Episode 81: Giftedness (Part 2): You’re a Zebra, Not a Weird Horse [featuring Dr. Matt Zakreski]
Nov 21, 2024
Show Notes
The rich, layered experience of gifted and neurodivergent individuals often includes profound emotional sensitivity, rapid thinking, and unique challenges in daily life.
In this episode, Patrick Casale and Dr. Megan Anna Neff, two AuDHD mental health professionals, and Dr. Matthew Zakreski, a speaker and clinical psychologist, discuss the complexities of neurodivergence and giftedness, including impostor syndrome, executive functioning, the concept of the rule of 5, mirror neurons, and the emotional depth of overexcitability.
Top 3 reasons to listen to the entire episode:
- Discover the unique traits of gifted and neurodivergent individuals, including the intense emotional experiences known as overexcitabilities, and learn how these shape one's perception of the world.
- Dive into the concept of executive dysfunction, where Dr. Zakreski offers a straightforward explanation to help you understand why certain tasks can feel overwhelming, reframing "can't" instead of "won't."
- Explore the persistent nature of impostor syndrome among neurodivergent individuals, and learn how embracing authenticity and self-compassion can alleviate feelings of self-doubt and foster deeper connections.
As you reflect on the diverse aspects of giftedness and neurodivergence, remember that unique ways of experiencing, processing, and interacting with the world are both valuable and valid. Whether or not you are neurodivergent or gifted, embrace your strengths, seek understanding for your challenges, and find communities where you can be your authentic self.
More about Dr. Matt:
Matthew "Dr. Matt" Zakreski, PsyD is a high-energy professional speaker and clinical psychologist who specializes in working with neurodivergent (gifted, 2e, ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, etc.) people. He has spoken more than 900 times all over the world on both stages and podcasts about supporting neurodivergent people in all walks of life, from schools to college to the workplace. Dr. Matt specializes in taking knowledge of the brain, human behavior, and clinical psychology and making that accessible and practical for people to improve their lives.
Dr. Matt is the co-founder and lead clinician at The Neurodiversity Collective, an active member of the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) and Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG), as well as the New Jersey Association for Gifted Children (NJAGC) and the Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education (PAGE).
- Book (Neurodiversity Playbook)
- Consulting: drmattzakreski.com/blank-3
- Podcast (Nerding Out on Neurodiversity)
- Website: drmattzakreski.com
🎙️Listen to more episodes of the Divergent Conversations Podcast here
🎙️Spotify
🎙️Apple
🎙️YouTube Music
▶️ YouTube
A Thanks to Our Sponsors: The Gifted Learning Lab, Resilient Mind Counseling, & Learning Nook
The Gifted Learning Lab is all about empowering parents to raise their gifted and 2e kids with confidence and less conflict. If you’re looking for real, neurodivergent-affirming strategies, you can check out Danika’s free email mini-course on reducing power struggles at giftedlearninglab.com/power. And for those wanting a deeper dive, her coaching program, 'Support Your Intense Gifted/2e Kid,' offers hands-on support for the journey.
Resilient Mind Counseling is a neurodivergent-affirming therapy and medication management practice operated in North Carolina. We specialize in supporting neurodivergent individuals, especially Autistic ADHDers, the LGBTQ community, and the BIPOC community. For mental health therapy, we accept Blue Cross Blue Shield, UnitedHealthcare, MedCost, Aetna, and self-pay. For medication management, we accept Blue Cross Blue Shield and self-pay. We can see clients all throughout North Carolina. If you are looking for medication management services, you need to be within a 60-mile driving distance to the office in case you need to come in. All of our clinicians identify as either Autistic, ADHD, or Autistic-ADHD, or have some form of neurodivergence or are neurodivergent-affirming. We strive to create a neuro-inclusive healthcare community. You can text or call our main line to get started at 828-515-1246 or visit our website at resilientmindcounseling.com. We look forward to helping you along your healing journey.
