Hey everybody, it’s Chad. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. I have got a big one for you today. It is the biggest breakthrough of my life. I, I don’t say that, lightly. I really mean it. And I, I have had an extraordinary week. I can’t wait to share some of this with you today, and it all comes on the backdrop of what I know that you and I are experiencing every day with what seems just like an absolute crazy world.

And I know that sometimes it can feel as we’re doing our personal and professional development, that it feels a little bit like whistling through the graveyard with everything that’s going on around us and the chaos that seems to bombard our minds and our lives every single day. I get that. I absolutely get that.

For me, it’s been about having a strategy of only allowing myself maybe an hour or an hour and a half of news in the evening, which gives me time to catch up on what’s going on. I want to know what’s going on. I just don’t wanna be overwhelmed by it. It gives me time to have a few [00:01:00] perspectives on it.

 I do everything that I can that’s within my own personal power. I call my senators, I call my representatives, I write to them. I go to protest. I do all the things that I can do, and I wanna remind you that amongst all of this chaos and everything that’s going on, our internal life experience is still extremely important.

As an individual in this life, having this human experience. Matters. It still matters. The work still continues regardless of what is going on out there. What’s happening in here really matters. And so I wanna honor you for showing up to a podcast like this and continuing the work. It’s important, it is meaningful, and I’m grateful that you’re spending a little time with me to think through these important matters.

A few of you emailed me this week, which I absolutely love, Joe Gage, Karen Thompson, Jennifer [00:02:00] Jones. It means so much to me that you all write me and tell me how the podcast is impacting you, or the newsletter is impacting you. The feedback is the only currency of this effort. Nobody is sponsoring my podcast.

Nobody is paying me on my newsletter. So the only way I get paid is through your replies. And I appreciate you all so very much for that. It means the world to me. If you have something to share, just reply to the newsletter. , if you’re not on the newsletter list, go get on that newsletter.

, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes, but I just wanna let you guys know how much I appreciate your replies. Alright. I feel like I am. Procrastinating a little bit, uh, because this is, man, this is a big day. It’s a big day. It’s the biggest breakthrough of my life, and let’s get into it. All right, so it all started with a question.

It’s a question that I’ve been asking all of my life. What is wrong with me? I have asked this over and over [00:03:00] and over, and this week I finally found my answer sort of. This week it all clicked and I cannot wait to share with you how it clicked. I can honestly say that I don’t think that I have been this excited, this clear ever.

I have been in the last four years, at least in a very obvious existential depression. This has been the most challenging four years of my life, uh, and certainly the most difficult in my marriage. I, I married a saint. Uh, there’s, there’s just no doubt about that. And the cracks in this crisis, the hints of relief.

Happened in a therapy session on August 5th, 2024. I know that because I wrote it in my journal. I had just started seeing a new therapist in San Francisco, and it was my very first session with him, and he stops me as I’m talking. I’m talking really fast, and [00:04:00] I’m, I’m laying out my internal reality for him and, and he interrupts me and he says, have you ever had your IQ tested?

And I said, no, I’ve, I’ve not, and I’m really not interested in that. And I explained to him why. And I get revved back up and he stops me again. And he says, I’m asking because it’s pretty clear to me already that you’re highly intelligent and that’s something that’s gonna create a different set of challenges for you than what most people experience.

Now this conversation was it, it felt very odd in the moment to have him say that. Of course there’s a little part of you that’s like, oh, he thinks I’m smart. Right? So that felt really good, but it was also really uncomfortable at the same time. It was like he was saying, Chad, the sky is blue. And you’re like, well, yeah.

But it’s also really uncomfortable to admit to yourself, especially out loud to another person that. That you’re intelligent. And at the time I didn’t think all that much of it. I was just, honestly, I was just kind of flattered. And I’ve been told that I’m smart. Before this wasn’t news to me.

My mom tells me that I’m [00:05:00] smart all the time. Alright, so this isn’t news. And I’m here, Mr. Therapist, and I’m paying you for pearls of wisdom. So let’s get on with it. All right, let’s go. So I get us right back on track and I’m talking about all the things that are wrong with me and my quest to solve this puzzle of what’s wrong with me.

