Making Friends and Building Community

More thoughts on DC2024

As soon as I finished the last post, I knew I’d need to start on another one immediately. There’s so much to say about the Dabrowski Congress and how special it was that it’s felt somewhat overwhelming to capture it here.

But I also needed to take a week off to rest. Last week was the first time I haven’t posted since July 2023. I’m in Wisconsin with my partner Jason this weekend because we will be moving here later this year. It feels good to disconnect from work and finally make time to reconnect with each other.

The next thing I want to share from the Congress is how satisfying it was to sit in the audience while my friends presented their sessions.

During the final evening at the Airbnb with Bee and Pam, we entertained new friends, and I talked about how I met Pam, Tracy Winter, and Kate Arms at SENG’s 2017 annual conference. All three of them were present at my first presentation for the gifted community. That session led to the development of vital relationships that endure today.

Kate Arms and I started a Facebook group in 2018 with our friend Jen Merrill. The group is called Parents of Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Kids, and it now has several other admins and more than 16,000 members. The three of us collaborated on a webinar series in 2019 when I was still struggling with anxiety and lacking a clear direction in my work.

Kate helped me start the Positive Disintegration Study Group in May 2020, and Tracy joined us a little later. During their session, Kate mentioned offering reduced-cost coaching in the study group, which Tracy took her up on. Their presentation was based on the work they’ve subsequently done together.

Tracy and I benefited from Frank Falk's help during our dissertation research. Frank was an external committee member for Tracy and helped me with my study as a community partner before we worked together at the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development for four years.

Kate and Tracy’s session came after Rachel Fell’s, and I got to know Rachel when she joined the group after the SoulSpark Learning Empowerment Summit Series in 2020. That series led me to meet Kate Bachtel, and later, I joined the SoulSpark Learning Board of Directors with Rachel and Joi Lin. Joi, of course, was the conference coordinator for DC2024.

Perhaps the biggest blessing of my time in this community has been developing various relationships that have led to personal and professional growth.

During my closing remarks, I mentioned meeting Linda Silverman in 2015, and I’m realizing now that it happened nine years ago this week. We met during my first time at SENG’s annual conference, which was held in Denver that year, and then we talked together a couple of weeks later at the Gifted Development Center in Westminster.

At the time, I was aware of Dabrowski’s theory and had been reading about it, but I also felt some resistance. Because I still aligned myself with the medical model and saw myself as mentally ill, I didn’t feel ready to embrace this alternative perspective. During the conversation with Linda, she said some things that would end up changing my life:

1. Stop trying to fit in and be “normal.”

2. Bipolar disorder may have been a misdiagnosis. Look at your past with fresh eyes through the non-pathologizing lens of TPD.

3. Consider presenting at the 2016 Dabrowski Congress in Calgary, Alberta. While SENG was a great introduction to the gifted community, know that the Dabrowski Congress is where you’ll find your people.

4. Submit a paper about your autoethnography to Advanced Development Journal.

Sometimes, we don’t know what we’re missing in our lives until we find it. We don’t have the language or the connections until we have them.

I’m so grateful for the friendships that have developed thanks to being in the Positive Disintegration Study Group. That’s also how I’ve gotten to know Katy Higgins Lee and

Marnina Kammersell

over the past few years, too.

Katy Higgins Lee and Marni Kammersell presented "Giftedness as Neurodivergence, Not Functioning Label" during the 2024 Dabrowski Congress.

Nearly all of the sessions from the 2024 Dabrowski Congress are now available on our website. They are available for $30 USD at this link or click the button below. If you don’t want to pay for them, they’ll be freely available starting in 2025. But we appreciate everyone who has supported our work because you’re making it sustainable for us.

Bumps in the road

I came to the theory of positive disintegration at a time when it was falling out of favor in the field where it had lived for over four decades. At my first Congress in 2016, there was concern and buzz about a paper in Gifted Child Quarterly claiming that Dabrowski’s theory no longer had a place in gifted education and the overexcitabilities were better explained by the big five construct of openness to experience.

From my own experience of coming to TPD and rethinking my history of perceived mental illness, I knew that the theory did matter and that its relevance was much more profound than the authors of the GCQ paper knew or could acknowledge. It was during the summer of 2016 that I made the personal decision to dedicate myself to studying the theory and becoming an expert. At the time, I was still a doctoral student and working on my dissertation about parenting stress.

For the first couple of years, I was working mostly on my own and getting to know Frank Falk and Michael Piechowski. During the 2016 Congress, I had the opportunity to talk with Frank and his wife, Nancy Miller, and I returned home feeling like I might finally have found people to work with. Shortly after, Frank invited me to join the Dabrowski Study Group he was reconvening in Denver.¹

The relationships I made during 2016-2019 carried me through those difficult early years when there was a push to remove the theory from the field of gifted education. They helped me keep going when I felt exhausted and burned out. They got me through the moments when I wondered if I was wasting my time and energy with TPD.

At the Dabrowski Congress this year, we heard from presenters who discussed overexcitabilities through the lenses of ADHD, autism, and other types of neurodivergence. We heard about the lived experience of positive disintegration outside the context of gifted education.

We must never forget Dabrowski’s main thesis—psychoneurosis is not an illness. The theory needs to be liberated from the field that has never fully understood its depth and importance in the world of mental health.

I wish I could articulate here how much has changed in the TPD community since I first came to it in 2015. Things have gotten better, and we’re moving in the right direction. Much work has been done on the parts of many people to create this change and forward momentum.

To wrap up these thoughts today, I’d like to invite you to participate in a study I’m conducting with Joi Lin. It evolved over the past year thanks to a graduating leadership camper from Yunasa who I first met in 2019. He asked me if I might work with him on a research project during his senior year of high school.

We worked with Joi to create a revised open-ended questionnaire to discuss and study overexcitability. We hope the data we collect will help inform an updated objective instrument that can eventually replace the OEQ-II.

Here are the details if you’d like to contribute to this research.

Help the Dabrowski Center with a Research Study

Take an overexcitabilities survey at https://bit.ly/2024OEsurvey

● Ages 13+

● English language proficiency

● 20-30 minutes, open-ended questionnaire, University of Denver, IRB #2184173, PI: Joi Lin, PhD

Thank you for your help! We are so grateful.

1. You can read about the original Dabrowski Study Group in Linda Silverman’s (2009) paper, My Love Affair with Dabrowski’s Theory.