Related post: Is your intensity out of control?
Do you watch the intensity of children as they feel each moment anew again and again, without worry for the future, and soak up experiences without fear of ever overflowing, and wonder where your own intensity has gone? Has your intensity, for too long uncared for or even unseen, collapsed under its own weight?
Mary Elaine Jacobsen, author of Liberating Everyday Genius (later retitled The Gifted Adult), writes that when adults have a balanced management of their intensity, they are “exhilarated by life,” have “frequent peaks of experience,” are “enriched by the five senses,” and are “robust.”
However, when intensity collapses, we are “listless,” we “numb out with substances,” we feel “understimulated and bored,” and we are “depressed or sullen.” (p. 259)
“Remember, intensity is not equivalent to being touchy. Rather it is about being profoundly in touch. If we are too afraid of rejection or betrayal, we can rein in our intense personalities for the sake of conformity. If we throw caution to the wind and let our intense natures run wild, we may found ourselves alienated and sabotaged by our own inner actions. Unless we learn to regulate our intensities and skillfully channel them, we play a dangerous game of chance, and in the end may lose the chances we deserve.” (Liberating Everyday Genius, pp. 266-7)
Have you reined in your personality? And just who is that intense personality, anyway?
This week spend some time remembering the intensity of your childhood. What moved you? What excited you? What did you feel? You might want to spend some time looking at childhood photos or drawings or writings, or asking your parents or other family members what you were like as a child, especially in the years before you went to school.
As an adult, how can you regain that intensity and manage it so as to be true to yourself and live the life you want?
For more insight and inspiration, read Jacobsen’s article “Encountering the Gifted Self Again, For the First Time”
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rachaelvoorhees/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