Clearly, I am flawed. Clearly there are things wrong with me and I need to get it fixed, so let’s fix it. And I took him down the path that I had been on. So I’m telling him, alright, here’s everything I’ve already tried. I tell him the philosophies that I’ve studied, the books I’ve read, the conferences I’ve gone to, the retreats, the spiritual practices, the mindfulness techniques, the coaching methods, the developmental stages of a man’s life, my trauma riddle background, the fundamentalist Christian upbringing, the sadistic father, my second book Breaking and Dingle.

I’m giving him this long list of my pathologies. All right. Double depression. With PTSD, I’ve been asked more than once. If I’m on the spectrum, doctors have wondered if I’m manic or bipolar and then realize that I’m not, and I go on and on and on. And this search for which pathology is the right one.

In search of the right [00:06:00] cure goes on for many sessions. In the meantime, he had asked me for a copy of my book, breaking Untangle, and so one week I took him a copy and he starts reading it. Now, listen, it is very, very odd to walk into your therapist office and there’s your book sitting on your Therapist’s side table.

It’s also odd that he would tell me that he’s recommended it to another client. Again, I’m a little flattered, but it’s a little odd. Or on the days that I would talk about a challenge that I was experiencing in my life and then. He would quote me from my own book. Now that’s not odd, that’s just fucking annoying.

So this keeps going on and I can tell he’s he, he’s getting frustrated with me because he doesn’t know what to do with me. I. And I’m getting frustrated with him because he keeps telling me to do all this stuff I’ve already done or I’m already doing. I’m already meditating. I’m already taking walks, eating right, working out, time blocking, practicing gratitude, connecting to my spiritual life, appreciating the oneness of the [00:07:00] universe.

I’m doing all of this, and I’m exhausted because I’m still here sitting on this couch, looking at you searching. Then one day. He’s obviously even more frustrated with me and he looks at me and he says, well, you were either a fraud when you wrote the book or you’re a fraud now.

Oh boy, there it is. My biggest fear he hit the nerve exactly right. He figured me out. I’m a fraud. I’m an imposter. He saw me for exactly who I am, and of course I just shut down. I was really proud of myself for shutting down and not coming across the room at him, but in that moment, I just shut down.

And I left, and I would obsessively ruminate about that conversation for weeks. And I had some [00:08:00] sessions where I just wouldn’t talk about it. Nobody would ignore it. But then a few sessions later, I let him know that I was really mad about his comment, that my experience wasn’t fraudulent, that what I was feeling wasn’t faked.

I’m not sitting here because I’m bored. And by the way, we live in San Jose. San Francisco where his office is, it’s an hour train ride each way. So every week I’m spending half a day and $225 to sit there with this guy. Plus it didn’t help that. For most of these sessions with him, he would say, I don’t know why you’re here, or, I’m not sure the best way to help you when you hurt, when you feel like life is challenging.

You feel like you might actually be crazy? This sort of feedback is not helpful because I’m doing all the stuff, I’m doing all the work, I’m going to therapy. All the books [00:09:00] say that these are the magic bullets, and here I am suicidal. Nothing is working, and I feel like you know, if this is gonna be my life for another 40, 45, 50 years, well.

There just ain’t no way. There’s no way I can feel like this for that amount of time. So during that session, he clarified his remarks a little bit and he explained to me that intellectually I already knew what he was gonna tell me. That there were no techniques or no tactics or ideas or practices that I hadn’t already discovered on my own.

And he said, Chad, you could probably teach this stuff better than I can, but for some reason it’s not sinking in for you deeper than your head. So one of the solutions was that we do an extended therapy session while I was under the influence of MDMA. MDMA is also a party drug known as [00:10:00] Molly. And what he was thinking was that by flooding my brain with serotonin, which is what this drug does, and talking through my history while in that state, that maybe it would make a difference for me that those old narratives would get reframed from a different state and that I could find some peace with my history.

In the present that I could look at those childhood memories as the adult that I am now and reconcile them as the adult, not as the child. That was the thinking. But he was also upfront with me and he said, this doesn’t work for everybody. And he said, I really don’t think it’s a silver bullet for you, but I do think you’ll get something out of it. So, of course I am desperate. I’m desperate to figure out what’s going on with me. I’m open to anything. I would’ve done anything, and so I agreed to it and I did it. All right, so we’re gonna get back to the breakthrough in just a second.

