Redefining 2e as Cognitive and Somatic Giftedness

Redefining 2e as Cognitive and  Somatic Giftedness  

In this episode of The Gifted Neurodivergent Podcast, I propose redefining "twice exceptional" from its current understanding, which combines disability and giftedness, to a new definition emphasizing "twice giftedness" in both somatic and cognitive domains.

I contend that disabilities in this context are caused by the education system's suppression of somatic intelligence. Our systems tend to cultivate a singular type of intelligence, often at the expense of those who possess alternative forms. The more sensitive an individual is, the more they are likely to be undermined by these systems.

Further, I argue that our societal structures are tailored to favor those exhibiting psychopathic traits. This emphasis on the absence of emotion alienates most individuals, but it particularly benefits psychopaths, who generally lack emotional depth and often operate ruthlessly. I suggest that the rise and fall of societies are intricately linked to the promotion of narcissism and the preferential treatment of individuals with psychopathic tendencies, as opposed to those who are highly emotional.

I present two examples: one illustrating cognitive giftedness and the other showcasing somatic giftedness, both within the neurodivergent spectrum but not classified as twice exceptional (2e). Additionally, I explore how individuals identified as 2e often share many traits with both groups but also possess a unique blend of these attributes, which sets them apart as creative intellectuals. This distinct combination in 2e individuals reflects a synergy of cognitive and somatic gifts, contributing to their unique intellectual and creative capacities.

00:00 Welcome to the Gifted Neurodivergent Podcast
00:22 The Journey of Creativity and Self-Expression
01:13 Redefining Twice Exceptionalism: A New Perspective
02:58 The Creative Power of Somatic Intelligence
03:53 The Suppression of Creativity by Educational Systems
07:25 Navigating the Future with Natural Intelligence
10:40 The Impact of Educational Systems on Outliers
15:45 Understanding Neurodivergence and Systemic Suppression
17:28 The Role of Cognitive and Somatic Intelligence in Society
21:00 Personal Stories: The Impact of Neurodivergence on Family Dynamics
23:23 Understanding Neurodivergence and Family Dynamics
24:02 Exploring Somatic Giftedness and Social Challenges
24:57 Navigating Shame and Self-Acceptance
25:34 The Dichotomy of Cognitive and Somatic Intelligence
27:32 The Struggle of Twice Exceptional Individuals
30:30 The Impact of Trauma on Somatic Giftedness
31:07 Challenging the System: Recognizing Diverse Talents
32:41 The Devaluation of Craftsmanship and Creativity
39:49 Redefining Success and Cultivating Individual Talents
44:11 Envisioning a Future Focused on Nurturing Exceptional Children

 www.GiftedND.com copyright 2024 

Transcript

Redefining 2e as Gifted in Cognitive and Somatic Intelligence

[00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to the gifted neurodivergent podcast. My name is Lillian Skinner. I want to share with you that this is my 45th podcast episode . Somebody wrote me and said, wow, you've done more podcasts than most people ever do, in this single year. I didn't realize that was true. I knew how many podcasts I had done. But I didn't realize that I was about at the year, mark. I think I might be a little over. I started this podcast one year ago. 

I didn't make any plans or efforts or goals for it. I was going to lay down what I needed to get out of me that I knew and this is the way that I process best. It's been a bit of a journey for me to finally get free enough, to be able to do something of my own, to make not just what I wanted to make, but also what I needed to make. People really do not understand that the creatives. Need to make things that others are never going to understand. I think that's something we all should be doing as we get further into our own ways of being, into understanding ourselves naturally. All of these [00:01:00] people who are competing with each other are not doing themselves any service Because creativity is a competition of one. You are not competing with the rest of the world. You're creating something new and that is why our systems repress creativity.

In this podcast, I'm going to redefine twice exceptionalism. I think it is wrong I don't believe it is disability and giftedness. I believe it is giftedness and giftedness. The reason we have it as disability and giftedness is that our systems do not educate us somatically.

 We are not educated in half of our intelligence. We each possess cognitive intelligence and somatic intelligence. Cognitive intelligence is at the mind ,somatic intelligence is at the body. 

Twice exceptional people have giftedness in both cognitive intelligence and somatic intelligence. This makes us very different from the rest of the population. It also makes us very creative, intellectually. I want to talk about how letting one intelligence go, in our systems. Not recognizing somatic intelligence and focusing on cognitive [00:02:00] intelligence is the driver that causes what our systems define as disability.

We are currently educated that twice exceptional students are neurodivergent and gifted, which I'm not arguing. What I'm arguing is what neurodivergence is, neurodivergence is giftedness. It's giftedness in either somatic or cognitive. This is why we have high intellectual giftedness and autism, because it is the cognitive side of our intelligence spectrum.

The twice exceptional label is muddying the waters so we don't actually understand that neurodivergence in its purest form is actually saying giftedness In two different areas, body intelligence versus cognitive intelligence. 