Explore the power of the neurodivergent community with the Neurodivergent Insights Learning Nook—a neurodiverse space that welcomes all neurotypes. Our community fosters personal growth with access to workbooks, eBooks, workshops, and more. We also host body double sessions, parent gatherings, and monthly live events. Clinicians can join our special tier for exclusive resources and networking. Limited to 20 new members monthly. Enroll at neurodivergentinsights.com/membership. Scholarships available.
✨✨ Hurricane Relief for WNC communities:
This money will go to nonprofits who are boots on the ground. It will go to struggling individuals who do not have enough money for gas to get out, or who do not have enough money to provide their basic needs right now. Donate to Patrick's GoFundMe to help provide urgent aid for WNC communities affected by Hurricane Helene. Visit: atppod.com/wnc
Transcript
PATRICK CASALE: Hey, everyone. You are listening to the Divergent Conversations podcast. We are two neurodivergent mental health professionals in a neurotypical world. I'm Patrick Casale.
MEGAN NEFF: And I'm Dr. Neff.
PATRICK CASALE: And during these episodes, we do talk about sensitive subjects, mental health, and there are some conversations that can certainly feel a bit overwhelming. So, we do just want to use that disclosure and disclaimer before jumping in. And thanks for listening.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Divergent Conversations. And we are continuing on our giftedness series that we are doing. And today we have Matthew, Dr. Matt Zakreski, PsyD, who is a high-energy professional speaker and clinical psychologist who specializes in working with the neurodivergent, gifted, twice-exceptional, ADHD, autism, dyslexic community. He has spoken more than 400 times all over the world on both stages and podcasts about supporting neurodivergent people in all walks of life, from schools to college to workplaces. He just wrote his book, The Neurodiversity Playbook. And we are going to be talking a lot about executive functioning today, giftedness, and all things neurodivergence, and wherever our brain just decides to diverge to. So, really happy to have you on the podcast today. And thanks for making the time.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Well, thanks for having me. I mean, you guys have rapidly become one of my favorite podcasts because when my assistant was like, "You should be on this podcast." I said, "Well, I should look into them." And about halfway through the first episode, I said, "Yeah, yeah. How did I not know you guys existed?" But there are a lot of good podcasts out there, so better late than never, right?
MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely, absolutely. Just kind of start us off, I'm a big contextual person. I like context for people. Can we set the stage with some context of just like, how do you come to this conversation? How do you enter this conversation of 2E, giftedness? Is it from personal experience? I know you're also a psychologist. Like, yeah, how do you enter this conversation?
MATT ZAKRESKI: Well, so like a lot of people in this field, this work is personal and professional for me. So, I got identified as gifted in second grade, as a lot of kids in America are. And, you know, sort of bopped around and did really well. And everyone said I was going to go to Harvard. And wasn't really sure what that meant.
And then, I hit something called the performance cliff in eighth grade, which is, basically, what happens when school becomes harder than you are smart. But if you're a good kid, you never develop the skills necessary to accommodate that, right? The idea is you grow along with how hard school is. But if you don't ever have to study, you never learn how to study. If you never ask for help, you don't learn how to ask for help.
And, you know, I've actually done some research on this, and it's one of the few phenomena in childhood education that we can actually be proactive about because it's like, listen, it tends to happen between seventh and 10th grade. So, if we know it's going to happen, what can we do in second, third, fourth, fifth grade to try and mitigate the impact of that?
So, got hit by the performance cliff. Looking back on that was very synchronous, didn't know that either. But the most important thing for this conversation is that halfway through high school I got diagnosed with ADHD. And, you know, like one of those twice-exceptional kids, where I was so smart that no one ever questioned what else was going on, but all those things that, like, I never knew when there were tests. I would just would study for them in the five-minute passing time, and sometimes I'd get a 97, and no one would ask me any further questions. Or, you know, they would sort of lean on the absent-minded professor trope. Like, "Oh, of course, Matt's backpack looks like a bomb went off." All brilliant people's backpacks look like that, and maybe, but also not all of them, right?
And then, you know, really spending my college years and 20s wrapping my head around what those two identities meant. And now as a 41-year-old who leads openly with his neurodivergence as a twice-exceptional adult, I say, like, people can learn with me and learn from me. And I think that's an important piece of authenticity here because I've had, basically, the whole gamut of the neurodiversion experience, and I want to share that with the people who want to listen to what I have to say.
