Intensity and Being A Creative Person
Intensity may often be part of the life of creative artists and high ability people, and accompany their trait of high sensitivity.
But living with intensity may mean respecting our needs for mental health and stability, while working with powerful emotions and other forms of intensity, while not trying to suppress or “fix” them.
You can see some forms of intensity in many actors, musicians, and other performers. It is one reason they have such power and presence.
“Intensity is not something I try to do. It’s just kind of the way that I am.” Lance Reddick
[Photo collage at top: red bg from facebook/LanceReddickOfficial; dark bg from article “Lance Reddick died suddenly today & many people slightly ignored this – From the Wire to the recent John Wick movie” By: TB Obwoge, Medium 17 March 2023.]
Jodie Foster once commented about Russell Crowe, “He has that glacier intensity.”
From post: Working With Your Intensity Through Creative Expression.
[Photo: Crowe in “A Beautiful Mind” – see quotes about the real John Forbes Nash, Jr. in article: Creativity and madness: High ability and mental health.]
The book “Enjoying the Gift of Being Uncommon” by Willem Kuipers uses the term Xi for uncommon people, which can stand for eXtra intelligent, or eXtra intense.
High ability people often – even typically – have personality characteristics that include high intensity or excitability.
This is another trait that earlier in my life led me to think I was “crazy” – partly because it was an inner experience I had not read about or heard others talk about, and it is in many ways private. I tended – for a time, at least – to think of it sometimes as being “pathologically” passionate or emotional.
Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski developed a theory of personality and emotional development that is often applied toward understanding the psychology of extra intelligent and intense, gifted and talented individuals.
One aspect of his Theory of Positive Disintegration is the concept of unusual intensity and reactivity, which he called overexcitability.
In their book “Living With Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and the Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults,” Susan Daniels and Michael M. Piechowski explain, “Overexcitability is a translation of the Polish word which means ‘superstimulatability.’ (It should have been called superexcitability.) …
“Another way of looking at is of being spirited – ‘more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, energetic’…It would be hard to find a person of talent who shows little evidence of any of the five overexcitabilities.”
But they also note that many people may not welcome such traits: “Unfortunately, the stronger these overexcitabilities are, the less peers and teachers welcome them.”
From my article The psychology of creativity: performers and excitabilities.
Hear brief audio excerpt from “Overexcitability with Chris Wells” (founder of The Dąbrowski Center) - a guest interview available to members of the Embracing Intensity Community by Aurora Remember:
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Continued with perspectives of psychotherapists, authors, artists.
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