the theoretical framework, to call it worldplay instead of dissociation. That shift from fear to respect was part of the integration itself.

The imaginal world served multiple functions: it was my therapy office, my laboratory for trying out different versions of myself, my refuge during unbearable emotional states, and my way of maintaining connection to transcendent values1 when the real world felt meaningless. When I was hospitalized as a young adult, when I was struggling with addiction, when I felt utterly alone in my intensity and sensitivity, I had somewhere to go. The imaginal world kept me alive when reality felt unlivable.

But it also kept me fragmented. I was never fully present in the world everyone else inhabited because part of me was always elsewhere, always comparing this reality to that one, always finding this one lacking.

When Worldplay Became Practice

The first sign that something was shifting came in 1999, during what I now recognize as a crucial moment in my development. For the first time, I began using worldplay as rehearsal rather than escape.

I was deep in addiction, cycling through the same destructive patterns, when something changed in how I engaged with my inner world. Instead of retreating into alternate realities, I began practicing transformation there. I witnessed my own recovery in worldplay before I experienced it in real life—watching myself make different choices, seeing myself get clean, rehearsing the person I could become.

Using my well-established ability to visualize alternate realities, I began to picture what it would look like to live differently. I saw myself moving to Los Angeles, leaving crack cocaine behind, creating a new life. This rehearsal in my imagination became a bridge between who I was and who I could become. I played out the transformation repeatedly, with small changes each time, until I felt ready to act.

That was the beginning of worldplay's evolution from survival strategy to self-guidance. Even before I had language for the third factor, that inner drive toward higher development, my worldplay was revealing it, giving form to the self I longed to become. What I didn't realize was that this shift had prepared me for something I'd been unconsciously seeking: a real person who could embody the witness I had been imagining for so long.

The Catalyst of Connection

When I first began corresponding with Michael M. Piechowski in 2016, I had no idea how profoundly he would enter my mind. Within months, he was in my head. I don't mean metaphorically. I mean that I heard his voice in my inner dialogue. I imagined his responses to things I was working on. I conjured his disapproval when I needed discipline. And I heard his kindness when I was struggling.

It wasn’t only Michael as a person who catalyzed the shift—it was the presence of his work, his clarity, and the worldview he carried. Our connection was the embodiment of something I had long been searching for: a way of living that honored intensity, sought coherence, and integrated spiritual depth with intellectual rigor.

It wasn't unusual for me to internalize people this way. I'd done it for years. But something about Michael was different. He wasn't just another character uploaded into the imaginal world. He was a real person whose mind, work, and spirit touched something fundamental in me. Not only did he enter the imaginal world, but he began to reorganize it.

What entered through our connection was the possibility of living with internal coherence. For over thirty years, I had carried an unnamed longing to be witnessed—to have someone see me clearly enough to meet me where I actually lived. My worldplay had been populated by imagined witnesses, internal figures who could hold space for my intensity and depth. But Michael represented something different: real presence. However partial or incomplete, he offered me my first taste of genuine witness.

The Sound of Transformation

One of the earliest ways he entered my mind was through sound: specifically, a radio interview he gave on Wisconsin Public Radio. I listened to it again and again. His voice, his cadence, his way of speaking about his work with the gifted: I let it wash over me. It gave me a felt sense of him that went beyond text or email. That recording became part of how I internalized him. [Click here to listen]

As I wrote to Michael about it later:

“I downloaded it during summer 2016 and had it available on my phone. It got to the point where I would listen to it nearly every night before I went to bed while smoking my last cigarette of the day.”

By March 2017, something had shifted. I was preparing for my first trip to Madison to meet Michael in person, and I simply stopped smoking. There was no struggle and no suffering. I was ready, and I decided to quit. Looking back, I'm certain this ease came from having developed that ability to dialogue with Michael in my head. The internal presence had already begun to reorganize how I approached challenges and change.

At first, I wasn't sure what to call it. It wasn't worldplay anymore, not in the way I'd known for decades. The tone was different. The structure was different. I wasn't scripting scenes or escaping into elaborate narratives. I was having conversations with Michael in my mind—disciplined, dialogical, often emotionally clarifying. It started in 2016 and intensified through that year into 2018. And it felt real. Grounded. Less like dissociation and more like a channel for reflection and self-guidance.

I didn’t “upload” Michael as a character. I began to carry his voice—its cadence, precision, and steadiness—into my own inner dialogue. I would hear how he might ask me to slow down, to name what I meant, to be exact. It wasn’t fantasy scripting. It was a disciplined exchange that clarified my thinking when I wrote or faced a choice. It felt conversational rather than cinematic, and it asked for honesty rather than escape.

Day to day, it looked simple: I would bring a draft or a dilemma to that inner conversation and notice what sharpened—definitions, boundaries, the next right sentence. If I was tempted to embellish or return to old patterns, the internalized presence didn’t collude. It steadied the line toward coherence and truth. The difference from worldplay was stark: no scenes, no alternate timelines, and less distance than ever—just the work of naming what is here.

The more I trusted the practice, the quieter the old world became. I didn’t need an alternate reality to be witnessed; I could meet myself in dialogue with a presence I experienced as real, grounded in our correspondence and his embodied way of moving in the world.

In June 2018, with little practical guidance from my dissertation committee, I found myself “talking with Michael in the background” while preparing for my defense. Drawing on advice he’d actually given me, my mind assembled his cadence and clarity into usable steps for my oral defense. Naming this made me tearful at the time, and it felt like real guidance arriving from within.

The Documented Journey

What sets this transformation apart is that I documented it in real time, in emails to Michael himself. In those early months, I wrote to him honestly about the challenge:

"You used to sound a little 'meaner' in my head. I'm not inclined to think that people are nice, sadly. But it was hard to get a handle on your tone—I didn't have much to work with."

With only brief emails to construct his presence from, my mind filled in gaps with familiar harshness. But I told him directly how things were changing:

"It's interesting to note that hearing your voice, on the phone, significantly impacts the way I can interact with you, in my head."