MEGAN NEFF: I love that. I love that, yeah. So, after we recorded our first episode, I opened up a thread in the community I run. And the conversation thread, like, blew up in ways that, like, we get a lot of activity in our community, but, like, overnight it was like there were 80 comments and 100 comments. It is so clear to me that twice-exceptional adults are looking for spaces to unpack the complexity of being both gifted and ADHD or gifted and autistic. And there's not a whole lot of spaces, I think, for adults to kind of grapple with the identity questions that come along with having that complex intersection.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Yeah, I mean absolutely, especially, since we've never done a good job identifying gifted kids. And part of the reason I try and speak so much about the intersectionality of this work is at some fundamental level teachers expect to see a kid like me walk through the doors, right? A young, upper-middle-class white boy, right? Who's is, you know, very well behaved. And, you know, and they were like, "Oh, what a pleasant human he is. And he must be a gifted kid."
And sure, I happened to be. But we're much more likely to miss girls, we're much more likely to miss kids of color, we're much more likely to miss kids with physical disabilities. I mean, in one study, I think they've only done IQ tests on something like 13% of kids with fiscal handicap IEPs in this country, 13%. I mean, we're just not having these conversations, right?
So, there's a lot of people who through various reasons skip through the cracks, and now here they are as an adult taking IQ tests, or joining Mensa, or as one of my gifted adults often says to him, he's like, "I just keep getting advanced degrees. I just keep finding them." And I'm like, "You don't find them. They're at the bottom of the cereal box. Man, like you're earning them." He's like, "I guess that's it. But yeah, I might get another doctorate." I'm like, "As one does in one's 40s's, right?"
And he doesn't think he's a gifted person. And if you listen to this, person whose name I can't use for obvious reasons, yes, I'm talking about you.
MEGAN NEFF: Well, so I will say this is a thread that actually I've been teasing out recently because when I share that I'm not gifted sometimes folks are surprised. And I've been teasing that out. And I think it's because I'm an intellectual. Academia has always been comfortable for me as an autistic. I am more autistic dominant than ADHD. And so, the world of ideas is how I explore my inner world. You don't have to do all of the social chit-chat in academia.
And so, one thing I've been teasing out is the difference between like being an intellectual and being gifted. And I would say I'm an intellectual who loves academia, and also has thought about getting a second doctorate, but I'm not gifted. So, we are out there, but I do think it's easily to conflate being an intellectual and being gifted, but I think there can be some differences there as well.
PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, and I want to jump in on that because we talked about this last week. And Matt, something you said really resonated with me. For me, I was what you're describing, like straight A's, but also because straight A's and wasn't like creating behavioral issues in classrooms, I went through the cracks pretty easily, and wasn't diagnosed autistic or ADHD until my late 30s. So, a lot of that time, you know, you're spent in this, like, void where you're like, things are coming really easily to me in certain senses, but everything else is really challenging to me, which is what Megan kind of mentioned before, where it was like, okay, you're so intelligent in all of these ways. However, all of these things that are supposed to be super simple or super easy to figure out or navigate are so overwhelming. And it creates that, like, paradox and that kind of confusion from the external world where it's like, how come you can't figure out how to do A, B, C, D, and E?
MATT ZAKRESKI: I mean, if there's a single truism in this field I think it's the neurodivergent experience of life is that hard things are very easy for us, and easy things are very hard for us, right?
MEGAN NEFF: That is so well said, yes.
MATT ZAKRESKI: I tend to speak in bumper stickers. So [CROSSTALK 00:10:55]-
MEGAN NEFF: Same, I love it. I'm here for it.
MATT ZAKRESKI: You know, one of my clients, you know, he's done a couple different jobs, but he's an EMT now. And he's the world's best EMT. You put him in a crisis situation, his brain locks in. The dopamine gates are wide open and he just charges. And then, he's like, "And then I will go back to the firehouse, and I will sit there, and it will take me three hours straight and after-action report." Which, like, literally, he needs [INDISCERNIBLE 00:11:22] and that's the ADHD experience, right? You know, I mean, he has saved multiple lives, but then he got fined by his superiors because he can't get his paperwork in on time.