Twice exceptionalism means that they have multiple labels of neurodivergence. So someone who's autistic and ADHD, would be twice exceptional because we're talking about cognitive and somatic giftedness.

If they only had autism or they only had ADHD, we're talking about singular exceptionalism. One area of giftedness. We don't measure [00:03:00] giftedness for somatic. So those with ADHD would show up as not gifted.

 I think what's preventing us from figuring out who we really are, is the lack of understanding of somatic intelligence. By not going in and understanding somatic intelligence they're preventing everyone who's somatically gifted, whether it, be twice exceptional or once exceptional from understanding how they move through the world, who they really are, what their full potential is.

I'm not going to differentiate too much between the twice exceptional and the somatically gifted because the truth is this is a spectrum and you can be twice exceptional and somatically gifted, leading. If your somatic giftedness is higher than your cognitive giftedness, there will be difficulties because the system is not using your strengths. So either way they both apply.

What makes the somatically gifted different from the rest of the population is we are the creatives. Somatically gifted people are very different from the cognitively gifted people. We have three different groups and we're only recognizing one. 

Why would a system want to suppress a type of giftedness that doesn't make sense? 

Unfortunately It does. the whole goal of the [00:04:00] system is to suppress creativity. Those of us who are somatic tend to be highly creative. Those of us who are twice exceptional, tend to be highly cognitively creative. That is why we're showing up in the system as disabled because the system is hurting us. It's harming us, it's causing trauma because it's suppressing the way that we move through the world. 

Creatives change things they're trying to prevent us from disrupting the systems we have in place. By suppressing creatives, you keep things the same . That's the whole purpose of our systems. They terraform the earth, they terraform us so that we are like the cities they build. They get to control them. The people in charge are the ones who get to decide what buildings will go up and they decide what people will be successful. 

The methodology used to take control of a population, oppressed them and make them into tools is always education. This has been true since the time of ancient Egypt, when they first separated your emotions and intellect. And turned everyone into a tool. It is within the process of educating everyone that they condition [00:05:00] everyone, to be the same, to serve a purpose, to work within their hierarchy.

When you're done with their education. system, you slot into the system that serves them. You do not learn how to meet your own needs. You move through the world and make a career based on what they allow you to do. The stories of poverty to wealth journeys. Those don't exist anymore. The only people that are allowed to get that are the ones that serve upward. The ones that serve the hierarchy and the cost of them is usually very high. Those of us with somatic giftedness, the cost is extraordinarily high.

The current system prevents us from learning the basic necessities of life. It prevents people from learning how to cook. It prevents people from learning how to clean. It keeps you inside all day, sitting at a desk when you could be doing a multitude of things at a time, as well as learning the one subject they're making you focus on. You could be engaging in ways that integrate things, ways that works your body as well. Those are all things that do a disservice to those of us who are most sensitive. Those of us who [00:06:00] need the physical activity of moving around. We atrophy sitting at that desk all day. 

When my children went to school, I learned that the school system was doing them more harm than good. I had to use a combination of Montessori school, home school and unschooling in order for them to get the education they needed, because they were such outliers. The only thing consistent across all three is the integration of the subjects. It is making sure that they are putting them together. So they realized that the same knowledge can be used in all sorts of different situations.

Things they would never learn in school because school forces them to do a single thing at a time. That's not natural. Our natural way of being is actually doing multiple things at a time and integrating them and understanding them within that integration. We are not teaching critical thinking by separating and siloing. This is going to come back and bite the mass majority as things fall apart. it's going to bite very hard.

If you've listened to my prior podcast, you'll know, I focus on the 2d versus 3d plus perspective. This is another thing that it's doing. By making us [00:07:00] silo by making us focus on a single thing. They present to us a series of facts in a 2d manner. Those of us who do multiple things at a time are integrating them. That is 3d understanding of the real world and how things integrate. That is how you foster critical thinking, creativity and geniuses. 

Our systems, aren't creating geniuses, they're conditioning. They're teaching cognitive regurgitation. There is a fundamental flaw for the future we're facing in all of that. Because our future is going to be so dynamic, so chaotic, we will not survive unless we're able to pull up integrated information and critically think in the times where it is required.

Our current system, the way it functions, the way it's set up is destroying our ability to know ourselves. It does this for everyone. It does it at the average level, but the further you are from average, the further you are from the standard that they've chosen. The more destruction, the more disservice they're doing, because you are working against yourself. You're causing yourself great pain because you haven't learned how you should function and you should be for you.

The creatives are the [00:08:00] very best at transitioning culture, societies, groups of people, ourselves into new spaces, because we love what's new. We learn and 

grasp quickly to what is new. You are able to do this because you are sensitive. It is part of your intelligence. It is the driver of your intelligence. Our sensitivity is a gift that allows us to move into new spaces and adapt quickly. It allows us to know when the old spaces are getting too toxic.

