Ep. 120 – Rough Transcript
[00:00:00] Melanie: We’re not square pegs being put into round holes. We’re multifaceted pegs being put into round holes. And so every time someone knocks off one of those little pegs that makes us the quirky, wonderful person that we are, it makes us less capable of going out into the world and being who we were meant to be.
[00:00:17] Aurora: Welcome to the embracing intensity podcast brought to you from Quinn mountain retreat in the Columbia river Gorge. I’ll be sharing interviews with powerful, gifted, creative change-makers who use their fire in a positive way. My name is Aurora. Remember Holtzman after years of feeling too much. I finally realized that intensity in the form of excitability is actually the source of my greatest power.
[00:00:51] Now, instead of beating myself up about not measuring up to my own self-imposed standard. I’m on a mission to help people embrace their own intensity so that they can share their gifts with the world through coaching, educational assessment, retreats, and other tools to help tune in to your
[00:01:35] hello? On this episode, I finally get to share Dr. Melanie Hayes’ talk on twice exceptional relationships. And this is just the talk part. If you’d like to hear the whole conversation that happened afterwards, you can find it in the embracing intensity community at embracingintensity.com. And you can also find all of our past call recordings and group calls along with conversation about our group calls, the ignite, your power course that I’m doing, and lots of other great connections.
[00:02:14] So join us at embracingintensity.com and you can join in the conversation. If you are listening on the day, this is released April 1st. You can join us tonight at 6:00 PM Pacific for our ignite your power group. Call on self-empathy and. The second Saturday of the month, we’re going to have Rukshana Triem talking about connecting with nature, and you can find all of our group calls, community events and local events on the Facebook page at embracing intensity Facebook.
[00:02:55] And see all the awesome stuff that we have going on right now. Remember that this whole event process is kind of a work in progress. I am offering most of these things for free, but the only way that it will be sustainable past this year is if we build up our community, both on embracing intensity.com and Patreon, if you want to pledge something different than the membership.
[00:03:21] And membership comes with any Patreon pledge. So come join us on embracing intensity.com or Patreon and help support this awesome work and connecting the community around our mutual intensity and outside the box thinking. Awesome. Welcome. It’s so great to see you guys. I’m super thrilled to have Dr.
[00:03:49] Melanie Hayes here with us. She was early on my podcast a few years ago, I think. And she has a school called big minds, unschool, and a book called we tried normal stories of twice exceptional families. Right. And it’s a topic that’s very near and dear to my heart because. Personally come from multi-generational giftedness and likely twice exceptionality.
[00:04:13] And it’s definitely colored my entire life and interaction throughout my life. And so I’m super excited to hear what Melanie has to say and get a great discussion afterwards about our own twice exceptional relationships. So welcome Melanie.
[00:04:33] Melanie: Thank you so much. I’m happy to talk about something that doesn’t often get discussed is the adult two E relationships.
[00:04:44] And there’s lots of things about being twice exceptional that can really affect how you interact with another person and especially in a deep relationship. So, I’ll start out by talking about some of the common problems in relationships that, um, a lot of people experience, whether you’re neuro-typical or twice
[00:05:04] And then we’re going to talk a little bit about how being twice exceptional impacts you in those specific sort of common problems. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about some solutions and I’m looking forward to answering your questions and the discussion that will follow. One of the things I want to talk about is how love is expressed in a relationship.
[00:05:26] So some people express love through service. They do things for you. If they love you, some people it’s through touch. It’s a physical connection. Some people it’s through conversation and feeling like they’re being heard. And so if you are on different ways of expressing love, that can be a problem in a relationship.
[00:05:44] Another one is levels of intuition. A lot of people say, you know, you should have known that about me or you never understand how I’m feeling. And so that’s a common problem, different developmental stages in life. If there’s a significant age difference, or if there’s a significant difference in where you are developmentally in your emotional development, that can be a problem, different commitment levels.
[00:06:08] Some people are much more committed in a relationship than their partner, which can be, communication styles or an issue of how you are able to listen and get your point across. A lot of people don’t have time to be together to do enjoyable things, insecurity about the relationship, or lack of tolerance for each other’s foibles is a problem, compatibility, in like spending education, religion, culture, things like that can be a big.
[00:06:40] Inequality and how we’re contributing to the relationship as a problem. If you have continual conflict and unresolved conflict leads to resentment and a lack of emotional connection. So, all of those things are kind of the big things that people come to a therapist for relational. And when you’re a twice exceptional person, those things take on a whole bunch more layers.