And the advocate in me is like, do we really care about the freaking paperwork? Like, why are we focused on this? And the therapist in me is like, there's got to be a way we can solve this problem for him, right? We're testing out a voice-to-text for him now to see if that makes things a little easier. I think his reports are going to go from four sentences to four pages because he's like, "And then this happened, and then this happened, and they have this really cool picture on the wall, and then this thing happened, and they had a dog." I'm like, "Focus."
MEGAN NEFF: Oh, my gosh. I love that. That's so funny. Yeah, progress notes. So, I, yeah, work with a lot of neurodivergent clinicians. And progress notes, oh my goodness. And for me, my notes were always way too long. Supervisors were always like, "This needs to be shorter. This needs to be shorter." But I'm like, "But you need all the context in a note." Like, it would take forever.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Well, it's brutal. And, you know, a lot of my colleagues, you know, who are in these similar spaces, they use ChatGPT to write their notes. And, you know, that's not my thing, right? I use templates that sort of like, in my head they're always like Mad Libs, right? I met with client name, and we talked about verb, and feeling. And I'm like, you know, it's a shortcut, but it gets the job done. You know, everybody finds their little ways forward. But, you know, Patrick, to think about, like, the way that these things fit together or don't fit together, one of the things that we don't talk nearly enough about in the neurodivergent space is the concept of asynchronous development.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Right? So, like, you know, if you're a neurotypical person you develop synchronously, though, you know, you basically hold together. If you're neurodivergent, and especially, the more neurodivergent you are, your development tends to become more and more asynchronous. So, you might have a 10-year-old who's intellectually 17, and you know Megan, to use your words, academically 15, right? Still advanced, but not the same level of that, right? But then, socially nine and emotionally eight, right? How do you find a way to meet that kid's needs when they really exist in five different developmental spheres?
And actually, so my mentor, Dr. Jane Peterson, she always referred to it as the rule of five, right? Because if you have a room of six gifted kid, why does it feel like 30? Well, it's because the rule of five, right? They literally are five different kids in one. So, it's exhausting for the parents. It's exhausting for the teachers. It's exhausting for the… God bless of all the Boy Scouts of America, you're doing the Lord's work, I promise you.
MEGAN NEFF: Oh, my goodness, I love this because I have two kids, and my spouse and I are always like, "How do people have more than two kids?" And you're telling me it's because I'm parenting 10 kids.
MATT ZAKRESKI: You have 10 kids [CROSSTALK 00:14:33]-
MEGAN NEFF: Okay, yeah, I'm going to start telling people that. Like, I'm exhausted because I have 10 kids.
MATT ZAKRESKI: "What have you guys been doing?" You're like, "Other than the obvious?" You know, but, you know, you guys could have a baseball team. Congratulations.
MEGAN NEFF: Oh, my goodness, yes. [INDISCERNIBLE 00:14:52].
MATT ZAKRESKI: No, it's so wild to me, and honestly, that's sort of at the heart of why I wrote my book and why I do the work I do because when you can name these concepts, when you tell people there's a word for it, it anchors something fundamental about the personal experience of this. Like, "Are you trying to tell me that like most ADHDers are half plus two emotional age. So, if I'm 14, I'm really like 10 and a half emotionally? Damn, does that explain a lot? Oh man, middle school sucked for lots of reasons, but that was one of them." Like and that's just contributes to this burgeoning sense of otherness that just seems to percolate around us at all times because our brains are just not wired like everybody else's.
MEGAN NEFF: You know, that was something that someone said when we were talking about this in my community, was how painful it was to not be mirrored accurately, to not be attuned to. And I would think, you know, if one person is five, and we're talking about all these different developmental stages, the attunement from the adults in that person's life would be so difficult, which would be so isolating, and so othering, as you're mentioning.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Oh, man. Well, and like when I was writing my book, I was doing some research on mirror neurons. Like, neurons are, like, one of my favorite things.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, they're fascinating.