Using our sensitivity. We figure out what style will suit us best. By allowing us the space to figure out who we are and how we move through the world. We are able to build the space that will heal us, the space that will educate us the space that will make us our full potential.

Being sensitive at the body level and the mind level provides you with the ability to naturally learn. This is called natural intelligence, and I'm bringing it back. We need to understand our natural intelligence. Because it's the only thing that will help us understand how to navigate the uncertainty that is coming. 

The most interesting thing [00:09:00] about this whole journey of understanding yourself and understanding how your natural intelligence functions is you realize how amazing your somatic intelligence is. You realize that there's many more ways to learn that we were trained out of as children, because cognitive was the only focus. Because cognitive served us fitting into the system. 

Everyone has cognitive and somatic. The people who are most valued in our system are the cognitively stronger. By focusing on the cognitive, they limit how much change can occur. We learn how to take the information of the past, memorize it and apply it. But not necessarily change it or fix it or make it better. It's mostly about applying it. We have PhD spaces where you're allowed to change a slight bit, but this is not changing the system it's changing and adding it in a small area. 

Being somatically gifted is the ability to learn by doing. Not only do you have the way that you can learn [00:10:00] in the system, but you can also learn on your own you can figure things out. 

 Understanding the process, both somatically and cognitively helps you get your full depth that you need for you appropriately moving through the world. Those contribute to your ability to discern. We will need discernment as we enter the next era. 

The disability are labels, and I believe those are lies set up to repress creativity. If you search on what a system would look like if you were to repress creativity or remove creativity, it comes up with our system. Do that simple search on AI, do that simple search in your library. You will find exactly what our system is. That is what our system is doing. 

I believe the damage that we are experiencing in our education system is the extreme conditioning meant to turn us into pliable, workable, harness-able people so that we serve the system. By focusing only on average, they're damaging significantly the outliers. 

By taking children who are extraordinarily bright [00:11:00] outliers and putting them in with children who are average, you're taking a child and putting them in a hostile environment from a very young age, for the majority of their waking hours, five days a week for many years. You are causing trauma. 

 In my last podcast, I mentioned the baby raised with the chimpanzee and how it damaged the boy for the rest of his life. But it was a boon for the chimpanzees intelligence. This example is extreme in the cognitive difference between the monkey and the baby. The cost lands on the higher intelligent child. It depends on the child, how the cost is manifest, but what the ultimate result will be is that child not reaching their full potential because the environment isn't good for them. 

The loss of the full potential looks like misunderstandings, challenges in developing proper social and emotional skills, broken peer relationships, low self-esteem, poor self-concepts. It looks like behavioral problems due to boredom and frustration. You have over and under achievement. You have kids burning themselves out, trying to prove they're not disabled, or they're not different. 

You have kids in [00:12:00] intellectual isolation. This one is huge. Kids in intellectual isolation are not going to reach their full potential. I was isolated from people who were at my intellectual level for most of my life. You have cultural isolation, which is another huge one because these children actually create their own culture. In order for you to achieve brilliance, for you to achieve the top level of adding to the world as a human being, you must create your own culture to see the new, to understand how you are going to change the world for better. 

You have to create your own world of being so you can see it in that unique and amazing way. That is destroyed in our systems. So many people do not know how to do that, what it looks like, and we'll never achieve it. Even though they have the brilliance to do so.

Instead those like us, our children are sent to places every day where they're ostracized, scapegoated must contend with classmates who are following the narcissistic hierarchical structure of the school systems and are constantly [00:13:00] competing, jealous, comparing and belittling them because they feel insecure. Because they know that those children are smarter, even if the system doesn't say that. 

This is what the system is doing to destroy our geniuses. They are keeping them from knowing who they are. They force everyone average to be a genius, and they force every genius to be average. 

Even if you had proper attachment to your parents, you will still come out of our school systems with attachment issues if you are profoundly gifted, if you are an outlier, if you are twice exceptional . This means you have limited emotional regulation. Emotional regulation for the twice exceptional is huge. 

The reason we have such dysregulation and have such high emotions is that our emotions have a more important purpose in our intellect. They're meant to be used. They are meant to extend our intellect so that we can process our inputs that we're taking it from the outside in real time, in greater complexity. 

So we can mental model these incredibly detailed, complex ways and see the world in ways we've never seen before. We are taught not how to [00:14:00] use that. As a result we're left with constant overwhelm And constant pressure. We feel like there's something wrong with us. 

This is the difference between a child who's a prodigy and a child who is emotionally broken. We are destroyed for not learning how our emotions are a part of our intellect, how they should feed into that. '

This makes it so much more difficult for us to ever build social capabilities, for us to socially move up to the world for us to ever take a position of leadership, even though this would be our natural role in healthy communities.