[00:07:06] So let’s just think about some of the common things in twice exceptional people. So, one of them is anxiety to eat. People in general have higher levels of anxiety, whether it’s a diagnosed disorder or not, we’re all pretty highly anxious. Oh, it has to do with our sensitivities as well as our high intellect.
[00:07:26] You know, we understand things about the world that maybe other people don’t understand and we feel things more deeply than other people feel. So, the anxiety is a natural reaction to that. We have overexcitabilities. All of us have things that we react to in intense ways. Sensory processing is a big deal for a lot of us, which contributes to the overexcitabilities.
[00:07:50] Some of us have working memory issues. Some of us have processing speed stuff that happens when we’re trying to have a conversation. Many of us are hyper-focused. So, we tune everything out, including our partner, lots of two E people have an unusual perspective on life. So, they look at things in a different way than maybe their partner does.
[00:08:13] We tend to overthink issues and we can’t let go of. We have asynchronous development. So that ties into what I was saying about where you are in your emotional development. Some of us have unusual sleep patterns, and that might impact our partner. Some of us have problems. Modulating. Our voice were either too soft or too loud.
[00:08:37] We may be chaotic people that have a hard time with organization. We may be overwhelmed by other people’s emotions. We’re perfectionists. As I said before, we’re highly sensitive. We may be compulsive and obsessive. We may be impulsive. We may have unrealistic expectations. Many of us have poor self-efficacy because we’ve had a hard time being successful at many things in our lives to eat.
[00:09:04] People often have difficulty with transactions and transitions between transactions. Well, some of us also have problems reading facial and body language. So that can be a real inhibitor when you’re trying to have an intimate conversation. Some of us have trouble with authority and authority figures.
[00:09:22] Many of us are out of sync with others and we could be socially awkward. So of course, that list doesn’t describe portion of being two E. And it certainly isn’t an all-inclusive because everybody is an individual with their own unique way of being in the world. But those are kind of common things about being a twice exceptional person.
[00:09:44] So what happens when you layer that on top of typical relational problems is you’ll get things like one person is highly sensitive. And so, you may have a partner who comes home from work really stressed. And they just need some time to decompress. A highly sensitive person is going to be overwhelmed the minute they walk through the door, that feeling of
[00:10:07] stress that they’re carrying from work is going to immediately flood you and make you feel stressed out. And so, depending on what your personality is, you might run away. You might try to fix the problem. You might go, you know, it’s like we go into fight flight or freeze, right? So, you might start to fight with your partner.
[00:10:24] You might want to run away. You might shut down. And that makes it really hard when your partner, particularly if your partner is a neuro-typical person, they’re not even going to realize that you’re going through. Just by them walking through the door and feeling that intense stress. There’s a psychologist named Dr.
[00:10:43] John Gottman, who did a study. Some of you might be familiar with his work, but he did this study called it the love clinic, and he could watch tapes. Couples fighting and predict with 98% accuracy, whether or not their marriage would last. And so, he’s done a lot of work around helping people work through what he calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse in a relationship.
[00:11:07] And those are criticism, defensiveness, contempt. And stonewalling. So, let me talk a little bit about each of them. So, criticism, we all pretty much know what that is. We’re critical of our partner. We’re critical of ourselves. Criticism often is how we communicate with each other and it sometimes takes precedence over all other forms of communication.
[00:11:30] Defensiveness. We don’t want to take responsibility for our part in it. We may have trouble taking another person’s perspective. That’s really tough for some people to understand the other person’s perspective, so they may get very defensive in conversations where even if their partner is being sensitive and kind about how they’re saying something, they may get defensive anyway.
[00:11:54] Contempt, you know, that’s sort of the death nail. If you feel contempt for your partner, it’s really hard to have any kind of a meaningful commitment. And for two people, oftentimes we’ve been bullied for a really long time, either from as childhood from school, from other children, from teachers, from authority figures, sometimes even our parents.
[00:12:15] And so oftentimes when we get to a point in our adult lives, We’re no longer the target of bullying, or sometimes even when we are, but particularly when we’ve sort of risen above it, oftentimes we’ve revert to being the bully. And I know it seems counterproductive, but that does happen sometimes.
[00:12:34] Like if you get particularly in a relationship where you might be the person who holds more power, it’s really hard not to flip the switch and become the bully and have that sort of contemptuous. And then the last one is stonewalling. So that’s that fight flight or freeze. You run away from the discussion.