By September 2017, I felt bold enough to tell him face-to-face during a visit to Madison:

"I need to spend time with you in order to improve on the mental representation of you in my mind."

His response was characteristically direct: "You're sampling me?" But there was curiosity there, not judgment. Here was someone who understood that my inner process wasn't pathological.

The Quiet Revolution

Over time, the world I had lived in for decades, a world of alternate histories, movie-like scenes, and emotional resonance, began to quiet. Michael's internal presence was not about fantasy at all. It was a parallel reality that required honesty rather than invention. Precision. Reflection. Spiritual inquiry. And above all, embodiment.

Through our real-world correspondence and my imagined interactions with him, something shifted in the structure of my mind. I no longer needed to escape into a parallel world, because that world had become a place of real work and real living. Instead, I could turn inward and listen. He had become a stable internal presence—and not only him, but what he represented: clarity, spiritual depth, discipline, kindness.

The change was so gradual I almost missed it. At some point, I noticed that the old scenes weren't playing anymore. The core figures of my worldplay had faded into the background. I wasn't spending time in alternate realities. I was living, writing, parenting, reflecting. Reality had become livable. And beautiful.

When I realized the shift had happened—that I was no longer running scenes, no longer relying on alternate realities to make sense of myself—something clicked. I felt capable. Not all at once, but steadily. As though the inner scaffolding I had built through decades of worldplay had finally been internalized. I didn't need it to be visible anymore. I could stand in myself.

By August 2018, I was beginning to recognize what had happened. As I wrote in my journal:

"It's as though my experiences with Michael and learning about the theory have created a different other life in my mind. One that is more useful and productive, and it is grounded in my real life. It's much more powerful. But it definitely has displaced the old life I had. Richard and Susan are memories from a past that isn't quite relevant now."

The conversations with Michael in my mind had also evolved. By 2020, I could see the progression clearly:

"At first, back in 2017 at least, I was interacting with Michael in my mind. We would have conversations, and he would tell me things. That went on for at least a year... At some point, there was a shift from that mental interaction to something I can only describe as deeper."

The dialogical presence had become something more foundational—not a person I talked to in my head, but a way of being present to myself and the world.

The Collaborative Process

In August 2018, struggling to explain our relationship dynamics to my friend and mentor, Frank Falk, I wrote what felt like a confession:

“Michael is in my head… He is in my imaginal world… He knows that he is in my head, of course, and we have worked deliberately at strengthening and building on this phenomenon.”

This was unprecedented—not only that Michael was in my inner world, but that I was telling him about it directly. I was writing to the very person I carried in my mind, describing how he appeared there.

“In my head, I would think, ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’ You asked what it was that I wanted to discuss… you are kind of a smart ass, in my head.”

The collaboration was explicit. I told him:

“It’s more important that you’re in my heart. It’s that combination which makes it work the way it does.”

And later:

“I wish I could adequately convey what it is like, the way I can interact with you in my head.”

Looking back now, I’m struck by the vulnerability required to tell someone how they appeared in my inner world while I was still getting to know them in the outer one. That transparency, and his willingness to meet it, was what made integration possible. I don’t think I understood at the time how rare that kind of response was—or how much it would change me.

For decades, my imaginal world had existed in shame and secrecy. I had internalized the message that this rich inner reality was pathological, something to hide or deny. That secrecy kept the two worlds rigidly split. What could not be spoken could not be integrated.

Michael’s response to my disclosure broke this cycle. Instead of questioning my sanity, he asked with curiosity, “You’re sampling me?” That single moment transformed a source of deep disquietude and fear into something worth exploring. His openness reframed what had long been shameful as something human, even meaningful.

What made this witnessing unique was its collaborative, real-time nature. I wasn’t describing old experiences to a therapist—I was documenting an unfolding transformation to the very person catalyzing it. This created a feedback loop where my inner process was witnessed, validated, and co-created at once. For the first time, my secret world had a genuine collaborator.

For a long time, I believed I was alone in living this way. Only later, in middle age, did I discover others with their own versions of worldplay.

Through our correspondence, I began externalizing what had always been hidden: describing how he appeared in my mind, how our imagined conversations felt, how the old world was shifting. The act of telling stitched inner and outer together, a synthesis that transformed the fabric of my experience. The secret became shared, and the sharing itself became healing.

Michael’s understanding of overexcitabilities and positive disintegration gave me a language that was neither medicalizing nor dismissive. Within that framework, my intensity became development, my imaginal world became adaptive creativity, and my struggle became evidence of growth.

Most crucially, his embodied presence offered what imagined figures had never been able to provide: a witness who could evolve, surprise, and grow with me. Because he was real, the inner dialogue could deepen into something more than projection. It became a genuine internalized relationship—one that guided me toward coherence instead of further fragmentation.

The transparency itself became part of the transformation. By naming what was happening, and by having it witnessed and accepted, the secret world could finally join the shared one. That was how the two worlds began to merge.

The Gradual Becoming

I wrote about this shift to Michael as it was happening:

“I don't have the feeling that I am in two worlds. To me, this is a phenomenon that deserves my attention.”

The change was so subtle I almost missed it, but unmistakable once I named it:

"I can hardly remember what it was like before you were in my head. I can tell how much things have changed for the better."

This was not about salvation, but about a turning point—one his presence helped make possible, and one I was finally ready to claim. His integration of spiritual depth with intellectual rigor, his capacity for both solitude and connection, his embodied wisdom: these qualities reflected my own hunger for coherence. Over time, I learned how to create that clarity from within.

But the shift wasn’t automatic or easy. How does someone learn to live in one world after three decades in two? It wasn't that Michael taught me directly. Rather, his way of being became a template. I watched how he held seemingly opposite qualities in balance. I observed his capacity for both deep solitude and meaningful connection. I saw how he embodied the values I had only been able to rehearse in my imagination.