Our systems teach codependency; waiting for someone to always feed you the next thing to do. Learned helplessness; waiting for someone to tell you what you're good at and cognitive delays, because they don't meet a teacher or student or peer or mentor who processes, who functions like they should. 

 It is rare that we actually meet somebody and are allowed, the both of us, to be who we naturally are. When you meet somebody of equal intelligence, [00:15:00] even if their giftedness is in a different space. We form each other into our best. 

We have so many young people right now who can't see a future and they were never taught how to make one. Those are gigantic things, and we absolutely need to address them. 

We are deeply, marginalizing those who have the most to offer. Because we don't know what healthy looks like. We have a system that's set up average, as the ideal we've pathologized high intelligence and we think healthy is high functioning narcissism. 

The reason narcissists don't show up for treatment is because they don't think they need it because our system is telling them every day, all the time that they are perfect. That they're supposed to be this way and they think, I'm functioning highest in the world. I am obviously fine. 

The reason that we see today, a huge inequality, people who are making so much money and other people who are barely surviving, is These people want to be in control. They were given power and it wasn't enough for them. They wanted more. They are psychopaths and [00:16:00] they have crafted a system that reflects how they think and move through the world.

Psychopaths do not have emotions. That allows them to be ruthless. To move through the world without concern for others, they lack empathy. Their brains are only cognitive. 

They have created environments that suit them. Environments that have high stimulation, are controllable, that will not surprise them because they lack emotions to sense and understand what the outside world is indicating. This is their deficiency and they've remade the world around it.

As they did so, they made those who have high emotion, those who have high sensitivity, the deficient, and the disabled. 

Emotions are required to understand the future. Emotions are required to remember the past. Their cognition is in the present and now. They will segregate themselves. They will make sure that they are taken care of because that is how they operate. It has always worked for them. So why would it not work again . . This is their limitation and they will take us [00:17:00] all down with them because of their limitation.

What we need to understand is how they did that. How did they subvert and get so much power? How were they ruthless so that we can prevent it from happening again? So we can get out of the systems or whatever it is that's suppressing us and start our own that heals . 

It's actually by taking one of the neurodivergence and making it the system ideal. If you believe that straight A student examples that they give us all. That very detailed oriented, linear thinking, quiet, in their seats student, is actually an autistic student. It's a high functioning autistic, but it's not the multiple neurodivergences, it's a single. 

I grew up with the perfect example for this person, my grandmother . She is the one of the first to come of age in the new education system after they had implemented the different focus of education. She is completely different than her parents. I had the opportunity to know both my great-grandparents and my grandparents pretty well. My great-grandparents were [00:18:00] really wonderful, giving, kind people. I cannot say the same for my grandmother.

My grandmother is about 125/130 IQ. She can reproduce whatever you give her perfectly. She has OCD level cleanliness. She knows exactly what her limits are. She doesn't really have any friends. She's racist, classicist, misogynistic. She appears in public spaces, beautiful and put together. She's idealized and she is the least valuable person to society. My grandmother has never worked, outside the home . She is just a consumer. She refuses to recycle. She wants everything that she brings into her house to be new. She cares only about what it appears like to other people. She has the classic type of cognitive empathy where she follows the rules of the society or religion that she participates in. She cares very much about what her priest thinks about her., but she does not care about the people who are struggling around her, including her own children.

I know many people whose grandparents are like this. They grew up [00:19:00] in an era where this was rewarded. People who do as they're told people who follow the rules are good, pure and wonderful. The nature of this group is controlling. They're a group that forces everyone else to fall in line with them because they believe they know best. 

This group lacks affective empathy for others who are struggling. They see them as internally flawed. instead of valuing sensitivity that others have, the respect or love that they give. They see this as a weakness.

By making this group, the ideal, they created a hierarchy, where this group looks down on the rest of the population and forces the entire population, through shame or coercion, to be like them.

This is the model for our straight A students. They take in the rules of the system as black and white. They are the perfect managers, leaders of a psychopathic system because they lack empathy. They will drive high quotas to meet the results that they want to get their reward. They turn into psychopaths the more they work within the system, the more [00:20:00] they're limited cognitive empathy, atrophies. 

It's as if our system has mastered taking each type of person and turning them into the worst version of themselves.

If you think of the original autistic labels, they were made by Asperger. He was looking for boys who were not empathic. He was looking for a particular group that had cognitive empathy, where they could be socially instilled to do what their leader said but they don't have affective empathy for those around them. 

They fall on the autistic spectrum because the autistic spectrum is cognitive intelligence. If you have very low cognitive intelligence or very high cognitive intelligence, you are typically diagnosed with autism. The extremes are the autistic part, but the cognitive intelligence spectrum is its own spectrum. 

Just like the somatic intelligence spectrum is the ADHD spectrum. The very highs and lows would be found and called ADHD. 

