Tag Archives: new book

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

6 Apr

 

I last wrote a blog post in November 2019, not long before the holiday celebrations and family visits began.

And then came 2020. Let me begin with personal experience. In a post here back on May 7, 2014 titled “No Less than the Trees and the Stars” I told of losing my husband and two of our four sons in 2013. Like that post, this one again confronts the subject of death in my own life, as my dog died in January of this year and my third (and last) stepson died on February 2. With my remaining son and his family I returned from the memorial service in Florida on February 29th, just days before Covid-19-related travel restrictions began.

Since 2013 people have often asked me how I managed to come to terms with the three deaths in that four month period. I would answer that grief can be utterly devastating, but I had found a way to cope through a philosophy I discovered in 1999 and began calling “story principle.” I spoke about it in a talk I gave at the National Association for Gifted Children conference in Kentucky in 2005. After that people began asking me if I could please expand that message into a book. So eventually, I did. It’s called Change Your Story, Change Your Life, and has been available on Amazon as both a physical book and a Kindle version since 2011. While the philosophy didn’t make coping with the deaths of 2013 easy, it did make it possible. The loss of my dog in January this year left me fully alone in my new home, and the death of my stepson took away the last member of the family that became mine when I married in 1964. Once again story principle is helping me cope.

Now, of course, the whole world is dealing with a pandemic that is continuing to bring death to every continent we humans inhabit. Kids are out of schools and families, many of whose gifted children are extremely sensitive and empathetic, are doing their best to cope with what may be the single largest and scariest disaster anyone on the planet today has ever experienced. We are told by those who study the subject of grief that we are all now currently faced with major grief caused by the sudden loss of the patterns our normal lives depend on.

 After a number of internet gatherings and email exchanges with families of gifted kids, I decided last week to make my book easily available in its entirety as a free PDF and posted the link to that PDF on all of my Facebook pages. I am including it here at the end of this post.

Now let me share some thoughts about how to connect with this material, if you decide to download it.  It was never intended as emergency help for a situation as difficult and life-changing as this pandemic. What I hoped for those who wanted to put it to work for themselves was that they could take it a chapter or two at a time, try whichever of the exercises between chapters that appealed to them, and move through it as far and as fast as seemed right for them. The structure of it was designed to bring the reader into the use of story principle one small step at a time, mainly to help them come to terms with how hard it can be to believe the principle without experiencing it personally. There is nothing like seeing and feeling it work for oneself to encourage a beginning acceptance and a willingness to experiment further.

 But now, as I think about the possible effects of the current world situation on the highly gifted, highly sensitive and aware PG population I’ve written about all these years, I would suggest a different approach to the material than I had envisioned when I wrote it. Maybe read the short introduction and then Chapter Two, “Story Principle 101” as a beginning, but after that you may want to skip around in it a bit.  Browse chapters and scan the “Putting it to Work” exercises to see what appeals to your particular interests or needs or life experience. It’s always possible to go back if you feel you’ve missed something that might help you understand more about how (or why) it might work for you.

Though with death tolls now a part of daily news broadcasts, one might be tempted to move quickly to the final chapters that focus on death, my suggestion would be that there are some pretty important chapters that come before those—especially from Chapter 9 on—to provide a more solid foundation first.

Science of Mind, from which Story Principle grew, was itself based on spiritual principles that can be found with some variation in most of the world’s religions. So some readers will immediately recognize aspects of it, especially if you come from a religious tradition that acknowledges “miracles.”

I wrote it to help people, as I had been helped, to bring more joy, more comfort, more fulfillment into their lives. I wanted people to discover the enormous power that their minds, their attitudes, and the “stories they tell themselves” have over their life experience. William James (1842-1910) wrote “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” It’s a discovery that has mostly been lost to later generations. This is just my way to help share it.

When my son first read the manuscript he said “Nobody’s going to believe this coming from you, Mom. Your life has been way too good. They’ll just say, ‘Easy for you to say!’”

Well, possibly they would have said it then, but not so very likely now. Nobody’s life is without losses and grief. But I couldn’t have imagined when I first wrote the book what a solid foundation it would give me for dealing with my own.

Here it is in its entirety. Feel free to download and also to share:

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

 

 

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Parenting, parenting, and then one day…

10 Oct
HC20677

Newborn

 

Many of you may have seen a recent research article: 

High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities

 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324 

And you may be forgiven for saying, “Well, duh!” This research shows what those of us who are and are raising highly intelligent folk (“cheetahs” or “mermaids/men”) have known all along. There are downsides to this “gift.”

When our kids are little and driving us crazy with their messy rooms, or forgetfulness, or endless arguments, or intensity, or sensitivity, or the scary downsides that the above article addresses, we may wonder about upsides. This post is a celebration of upsides, and a follow up to an earlier one, (Feb. 12, “On the Lighter Side”) in case you missed it.

If you’ve never read it, you might want to take a moment to go up to the top right hand side of this blog and click on “An Open Letter….” When I was in the trenches, learning about high range giftedness and coping with school issues and asynchrony (which hadn’t been named yet), nobody told me that it might not be a good idea to “out” my child to the larger world—so when it was decided to make the open letter I had written to my son’s teachers a chapter in Guiding the Gifted Child, 1982, it didn’t occur to me to hide his identity. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be hurt by this (except for the embarrassment of having the words “Gifted Child” as an on-screen caption during an interview with me on the Today Show when he was an adult working in New York City).