MATT ZAKRESKI: And it's funny because, like, when Patrick took a sip of whatever you're drinking my brain was like, "Am I thirsty too? I think I am." And I had my coffee like 30 seconds later. But what the research shows is that in neurodivergent people, their mirror neurons fire at a different rate.
So, you know, I think the best way to explain this is that if a neurotypical person's mirror neurons fire at length four, four times, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, a gifted person's mirror neurons are going to fire 16th, 16th time, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. They're going to sync up every once in a while, right? Because then, you know, it's a factor of four. But there's just so much happening in the beats in between the thing that it's this sort of herky-jerky, are we actually doing this or not? Thing. Like, some of the research indicates that people would be better off having people who have entirely dissimilar things rather than these things that sync up every once in a while and then don't.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, the inconsistency, I would think, would actually create more of a sense of almost threat or unsafety than consistently being like unattuned, unconnected, or consistently being connected, if that makes sense. And that's specific to giftedness. Or is that also true of like ADHDers and autistic people? Or is that research, specifically, gifted kids and mirror neurons.
MATT ZAKRESKI: That was specifically the gifted kids. Though I would wager that it exists in ADHDers as well, I just haven't found it.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, that's fascinating. I want to go dive into that. It's really interesting. Okay, so misattunement. So, I'm curious because a lot of our listeners are adults who have, you know, discovered this later in life, that sort of like level of misattunement, even on like a fundamental mirror neuron misattunement level because I know you work as a psychologist. Like, what do you see being some of the identity issues that come from that for folks that they're working through later in life?
MATT ZAKRESKI: Well, top of that chart, right? Is impostor syndrome. I mean, neurodivergent people are so much more likely to have impostor syndrome and they're more likely to have a more intense version of it, right? So, impostor syndrome is when you doubt your accomplishments and have a persistent internalized threat of being discovered as a fraud. And even to feel that way requires a certain amount of mental acuity, right? Because you have to be able to reflect on oneself.
But one of the things that occurs in being neurodivergent is that you look enough like everybody else that you're sort of either subjectively or objectively held to their standard. But then, what happens is because your brain is so different, your way of going about getting to the thing is so different, your awareness of that difference makes you feel like a fraud.
And so, people who are made to feel different in some way are much more likely to have impostor syndrome. The way this shows up, vitally, for our conversation is as a gifted ADHDer, I have words for the things that I do that are different. You know, the fact that, you know, this past two weekends ago, I cooked dinner for 17 people. And we had a great time. And I was bringing everything out. And then I'm like, "Cool. Now, where's my phone." Right? So, like, in the middle of cooking dinner for all these people and getting the place settings, knife, and it was a really good dinner, I lost my phone, and it turns out my phone was in the bread basket. Why was I even in the bread basket? Get great question. I have no idea, right? So, like the duality of that.
But the idea that, if you looked at, well, that's a beautiful dinner, anybody can make a beautiful dinner knowing the chaos and strife that takes you to get there, that's like, "Oh, wait, I'm not like everybody else. Maybe I'm only here successfully because they took pity on me. Or maybe I'm just here with all these friends because I fooled them."
And if you never grew up with the words that explained who you are and the understanding that comes with that knowledge, you're going to assume that those differences are personological, right? It's like-
MEGAN NEFF: Right.
MATT ZAKRESKI: You know, this isn't Megan's brain. This is Megan the-
MEGAN NEFF: My character, absolutely.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Yeah, your character, right?
MEGAN NEFF: This is why, like, one of my biggest advocacy stump speeches for like, power of identification and diagnosis is, you know, some professions in our field are nervous of the label, but I'm often saying, like, we are just replacing character-based labels with a label that, like, this is how my brain works, this makes sense.
Yeah, I've always been a very shame-filled person, but I've been able to at least start working my way through that shame after identification. Because yeah, I resonate so deeply with this. I often use the metaphor of, like, the Oz figure and Wizard of Oz, how it's like this little man and there's the big screen. I've always felt like that. Like, anytime I do something that gives me praise, I'm like, "Yeah, but you just pull back the curtain and you're going to see like me frantically cobbling this together."