But because I think that this is sort of interesting, I wanna take a little bit of a field trip here and talk about the Molly. Okay? This is not the breakthrough, and the breakthrough was [00:11:00] not a result of the MDMA, but there’s some interesting side notes about that experience that I think you’ll find interesting too.

So I wanna talk about it for just a second. All right. So first of all, it felt amazing. So, as far as the drugs go, I’m, I don’t have a big history with drugs. I’ve only ever done mushrooms. I think I’ve done mushrooms three times. I took a pot gummy once, which did absolutely nothing for me, and now I’m taking this MDMA.

So my recreational drug history is very, very short and limited. It’s just never been my thing. So MDMA feels amazing. Amazing. I have never experienced that total sense of being okay, like that. I just cannot begin to describe how Okay. I was, there was nothing to worry about for five hours.

Not a worry in the world. There could have been a nuclear blast, and I would’ve smiled and bashed in the warm [00:12:00] glow. I am not kidding. It was amazing. And that was the point. That was the point that my therapist wanted me to experience. Our hypothesis was that I’m doing all this stuff to feel better, but how do you know what better is if you’ve never experienced.

What it means to just be okay. What if you’ve never felt okay at peace? How do you know what you’re working toward? MDMA would give me an assist in knowing what it felt like. I. For everything to be okay. So in that regard, it felt amazing. Mission accomplished way to go. It was a five hour therapy session.

It felt like 10 minutes. By the way. He sat there and he took notes and he asked questions, and we just talked. I started at nine in the morning with one capsule that was dissolved in water. A few hours later I took the second capsule and that was it. And I do think that there were some things that found their way to resolution by way of the guided MDMA experience.

 Was it a paradigm shifting event in my life? Like, did everything [00:13:00] fall into place and solve all my worries? Absolutely not. No, I don’t think so. Which was of course disappointing because I’d heard stories of this being the thing that shifted everything for somebody, and he warned me. You know, like I said, he warned me, this probably won’t be the case for you, but I was just a little bit let down that this wasn’t my miracle. All right, so that was the MDMA experience.

 So that was the first clue to this breakthrough awakening that my therapist acknowledged what he saw in me as high intelligence. Alright, the next clue in my big breakthrough. Sometimes I will use chat GPT to help me organize my thoughts or research something or break down a problem or help me understand something better.

And so I was chatting with it one day. I don’t remember about what, and when I do this, I’m trying to understand something about myself and I’ll ask it to help me understand the psychological premise of the experience that I’m describing because. Of course, I’m always looking for what’s wrong with me so I can figure out the answer, right?

If I can just figure out the, the thing that’s wrong, I can go find the pill to fix it. [00:14:00] That’s what I’ve been trying to do. So this day I’m chatting away and I’m searching for my answers, and it comes back and it says something like, have you ever looked into what’s called two E or twice Exceptional? I had not, I’d never heard of that before.

Twice exceptional refers to people who are both gifted and who have learning differences or challenges like emotional or cognitive challenges. And with people who are two E, it’s hard to support them because it’s really hard to catch it. It’s really hard to identify it because a lot of times their strengths are gonna mask their struggles.

So that felt very familiar to me. I completely understood that. And no, this is not a chat GPT diagnosis story, but it was a clue. It pointed me in the right direction. Alright, so that was the next clue. And then the next clue. A few weeks later, I’m having a conversation with my friend Amanda.

And Amanda and I have a standing date every single week. She lives in Texas, I’m in California. We met in a mastermind group and we’ve stayed in [00:15:00] touch. We’ve been doing this for like six or seven years, and sometimes our conversations are really pedestrian and quick, but sometimes, and this is why I love her so much, they are just lightning in a bottle.

They’re just incredibly. Deep and insightful. And a few weeks ago we had one such conversation about our struggle for meaning, and we talked about how I’ve been in this four year existential depression in search for meaning and continually coming up short or getting confused and always feeling like I’m starting over.