“On the Lighter Side” tells the history of the Applewhites books, including my idea (back in 2012) to ask RJ to collaborate with me on the third book my editor had been urging me to write. He agreed, amazingly soon came up with the initial plot outline, and so we began to write, discovering in the process that neither of us was entirely thrilled with the need, sometimes, to let go of a brilliant idea of our own to embrace the brilliant idea of the other. It wasn’t all roses and sunshine but thanks to its being about the Applewhite family there was a lot of laughter. And then the book got sidelined by family tragedy in 2013. It didn’t come to life again for a very long time. But finally it called us back to our keyboards. Laughter had won out!

So we will have a great celebration party next Tuesday, October 17, at Books of Wonder (18 West 18th Street, New York, NY), when Applewhites Coast to Coast is officially launched. It is impossible to fully express the joy of working together, sharing the ups and downs of life and of the creative process. And the fun of celebrating this birth together!

tolan-and-tolan-42.jpg

Mother/Son Selfie

 

 

Tags: , , , , ,

Off the Charts! — Book Debut

13 Nov

Twenty years ago the field of gifted education was beginning to define giftedness very specifically as achievement—as doing rather than being.  One of the leaders in the nation’s gifted community was claiming at that time that schools “created” giftedness and that children who were not achieving academically were clearly not gifted (and therefore should not be taking up the limited numbers of “seats” in gifted programs).  Dismayed by the narrowness and external focus of this definition, a group of us whose experience with the gifted had shown us that unusual intelligence was an internal aspect of the child, apparent well before the start of school, gathered to discuss how we might help to refocus attention on this way of understanding the gifted population.

Out of our meeting in Columbus, Ohio in the summer of 1991 came the definition of giftedness as asynchronous development that was quickly recognized and adopted by many teachers, parents and counselors throughout the country and around the globe.  A phenomenological view of unusual intelligence, it provided a way of comprehending both the potential for extraordinary achievement and the struggles the gifted face in being out of sync both internally and with the expectations of the broader culture.

Last year at the national conference of the National Association for Gifted Children (just a few months more than 20 years after that first Columbus Group meeting) the suggestion was made in the presidential address that the field of gifted education should unify its disparate viewpoints by adopting Talent Development, with its clear attention to the issue of extraordinary achievement, as the single driver of both this field’s educational programming and its research.   So it was that members of the Columbus Group, that has continued to meet throughout these two decades, decided it was an important time to put out a book to remind the field of the critical “other side” (the inside) of giftedness, which is part of the gifted individual’s experience whether in or out of school, whether achieving in the eyes of the world at any given moment or not! 

So, we’re thrilled that the book (conceived only a year ago, and with chapters from 14 experts on the needs of gifted and highly gifted individuals) is to be available online from Royal Fireworks Press (http://rfwp.com) as of today (though at 1pm EST it wasn’t yet up on the website).  Dedicated to the memory of Annemarie Roeper, the book includes her last writing about the population of children to whom she devoted her life. 

We had hoped to have the actual books at NAGC this week, but weather (a modest incursion of Hurricane Sandy on its way to devastating the North East) intervened and stopped electricity to the presses.  

Prepublication discount!  The list price of the book is $30 but for online orders this week (through November 18th) the price is $25. 

Included in the book are chapters on the historical foundations of the definition, methods of identification, characteristics of asynchronous development, understanding individual needs, gifted adults, counseling, parenting and family issues, and educational options from a group of authors, each of whom has decades of experience working with, researching, and writing about “off the charts” kids and families.  

On a personal note:  the other thing that happened last year at NAGC that particularly motivated me when the idea for the book was being considered occurred at my presentation for the Counseling and Guidance network called “The Asynchronous Cheetah.”  (My cheetah metaphor was developed originally for a keynote at the Hollingworth Conference for the Highly Gifted in 1992—the same year the first article about asynchronous development was published in Understanding Our Gifted.)  When I mentioned the Columbus Group during that presentation, an attendee raised her hand and informed me that when she had been doing some research on asynchronous development for her graduate degree in gifted education, her professor had informed her that the Columbus Group didn’t exist.  “It’s a fiction,” he told her. 

Laughing at that representation, I explained that not only was the Columbus Group not a fiction, but it had actually met the evening before in the conference hotel. 

It’s quite true that I’m a fiction writer, and I’m really fond of fiction and the fundamental truths that are often explored in the pages of a novel.  But I prefer not to think of myself as fictional.  So–for those who may be interested in the Columbus Group’s “true story” and the reason a leading figure in gifted education could make the assumption that it wasn’t real (as a group, we have flown quite purposely under the radar all these years) I wrote an introductory chapter giving the “true story” of that 1991 meeting and the definition that grew out of it.  So if you’ve ever tried to find out more than what could be gleaned from the usual citation of the “unpublished transcript” of that meeting, you can learn why you couldn’t.  There are hours of audio tape from that meeting, but no plans to publish the transcript!

Tomorrow I’ll be off to Denver for NAGC 2012 and hope to see some of you there.

Tags: , ,