Overexcitabilities

The most common path people follow to discover the Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD) seems to start from Dabrowski’s concept of overexcitability (OE), which psychologists have defined as a heightened response and lower threshold to stimuli. 

In ordinary language, this means that for a person with OE, life is intense.  You take in more than others, and you respond more readily and more strongly to all that you take in.  Overexcitability (occasionally referred to as simply “excitability”; the “over” is an awkward translation and shouldn’t imply that one is out of bounds) is about how you’re wired—an all-encompassing property of the central nervous system. Here’s a fun fact about an overexcitable person’s physiology: if an average person closes her eyes and someone presses on her eyelids, her heart rate will fall ten percent, while if someone does this to a highly excitable person, hers will drop fifteen to twenty percent.  (For an explanation, jump to about 16:30 in this presentation from the 2016 Dabrowski Congress.)

There are five distinct categories of overexcitability: intellectual, imaginational, psychomotor, sensory, and emotional. A person can have any one of them, or a few at different levels, but they frequently function as a package deal.  That means that people with OE have up to five channels through which they’re absorbing, processing, and reacting to an unusually high amount of external stimuli.  As one author puts it in Living With Intensity, an excellent book on the subject, people with OEs have been told that they are simply “too too.”

Overexcitabilities are like highly saturated hues of life.

There’s nothing like personal stories to bring definitions to life, so I thought I’d start by sharing my own lived experience, from childhood through my mid-thirties (where I find myself as I write this).  Below you’ll find links to a basic description of each overexcitability quoted from an authoritative source, followed by a sketch of my lived experience.

Intellectual   ★   Imaginational
Psychomotor   ★    Sensory   ★   Emotional

Since I’m merely one individual, I’d love to add other people’s stories here to flesh out the picture.  If you also have OE and would like to share a story here, I invite you to post a comment on the relevant page or reach out if you’re interested in a longer contribution. Please feel free to post links to your own blogs describing your experiences with OE, too. Here are a few that I’ve collected so far:

• Laugh, Love, Learn is Lucinda’s blog all about her overexcitable family, chock-full of stories you’ll relate to whether you’re a parent of overexcitable children or an overexcitable person yourself (or maybe both), as well as ideas and suggestions for living this oh-so-intense life.

I also explore the post further in additional posts on this blog that I’ve tagged with content on overexcitability.

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As I noted earlier, overexcitability seems to be the most common route through which people discover Dabrowski’s work.  I figure this is both because it’s easy for people with OE (or their parents) to recognize themselves in the descriptions, and because OE has been adopted by gifted educators because of a correlation between OE and giftedness.  (It’s important to note, though, that not all people with OE necessarily meet any of the various definitions of “gifted,” and not all people labeled as gifted are overexcitable.)

It’s therefore important to emphasize that OEs are just the launch pad for this complex theory.  The copious amount of information that an overexcitable person absorbs and processes is a wellspring for developmental potential, the sine qua non of the Dabrowskian idea of “personality.”  It’s unfortunate that some people who learn about overexcitability never bother to dig deeper into the Theory of Positive Disintegration, so they miss what I’d argue are the most important implications of a life lived with “superstimulatability” (which is a more literal translation of the term Dabrowski used in his native Polish, nadpobudliwosc.)

So on that note, let’s move on to a likely result of a life lived with overexcitability: disintegration, and why we call it positive.

This page is also a part of Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop.
Follow the link for loads more takes on this topic.

This vibrant creature seemed to fit on this page somehow.