Learning to Listen

Part 3: Reflective depth and the integration of insight

This is the third post in my series “Mapping the Emotional Landscape,” exploring how emotional overexcitability developed across five distinct phases of my life. In Phase 1, emotional intensity felt too dangerous to feel fully: seventeen years of fragmentation and survival. Phase 2 marked the breaking of that protective silence, learning to fight for my own voice. Now we turn to Phase 3, when that voice began to reveal something deeper: emotion itself as a form of intelligence, and the formal beginning of what would become relational-developmental autoethnography.

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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.

Photo by Anastasiya Badun on Unsplash

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.

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

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