Is Facing the New Year as a Creative, Sensitive or Gifted Person Daunting? Here’s Inspiration and some Creative, Sensitive Gifted New Years Tools – As one year ends, and a new one begins, we tend to ponder our lives. We ask, “Is my life where I want it to be? Are my relationships the way I want them to be? My finances? My spiritual/soul life? My work? My health?” Just in case they’re not, and you, too may sometimes wonder if you (or your creative, sensitive, or gifted kids) can actually craft a life you (or they) love to live, here’s …
How Creative Sensitive Gifted People Can Cope with Trauma
New Year’s Eve, 2017 started with a bang in Highlands Ranch, my home town. Before sunrise, police answered a domestic dispute call. Before it was all over, one officer was killed and other officers and citizens were wounded, according to the Denver Post. This photo shows law enforcement officers gathering by Littleton Adventist Hospital to form a motorcade in honor of the fallen officer. Tragedy such as this, natural disasters, terrorism and mass shootings may impact all of us, even when we are far away from the action. When we are directly involved in a life-threatening situation, we experience direct …
FREE Webinar: How CASIGYs™ Can Thrive Through the Holidays
Are you Creative, Super-Sensitive and/or Gifted, AKA a CASIGY™? Have Previous Holiday Seasons left you feeling frustrated or hurting emotionally? Are you Thinking, “THIS YEAR the Holidays MUST be BETTER!”? Here’s Hope and Help from Sharon M. Barnes, MSSW, LCSW, Therapist for Sensitive and Gifted. I’m giving a Free Webinar: How CASIGYs™ Can Thrive Through the Holidays! Join me in this Free Webinar, where you’ll learn: Life Lessons We Can Learn From Classic Holiday Movies That Can Help Us Improve Our Holiday Experience as CASIGYS How To Bring Soulfulness In, So Your Holidays Have Depth And Meaning How To Sensitively Navigate Difficult …
What Can a Creative Sensitive or Gifted Person Do When You Don’t Feel Grateful
What can a Creative Sensitive or Gifted Person do when you don’t feel grateful, especially on the annual day set aside for giving thanks? If you’re like most CASIGYs™, you probably feel guilty about it. Beyond that, the short answer is that you can feel what you feel! And then you have the opportunity to deal with how you feel.The long answer is, well, the rest of this post. What do I mean, “you feel what you feel”? When you don’t feel grateful when you think you should, that usually means that you’re feeling something else. Maybe you’re feeling anxious, …
How to Face Bad Dreams – for Highly Sensitive or Gifted Children & Adults
Not long ago, two sensitive, gifted children came in on the same day telling me some recent bad dreams. These were intense sessions. It was hard for them to tell their bad/scary dreams. Their moms were also worried about what these dreams might reveal – about their child’s psyches, about their parenting, about what the dreams might mean. Bad, scary dreams are hard for anyone to deal with, especially children. And when you add sensitivity and intensity into the mix, well, strap on your boots, we’re getting serious here! We did unravel these dreams, and their possible meanings. I helped …
Pandora’s Box of Emotions
As you may recall, the myth of Pandora’s Box involved a Forbidden Box which was not supposed to be opened, but of course WAS opened, and then unleashed Evil . . . . and finally, Hope. We each have similar boxes; ours are often boxes of emotions. I remember standing with my father in his home office when I was a young adult. We were talking about life, and coping with emotions. I told him that getting in touch with my emotions had not helped me feel better at all! Instead, getting in touch with my emotions was making me …
7 Tools to Help Your Creative, Sensitive or Gifted Child Build Confidence
Robert and Sue, parents of 9 year old Ethan and 6 year old Olivia (not their real names) recently asked me how to help their creative, sensitive, gifted children build confidence and experience less fear and avoidance in new or difficult situations. As many creative, highly sensitive or gifted children (AKA CASIGYs) do, they would often pull back from new or challenging situations. He or she would claim to be shy, say she has a headache, or he has a stomach ache or some other physical symptom in order to get out of doing whatever it was that they didn’t …
Creative Coping skills -Identifying and Honoring our Limits
Six year old sensitive, gifted, creative Jennie wants to take yoga, karate, piano, guitar, gymnastics, robotics, and more; she melts down at the mention of there being limits of her energy, time and her parent’s money. Her parents know it will be a disaster if they sign her up for all of these activities. But if they don’t, they also know they will face many, many emotional outbursts over this. John, 46 years old and also sensitive, creative and gifted, goes to graduate school full time, works full time and is married with 3 children. He also is on the …
CASIGY Coping Tools-Steps 5, 6, 7
Here’s More CASIGY™ Coping Tools This continues Strategy #4 in the series, “7 Strategies to Cope With the Differences of Being a Creative, Highly Sensitive or Gifted Person”. We’ve been talking about CASIGY coping tools (CASIGY™ = Creative, Acutely Aware, Super-Sensitive and/or Gifted You-s). CASIGY coping tools are ones that are suited to your creativity, sensitivity, intensity and intelligence. In my previous blog post of this series, I introduced the Personal Power Pyramid, a collection of CASIGY coping tools. They help CASIGYs develop Emotional Resilience and build Emotional Core Strength™. In that post, we then discussed the first 4 …
For HSP & GT Youth: Do Intense Emotions Mean I have a Mental Disorder?
Here’s a post to share with your HSP or Gifted Kids and Teens: A high school senior recently told me, “I think I must have some mental disorder. I’ve been searching online since I was in middle school to find out what it is.” As we talked, it became clear that intense emotions were the source of this big concern. “I wish I had heard this when I was in middle school” a high school senior told me a few weeks ago, at the end of a talk I gave to highly sensitive and gifted students and their parents. “It …