Conversation 4: Gifted Needs & Symbolism

**Karin Eglinton** (0:00)
Hello, everyone, this is Karin Eglinton, and we are back with another episode of our Gifted Trauma Podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about the way that gifted trauma impacts our awareness of our own needs and learning to become aware of our needs, which we might not be otherwise when we are in a trauma state.
So I'm here with my dear friend and mentor, Jennifer Harvey Sallin, and we're going to be exploring a little bit about theoretical aspects of how to think about needs, and we're going to be exploring a little bit of our own stories with getting acquainted with our own gifted needs and what that means. And the reason why we are thinking about gifted needs is because, as many of you know, I'm taking over Jen's Legitimizing Your Gifted Needs workshop, which is a very popular workshop on inter-gifted. And so in the conversations about it, the topic of gifted needs has been really fresh on our minds. So we don't want to give away a lot of what's going to happen in the workshop, but we definitely want to give you a sense of how we're thinking about it and share some of our experience so that you can yourself start to explore what your gifted needs are, especially if you've had gifted trauma, and start recognizing and meeting those needs in your life.
One of the things that we know about what happens with trauma and needs is that gifted trauma often takes us out of the immediacy of experience, the in the moment, here and now, body, felt sense of experience, into a realm that is more symbolic and at times more black and white, you could say more in the head. So Jen, would you elaborate a little bit more on this and tell us about what that's like and what that means?

**Jennifer Harvey Sallin** (2:01)
Yes, I'll be happy to. So I'm happy to be back here with you today, Karin, and with all of the listeners. And I hope that all of our podcast episodes are benefiting you all in some way or another.
We're loving hearing your feedback and following the discussions that are happening as a result of you listening and engaging with the themes that we're talking about. So thank you all for that.
And thank you to you, Karin, for taking over my workshop. As Intergifted grows, all of our listeners who are part of our community know that it's a lot of demand on my time and energy, and I simply can't do it all. So I'm really happy to be able to continue to offer the workshop through Intergifted thanks to your facilitating it.

**Karin Eglinton** (2:52)
Yeah, thank you. I'm super excited to be doing this, and thank you for the opportunity.

**Jennifer Harvey Sallin** (2:57)
Yeah, and well, of course, and you're perfectly placed to offer this, because as we'll explore today together in this recording, you've gone through the process of figuring out your needs, even when it was not so simple on your journey.
So yeah, a little dive into kind of what can happen when we have gifted needs, because if we're a gifted person, we have these gifted specific needs, just like any particular human experience. So if you're a female, you have female-specific needs. If you're a cat, you have cat-specific needs. If you're a tree, you have tree-specific needs.
Each living being has its own set of needs that are particular to its own makeup. And for gifted people, that includes this gifted-specific thing that a non-gifted person is not going to experience just by virtue of their own makeup. And naturally, I mean, I joke about this often in my work, that in school, we don't get taught typically, I mean, in basic schooling, unless you go to school to become a psychologist or something, we don't get taught about what our basic needs are. Our basic emotional needs, our basic belonging needs, our basic needs for self-esteem, for intellectual and aesthetic stimulation, and connection, and our needs for understanding life meaning, and having a sort of somewhat philosophical, even if it's simple, but a philosophical basis for our sense of meaning, so that's not just this kind of floating thing that feels untethered to anything in reality or to other people or our connections with other people.
We don't... I mean, nobody's talking about this. People aren't in school. I mean, we're not getting classes on values and all of these things. And so a lot of us, most of us are just trying to do our best. We know all the math and history dates and all of the technical details that we have to do memory for in school, but we often are just really blind to our own personal experience and our own personal needs. And even for psychologists, and again, this is something I joke about a lot in my work, but studying to be a psychologist, you realize that a lot of people who are studying to become psychologists are doing so because they have no idea either. There's oftentimes, and it was certainly a part of why I went to study, is like I had to figure things out because my life wasn't going very well. I wasn't understanding my basic needs or how to meet them. So me studying psychology was in part linked to that. I mean, I did have a serious interest in the topic as well, but there was certainly a part, and I saw that with most of my fellow students, that that was certainly a part for them. And sometimes it was the majority of it, just trying to figure themselves out.