[00:12:55] You don’t engage with the emotional reaction that the person needs. They may be feeling sad and you just don’t want to deal with it. So, you walk away and those are difficult in the relationship, but they’re also really difficult for you as a human being. So even if you weren’t in a relationship, sometimes we do those things to ourselves.
[00:13:17] So if you think about a two E person who has not ever fit into the world really well, they might struggle socially. They’ve not had great success with their career, even though they might be financially successful. They don’t really feel like they’re doing their, what they’re really passionate about and what they were put on this earth to do.
[00:13:37] You often are really hypercritical and perfectionistic. To yourself. And so, you’re not very kind to yourself and that can all roll out into how you interact with your part. So, one of the things I wanted to talk about ways that we can first learn to love ourselves and then have that love rollout into our relationship, because it’s like, you know, the put your own oxygen mask on first.
[00:14:05] If you don’t love yourself, you’re not going to be capable of someone else. So, the thing that I would like to ask people to do, some of you might be familiar with mind mapping, but even if you’re not you make a list of all of the things that you feel like you have done well in. And I guarantee you, it’s going to be hard to do, because if you make a list of all of the things that you’ve done wrong, or that you’re not well doing well, you consider the faults that you have within yourself.
[00:14:34] You’re going to be able to make a list as long as your arm, but to make a list of things that you feel like you do well. And you’re really proud of yourself for doing that’s much more difficult for. And it refers back to the perfectionist and the anxiety and all of us. Um, perfectionism stems directly from anxiety.
[00:14:52] We have higher standards for ourselves than we do for anybody else. But if you can do that exercise and start to look at the things about yourself that are really marvelous and wonderful and unique, because two people are the most amazing people on this planet. I’ve worked with two people for 20 years professionally.
[00:15:12] I’m a two E person. I’m married to a two E person. I have two children who just turned 18. So, I said, even my dog is too. He’s really smart and has high anxiety. And you know, he’s a Chihuahua Jack Russell. So of course, you know, he’s in the mix. But I think that the key to being a successful two E person is to recognize how unique and wonderful you are and what I’ve seen in my work with two children in particular.
[00:15:39] And I’ve said this many times before that we’re not square pegs being put into round holes. We’re multifaceted pegs being put into round holes. And so, every time someone knocks off one of those little pegs that makes us the quirky, wonderful person that we are, it makes us less capable of going out into the world and being who we were meant to be.
[00:15:59] So we, we get disconnected a lot of times through childhood, through parenting and school, we get disconnected from those things that made us our unique person. Your too dreamy. You are spending too much time doing art. You’re spending too much time reading you. All you want to do is run around in nature.
[00:16:17] You never do your homework, you don’t do your chores. So, all of those kinds of voices we hear in our heads now as adults, we’re part of the. Raised in a world where we were told basically who we are, is not compatible with what the world wants for us. So, as you know, most two E children are not compliant children.
[00:16:37] We don’t like to be controlled. We don’t like to be told what to do, but we’ll be the first person to stick by the rules if we believe in them and see their value. And that is in many ways, twice exceptional people. Walk that fine line, because on the one hand, we’re going to be the first person that’s going to rebel.
[00:16:54] On the other hand, we’re going to be the first person who once we understand what the rules are, we’ll want people to adhere to them. But what happens in childhood when you do that is you do lose track of who you are and who you were meant to be. And a lot of times it starts a pattern of self-loathing and disconnection from seeing yourself as a worthy human being.
[00:17:17] So it, it is sort of deep work that has to be done about who you are as a person and learning to value yourself before you can actually value another person in a relationship. One of the people I really like is Dr. Ross green. He has a website that’s meant for parents and teachers working with children.
[00:17:39] It’s called lives in balance. And he talks about. He calls them the unlucky children, the kids that are, or nobody likes because they’re really hard to deal with. But if you think about those kids that dwell inside of us, he says that all kids’ misbehavior, everything that they do that makes people feel like they’re bad kids has to do with lagging skills and unmet needs.
[00:18:04] So he doesn’t believe that there’s any such thing as a bad child. So, if you look at the inner child in yourself and you say all of those things that I’m super critical about myself, that I feel have made me into a lousy human being. If I try to reframe that and I changed my perspective and I say, what are the unmet needs that I have right now?
[00:18:28] And what are the lagging skills? That I need to be able to meet those needs. So, you’re looking at it through adult eyes, and this is a different way of looking at Dr. Green’s work. But I think it’s really effective. I think we can say to ourselves.
