Working With Intensity, an amazing book by Daniels and Piechowski

Thank you, Melissa, for recommending this book.  Like finding the Myers-Briggs when I was 19, or The Highly Sensitive Person at 29, this book is affirming and encourages me to stop fighting who I am.  Funny how we circle back over and over through that lesson, huh?  

By the way, I am an INFJ....what are you all???  

Here are some quotes:

Intensity, Sensitivity and Overexcitability

Dabrowski explained the sensitivity and intensity experienced by these individuals in terms of overexcitabilities – a greater capacity to be stimulated by and respond to external and internal stimuli.  Overexcitability permeates the person’s existence.  Whether it’s music, language, physical sensing, kinesthetic activity, imagination, or something intellectual, an overexcitability orients and focuses them.  Overexcitability gives energy to their intelligence and talents.  Like a plant turns toward light, overexcitability draws out a their thoughts and behaviors.  An overexcitability is a temperamental disposition toward a class of stimuli that the person notices and responds to.  It is a lens that opens, widens, and deepens their perspective.  They receive and respond to signals that many others don’t even know or can’t imagine might exist.

Overexcitabilities are “original equipment.”  They are innate predispositions.  We are born with them.  Although everyone is born with basic modes of experience, persons with overexcitabilities are unusually intense in their experiences.  They react to lower stimuli than others – that is, one’s reactions may be higher or greater than others’, but also one’s threshold for reaction may be lower, and a person may react strongly to what others perceive as a non-event.

The five forms of overexcitability are: psychomotor, sensual, imaginational, intellectual, and emotional.  People often hear:  “You are just too sensitive.”  Our goal, with children with overexcitabilities, should be to nurture our children’s genuine self-expression – to support each individual child along his or her unique developmental path.  In terms of expression of overexcitabilities, we must guide our children to express and release their intensity and energy in safe and gratifying ways; and to help our children learn strategies to modulate the expression of their OEs.  To modulate means:

1.     to regulate or adjust

2.     to alter or adapt according to circumstance

3.     to change or vary the pitch

To ask a child to completely quiet or squelch expression of their OEs can be damaging to the child’s development.