The complex experience of being a 2e adult with Julie Skolnick

What is Twice exceptional or 2e? Julie Skolnick explains "This is a person identified as gifted with a learning difference or learning disability.

"Now, why did I say person? Why didn't I say kid? Well, because we don't outgrow our giftedness or our 2e-ness. It's something that's with us throughout our life and something we need to understand and manage and love so we can live our best lives."

The audio here is from two of her videos: "What is Twice Exceptional / 2e?" and "Emotion Regulation and the Twice Exceptional Profile."

See the videos and much more about the program she hosts in my article How To Thrive More as a High Ability Adult – the Let’s Talk 2e Adult Conference. 

Julie Skolnick M.A., J.D. is "the Founder of With Understanding Comes Calm, LLC, through which she passionately guides parents of gifted and distractible children, mentors 2e adults, trains teachers on how to understand and address 2e strengths and struggles."

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Transcript

Hey guys, it's Julie Skolnick from With Understanding Comes Calm, Let's Talk 2E and 2E resources.com. This is our first vlog and we're going to call it gifted and distractible, which is the same name as our free newsletter. 

And it really talks about the twice exceptional profile gifted and distractible. So this first vlog is actually going to be about what the heck does that mean twice exceptional or 2E and even if you've heard those terms before, maybe you're going to learn something so hang on and listen to it. 

Twice exceptional or 2E is a person identified as gifted with a learning difference or learning disability. 

Now why did I say person? Why didn't I say kid? Well, because we don't outgrow our giftedness or our 2E-ness. It's something that's with us throughout our life, and we need to understand and manage and love so we can live our best lives.

Gifted is that part of twice exceptional that most people assume means smart, bright potential. And they'd be right. 

But that's like this much of actually the gifted in our experience. If you are somebody who has a strong sense of right and wrong, really important to you is justice and fairness, if those are important to you, if you spend time thinking about existential considerations, life, death, disease war, why fairness for some and not for others, another real indicator of giftedness. 

If you are developing asynchronously meaning in your social, emotional and physical worlds, you have superpowers, and then you have areas that are significantly less than your superpowers. 

Hang on for one second, what do I mean by that? You might be above average, and in the stratosphere in some way. And you might be average somewhere else. This could be processing speed, working memory, executive function. 

But if you are just average, compared to your superpowers, there's a huge discrepancy there. And that asynchrony is part of the defining factor of giftedness. 

And it's frustrating and it's challenging and oftentimes you think to yourself as a 2E child, 2E adult, or as a parent of a 2E child or a teacher of a 2E kid, or a clinician working with the 2E, why can you do something so well, and other things are so hard? Why? 

Why do easy things seem hard and hard things seem easy, sometimes for gifted and 2E people? 

So we have that asynchronous development, then we have a tendency toward perfectionism, right? We know people have high expectations for us. No person, pretty often expectations are either too high or too low. 

And that situation causes frustration, frequently anxiety, in fact, the other side of perfectionism, unhealthy perfectionism can be anxiety and so so often our 2E people have unhealthy perfectionism as part of their profile. 

And then last but not least, there's intensity or what's known in gifted parlance as overexcite abilities. 

And we find this overexciteabilities for this ability to plug into the world in this organic way to derive great pleasure or growth or great pain in five areas: 

Intellectual overexcitability: needing to know the why but the why behind the why this rage to learn being able to be fed through a firehose but often receiving information drip by drip. That's educational overexcitability. 

Then we have emotional overexcitability, a huge spectrum of emotions that can cause again great pleasure and great pain, frustration because it's it's hard to receive back all the incredible efforts that emotionally overexcitable people make on behalf of friends and family. 

Then we have creative overexcitability, imagination overexcitability, where you just lose creativity in your writing or your art or your building in your imagination. That's imagination overexcitability. 

Then we have sensual overexcitability, which looks a lot like sensory processing disorder, but you can derive great pleasure from sensory input. In fact, what we recommend is dialing up or dialing down the sensory input based on whether you have a sensory seeker or a sensory avoider. 

And then last but not least psychomotor overexcitability which is this movement for movement's sake, needing to move to learn. 

I have clients during the pandemic, who their kids had to literally do laps around the living room. And instead of changing their behavior, we advocated for the teacher to decide do you need to turn off your camera? Is it distracting? 

Or what's your plan because that kid is going to move they need to move to learn. 

So all of this is just the gifted part, then we add in for twice exceptionality, a learning difference or a learning disability. 

And that can be anything from ADHD or ADD, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, dyslexia, that can be high functioning autism, but it can also include processing speed, working memory, executive functioning challenges, and pretty often anxiety because as you can imagine, this uneven profile engenders, as I've said, expectations that are too high or too low, and there's internal frustration, internal doubt. 

And that leads oftentimes to anxiety. 

Today, I want to talk about emotion regulation, or maybe I should say, emotion dysregulation. 

You know what 100% of my clients, whether they are parents of two week, kids, or their two, the adults themselves report the emotion dysregulation as a challenge for themselves or their kids. 

And when do you ever get to say 100%, but it really is 100% Because gifted is a range of responses to the environment that are otherwise a typical to the general population, right, we know about overexcite abilities. 

We talked about that in our last vlog about what is to A and so these overexcite abilities being this widened, heightened antenna, where in stimulation is either incredibly pleasurable or really painful. 

This sort of sets us up for emotion dysregulation are responding to stimuli in a very big way. And because of the way gifted people show up in the world, whether it's at school, at home, in the clinicians office or at work in a marriage, emotion regulation can be a challenge. I want you to picture this formula I'm going to describe for you it's the Skolnick formula for our emotion regulation. 

So think about gifted characteristics, intellectual interests, existential considerations, a synchronous development, perfectionism overexcite abilities are intensities, right? 

That showing up in the world leads to anxiety, stress, frustration, misunderstanding, and the combination. 

And the fact that everybody around you misunderstands sort of this sensitivity, leads to challenging behavior, which is often seen as emotion dysregulation. 

What happens next? Reactions, everybody around you based on misunderstanding based on assumptions based on judgment. They misunderstand you and they react, the reaction consequences, punishments, threats, bribery, whatever it is, those reactions lead to more of the anxiety, stress, frustration and misunderstanding. 

And typically, where we intervene is at the reaction spot. That's where we're intervening. That's where we're addressing what's happening in front of us. 

Well, if you know about the rage bell curve, no teaching or changing of behavior is going to happen in the middle of tantruming, in the middle of breaking down, in the middle of closing off in that moment in that rage bell curve. 

The teaching or modifications have been sort of anticipatory really setting us up for success, or looking back and unpacking the situation together. 

So where should interventions happen? Before. 

We know the giftedness characteristics, we know the intellectual interests, we know the existential considerations, and how emotionally that can affect our gifted and 2E learners into 2E selves, and asynchronous development and perfectionism and super stimulatabilities or overexciteabilities.

So we have to anticipate... and by the way, those of you who are loving a 2E a child, teaching a 2E a child, or if you are a 2E adult, you have to really regulate yourself before you can regulate those people who you are interacting with, who you love, who you're trying to teach. 

So first anticipate, then self regulate, and then investigate what actually is lying beneath that behavior. 

Is there something we can do about it. Behavior Is communication, let's not assume that the behavior means defiance. 

Let's not assume that the behavior is the child trying to get attention. Let's find out actually what underlies the emotion dysregulation so that we can really help this child solve their problem and learn lagging skills. Thanks for listening.