So, yeah, that experience of impostor syndrome. And then, I like how you're connecting it too. And then, when we have names and language to describe our experience, that's actually one of the things that helps reduce that impostor syndrome because all of a sudden we have names for these things, we can articulate what's happening in our inner world and in our mind.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Yeah, my version of that is that it's always better to know that you're a zebra, not a weird horse.
MEGAN NEFF: Okay. I need a collection of your bumper stickers. You do so good ones.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Right. How many weird horses are walking around there? They're actually zebras. They're like, oh, it's totally normal that, you know, I count all of my shirts, and I make sure that they're in size, order. And I can't go to sleep until my shirts are counted. That's what everybody does. Like, no, that's that OCD autistic world. And we know-
MEGAN NEFF: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
MATT ZAKRESKI: …what that means for you. You know, I mean, fundamental to what we all do, right? Is that differences aren't deficits, right? That our brain differences make us who we are, but there isn't a brain that is better or worse than anybody else's brain. And it is so easy to get a lot of messaging, especially, in Western culture, that if we cannot optimize or monetize your difference you're worse. And that breaks my heart for a lot of my clients, especially, my adult clients who come to me in their 30s, 40s, 50s like, "I think this is who I am." And I'm like, "Oh, if only we could have gotten you 30 years ago." Right? Damn.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I have more questions, but also, Patrick, I don't want to be mic-hogging the space.
PATRICK CASALE: No, mic hog away.
MEGAN NEFF: Okay.
PATRICK CASALE: You know, I relate to a lot of this, for sure. I talk about impostor syndrome, self-doubt, perfectionism in my world all the time. And I think that's a real piece of it. And when we do have the language for our experiences, there's so much more validation, whether it be internalized or externalized. And I think it just leads to such an increase in understanding.
And I never think that the, like, self-criticism, Megan's Oz analogy, or any of it really dissipates completely. But I think it gets so much more manageable when we have the right language, and the right words, and the right ways to describe things, instead of just consistently creating this narrative that I am really different than everybody else, and someone is eventually going to figure that out no matter how hard I try not to be.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah. Like, I'm hiding something, and it's just amount of time before people figure this out. I actually wanted to ask you, Matt, because I had this… So, when we were reading your bio and it's like, you've given 400 talks. I'm like, "Oh, my goodness, that's impressive." Like, talks, I do them, but they make me very anxious, and I have to prep a lot for them. Do you still have impostor syndrome as someone who has given 400 talks in this topic?
MATT ZAKRESKI: Well, you want to talk about impostor syndrome, I'm sitting here be like, "Oh, you have my old bio for some reason." So, that's fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm not freaking out. It's good. It's great.
MEGAN NEFF: So, what about the old bio is causing some cringe right now.
MATT ZAKRESKI: It's like closer to 900 now, and it's-
MEGAN NEFF: Oh, okay.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Because my mentor was like, you have to count your webinars, too, those count as presentations. And so, you know, I mean, like, it's something like 490 talks in person, and like 430 somewhat webinars. So…
MEGAN NEFF: Okay, so given that you've done 900 talks, like, yeah, do you still experience impostor syndrome?
MATT ZAKRESKI: All the time. And I actually tell people that I'm going to stop giving talks when I stop feeling anxious about them because to me, my anxiety means that I care. And, yes, there are times where I'm like, "Oh, they are going to drag me out of here by my ear. The fraud police are going to show up and they're going to be like, 'You there.'" Like, "Ah, you got me. I had a good run."
But can I tell you guys my best impostor syndrome story?
PATRICK CASALE: Sure.
MEGAN NEFF: Please.
MATT ZAKRESKI: So, I went to Wake Forest University, undergrad. And while I was there, Maya Angelou was a professor at Wake. She taught this second-semester class for seniors in poetry. You, of course, had to apply to get in. And being the gifted kid I am I was like, "Totally doing that." Was I an English major? No, I wasn't. That's a good question. Thank you for that.
