The Tragic Gift
For Adults Living With Overexcitabilities
About this website
This website has been created by a person with overexcitabilities (OE), for people with overexcitabilities. The pages on this site contain summaries of Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD), along with my personal stories, experiences with self-therapy, and hacks, as well as links to other resources. It is a starter-kit for people who have discovered they have OE, in a plain language, simple format. I’m sharing what I have learned in the hope that it will help other people – and let them that they are not alone!
NEWS: Dabrowski Congress 2024
We are delighted to announce the 2024 Dabrowski Congress, exploring the theory of positive disintegration. Join us from July 11-13, 2024, for a journey into the application, study, and lived experience of positive disintegration. Our theme is Living the Theory, and the Dabrowski Center needs your help to bring this event to life! You can help us make the congress a success, by letting us know how and where you would like to participate.
Are you gifted or creative? Are you intense, sensitive or complex? Have you been told you are “too much”? Perhaps you have overexcitabilities…
What are overexcitabilities?
Polish psychologist and psychiatrist, Kazimierz Dabrowski, brought us the Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD), to describe personality growth and change in a dynamic way. With this theory, came the concept of overexcitability (OE).
– A heightened sensitivity to their inner world, and the outer world
– People who see the world in a stronger, more multisided, and complex manner
– Intense, rich inner lives – Imagination, intellect and emotion
– Physically energetic, or heightened senses
– It can be found in gifted and creative individuals
He called it a ‘TRAGIC GIFT’. The intense experience of life – good and bad – leading a person to see the world in a very different way.
Do you see yourself in this poem?
‘Be Greeted Psychoneurotics!’
– by Kazimierz Dabrowski
BE GREETED!
“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!”
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Connect with other people who have OE on social
A group has been set up under the name ‘Adults With Overexcitabilities’ on Facebook, which you can join and meet other overexcitable people like yourself. You can also follow Adults With Overexcitabilities by the Facebook page or via the YouTube channel.
Support the cause
If you would like to support my work, and the cause, please consider donating to the Dabrowski Center. The Dabrowski Center is a completely not-for-profit organisation that serves several communities of interest by providing resources, advocacy, and information about the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Every little bit helps, and is gratefully appreciated!