[00:18:42] Okay. I’ll give you an example. My husband often does not hear things I ask him to do we write them on the calendar. We text him because he’s, he has some auditory processing stuff. So, I could say, I think he’s a terrible person because no matter what I ask him to do, he doesn’t remember or doesn’t hear what I asked him to do. But if I change that lens and I look at him that he has a lagging skill in being able to hear auditory instruction.
[00:19:11] And if I adjust my way of being to say, okay, I have to write this down. I have to send him a text to remind him, instead of being frustrated and feeling like he’s a terrible partner, I can say he has a lagging. And so how can I use that to interact with him in a more effective way? And I’m not tearing him down and making him feel like a horrible person, because he already has that built in him.
[00:19:37] Right? All of us to eat. People have that side of ourselves that we think is unworthy and so sensitive. We may be very sensitive to criticism, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not getting my need met. It doesn’t mean that I’m being willing to put his needs before mine. It just means that I understand that he has a lagging skill.
[00:19:56] And if I’m also looking at myself, then I, as a child, might’ve had an unmet need of being here. Heard. I grew up in a family of eight children. I was the middle kid and believe me, I was not heard. I’ve been at adult family reunions where I’m in the middle of making a conversation at the table and somebody at the other end of the table will start to talk, one of my older siblings, and the whole table will turn and look at them. So, I still in my family system am not heard. So, for me, you know, that’s an unmet need. I need to be heard. And so, you could see if we’re not looking at this relationship with this more pragmatic way of seeing things, my unmet need to be heard with my husband’s lagging skill to hear.
[00:20:40] Could cause the relationship to fall apart. So, one of the things I like to do around self-care is think about your relationship and your interactions. Are they fear-based or are they love-based? And really truthfully, even fear-based is love-based because most of us, the fearful reactions we have are about needing love or wanting to give love and not able to do.
[00:21:09] For whatever reason. So, we often, when we feel fearful, like my husband is never going to remember my anniversary and I’m going to feel really depressed because he doesn’t remember my anniversary or my partner says that they don’t think anniversaries are important and they just don’t want to celebrate them because that’s not an important thing to them.
[00:21:32] So those kinds of things can be really hurtful if we’re not willing to look at. Those things as being fear-based or love-based. So, so fear-based, if my partner says to me, I don’t think anniversaries are important. I don’t ever want to celebrate them and I try to control it by saying, you know, you must celebrate my anniversary because it’s important to me then that’s not going to be successful.
[00:21:54] But if I say to my partner, well, this is an unmet need that I have. I need our anniversary to be celebrated. Can we find a way to celebrate? Maybe it’s not the actual anniversary because you don’t find that date important, but is there some way we can come to a compromise to celebrate this thing that feels like a milestone to me.
[00:22:15] Maybe you have an unmet need of never having a successful relationship before. And so, in being in a successful relationship for a year or two and something that you can mark that time, it feels really important to celebrate that milestone. So, then you have to talk to each other. What I call the empathy channel, you have to listen to each other’s perspective and you have to say, how can we come to a mutual compromise around making sure that both of our needs are met?
[00:22:43] So that’s one thing. I talked about self-love first. What does make you happy? What is important to you? How would you like to be in the world? How would you like to have people interact with you? All those kinds of things. You have to think about how you want to live and what is meaningful to you. That’s the number one thing until you figure that out for yourself, you’re not going to know how to do that empathy channel, to ask for your partner for what’s important for you.
[00:23:13] And I don’t believe there’s such a thing as selfishness. I think that people can be too self-centered. I think that people cannot take another person’s perspective, but when you’re a twice exceptional, you really do have to look at yourself deeply. You have to really understand that you have to get your needs met first, or you’re never going to feel competent to get someone else’s needs met.
[00:23:39] And that can be really hard for us because oftentimes. Many of us have attachment issues from when we were young children, I will just say Two E babies are often hard to parent because they cry a lot. They don’t sleep well. They can be oppositional from a really young age. So, a lot of times our parents didn’t give us the kind of nurturing we needed to have that
[00:23:59] deep positive attachment. That is sort of the basis of self-love. So sometimes we have to go right back to look at ourselves as a little tiny child and start to heal that lack of attachment, a lack of self-love. And if you recognize that your partner, your two E partner has that same, probably some lack of positive attachment experiences, you can work towards both of you helping each other.