The imaginal Michael had been preparing me for this. Through our correspondence and his steady presence in my inner world, I had been practicing a different way of being. The reflective structure of our imagined conversations, with their demand for precision, honesty, and reflection, had been training me to meet reality with the same depth I had cultivated in my inner sanctuary.

The imaginal world had served its purpose. It helped me survive unbearable emotions, gave shape to my deepest values, and kept me connected to a sense of meaning when the external world felt vacant and cruel. It was less an escape than a kind of refuge, a shelter where existence was possible. But it also came at a cost. Living between two realities meant never fully belonging in either. I was always half-absent, half-searching, carrying a quiet ache for someone who could see me clearly enough to meet me where I lived. For years, that longing had nowhere to go. The imaginal world became the only place I could bring my whole self.

Letting it go wasn't easy, even as it became possible. But the presence that answered that longing made integration much more than survivable. Michael’s presence in real life, however partial or limited compared to the one in my head, had given me my first taste of genuine developmental witness in this reality.

That kind of shift—an internalized relational presence supplanting a constructed one—is consistent with what developmental psychologists describe as a structural reorganization of self. I no longer needed elaborate alternate realities to feel seen because I had experienced being seen, at least partially, in this one. The treasures I had cultivated in my inner sanctuary could finally find expression in relationship with another human being: the longing for truth, the moral clarity, the emotional attunement.

Through our correspondence and the steady influence of his presence in my inner world, I began to trust life. I began to feel connected to something larger than myself. I began to believe in the possibility of love beyond performance or projection. And slowly, beautifully, inevitably, the two worlds became one.

Living In One World

Living in one world looks different than I expected. The imaginal world didn't vanish with a dramatic finale. Instead, it transmuted. I no longer need it as a separate reality because I now carry its gifts within me.

The changes are subtle but profound. When I write, I no longer slip between realities to access depth. I write from a unified self. When I'm with my family, I'm not partially elsewhere, comparing this moment to some imagined alternative. When I interact with other people, I'm fully present to their reality because I'm finally fully present to my own.

The integration isn't a destination I reached. It's a daily practice of choosing presence over escape, embodiment over imagination. Some days are easier than others. But the foundation has shifted. I no longer live between worlds; I live in this one, carrying forward what I learned in the other.

The conversations with Michael in my mind also evolved. The dialogical presence became something more foundational—not a person I talked to in my head, but a way of being present to myself and the world.

The Theory Beneath the Story

Looking back through the lens of developmental theory, what happened makes sense. In Dąbrowski's theory of positive disintegration, development isn't symptom reduction or conformity—it emerges through inner conflict that drives transformation. A person begins to experience reality at multiple levels, seeing how things are alongside how they ought to be. That gap becomes a source of suffering and growth.

My worldplay was animated by what Dąbrowski called multilevel dynamisms. I rehearsed ideal versions of self and relationship long before I could live them. I knew what authenticity and integrity felt like before I could find them in waking life. Emotional intensity—especially longing, loneliness, and moral conflict—was my compass, even when I didn't yet understand where it was pointing.

The longing for witness, the dissatisfaction with myself and the world, the imagined dialogue with someone who could help me climb toward a higher self—these reflect what Dąbrowski described as essential for inner transformation. He called this motivational force the third factor: an internal drive toward authenticity and value alignment, especially when it requires breaking from conditioning. I had experienced this long before I could name it.

This process was never neat or straightforward. It was messy, painful, sometimes emotionally overwhelming, sometimes uncannily clear. But it was meaningful—the work of emotional development unfolding in real time. My inner world wasn't evidence of pathology; it was evidence of vertical growth before I had the language or support to name it.

What I mean by integration in my story is something local and lived: the loosening of a split between worldplay and daily life, the consolidation of an internal witness that steadies choices, and a practical continuity of experience that makes one reality livable. It's ongoing and revisable—a daily practice rather than a final destination.

What This Means for Others

The imaginal world gave me a life when I couldn't live in this one. Through my connection with Michael, I learned to stop escaping and start inhabiting my actual life.

Integration, as I understand it now, means that nothing essential is lost, but everything is transformed. The inner world becomes internal presence. Spiritual connection replaces simulation. The self becomes whole—not perfect, but unified.

I think often about others who live in multiple realities: neurodivergent children creating elaborate inner worlds to survive environments that don't understand them. Trauma survivors who've learned to leave their bodies to endure the unbearable. Anyone who creates alternate realities because this world feels too harsh, meaningless, or simply unable to hold their full selves. These inner landscapes are not pathologies; they are acts of survival, sometimes even acts of creation. For me, what began as refuge eventually became a bridge, carrying me toward a more coherent, integrated life.

There is no shame in these strategies. They are what keep us alive when nothing else can. And yet, healing is possible too—a coming home to oneself that allows us to live more fully in this world, while carrying forward the hard-won blessings of our inner worlds.

The imaginal world taught me how to love, how to hope, how to maintain faith in transcendent values. More importantly, it taught me what it felt like to be witnessed, even if only by my own constructed companions. Now I practice those same qualities here, in this reality, with real people, in real time.

For me, the task isn’t to leave behind the depth of the inner world, but to let it take shape in this one. It’s about allowing ideals to find expression in daily life, and letting the sense of witness I once longed for become something I can offer—to myself and to others—right here, right now.

The integration continues. Each day, I practice what it means to be finally, fully here, letting it unfold as a way of being.

Have you experienced your own version of living between worlds? I'd love to hear about your journey toward integration in the comments. These transformations are often invisible from the outside but profoundly life-changing from within.

Drawing from interpersonal neurobiology, evolutionary theory, and climate psychology, Richard demonstrates how Dabrowski's developmental framework operates as a fractal pattern—appearing at the individual level, within relationships, across cultural systems, and throughout our species' evolution. This conversation reveals how our current global crises, from climate change to political upheaval, can be understood as manifestations of species-wide disintegration, and how individuals can become conscious participants in determining whether this leads to collapse or transformation.