Nobody is perfectly on any of these spectrums, one extreme [00:21:00] or the other. My grandmother happens to be one of those people that really does fit into the box that I'm describing. 

Average people would be average somatic intelligence, average cognitive intelligence. My grandmother has average somatic intelligence and high cognitive intelligence. The ADHD example I'm going to offer up is my mother. She has high somatic intelligence and average cognitive intelligence.

The interesting thing is while they're both equally as extreme In their neurodivergences. If my mother were a child today she would be diagnosed with ADHD. She would have to seek treatment to help her focus. My grandmother would never seek treatment. Nor would she need to, to survive in our systems?

My mother is the perfect somatic example with her extreme ADHD and nothing else. My mom is a doer. She is constantly moving, constantly functioning, constantly motivated by some internal burning engine within her. Every day, she'd take us for three mile walks in the woods and she would try to [00:22:00] get lost and then find her way out. She had this internal compass that she was always trying to test and she orients like an animal. She knows what time it is, no matter what we've been doing and she never wears a watch. Now she has her phone today, but when I was a kid that didn't exist. She makes her living as an artist, and a musician . Anybody can call her for anything artistic and she will deliver for it. She makes her living in small towns . A place where most artists never can survive, yet she does.

She doesn't plan anything out artistically. She starts making it and it just forms. She lives in breathe, aesthetic. She's all emotion in the way she goes about her world. She plays many instruments. she does many art forms. She's constantly having to create and make things. She was constantly redoing the entire house. She cannot sit still. She cannot stand to be directed. She cannot stand to have people tell her what to do next and follow the schedules of others. She can never work a full-time job . She [00:23:00] has the highest form of pathological demand avoidance of anyone I've ever met. I've seen her run out of places because people were demanding too much of her. 

She has an affective empathy, which means that she can only relate to empathy that she has experienced herself, at the body level. So if her body went through it, she understands it. If her body didn't go through it, she doesn't understand it. 

 In upper elementary, I developed epilepsy. My mother couldn't understand this. She kept trying to give me raisins to raise my blood sugar, because that was something she could relate to. She couldn't grasp the fact that my epilepsy would not be changed by raising my blood sugar .

 The dichotomy of watching my grandmother moves the world and watching my mother moves through the world, and watching them interact was amazing.

My mother needs the rush of people paying attention to her. My grandmother would prefer to stay inside and read a book. 

Watching them communicate was a horror because my mom was always talking about how she felt. And my grandmother was always talking about what she did and she couldn't comprehend the feeling. My mother couldn't comprehend when my grandmother could only [00:24:00] operate by rules and regulations. 

I believe that part of the communication issues between neurodivergence. Is the differences of extreme intelligence. I find that when I'm in my somatic giftedness, I am more childlike. I approach the world like everyone is egalitarian. I was in a PDA conference recently, Where a gentleman was talking about the shame spirals he experienced communicating with others, and I understood exactly what he was saying. For me, it's very clear they're occurring because I approach people as a egalitarian and there are all these unwritten rules when you go certain places. 

 When I first start any place, I'm very optimistic about the way things will go. Then I start learning all the unwritten rules and I have to switch over to my more autistic side. I have to go by their black and white rules. 

I have so many instances where I'm shamed for not being right for not knowing these rules yet. I definitely understand those shame spirals. They come up from childhood so deep and so strong because it's been an issue every time I meet new people in certain environments.

 As an adult, I've turned those shame spirals around and to [00:25:00] make them work for me. I teach my children to do the same. I say, this place is an unhealthy place and they're letting you know that this isn't the right place for you. It is very difficult for us to move through the world, navigating with what we're taught in our systems. Because they don't teach them , that the environment, could be wrong. They teach them that they are wrong.

The most sensitive people, what they're doing is picking up on dysfunction and they're internalizing it when in reality, what they ought to be doing is externalizing.

 That's exactly what healthy PDA kids are doing. They're saying, mom, dad, I cannot go to school because it's so dysfunctional. They're so cruel to me. I can't go. My body says no, that's genius.

Another way to look at this is my mother is ADHD. Her somatic giftedness makes her need to be free so she can use her sensing because that's her most intelligent space. She must do it the way she needs to do it because her body is leading. If you take away her body, which is what we do with cognitive focus, then she can't accomplish this because she's following her aesthetic. 

My grandmother is cognitive. The [00:26:00] rules and regulations are comforting. She likes to know what she's supposed to do. She likes to receive commands and fulfill them. She has been taught that she is a good person if she's doing what she is told. 

Those of us who are twice exceptional. We have both the giftedness of our body and our mind, but our bodies are going to give us the data that discerns. They have to shut down that so that people can not question what they're being told. So they'll blindly follow the authority of the hierarchy.

