Relationships and Vulnerability

Positive Disintegration Podcast

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Relationships and Vulnerability

Join hosts Emma Nicholson and Chris Wells for Episode 14 with Michele Kane

Dr. Chris Wells

and

Emma Nicholson

May 27, 2022

In episode 14, Chris and Emma were joined by Dr. Michele Kane, an educator, storyteller, and long-time Dąbrowski enthusiast. She has done wonderful work tending relationships in this community, and she shared herself with vulnerability and courage in this episode. Some of the topics touched on include the reality that learning about the theory changes your relationship with yourself, how well the theory captures differences in emotional range, and the importance of connection. We learned that feeling and being seen are critically important, and receiving mirroring is one of the blessings of discovering and participating in the Dąbrowski community.

We talked about the Dabrowski Congress, which Michele has hosted twice (in 2010 and 2018, click on the year to download a PDF of the proceedings). Click here to watch videos from the 2022 Dabrowski Congress in Denver.

Emma read the following poem from Dąbrowski’s 1972 book Psychoneurosis is Not an Illness:

Be greeted psychoneurotics! For you see sensitivity in the insensitivity of the world, uncertainty among the world’s certainties. For you often feel others as you feel yourselves. For you feel the anxiety of the world, and its bottomless narrowness and self-assurance. For your phobia of washing your hands from the dirt of the world, for your fear of being locked in the world’s limitations, for your fear of the absurdity of existence. For your subtlety in not telling others what you see in them. For your awkwardness in dealing with practical things, and for your practicalness in dealing with unknown things, for your transcendental realism and lack of everyday realism, for your exclusiveness and fear of losing close friends, for your creativity and ecstasy, for your maladjustment to that “which is” and adjustment to that which “ought to be,” for your great but unutilized abilities. For the belated appreciation of the real value of your greatness which never allows the appreciation of the greatness of those who will come after you. For your being treated instead of treating others, for your heavenly power being forever pushed down by brutal force; for that which is prescient, unsaid, infinite in you. For the loneliness and strangeness of your ways. Be greeted!

*A transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Resources mentioned in this episode

The books Dąbrowski wrote under the pseudonym Paul (and Paweł) Cienin called Existential Thoughts and Aphorisms and Fragments from the Diary of a Madman. These books can be purchased from Bill Tillier as part of a larger download package.

Beyond Old Age by Annemarie Roeper

Some of My Best Friends are Books by Judith Wynn Halsted

Emma’s post The Beauty of Imperfect Self-Care

Connect with us!

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Adults with Overexcitabilities group on Facebook

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The Tragic Gift blog by Emma

Email us at positivedisintegration.pod@gmail.com

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Positive Disintegration Podcast

What can be positive about disintegration? Join us for an exploration of positive disintegration through conversation and shared stories. It’s a framework for understanding a variety of intense experiences that often look and feel like mental illness, but which can also be viewed as building blocks for creating an authentic personality.

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