Key Topics Explored:

• Interpersonal Neurobiology & Integration: Richard explains Dan Siegel's framework connecting mind, brain, and relationships, and how understanding integration helps us better comprehend what disintegrates in positive disintegration.

• The Deep Neuroculture: A fascinating concept describing our collective nervous system as a species: the "mycelial network" beneath the surface of individual consciousness that shapes our biological and cultural niche.

• Species-Wide Disintegration: How humanity is currently experiencing a collective positive disintegration driven by climate crisis, requiring us to transform our relationship with our environment.

• Toxic Enculturation & Cycle Breaking: The process of liberating ourselves from harmful cultural patterns passed down through generations, with special attention to parents who refuse to perpetuate trauma.

• Third Factor as Evolutionary Avatar: Reframing third factor individuals as harbingers of consciousness and relational evolution, essential for species survival.

• Courage and Authenticity: The vital role of bravery in expressing our authentic selves and challenging the status quo, even in seemingly small interpersonal moments.

Connect with Richard Edelman:

• Richard’s website: livingartswisdom.com

• Email: richard@livingartswisdom.com

Resources Mentioned:

• Dan Siegel's work on interpersonal neurobiology

• Iain McGilchrist's book "The Master and His Emissary"

• Internal Family Systems (IFS)

• Climate Psychology Alliance

• Enactivism and Francisco Varela

• Britt Wray’s Unthinkable (the book: Generation Dread)

• The Third Factor (Dabrowski Center website)

This episode offers a powerful reframe of the theory of positive disintegration, showing how individual transformation is intimately connected to the larger evolutionary challenges facing humanity. Richard's synthesis of multiple frameworks provides both theoretical depth and practical pathways for those seeking to navigate—and actively participate in shaping—our current polycrisis toward positive transformation.

Connect with us

• Positive Disintegration on Substack

• Visit the Dabrowski Center website

• Facebook

• Instagram

• The Positive Disintegration YouTube Channel

• Adults with Overexcitabilities group on Facebook

• The Tragic Gift blog by Emma

• Email us at positivedisintegration.pod@gmail.com

• Please consider donating to the Dabrowski Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

• Find Positive Disintegration Merch

If you enjoyed this episode on Apple or Spotify, please remember to click on the stars and leave a rating or write a review. Thank you!

I’ve lived through both. What I’ve come to see is that refusing disintegration doesn’t preserve your wholeness—it fragments you in quieter, more insidious ways. You start sacrificing parts of yourself to maintain an identity that no longer fits. You suppress the signals of discomfort, the inner protests. You become rigid where you once could bend, clinging to what feels safe until any challenge to it feels like an attack. And all the while, you tell yourself it’s strength.

What feels like stability can actually be the slow settling of a life that’s stopped growing. A version of “wholeness” that values comfort over transformation. Sometimes the very structures we build to protect ourselves become the walls that imprison us.

The Rewarded Resistance

Our culture has a complicated relationship with falling apart. On the surface, we celebrate resilience, composure, the ability to "bounce back." We reward people who appear unshakeable, who can handle whatever life throws at them without visible distress. There's an entire industry built around helping people "manage" their emotions, "cope" with stress, "maintain" their composure.

But what if the very thing we're trying to avoid—disintegration—is actually what we need?

Resisting disintegration is often framed as maturity. In many systems, it's even rewarded. You appear composed. High-functioning. Reliable. You become the person others turn to in a crisis because you "have it all together." But inside, you know something vital is slipping away: your vitality, your authenticity, your connection to what matters most. You become a master at managing impressions while losing access to your deeper truth.

This is what happens when we equate pain with failure, when we've internalized the idea that being undone is weakness rather than a threshold. So we armor up. We over-function. We intellectualize. We channel everything into control because falling apart feels too dangerous, too costly, too unknown.

But disintegration—positive disintegration—is not destruction. It's a passage. A shedding. A sacred undoing that makes space for something more honest to emerge.

The Architecture of Avoidance

I've watched this pattern in myself and others: the elaborate systems we create to avoid facing what wants to change within us. Sometimes it looks like workaholism—staying so busy that there's no time for the inner voice that's trying to get your attention.

Sometimes it's perfectionism—if you can just get everything right, maybe you won't have to face the places where you're not who you want to be.

Sometimes it's intellectual bypass—analyzing your life so thoroughly that you never have to actually feel it. Or spiritual bypass—using meditation, gratitude practices, or positive thinking to avoid the messier emotions.

Sometimes it's relationship patterns—staying in connections that no longer serve you because change feels too overwhelming.

The forms are endless, but the underlying dynamic is the same: the strategic avoidance of our own becoming.

What's particularly insidious about this pattern is that it often looks like growth from the outside. You're working on yourself. You're reading books, going to therapy, attending workshops. You're doing all the right things. But somehow, nothing is fundamentally changing. You're managing your symptoms without addressing their source. You're rearranging the furniture without examining the foundation.

The Compound Cost

The longer you postpone it, the more distorted your inner world becomes. You start mistaking your defenses for your personality. You mistake fear for discernment. You mistake control for strength. Slowly, the self that longs to emerge gets buried under the self you perform to survive.

I've seen people spend decades in therapy learning to manage their anxiety without ever asking what the anxiety is trying to tell them. I've seen people exhaust themselves maintaining relationships that drain their life force rather than face the guilt of setting boundaries. I've seen brilliant, sensitive people numb themselves with work, food, alcohol, or shopping rather than feel the intensity that's actually their greatest gift.

The theory of positive disintegration isn't just about growth through suffering—it's about allowing the process to happen. Not just surviving it, but consenting to it. Trusting it. Surrendering, not because it's easy, but because it's real.

When Dąbrowski wrote about disintegration, he was describing the necessary breakdown of lower-level organization to make way for higher-level integration. The old structures, the ways of being that once served you, must dissolve before something more authentic can emerge. This isn't pathology; it's development.

But our culture teaches us to fear this process, to see any form of falling apart as failure rather than metamorphosis.