 All of these symptoms that we have pathologized, which are really kids who just need to be creative. Kids who need to work with their hands and produce things. Kids who process through the body . Kids who will fail or be unsuccessful in the way that they're teaching in the cognitive and they know this because the body's intelligence is huge.

Those are not bad things. Those are just different things. Our system has decided to oppress them. Because they want you to go into the system and produce as the system dictates. In order [00:27:00] for you to do that, you can't be too stubborn. You can't be needing to perform your own thing. 

It's a beautiful thing if your child has PDA and you're allowing them to go through that journey, it means you're a good parent. It means that you are letting them manifest who they actually are. Too many children will have parents who will severely discipline them for having something like stubbornness or PDA. The result is that they will have to punish them so harshly to override at a cognitive level what the body needs to do at the somatic level. It will destroy the relationship between the parent and the child. 

Now let's talk about twice exceptional because twice exceptional people will manifest in both of these ways, both like my grandmother and like my mother. I have found for young boys who go through the system they demonstrate a lot of somatic giftedness. Because they have a cognitive growth spurt so late. In my family, the boys have it in their twenties. The girls have it 9, 10, 11. 

In the profoundly gifted research, they have recognized that children who have later cognitive growth spurts are the 2e [00:28:00] outliers. It's genius that our bodies do this. They will delay our cognitive growth when we're younger, so that we can fit in. But then later we'll have this big cognitive growth spurt, and be very different, very weird. I think of all the goth kids the kids who in middle school go from being these sweet little bouncy, delightful children, to dark and morose children. 

That is the kids who suddenly have gone to these large cognitive growth spurts. They are no longer these somatically gifted kids moving through the world. They're now deep, intense, twice exceptional kids who have not been taught, how they move the world. Who feel, see and can tell the system is not working with them, but working against them.

 We have to understand that our child being not great at cognitive things is not really indicative of their end result. Twice exceptional people develop differently. Twice exceptional people have a brain and body that's in competition for [00:29:00] resources and they're trying to meter it out. That's why you only have one area of extreme giftedness. Because you cannot have any more just based on the resource restrictions of your body. 

For both somatic giftedness and twice exceptional, there is a knowing they talk about and giftedness. A knowing at the body level. The body knows more than the mind does. 

When I was younger, my mom was always calling out people that you thought would get a divorce or this person would have a baby when they would come true, she would always whip around and say, how did I know that? Like it was magic. I was the most invalidating child in the history of humankind, I would then list out all the ways we knew that this was coming . My mother would get very upset with me and storm off because I wasn't allowing her to have this magical experience. 

That is the difference between 2e and somatic giftedness. 2e can process cognitively from the intuition. That's really what makes me naturally intelligent. The somatically gifted have feelings and they are led around by their body and their [00:30:00] intelligence can't process it up to the same detail. 

 The beautiful thing about having relationships between twice exceptional and somatic. They're both creative. One is creative as a making the others creative as an intellectual . They validate each other. They work together to produce a whole. 

 The somatically gifted, have been denied their intelligence. They've been restricted from using it as part of the science. But the twice exceptional will be able to help them use their intelligence. Together they can make it science.

 I see a link between the somatic giftedness and trauma. When you have a trauma, your brain suddenly switched from focusing on the inside to focusing on the outside. I had some severe trauma as a child, and I believe that made my brain more somatically gifted. 

I believe it made it so that I could prepare for the future because I didn't have a safe place or a good place that I could rely on or fall back on. I was going to have to chart my own way. That's how it made sure I would [00:31:00] survive. I think that we're going to see more and more somatic giftedness because the trauma is going to 

increase as we move forward.

There's many 2e gifts that we don't recognize. There's many somatic gifts that we don't recognize,. We need to, because those gifts need to start being understood so that we can use them again because our systems and our environment are going to be changing so drastically.

 The cognitive are going to know the here and now. We have spent so much time focusing on the cognitive as being the ideal. They serve the system in making things and making certain people very wealthy.

The somatic and the twice exceptional, our prompt driven people. They're the creative. So they have a tendency to want to make things they want to create their own unique way. One way to look at it is an engineer versus a mechanic. They're both engineers. They're both mechanical. But one person's more theory and one person's more hands-on in some cases you can go all the way. That would be the twice exceptional. The cognitive would be the [00:32:00] engineer . The somatic would be the person who does things hands-on. It's more of a knowing at their body level. 

By ignoring the somatic, by not trying to understand it, by making it into a magical thing, instead of a realm of science, they're able to, extract emotion from science. They are able to devalue the people who had incredible giftedness and brilliance so that everybody who made something was the same. That's not true. 

There are different levels of craftsmanship. We all know that, but truly that is gone now. We don't see that in our world. Do you know any craftsmen? I don't, I know some people who do it as hobbies, but I don't actually know anybody who makes a professional living being a craftsman. 