And we talked about, , my flirting with nihilism and the utter meaninglessness of it all. And you know, as friends do, so I go back to Chad GPT in search of reading recommendations on this topic because. That’s what I do. And in my search I came across a few books and one of them I recommended in the Mindset Monday newsletter last week, uh, it was called Why Smart People Hurt by Eric Maisel.

And the other book that it recommended was The Gifted Adult by Mary Elaine [00:16:00] Jacobson. I’m gonna put links to both of those in the show notes. So down the rabbit hole I go. I also got chat GPT to generate a deep research report from me on the psychological understanding and lived experience of gifted adults.

What I got was a gold mine. It was this well-researched insided report. It’s about 90 pages and it lays out in a really easy to read and organized way. What this is, this experience is of the gifted adult. I’m going to include a link to that chat in the show notes so that you can read it for yourself.

So make sure you check that out. I’ve read it multiple times. I’ve printed it out. I’ve marked it up and highlighted it because it’s like reading my own biography. It is my life’s experience, and it made so much sense For the first time in my life, my life makes sense. I have never. Never felt as seen as I have in the last few weeks as I acknowledge that I am what is called a [00:17:00] gifted adult.

Now that sounds weird, right? Gifted adult. I get it. It sounds, it sounds weird. So I wanna address that right away, because if you’re somebody that’s listening to me and you’re like, okay, maybe I follow PV for a little bit, and sometimes I relate to him, maybe this is me, but gifted adult, I don’t, you know, that sounds weird.

It’s like what they call elementary school kids, right? All right, so let me address this right away. So to be a gifted adult, it does not mean that you are better than or smarter than anybody. It’s just giving a name to an inner experience. It’s an inner experience that shapes personality traits and behaviors.

And one of the symptoms of that is being smart. Yes. But so is being a troublemaker. All right? So gifted adult doesn’t mean anything except. This inner experience that we’re having. So nobody should be looking down their noses and saying, oh, you think you’re gifted? Huh? Who do you think you are? Okay.

That’s a little bit like looking at a kid [00:18:00] who’s in, you know, in special needs and you’re like, oh, so you think you’re special, huh? I mean, what an asshole, right? So let’s be clear right away if you can’t see past the label of gifted adult. You know, one of the other things that I’ve been working on, it’s just giving fewer fucks about what people think.

So I’m choosing to exercise that in this situation, I’m also inviting you to give fewer fucks about what people think. As you go through this process, if this matches you, so the term gifted adult, if that’s a problem for you, all I’ve gotta say to you is, you know, God loves you and I’m trying, it’s a term of art and we just shouldn’t read that much into it.

 There are other people out there who call it things like intense perception or a rainforest mind, or divergent thinker, or multipotentialite or everyday genius. For me, it’s just easiest. It makes most sense to just to stick with gifted adult, at least for today. I may change that later, but for today, it’s gifted adult. All right? Enough of that.

So these clues that I’ve mentioned, they come on the backdrop of being identified as a gifted kid in elementary school. [00:19:00] My school had a gifted and talented program and I was in it, but I never really identified with that placement. It was just never a big deal to me. If you read my boat Breaking and Untangle, you know that I was a gay kid growing up in rural Arkansas with the sadistic father, I was much more concerned about getting beat up at school or having the shit knocked outta me at home than I was doing some mind teaser puzzles in the library during gifted and talented hour.

Okay. It just didn’t make that much of an impression on me considering everything else that I was dealing with as a kid. But I’d also been called smart all of my life. Even people who don’t like me will say, what an asshole, but he is smart. So again, this was always in the backdrop for me but I never really attached that to a part of my identity, and so I would’ve never tied the smart talk to my lived experience. It just wasn’t, wasn’t my thing. I. Because I had lots of reasons in my life to be depressed or anxious or traumatized or obsessive or living in fear or to doubt myself or to feel like an [00:20:00] imposter.

I had lots of reasons to explain those things away, and anytime one of those things would come up, I would go off in search of the single solution to fix that thing. That’s what’s emerging. Let’s go fix that thing. There were lots of reasons. I would find it hard to connect with people. Lots of reasons why I was lonely all the time.

Lots of reasons why I might not be good on a team. And if I was on a team, there were lots of reasons why I would always end up in charge. There are reasons to explain the feelings and behaviors because my upbringing offered away to explain it away.