Two Forms of Refusal

Sometimes the refusal is unconscious. It feels like survival rather than resistance. You don't know you're clinging; you just know you're tired. Or numb. Or incapable of accessing the parts of yourself that once felt alive. The performance becomes so practiced that you forget it is a performance.

This is the person who says, "I don't know why I feel so empty. Everything in my life looks good on paper." They've successfully met all the external markers of success while losing touch with their inner compass. They've optimized their life without asking whether it's the life they actually want.

Other times, it's deliberate. You sense the tremors. You hear the inner voice asking you to pause, to question, to soften. But you shut the door. Not now. Not here. Not if it means losing control. Not if it means disappointing people. Not if it means facing uncertainty.

This is the person who recognizes they're unhappy but says, "I can't afford to fall apart. Too many people are counting on me." They've made themselves indispensable as a way of avoiding their own need for transformation.

Neither is something to be ashamed of; both are something to understand. There are always reasons why we resist falling apart. There's a history. A context. A self that learned, often early on, that breaking open could be dangerous. That safety meant containment, even at the cost of self-abandonment.

The Wisdom of Systems

From my own experience and from witnessing the journeys of others, I’ve come to see that our psyche has its own intelligence. The same way a fever is the body's way of fighting infection, emotional and spiritual breakdown is often the soul's way of fighting what's no longer working.

When someone comes to me in the middle of what looks like a life falling apart—job loss, relationship ending, identity crisis, spiritual emergency—I've learned to ask: What is trying to emerge? What is this breakdown clearing space for?

Because invariably, beneath the surface chaos, there's an intelligence at work. Something in them knows that the old way of being has run its course. Something is ready to be born, but it can't happen while they're still invested in maintaining the structures that no longer fit.

The disintegration isn't random. It's targeted. It's surgical. It takes apart precisely what needs to be dismantled to make way for the next stage of growth.

Walking Through the Walls

Part of the journey is learning to recognize when the walls we built to protect us have become the very structures that imprison us. Positive disintegration invites us to walk through those walls slowly, willingly, with the support we need to make it through.

This doesn't mean being reckless with your life or your responsibilities. It doesn't mean having a breakdown without regard for the people who depend on you. It means developing the capacity to feel what wants to change without immediately trying to fix it, manage it, or make it go away.

It means learning to distinguish between the anxiety that's warning you of real danger and the anxiety that's trying to keep you from growing. Between the sadness that's depression and the sadness that's grief for who you used to be. Between the anger that's destructive and the anger that's trying to establish healthy boundaries.

Disintegration asks us to trust the intelligence of collapse. To honor the inner call to let go. Not recklessly, but bravely. Not all at once, but honestly.

The Invitation

If you're reading this and recognizing yourself in the pattern of holding too tight, I want you to know: your resistance makes sense. Whatever you learned about safety, about love, about survival, it was probably accurate for the circumstances you were in when you learned it.

But you're not in those circumstances anymore. And the strategies that once protected you might now be preventing you from becoming who you're meant to be.

The invitation isn't to destroy your life or abandon everything you've built. It's to develop the capacity to feel what's true—about your relationships, your work, your way of being in the world—without immediately needing to act on it or make it go away.

Sometimes the truth is that everything is fine and you just need to adjust your perspective. Sometimes the truth is that major changes are needed. Most often, the truth is somewhere in between—some things to keep, some things to release, some things to transform. And sometimes the truth is that you’ve outgrown the life you built while holding yourself together so gently and persistently that you don’t notice the ache until it’s asking to be met head-on.

But you can't know which is which if you're afraid to look.

The Intelligence of Breakdown

In the end, falling apart isn't the end of you. It's the beginning of becoming someone truer. Someone more aligned with their deepest values. Someone who can hold complexity without needing to resolve it immediately. Someone who can feel deeply without being overwhelmed by the feeling.

The cost of holding it together too tightly isn't just personal, it's collective. When we refuse our own growth, we model that refusal for everyone around us. When we prioritize appearing functional over being authentic, we create cultures where everyone is performing wellness rather than actually cultivating it.

But when we have the courage to let old structures dissolve, when we trust the process of positive disintegration, we don't just heal ourselves: we give others permission to do the same.

The breaking open you've been avoiding might just be the breakthrough you've been seeking.

What structures in your life once protected you but now feel like prisons? What would it mean to trust the intelligence of your own becoming, even when it feels uncertain? I'd love to hear your thoughts on the delicate dance between stability and growth.

For nearly nine years, I've been documenting our friendship: from our first tentative email exchanges in 2016 to our deepening connection that has become one of the most transformative relationships of my life. What began as correspondence with a renowned scholar whose work had changed my understanding of myself evolved into a mentorship that was, by his own admission, reluctant at first but ultimately meaningful for us both.

Michael, now 91, is the scholar who brought Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration to the field of gifted education in 1979. His work on overexcitabilities has helped countless gifted and intense individuals understand that their sensitivity and depth are not pathologies but possibilities for growth. When I first encountered his writing in 2014, I saw myself reflected in his words in a way that felt like coming home.

But this isn't just a story about discovering a helpful theory; it's about what happens when you reach out to someone whose work has changed your life, and they let you in.

The material I'll be sharing comes from my extensive archives: journals, emails, reflections, interviews, and observations collected over our years together.

A Living Archive

What makes this sharing special is that it's drawn from nearly a decade of real-time documentation. I've kept careful records not because I knew they'd become public, but because writing is how I process and understand my life. The result is an unusual window into how a profound relationship develops over time: the setbacks and breakthroughs, the misunderstandings and moments of perfect connection.

Michael has taught me that the most important growth happens slowly, often invisibly, and always in relationship. Our friendship has been a laboratory for practicing patience, extending grace, and learning to love someone exactly as they are rather than as we wish they were.

These are the words I'm finally ready to share with you.

I'm starting with a piece that captures something essential about the transformation that happened in my life over the past decade, and perhaps something universal about how we grow from seekers into guides ourselves.

