People high in emotional OE are sometimes accused of ‘overreacting’, and their intensity is often misunderstood as a sign of emotional immaturity. Their compassion and concern for others, their focus on relationships, and the intensity of their feelings may also interfere with everyday tasks and hold them back from achieving in life (Piechowski and

We pay the high price of our own emotional freedom when we allow ourselves to be stranded by others’ temperaments and actions.

Remember that true intimacy is only achieved when you can allow the other person to be exactly as they are. The more your mind is preoccupied with how things should be, the more tension you will feel, and the more distance you create between you.

Some research found that ongoing negative feedback towards the young person’s intuitive perception is the most damaging (Park et al., 1992). If the parents explicitly or implicitly reject the child’s idiosyncrasies, the child will internalize the shame of rejection and experience themselves as being profoundly bad (toxic shame), and their natural

Last but not least, the gifted have an intense moral commitment to bettering the world. They want to address the injustice they see and are frustrated with inequality in humanity.

The scapegoat role is not assigned by accident. It is often imposed on the innately sensitive and hyper-empathic child because they often are the ‘whistleblower’ who sees through and points out the facade. As the family members ‘discharge’ their resentment, the child becomes the carrier of all the angst and suppressed negativity in the family.

When you turn away from feeling bad emotions, you turn away from feeling good emotions too. You may become an observer of life, watching it go by without being ‘in’ it. Some people may even experience memory loss, as they do not remember much of their life – even looking at old pictures of themselves can seem surreal. Life’s pain may seem dampened,

As you remember these experiences, notice how you feel on a visceral level. A cognitive recounting will not suffice, unless it is connected strongly to a bodily feeling, because your memories were stored in your body on a cellular level. The challenge is to find the accurate sense of feeling but not necessarily a storyline. Truly grieving involves

Though history cannot be changed, you can rewrite the story that you tell yourself. You are in no way ‘bad’ or ‘too much’. You are a sensitive, intuitive, gifted individual who might have been deprived of the right kind of nourishment during childhood. Your high level of awareness and acuity to subtleties is both rare and incredibly precious. If