And so for most of my life, I’m thinking, and I think a lot of the people who were trying to help me throughout my life were also thinking. Well, what he’s experienced is just a consequence of his upbringing or, you know, maybe it’s because he is gay. Gay is different. Different is weird. Maybe this is just how gay people are.

Do you remember those worksheets when you were a kid that had the dots on them? And when you would trace the dots, it would reveal the outline of [00:21:00] something like a dog or a dinosaur or something like that. All of my life has been like jumping from one.to another. With no line to connect them. I would jump from.to dot and then look around for reasons why I’m there.

I wasn’t able to connect one.to the next, the one before. It made no sense. I had no idea where I was going next, but, well, here I am and I’m confused, or I’m bored. Let’s go to the next dot. This has just been my life, just on those dots. Jumping, jumping, jumping, and life gets confusing and it’s painful and it’s challenging, and I would try anything I.

I would look for answers anywhere from meditation to medication, from stoicism to psilocybin, and sometimes I would find a little relief, but never for very long. My whole life has been people telling me that I’m just overthinking everything, that I just need to lighten up and just have fun, that I just need to trust in Jesus and give [00:22:00] it all to God.

Well, I tried, but it, it never, it never worked. It was like a wonky fitting piece of the jigsaw puzzle. It kind of fits a little bit, but not really. You know, you’re sitting there and you’re like trying to shove that piece in. You’re like, it almost goes, it almost, no, it doesn’t go. But for the first time in my life to identify as a gifted adult, to read the research on what it means to have that life experience, I’m finally able to connect the dots.

There’s now a through line for my life that’s making perfect sense. My head recently has been like playing a winning game of Tetris, where all the blocks are lining up and crunching away and making room for more. It is just on overdrive and it’s, it’s just click, click, click, click, click, and it feels so good.

And as I dig into the research, I find myself laughing. And then the next minute I’m crying, I’m gonna tell you more about what the lived experience has been for me. [00:23:00] And why I relate to this label in a little bit, and I’m especially gonna do it in future episodes on this podcast, but I wanna take a minute and talk about the labeling itself because I know that there can be a reluctance to label ourselves or others, and sometimes labeling can turn into trouble.

I’ve even talked about this myself, where I would tell people, you know, exercise caution when labeling yourselves, but I think that that was probably because none of the labels ever really fit. So don’t apply a label and over identify with a label that doesn’t fit. And that had been my story for a long time.

So let me tell you what it has meant for me to label this and find a label that finally fit. It just clicked right into place. All of my life, my internal experience has been manifest through my personality traits and behavior in ways that are sometimes really hard for other people to make sense of.

And so I’ve been told so many times things like, that’s just Chad. [00:24:00] That’s just how Chad is. So the label was Chad, which makes the experience of being Chad really fucking lonely. If it’s just Chad being Chad, then Chad should have the power to fix whatever is going on with him on his own. You fix the problem, you fix it yourself, get it together.

You’re smart. You can figure this out. What’s wrong with you? Come on, don’t you think I would’ve already done that if I could have. I cannot tell you what it means to me to have a label for what I’m experiencing. A label that says, it’s not Chad. It’s this thing, which means to me, I’m not alone. It’s a label that says that this experience isn’t a singular experience.

I’m not broken. This is not a unique human [00:25:00] being forged by unfortunate circumstances. It turns out I’m not that special. And what a fucking relief. The research says that there’s anywhere from five to 20 million of us in the United States, which isn’t a lot, but it’s more than one. And the reason that they aren’t sure of how many of us there are is because it’s extraordinarily difficult to identify us.

In fact, you may have already been asking yourself this question as you’ve listened to me. Chad, how can you know you are so-called gifted if you haven’t been diagnosed? Well, that’s because a lot of people who identify as such are self labeled and ultimately have to self acknowledge what this is in themselves, and we find ourselves in the research.

We find ourselves in one another’s stories. The research tells us that standard IQ tests are not reliable tools to determine whether somebody is gifted. History is full of stories of people who didn’t have [00:26:00] extraordinarily high IQs and were obviously gifted. The research sheds a light on the gifted person’s experience, and from that research we get to recognize ourselves.