This began as a reflection on patience, but as I wrote it, I realized it was really about witnessing: what it means to hold space for someone's growth, and how that capacity develops in us over time. It's about the moment when you stop being primarily someone who needs to be seen and start becoming someone who can truly see others.

It's fitting to begin here, because this shift—from seeker to witness—has been one of the most profound changes in my relationship with Michael, and in my life more broadly.

There was a time when I didn't know how to be patient. During my early correspondence with Michael M. Piechowski, I was overwhelmed with questions, excitement, and a desperate need to connect. In hindsight, I sent far too many emails. I flooded him with my thoughts, hoping for guidance, validation, or maybe just someone who truly understood.

What's incredible to me now is that, despite my intensity, he remained in my life. Over time, I realized I needed to try harder: to pause, to give him space, and to trust that our connection didn't require constant engagement. And somewhere along the way, I began to cultivate patience.

This story isn't just about learning patience, though. It's about a fundamental shift that happens in our lives, often when we least expect it: the moment we stop being primarily seekers and begin becoming witnesses for others.

The Hunger That Drives Us

I think about that version of myself from 2016—so hungry for understanding, for connection, for someone to see me clearly. There's something both beautiful and painful about that hunger. It's the drive that pushes us toward growth, toward finding our people, toward the mentors and guides who can help us make sense of our experiences.

But hunger can also be overwhelming. When you've spent years feeling misunderstood or isolated, whether because of your neurodivergence, your intensity, your way of seeing the world, finding someone who gets it can feel like discovering water in a desert. Of course you want to drink deeply. Of course you want to share everything, immediately.

What I didn't understand then is that true mentorship isn't about constant engagement or immediate answers. It's about creating space for something to unfold over time.

The Power of Being Witnessed

One of the greatest gifts I received from Michael was his ability to witness my growth. He didn't rush me or try to shape me into something I wasn't ready to be. Instead, he held space for me to evolve. He saw my intensity and didn't push it away. He didn't rush my development or try to fix my eagerness. He didn't shame me for my hunger or my questions. And because he created space rather than trying to fill it, I was able to grow in ways I never could have predicted.

This kind of witnessing is radically different from advice-giving or problem-solving. It's not about having the answers or knowing the path forward. It's about holding steady presence while someone else finds their way.

Learning to Hold Space

I remember the exact moment Michael sent me a message that said, "Patience, patience, patience." At the time, it felt almost cruel. I was burning with questions, with the need to understand, to connect, to make progress. Patience felt like the opposite of what I needed.

But what I was learning—slowly, painfully, beautifully—was how to sit with uncertainty. How to trust that growth happens in its own time. How to find meaning in the process itself, not just in the outcomes I was desperately seeking.

This wasn't easy for someone wired like me. If you recognize yourself in my story, you might understand what it's like to have a mind that moves quickly, that makes connections others miss, that sees patterns and possibilities everywhere. Slowing down can feel like betraying your own nature.

But there's a difference between slowing down and shutting down. Learning patience didn't mean becoming less intense or less curious. It meant learning to channel that intensity in a way that served both me and the relationship.

The Unexpected Shift: Becoming a Witness for Others

At some point, and I couldn't tell you exactly when, the dynamic changed. I started noticing that people were coming to me for guidance. I wasn't just seeking understanding anymore; I was offering it.

This wasn't something I planned or even recognized at first. And honestly, I wasn’t sure if I was ready. But others seemed to know before I did. It happened gradually, in conversations with friends who were struggling, in moments when someone would say, "I need to talk to someone who understands," and they'd reach out to me.

People could see that I had gotten to a place where they hoped to be. Not because I had all the answers or had figured everything out, but because I had learned how to hold space for complexity, for not-knowing, and for the messy process of growth itself.

John Welwood wrote about his work with clients in a way that resonates deeply with what I was learning to do. While describing work with one of his clients, he said:

"I provided an environment of attentive listening and presence that welcomed her experience in an attuned, accepting way. The kind of holding environment I gave clients was the bedrock of therapeutic healing."

This is exactly what I found myself offering. Not as a therapist, but as someone who had learned to witness. I learned to listen without immediately trying to fix or solve. I learned to sit with someone's confusion or pain without rushing to make it better. I learned to trust that people have their own wisdom and timeline for growth.

What Witnessing Actually Looks Like

Real witnessing isn't passive. It's not just sitting quietly while someone talks. It's active presence: being fully there, tracking both the words and the emotions underneath, and becoming aware of the patterns that emerge over time, and the moments when something shifts.

Sometimes witnessing looks like reflecting back what you're hearing: "It sounds like you're feeling torn between what you want and what you think you should want."

Sometimes it's asking questions that help someone go deeper: "What would it mean if you trusted that instinct?"

But often, it's simply being a steady presence while someone works through their own process. It's creating safety for someone to think out loud, to contradict themselves, to not know what they think yet.

I've learned that one of the most powerful things you can offer someone is the experience of being truly seen without being judged or fixed. So many of us are hungry for this—to be witnessed in our full complexity, to have our struggles normalized, to feel less alone in our questions.

The Responsibility of Witnessing

Holding space for someone's growth is a privilege, and it comes with responsibility. You're not responsible for fixing their problems or making their path easier, but you are responsible for maintaining the quality of presence that creates safety for their exploration.

This means being honest about your own limitations. It means not taking on more than you can hold. It means being clear about boundaries while still offering genuine care.

I think about all the ways I could have damaged my relationship with Michael in those early years—by demanding too much, by not respecting his boundaries, by expecting him to fill roles he wasn't meant to fill. The fact that he stayed, and that he continued to offer guidance even when I was overwhelming, taught me something profound about grace.

Now, when I'm in the witness role, I try to offer that same grace to others. Not everyone will learn boundaries as quickly as they need to. Not everyone will know how to receive guidance without becoming dependent on it. Part of being a good witness is holding space for people to learn these things in their own time.

