Gordon Smith, LPC

02/01/2026

"The "Greensboro Four" late in the afternoon sat on four bar stools at the segregated lunch counter and asked for coffee. When they were refused service, they remained at their seats until closing. The next day over twenty students returned with them including some from the all female Bennett College. The third day included over 60 persons followed by over 300 on the fourth day. With promotion of the sit-ins in the media, the sit-in tactics spread to other cities in North Carolina and eventually throughout the southeast. This Greensboro sit-in is credited as being the major and most influential sit-in of the civil rights era."

February 1, 1960, four young North Carolina A & T State University students began the nations most momentous sit-in of the Civil Rights Era in Greensboro, NC.

01/30/2026

Gifted Trauma is about all of the rejections you experience and/or internalize throughout your life. Your giftedness is a neurotype, a way of being, a consciousness that encompasses all that you are. When that simple truth is negated again and again by people and systems, we gifted people can develop distorted self-concepts and internalized shame for being who we are. We can contort, camouflage, shrink, and desperately try to conform our expression in order to receive approval, acceptance, connection, and love. The aggregate of this rejection by a thousand cuts is at the heart of gifted trauma.

Enter Narrative Medicine and the wild reaches of creativity. Gifted Trauma Alchemy is a six-week experience designed to elevate and celebrate your creative consciousness. Through this process, you will see yourself with new eyes and begin to unwind all the damage done. If you’ve been writing for sixty years or you’ve never done any creative writing at all, Gifted Trauma Alchemy is an unconventional avenue to gifted personal development.

It begins Feb. 8, and it will help you come into a new relationship with yourself as you release the weights laid upon you when you were younger.

Gifted Trauma Alchemy - This six-week series elevates and centers creative consciousness in your gifted personal development.

01/28/2026

"Ultimately, there is profound hope in this reframing. When you cease viewing your anxiety as a character defect, you can stop fighting a war against your own biology. You possess a rare and powerful mind capable of extraordinary depth. By honoring your valid need for data and respecting your sensory limits, you can move from a state of constant survival to one of thriving. You were not built for a low-resolution world, but with the right adjustments, you can certainly learn to navigate it with grace."
[...]
"The neurotypical brain relies on top-down processing. It uses prior context to generalize and ignores minor deviations in the data. It operates on predictions that are essentially “good enough” to function.

The autistic brain, conversely, tends toward bottom-up processing. It ingests granular details first and attempts to build a reliable pattern from raw data.

When faced with seemingly high-stakes uncertainty, the bottom-up processor cannot form a pattern because the data points do not align. To a high-fidelity mind, this inability to close the loop looks like a critical system failure. The brain spins its wheels and runs thousands of simulations to resolve the data gap.

The Intelligence Trap and Cognitive Looping
High intelligence can paradoxically worsen this state. Because your processing speed and capacity are high, you do not simply “sit” with uncertainty. You attempt to “solve” it."

Sarah Swenson is a psychotherapist and international coach working with neurodiverse couples and high-intelligence individuals worldwide. Splitting her time between Italy and the U.S., she speaks Italian and German and is especially interested in where cognition, attachment, culture, and long-term r...

01/27/2026

"What if the very thing that makes you gifted is also what makes life feel overwhelming?

In this episode of Notes to My Nervous System, Erin Vandermore sits down with therapist Gordon Smith to explore what it means to live in a gifted nervous system — especially after burnout, crisis, or long-term emotional overwhelm.

Giftedness is often misunderstood as simply high intelligence. As Gordon explains, it is a neurodivergent nervous system that processes the world more intensely — emotionally, cognitively, and sensorially. For many gifted adults, this heightened sensitivity can make life feel louder, heavier, and harder to navigate, particularly in systems that weren’t built for how deeply they experience the world.

Together, Erin and Gordon explore:

Why gifted people often feel “too much” or misunderstood

How chronic overwhelm and self-doubt can develop over time

Why traditional school and work environments often fail gifted nervous systems

How creativity, imagination, and improv can support regulation and recovery

Gordon shares how storytelling and creative expression can help the nervous system feel safer, expand capacity, and rebuild meaning after stress or trauma — without forcing performance or perfection.

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt different, emotionally intense, overwhelmed by their own mind, or exhausted from trying to fit into systems that don’t quite fit them.

Gordon Smith ()

01/26/2026

Hi, all. The murders of US citizens by government paramilitary units are unconscionable and categorically wrong. The murderous attitudes are nothing new - they are simply more open and enabled than at any time this century. The inherent dominance, hierarchy, supremacy model of the United States exists alongside our inherent equal rights, liberty, and growth-orientation model.

Cruelty v. Compassion

It's a tale as old as warfare, as old as systems of control. It's happening today, and no one is safe until the government returns to a Rule of Law stance, adopts an equal rights stance, and rebuilds some semblance of rule by the people.

I wonder how you're feeling and how you're seeing the unfolding violence in our nation. I'm a vast sea of emotions around it - grief, sadness, anger, rage, shock, and resolve. In my own life, I've found action to be the antidote for anxiety and/or feelings of powerlessness. I have a lot of deep breaths. I work to keep my heart open even as it breaks. I am doing things in my personal life to develop greater community and security. There's a lot more I could say, and there'll be time for it all.

Today I just wanted to open the floor for your perspectives and feelings. Be kind to your intense, complex, and sensitive selves - Holding compassion as a guiding principle means caring for each other and ourselves, knowing there is no separation.