The research puts up a mirror. The stories that we tell about our experience puts up a mirrors for others to see themselves, that research and those stories are of people who are struggling with imposter syndrome, perfectionism, loneliness, being misunderstood, and existential depression often all at the same time.

It’s stories of people who have heard all their lives, that they’re just too smart for their own good. I mean, what does that even mean? And what am I supposed to do with that? Go chew on some lead paint. Being gifted is a lifelong developmental phenomenon. It’s not something that went away when we got to middle school or high school or college.

And it’s not just about being smart, even though smart is often a byproduct, being gifted is about how our [00:27:00] brain works. Our brains just work differently than most other brains. It’s a neurodivergence. That’s it. Gifted adults are cognitively complex. They’re abstract global thinkers. They’re problem solvers.

They have intense emotional reactions. They have a heightened sense of social awareness. They have a drive for mastery and high standards. They are profoundly curious. They love learning, and they often feel like outsiders. They have a deep fear of failure. Their perfectionism becomes a liability to their progress.

They struggled to choose a single path in their career because they’re capable on many paths. Loneliness is very common amongst this group. They’re often misunderstood as arrogant or aloof or condescending, which makes it very hard to make friends. Mental health issues are common, anxiety, depression, existential angst.

They have a tendency to spiral and worry not only can they look at a problem and see their way [00:28:00] to a solution, but they can also see every other problem along the way and the likelihood of that happening. They can game things out.

They can see the ideal outcome in their minds, how the game can be won, and then they see the reality of the world that they live in and the likelihood of losing, and that’s overwhelming. It makes it so hard to find meaning or purpose in any of it. It is physically painful and yet, and yet I cannot begin to tell you what it means to finally see myself in a group of people who are experiencing the world like I am.

It gives me a spark of hope and there are so many more people like me, and maybe you’re one of them who is having this life experience and unable to make sense of it. I am 44 years old. As I record this and I’m just now discovering this about myself, I read a lot [00:29:00] and for many years I’ve been a big reader.

Lemme tell you something, it was way, way too hard to stumble upon what it means to be a gifted adult. The shit that I’ve got on my bookshelves about the most hokey bullshit life advice nonsense that you can possibly imagine found a much easier path to me than the research and stories of being a gifted adult, and that is fucking tragic.

 We are great at pedaling nonsense. Why are we not getting good information to the people that need it the most? We don’t put a lot of resources and telling people what’s right about them. It’s much easier to pathologize them than it’s to spend time with them and understand their life experience.

It’s much easier to just prescribe a solution to the symptom than recognize the source of the pain, but I’ve gotta do my part. I’m gonna ask you to share this podcast with somebody that you think may be living life [00:30:00] as a gifted adult. I’m gonna ask you to subscribe to the newsletter that I’m launching where I’ll be talking exclusively about the lived experience of gifted adults.

The link for that is in the show notes. I’m gonna spend more time on this podcast talking about that experience. And listen, there are some truly Marvel movie level theories backed by research about why gifted people even exist, and I cannot wait to share that with you. There are tools and assessments that help you identify just how you are gifted, which again, has nothing to do with your iq.

There are multiple intelligences and there are ways that in which being a gifted adult impacts your personality and behaviors that seem to make you an odd duck, but when you put it through the lens of a gifted adult, it’s gonna make perfect sense to you, and I can’t wait to share some of that information with you.

There are lots of ways of looking at the world through this lens that comes with a profound sense of meaning and purpose, and that’s so ironic that it’s the meaning that often gets us here. It’s the meaning that’s hitting me smack in the face this week, and I can’t wait to share [00:31:00] that research with you.

And there are lots of life strategies to help a person shape their outward world, to match their rich inner world. And I’ll be sharing more with you about that too, as I learn more about them and put ’em into practice. I. So until then, there’s a lot of information this week for you in the show notes.

So make sure you check out all of those links and dive down this rabbit hole for yourself. And until then, may you have joy, peace and happiness, good health and wellbeing, a life of ease and prosperity. The courage to get what you want from this life. The clarity to know what that is. The imagination, to not sell yourself short and the discipline to see it through.