The Mirror of Growth

One of the unexpected gifts of becoming a witness is how it reflects back your own growth. Every time someone comes to you for guidance, it's evidence of how far you've traveled from that earlier version of yourself.

I think about the person I was in 2016, so desperate for validation, especially for someone to tell me I was on the right path. That person couldn't have imagined becoming someone others seek out for perspective and support. The transformation wasn't a straight line, and it certainly wasn't quick, but it was real.

This is one of the beautiful paradoxes of growth: the more you learn to hold space for others, the more space you create within yourself. The more you practice witnessing without needing to fix or change, the more patient you become with your own process.

When You're Still Seeking

If you're reading this and you're still in the seeking phase—still looking for your mentors, your guides, your people who understand—I want you to know that your hunger is not a flaw. Your questions are not too much. Your intensity is not something to apologize for.

But I also want you to know that learning to seek with patience will transform not just your relationships with others, but your relationship with yourself. When you can sit with not-knowing, when you can trust that growth happens in its own time, you create space for insights and connections that can't be forced.

The mentors and guides you're seeking? They may be looking for you, too. But not all mentors arrive ready. Some need time. Some never become what we hoped. And sometimes, before anyone else can truly see us, we have to become our own best witness first. That, too, is part of the journey.

The Long Arc of Becoming

What I understand now that I couldn't have grasped in 2016 is that becoming a witness isn't a destination—it's a continuous process of deepening. Every person I hold space for teaches me something new about presence, about patience, about the complexity of human experience.

I'm not witnessing in the same way Michael witnessed for me, because we are different people with different gifts and different approaches. But I carry forward what I learned from him: that true mentorship is about creating conditions for someone else's flowering, not shaping them into what you think they should become.

I remembered Michael’s words often: Patience, patience, patience.

It took years, but I understand now. Patience isn't about slowing down your natural intensity or curiosity. It's about trusting that the most important transformations happen in their own time, often in ways we can't predict or control.

The person you're becoming, the witness you might someday be for others—that's emerging too, in its own perfect timing.

A Final Reflection

Sometimes people ask me how I knew I was ready to step into a guiding role with others. The truth is, I didn't know. It happened organically, as these transitions often do. One day, I realized that I was spending more time listening than talking, more time asking questions than seeking answers, more time holding space than trying to fill it.

If you find yourself in a similar transition—if people are starting to come to you for guidance—trust that you're ready for whatever comes next. You don't need to have all the answers or be perfectly healed from your own struggles. You just need to be willing to show up with presence and patience for whatever someone else needs to explore.

And if you're still in the seeking phase, still hungry for witnesses in your own life, know that your process is unfolding exactly as it should. The right mentors will appear. The right guidance will come. Your questions will find their answers, often in ways more beautiful than you can imagine.

Both seeking and witnessing are sacred roles. They require courage, and both transform us in ways we can't predict.

All we can do is show up with as much presence, patience, and grace as we can manage—and trust that growth, in all its forms, knows what it's doing.

What has your experience been with mentors, guides, or witnesses in your own life? Have you noticed yourself shifting into a witnessing role with others? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

But that’s changed. I’m in a different place now. I’ve come to trust my voice, my boundaries, and my capacity to stay grounded in what matters most. And more importantly, I’ve come to trust you. Many of you have been reading for a long time. Some of you are new. Either way, I’m so grateful you're here.

So, starting now, comments are open. I’ve gone back and opened them up in the archives as well. Not every post will naturally invite discussion, but when it does, I’ll be there. Participating, listening, and growing this space with you. I may not respond to every comment right away, but I do read them all, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Thank you for your patience and presence.

This is part of a bigger shift. After years of staying quiet on social media and limiting how much of myself I shared publicly, I’m finally showing up more fully. To connect, build, and most importantly: to invite transformation in all directions.

If you’ve been here a while, thank you. If you’re just finding this work, welcome. We’re doing more than talking about disintegration here—we’re living through it, and building something beautiful on the other side.

For those who are unaware, I’ve been working on cosmic cheer squad and PDA: Resistance and Resilience, as well as Positive Disintegration. Here are some recent posts:

• One of my latest written posts on cosmic cheer squad was Growing into Love: A journey of becoming. A reflection on how my experience of love shifted from longing and self-abandonment to grounded presence and growth.

• cosmic cheer squad (co-hosted with Bee Mayhew) has released eight episodes since April. Our latest is episode 8 with guest Sheldon Gay, compassionate mirrors. We talked about what it means to be a mirror for others, and how reflecting people’s truths—especially when they’re not ready to see them—can be both sacred and heavy.

• PDA: Resistance and Resilience is a newer podcast I’m co-hosting with Marni Kammersell. We released our fourth episode last week, and the first with a guest: All About Functioning Levels with Katy Higgins Lee, MFT. From the show notes: we dive into the complex terrain of functioning labels, exploring how terms like “high-functioning” and even PDA itself can be misused in ways that reduce human complexity and perpetuate ableist assumptions. The conversation weaves through lived experiences, therapeutic insights, and parenting reflections while highlighting how labels often obscure more than they clarify.

Another update I’m excited to share: I’ve unlocked many of the previously paywalled posts here on Positive Disintegration, including the Interesting Quotes series. These are pieces that came from the work I’ve done connecting dots and tracing meaning over the past decade or more. For instance:

• Interesting Quotes, Vol. 4, Excerpts from Dąbrowski's unpublished manuscript, Developmental Psychotherapy

• Interesting Quotes, Vol. 10, Christopher Poulos on Autoethnography

• Interesting Quotes, Vol. 14, The introduction of overexcitabilities to gifted education in 1979

While I rely on the support of this community to continue my work, I don’t want to put a paywall between readers and resources that could help them grow or feel seen. My goal has always been service, not exclusivity.

The only posts I plan to keep behind the paywall are ones that are deeply personal or require a different level of privacy. Everything else? I want it in your hands.