[00:24:26] Get. Love and a positive, strong attachment that allows you to be able to really have those deep relationships that we all crave because we are deeply empathetic people. We are deeply sensitive people, and we really want those meaningful connections to someone we love and care about, but it might be really hard to make that happen because of who we are as a two week.
[00:24:52] So the last thing I want to say before, I will open it to answering your questions because I think that’s probably, what’s going to be the most helpful and meaningful for all of you is to be able to talk about your own lives is I want to say, I read an interesting book the other day by Dr. Kelly Turner.
[00:25:09] It’s called radical remissions has nothing to do with relationships. It’s about people who were in end stages of cancer and for no medically explained reason fully. She studied about 1500 people around the world. And she found there was some commonalities to these people in their recovery. And I’m going to read this list to you because I think it’s really important.
[00:25:31] It, there were only two things that were physical. There were nine things on the list and two of them were physical. The other seven were emotional. And when I read this, I thought, oh my gosh, this is the recipe for two people to be able to connect with who they really are. And. Have the kind of fulfilling lives and relationships they would like to have.
[00:25:54] So here goes, it’s take control of your life, follow your intuition, release, suppressed emotions. And for empaths, that is so critical. Like you have to figure out some way to grab those emotions because a lot of the times the emotions you’re feeling are not yours. They’re actually somebody else’s that you’ve internalized.
[00:26:16] And for everybody to release it as different. So, you know, I can’t give you a formula for releasing it. It might be walking barefoot in grass. It might be going for a swim. It might be drinking a cup of tea, you know, it’s different for everybody increasing positive emotions. So that’s that self-love, I’m talking about really being able to recognize how wonderful you are.
[00:26:37] Embracing social support. And for many two E people, this is hard. Like we don’t really have great social support because most people don’t understand us. So that’s why communities like Aurora is what she’s built here is so. Because we have the distance wise few and far between, but thank God, you know, we can connect electronically and know that there are others like us out there, um, deepening your spiritual connection.
[00:27:04] So whether that’s spiritually connected to nature, whether you believe in angels, whether it’s connected to a higher power, whether it’s the collaborative love energy that flows through the world, whatever is meaningful to you spiritually. Really being connected to that is helpful and having a strong reason for living.
[00:27:24] And I know for many of us who are two people, we’ve been through deep depression. We’ve been through times when we didn’t really feel like there was a reason to live, but we also have a unique way of looking at the world to eat people, see things, other people don’t see, we can connect things. Systemic patterns about what might be coming in the future or how other things are connected or how to solve really difficult problems that other people don’t see solutions to.
[00:27:55] So what I encourage you to do when you’re feeling like there’s no real reason for living and you know, right now in the world, there’s a lot of horrible stuff happening that makes a lot of us want to run away because it’s too intense. I encourage you to look at your own life. What are you passionate about?
[00:28:13] What little thing can you do in your neck of the woods? That will make a difference, maybe even only for yourself, but be connected to life because we do have capacity to do things that other people can’t do, and we really are needed in this world. Like the more of us that engage in the world and make some small difference.
[00:28:35] The better the world’s going to get, because we sort of are connected to the future and understanding problems and solving problems and connecting people and ideas in ways that other people are not capable of. And I thought, boy, if all of us could figure out how to do that, we could be wonderful at loving ourselves at getting what we need and want out of life.
[00:29:00] And we would be wonderful partners to the people we choose to share on.
[00:29:05] Aurora: You can find the full Q and A conversation and discussion in the embracing intensity community@embracingintensitydotcomandhelpsupportthecontinuationofthesefreegroupcallsandeventsbysupportingusonembracingintensity.com or embracing intensity on Patreon.
[00:29:25] See you next week,
[00:29:33] looking for ways to embrace your own intensity. I’ve got two free tools on embracing intensity.com to help you start your journey of self-exploration. My find your super power course, where you can explore your own unique brand of excitability. And identify what it looks like when your power is well harnessed and a free retreat planner to help you plan out your own personal self-exploration retreat.
[00:30:00] You can also join our Facebook community, the league of excitable women, where you’ll meet a growing group of like-minded women, non-binary folk and the femmes who get what it’s like to be highly excitable and are committed to creating a supportive community. If you’d like to support the production of embracing intensity, you can become a patron on Patreon and receive tools such as done for you.
[00:30:23] Personal retreat guides and my ignite, your power course, all links can be found in the show notes on embracing intensity.com.