01/23/2026

It's been a while since I offered up a bouquet of memes for you. With an ice storm gathering and blowing my way, I reckoned it was high time to bring some memetic heat. Please feel invited to add your brightly burning meme flames to the fire.

01/22/2026

For the last 78 days, I've made a big effort to decrease my screen time. For me, that meant using the BePresent App, and deliberately altering some of my routines. It's made some important differences in my anxiety levels, attention span, and sense of well being. I've still kept up with the headlines and done my little social media checkins, but I haven't scrolled myself into oblivion in almost three months.

How are you navigating your relationship to screenworld?

01/21/2026

“I was shocked by how quickly the group members and I were able to freely share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. I was also surprised and overjoyed with the comfort doing so provided.” – Trent M.

This group provides gifted adults a space to explore their neurodivergences in a virtual room full of other outliers. GAGE is designed to be a balm and a laboratory. This six-week group coaching experience is open to all self-identified gifted people.

How it works:

The next group will run from February 17 – March 24, 2026. Prior to the opening session, I’ll send everyone a document with links to some readings as well as some prompts for reflection. It’s all optional.

At the opening session, we’ll establish our group norms and get to know each other in various ways, including sharing some of our gifted journeys. I’ve been leading groups for a couple of decades now, and I’ve figured ways to do this that are meaningful and non-cringe.

I will facilitate large group and breakout room explorations. The themes and questions that emerge from the group will provide the foundation for our Week Two content. We’ll repeat this iterative process each week, making GAGE a group process that responds to each group’s needs and emerging themes rather than following a pre-determined formula. By the end of the series, we’ll all know each other deeply, feel accepted and seen, and understand ourselves better than we did when we arrived.

This six-week group coaching experience is open to all gifted and otherwise neurodivergent people.

01/20/2026

I am returning for my third year at Camp Yunasa - this experience is one of a kind, and it's provided hundreds and hundreds of gifted young people an experience of acceptance, growth, and community - "Yunasa Summer Camps are designed to work with gifted youth ages 10-16 to nurture balance and cultivate personal growth. At Yunasa, we work with experts in gifted education to provide a week-long camp that is filled with self-exploration, connection with nature and each other, and most importantly, FUN! Through Yunasa, gifted youth are able to experience all the adventures of traditional summer camps while also forming meaningful connections with peers who understand the unique joys and challenges of giftedness."

Yunasa Summer Camps: Created Specifically for Gifted Youth

01/18/2026

These gifted bodyminds in which we dwell seek a coherent experience of living – to have our internal experience harmonize with external experience. We are sensitive, intense, and complex. We’re outliers among our fellow humans. And, like everyone, we’re seeking secure, safe, loving attachments. We’re hungry for knowledge and experience. We long to express ourselves fully and in resonance with the ways we perceive.

When our ways of seeing and being are rejected and dismissed over and over and over again, when we don’t have the mirroring and encouragement we need to step into our gifted experience, then internalized fear and shame can take root. This internalization can lead to masking, shrinking, contorting ourselves in the pursuit of connection and acceptance.

Gifted Trauma Alchemy steps outside the conventional models into creative consciousness, where our imagination can open panoplies of perspectives. In a critique-free community we step together toward giving ourselves a place in the ecology of things.

Over the course of six weeks we’ll go through a process of transmutation. You’ll receive and give yourselves permission to explore and express without the inner censors and inner editors inhibiting you. The group is a safe place to test becoming amidst acceptance. You’ll be surprised at your creative mind’s vast subconscious operations. You’ll come to the understanding that there’s more of you, more of the world, more possibilities inherent in living. You may experience disintegrations of old identities, adaptations, self-concepts, and ways of knowing the world. You’ll feel the embodiment of new perspectives beginning to integrate. At the end, you may find a new wholeness, felt-sense integrity, and a bigger experience of living.

Gifted Trauma Alchemy - This six-week series elevates and centers creative consciousness in your gifted personal development.

01/14/2026

When so much of your lived experience is through the lens of differentness and/or loneliness, being in community with actual peers is a fast track to rapid expansion and evolution. Adults who are still learning to relate to their own giftedness crave spaces to explore and discuss it freely with others. If that’s you, then you’ve come to the right place. When you’re: feeling such difference from the neuromajority and knowing that the masks just don’t fit – having questions about your intensity, complexity, and drive – wanting to be with people who share an existential depth – the Gifted Adult Group Experience is here to provide a place to be together and know yourself in new ways.

Once you’ve realized that your giftedness has everything to do with the way you interact with the world, the next, inevitable steps are toward processing, recalibrating, reorienting, and living a life more aligned with who you are. This group provides gifted adults a space to explore their neurodivergences in a virtual room full of other outliers. GAGE is designed to be a balm and a laboratory. This six-week group coaching experience is open to all self-identified gifted people.

You’ll meet other neurodivergent people, each in their own experience, and each showing up ready to connect and learn. The overlap between giftedness and a host of other neurodivergences is broad and deep. Characteristics of what the neurotypical world calls autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity, dyslexia, dyscalculia, aphantasia, synesthesia, etc. are elements of the gifted experience that you may possess. Pathologizing those characteristics and the innate intensity and complexity of giftedness results in cultures where gifted people internalize rejection and shame, where we learn to mask our authentic selves in order to make it.

Next six-encounter series runs from February 17 – March 24, 2026. Tuesday evenings from 6:15 – 8:15pm Eastern Time. Held entirely on Zoom.

Cost for the whole series is $305. Equity rate for BIPOC folks who choose it is $228.75.

This six-week group coaching experience is open to all gifted and otherwise neurodivergent people.