As a result, somatically gifted people are really only allowed to make money if they are extreme outliers. Those people who are musicians, artists, craftsmen, athletes, have to be extreme in order to make any money. I've seen comparisons between professional athletics and the slave trade. I'll [00:33:00] never be able to unsee that because it applies to all the somatic. The hierarchy puts extreme production contracts on these people that cost them their mental and physical well being. Nobody thinks twice about it because they've made it so exclusive for you to be successful as a somatically gifted person.

School subverts the somatic gifted path because it teaches us that school is supposed to be torture. School is supposed to be boring. School and work are supposed to be something you have to do, not something you want to do. So the somatically gifted have to sit through an education system that doesn't serve them and then go into a job that doesn't serve them. 

Without pathways for somatic giftedness. They never learn a way to choose that as a path. They never learn that it's even an option. They're taught that they are wrong, that having body intelligence is wrong. Unless they're extremely exceptional in their raw talent. 

But even with the raw talent, my father and my sister are both musical savant and our schools destroyed [00:34:00] their ability to enjoy being a musician. They told them that their way of learning, which was by ear, which was knowing theory innately, which was being able to sing harmonies as a baby. Was wrong. That it was cheating, that they could hear a song once and then replay it on a multitude of instruments. That wasn't the right way. They had to produce a cognitively. 

They never taught them a method for teaching intuition to cognition. We have it in Suzuki for music, but our school system, which we went to a very good public school system. It didn't bother to teach my sister that it didn't bother to teach my father, that. It destroyed them. It shamed them publicly in front of the whole music ensemble we were in. That's what our school systems do to the most somatically gifted. That's what it does to the twice exceptional. It destroys them. 

People do not understand that savants are somatic first. That's what drives their innate expansive knowledge.. My math savant was told she was disabled because she could do math at 18th grade level when she was 10. that's not a disability. We have higher access to our [00:35:00] subconscious. She could see the end result. What she needed to learn to do was figure intuitively to cognitively. The intuitive to cognitive is very different. Because she does it intuitively to cognitively. She understands math in a way that most people will never understand math. She will move the whole way of seeing math forward because she is using the expanses of the entirety of nature to understand math. 

Our systems take brilliant people and they destroy them. They let them know that unless they fit into this little tiny box that they've created, they have no value and they will never succeed in our world. That's a lie. They have amazing things to offer the world things that are much greater than what our system has to offer the world. But we have pushed them out because we have to prove ourselves through the system. 

In order to keep the myth of equality and everybody having the same chances based on hard work, they have to destroy the most talented people. Let me use a more everyday example. . We have mechanics who are fixing your cars. There are very good mechanics out there, and there are very bad mechanics [00:36:00] out there. 

We all know this. We all take our car in and sometimes it doesn't get fixed or we have to take it back four or five more times and we have to go find another mechanic. They are not all equal. Yet our system pretends everybody who does the same thing, who goes through the same system of education is equal. 

This simply isn't true. There's people who are excellent at their jobs. There's people who are barely passable at their jobs. But they are getting the same degrees, the same certifications and they're making the same pay. That is not fair. But that's what happens when you make hierarchy. Everyone at the working level valued the same. They are stealing from the most talented people at that level to send it up to the top for the bosses.

The conditioning of the nation to make it so that we could lose our talent at the somatic level is very similar to the way we've changed it for apps. Uber has shut down the taxi industry. Taxis are charging more in one way, but the people getting the money or not the drivers. Airbnb has eclipsed the hotel market and the rentals market. Airbnb gets the most money. It's not [00:37:00] local businesses. 

The aggregate service apps are very similar to what occurred in the 1950s and manufacturing. Everyone was conditioned to want the same thing. They put out a single advertising message and that destroyed the industry for people who made things. People who did anything somatic because they were now not making custom one off things for individuals. 

Everybody was buying mass produced. Everybody that used to do the jobs where they were doing unique items. When and worked in a factory. There was no need for an individual understanding of skill set because you're going to make things that they somebody else had designed. It wasn't about quality. It was about mass production and everybody having the most value for the least amount of money. Well, now we have the most amount of money for the least value.

The craftsmen who made these beautiful, ornate rocking chairs only went to the rich, but then the rich would , haggle with them and push their prices down. Eventually, they went out of business and the people who had purchased [00:38:00] their beautiful pieces now have heirlooms. They have antiques worth money. 

 Now that there weren't any craftsmen making any products that really stood the test of time. They could start doing planned obsolescence . Now everything is junk. Most of its plastic. It's creating garbage everywhere. We have plastic in umbilical cords. 

There's a destruction of the creative is part of the pillaging by the upper-class of the lower classes. But getting rid of the arts and telling everyone that being a creative is a luxury. You have no choice then to go and work for them and be paid the same price as everyone who may not be as gifted as you. Whose creativity is not as high as yours. 