Thank you to all who support me, whether financially or through your presence, reflections, and shares. You make this possible. 🙏

On July 19, 2025, I gave this talk at the annual meeting for the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP). What follows is the text of my presentation, along with a PDF of my slides. This talk traces how autoethnography became a path to reclaiming my identity and reinterpreting my past through a developmental lens.

Hello. I’m Chris Wells, and I’m so grateful to be here today. My presentation is called From Reflection to Integration: How Qualitative Inquiry Fosters Personal Growth.

I’ll be sharing how, over the past decade, autoethnography became more than a research method for me. It became a way to reclaim my identity, revise the stories I had been given about myself, and live with greater clarity and coherence.

For me, autoethnography began with personal writing, but it became something much deeper. I found myself returning to the same questions again and again—What happened? What did it mean?

Over time, writing became a mirror. Then it became a method. And eventually, it became a path.

I’m a nonbinary, neurodivergent writer and researcher based in Madison, Wisconsin. I co-host the Positive Disintegration Podcast and lead a small nonprofit called the Dąbrowski Center.

I first came to qualitative research as a student—but I was living this way long before I had the language for it. I was already observing, recording, questioning, and making meaning from the inside out.

My method began in the margins of my journals and in the tension of being misunderstood and mislabeled for much of my life. And it wasn’t until I became the parent of a neurodivergent child that I began to ask: What if the stories I’d been given about myself weren’t the whole truth?

A Life Misunderstood

“As long as I believed that I was mentally ill, I was.” (Journal entry, April 2022)

The quotes I’ll share throughout this talk come directly from my journals. I started journaling at 16, thanks to a book called When Anger Hurts. What began as a way to document outbursts of anger became a daily reflective practice.

I internalized the label "mentally ill" early in life. It shaped how I understood my thoughts, my emotions, and even my capacity.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 19, but that wasn’t the only label I carried. Over the years, I received multiple psychiatric diagnoses. For more than two decades, those labels shaped how others saw me, and how I saw myself. That belief—that I was fundamentally broken—was the foundation I started from.

“I have a problem and I am not afraid to admit to having a mental illness. It is something I believe I will always have to deal with. I may not like it, but I have no choice, do I.” (Journal entry, August 26, 1990)

I wrote that in my journal at 17. I had already accepted that I would live my entire life as a mentally ill person. But what I didn’t realize then was that I had already begun writing my way out of that identity. My journal became the first place I started to witness myself.

Searching for Pathology

“People are surprised to hear that I was once a mental patient because it doesn't fit with my status of having my MSW and getting a PhD. Mentally ill people are informally expected to not be capable of such academic achievement.” (Journal entry, April 12, 2014)

By the time I began my doctoral work, I was still carrying the story that I was fundamentally disordered, but high-functioning. I went into social work, and I was raising a child with multiple exceptionalities. Advocating for him brought me back into the diagnostic system—this time as a parent.

I saw him struggling in ways that felt familiar. I recognized myself in him. But I also began to notice something I hadn’t allowed myself to see before: that he was disabled and gifted.

For the first time, I began to wonder: what if those things weren’t mutually exclusive in me, either?

“By deeply pathologizing two of my strengths, I was left feeling more damaged than I already had because of my internal conflict—the 2e paradox of feeling like a fraud. A classic issue for anyone who’s gifted and disabled.” (Journal entry, September 16, 2014)

When I discovered the concept of twice-exceptionality, everything began to shift. The term means gifted and disabled. I realized that my giftedness and my struggles weren’t canceling each other out—they were coexisting.

In the middle of my dissertation, I threw on the brakes and launched a personal research project using grounded theory and autoethnography. As I read the literature, I realized I had pathologized my emotional intensity and imaginal process—the very qualities that were actually signs of developmental potential.

This was the first time I began to see that what I had called illness might have been a different kind of process.

Positive Disintegration

This is when I found Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration. There’s not enough time to explain it fully here, but it’s the focus of my work and podcast. Dąbrowski offered a psychological framework that didn’t see inner conflict as pathology—but as potential. He described disintegration as a developmental necessity.

His work gave me a language for what I had lived through. I also drew from relational-cultural theory, especially its emphasis on connection, mutual empathy, and relational resilience. These frameworks shaped how I approached writing as a relational act.

“I need to write about the changes I’ve gone through since doing the autoethnography. The way that I no longer think that I was mentally ill. It was a difficult thing to figure out. I was certainly struggling during those years in my 20s, but it wasn’t a sickness.” (Journal entry, December 26, 2021)

That realization was hard-won. It took years of recursive reflection to reframe my past and begin integrating my life.

Relational-Developmental Autoethnography

I came to name the method I was building Relational–Developmental Autoethnography, or RDA.1

“RDA is a qualitative method grounded in recursive reflection, relational engagement, and developmental theory, used to make meaning of lived experience over time.”

Central practices of RDA include:

• Dialogic writing: letters to real or imagined others

• Recursive retrieval: returning to past journals and documents to reinterpret them

• Developmental coding: engaging personal data through cycles of meaning-making

• Holding multiplicity: allowing for inner conflict and ambiguity

• Ethical reflexivity: writing about others with care and relational responsibility

RDA allowed me to integrate lived experience. Not by forcing coherence, but by tracing how insight emerges in layers.

It’s a developmental practice grounded in:

• Temporal recursion: revisiting material across years, and even decades

• Emotional recursion: feeling what was once defended

• Relational recursion: returning to key relationships with new understanding

• Theoretical recursion: deepening insight with each pass through the same ideas

For those who’ve been pathologized or misunderstood, RDA offers something powerful: a way to reclaim complexity.

“I used to see myself as so broken.”

That was from a June 2024 journal entry.

While my story centers on reframing a bipolar diagnosis, RDA has broader applications. It can serve anyone who has been told their intensity, sensitivity, or depth is too much.

It offers a way to recover meaning in places others may have seen only disorder.

If you’d like to explore Dąbrowski’s theory or listen to our podcast, you can find more at dabrowskicenter.org and positivedisintegration.org.

Sqip 2025 From Reflection To Integration

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