Who's energy if you have ADHD is not as unending and you are working very hard for the same rate as other people. You're making for them at higher quality, faster, with no extra value for you. In fact, what you're actually doing is driving everyone else to have to work harder until they burn out. This is why they're constantly driving competition. They're constantly talking about to compete is [00:39:00] natural. It's not natural. Competition is the opposite of natural. 

We are collaborative as a species. That's our natural state . The only person who gets served by competition between people who are employees is the owner. The person who loses is everyone who's competing. They lose because they're driving the value down of everyone, at an individual level.

 By knowing both extremes I'm showing in my examples, you will know the two sides of yourself. I think about that corny saying about wolves, you feed the one Wolf or the other. It's really about the two different intelligence we have and how we move to the world. Because we're forced into a single type. We become wolves. But if we weren't forced into a single type, if we were actually cultivated in our many types, we would not be starving ourselves and fighting ourselves, trying to figure out how to fit in. 

Let's offer the counter to this current system, let's offer places that cultivate us. As we are. That figures out how we move through the world. That does individual development when it's needed. Instead of being sliced up [00:40:00] and siloed, Seeks to make a person whole. Seeks to make a person who understands all their talents and how they can potentially come together. Because that is how you create new intelligence, new ways of moving through the world. New ways of seeing it. 

This is how you create brilliance. You do it by going into them and meeting them where they're at, not making them fit into the box. The box is a lie.

They tell you in the system that your child, this exceptional child, is wrong, bad, is never going to achieve much. These are all lies. These are people who were conditioned to believe that average is ideal. That children who do not comply with every demand, they're going to fail in life. Those are not the children that are going to fail in life. Those are the children that are going to succeed in life. 

We need our children to have spunk. We need our children to be obstinate. To be good parents, to deliver for our children, we need them to know themselves. They need to be able to protect themselves. Everything in our system right now is beating children down so that they are [00:41:00] broken, compliant, and will produce under the worst circumstances because that's what we're facing. 

 The children that are going to be successful are going to be the ones who figure it out for themselves, how to survive, how to be successful on their terms, not the world's because the world's success i 's gone. . 

 They are wired this unique way because they have a unique purpose in the society and they're trying to subvert that purpose. It doesn't work that way. 

Prodigy is not what people make it out to be in our system. Prodigy is a child who has extreme giftedness in one area, because that is twice exceptionalism. It may not be an area that the system recognizes. It doesn't mean that they don't have that giftedness. It means that they're a twice exceptional child with that one island of greatness that rounds out later and becomes an entire continent of greatness.

The most exceptional children are the ones resisting right now. They're laying down in Asia, they have pathological demand avoidance (PDA) in America. They have no choice. Their brilliance is telling them there is no [00:42:00] way success will occur on this path. It's too severe. 

This is children with high somatic giftedness who can map and see that there is no future for them. That right now, the best way to get through it is to check out. That is understanding at a deeper level than their parents, do than the administrators do. That is something we should be going into ,understanding and using to help them find their natural path so that they can reach their full potential.

I have had other people argue with me that these aren't smart kids, but that these are lazy kids because there's other kids that are creative that don't give up. They're correct. But their kids are not lazy. Those other kids don't have a choice they're put in between a rock and a hard place. They're usually the adults in the situation that they find themselves in. They're taking the responsibility of adults and living a life that doesn't serve them at all. 

Everybody who serves is not valued in our society. We're seen as weak. We're seen as sensitive fools. We are treated very poorly. Most of us are in bad relationships because we have no [00:43:00] idea what unconditional support and love looks like. Because our system treats those of us who are the smartest, who are the most giving, who love unconditionally, the worst.

We no longer value people who are kind, we don't value the nurses who spend extra time, the bus drivers who wait for us, the people who serve us well. The people who love us in their acts of service. We don't value those people in our society because it's all about making the most amount of money in the least amount of time. 

The best way to change a society is to focus on those who do the most value for it. It's the same idea that by changing a family, you focus on the mother because she's the heart of the family. These people are the heart of our society. If you focus on the most sensitive, most compassionate, those who serve others naturally, that's their innate way of being. Then you will change society. because they will choose to serve in a way that they stop serving those with power and start serving those who are most in need.

In foresight, you learn to see [00:44:00] many futures and you try to direct your life to the one that you want best. I only see one good future. I see mostly, really sad and painful ones. The one future I see that is beautiful is the creation of communities around these children who are not fitting into the system. Who are struggling and failing out or refusing to go. If we can give them the environment they need to be cultivated. They will be able to figure a pathway forward beyond the mess we're leaving them. 

 They're meant to figure out things other people can not figure out.. We have been trapped by psychopaths for 6,000 years, and this is our time out. If we get in front of it, we can change the entire existence of humanity. 

All right. That's my podcast for this week. I hope you found it valuable. Thanks for listening.

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