So, I got in and her class was not on campus. We had to drive to her house, which is a thing. Like, you know, as you're driving the terrible beater car you drove in college to Maya Angelou's house. So, we're sitting around, and we introduced ourselves. And I went last. And I was like, "I'm Matt. I'm a senior. I'm a psychology major. I'm from New Jersey. And I don't belong here."
And, you know, everybody chuckled, right? Because everyone was feeling some version of that. And Dr. Angelou, she looked at me and she was like, "So, let's talk about that for a second because one of two things can be true. One, congratulations, you fooled me. You are actually a terrible writer, and you faked being a good writer so well that I let you into my class. Or two, you are actually a good writer, and you have some talent in yourself that you don't recognize, but I can."
And I'm telling you guys, I have been speechless seven times in my life, and that was one of them. Maya Angelou looked into my soul. She was like, "You there." I'm like, "Oh, no."
So, how does this apply to what we're talking about? I just realized at some point that I am good at what I do, and if people see value in that, that has to be louder than my own self-doubt. Like, yes, there's a non-zero chance that I fooled them, and I don't actually know what I'm talking about, but every time I give a talk that percentage gets smaller. And you know, I don't think it will ever be zero. You know, way too much going on up here for it to be zero. But I think every time I do it, I do a talk, I do a webinar, I answer somebody's question, it reaffirms that the value that other people see in me is real even if I can't always see it myself.
MEGAN NEFF: And I love that you're able to take that in and hold that.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Took a lot of therapy, but you know what?
MEGAN NEFF: I bet.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Yeah, but I own that, right? Like, I leave with my neurodivergence. I talk to my clients that I see a therapist. Like, you know, I mean, fundamentally, aren't we all here to practice what we preach? I mean, you know, that's, I think, why people are drawn to us and the work we do.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah.
PATRICK CASALE: I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but I don't want to go down that pathway. I wanted to ask about-
MEGAN NEFF: [CROSSTALK 00:29:51].
PATRICK CASALE: Well, because, like, you know, self-doubt, impostor syndrome, perfectionism is so much of my other world of like talking about it and…
MEGAN NEFF: Yes, it is. But also, I think that is so core to, like, the gifted experience that people find a lot of freedom in naming. I mean, you don't have to go down that, but like, I want you to feel free to go down that rabbit hole [CROSSTALK 00:30:15]-
PATRICK CASALE: Yeah. I mean, I think the more we openly talk about how we're feeling, right? Like, when we're feeling different, when we're feeling uncomfortable, when we're feeling unsettled, those are ways to help other people feel connected to humanity. And whenever I'm doing talks, you know, I just did the Doubt Yourself, Do it Anyway summit in Italy. And, you know, I was the final speaker. And I put myself last because some of it was ego. I was like, "I want to speak last at an event that I created." But also, because the way I speak is different than the way you speak, Megan. I know you've talked about, like, really prepping and really prepping. I really have to experience the experience to know what I'm going to talk about, if that makes sense.
So, like, I had to absorb five days of the experience to know what I was going to say when I got on stage because I wanted to make sure it was what everyone needed to hear, or what everyone wanted to hear, in terms of, like, content. And my heart's beating out of my chest and beating out of my chest, and I'm pacing, and I'm probably stimming quite a bit and just naming I'm feeling really overwhelmed, I'm feeling a ton of self-doubt, and impostor syndrome. And I mean, curse as hell. It helps everyone in the stage, and you see the audience go like, "Whoooo." It's like collective.
And I think the authenticity piece has always served me really well in that realm, but I still have massive self-doubt, and impostor syndrome, and harsh centered world, like criticism throughout and afterwards, and pick it apart to no end. So, it's really fascinating, but I think it's like this hyper-awareness of how uncomfortable you are moving through the world a lot of the time, and by being able to introduce some of that discomfort, it actually allows for a lot of people who are feeling similarly to feel seen, and affirmed, and connected for the first time, potentially, in their lives.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah. I mean soft emotions, like leading with vulnerability, leading with soft emotions can be so connecting. And it can, oh gosh, this is a huge throwback to my older work, but I used to think a lot… Like Martin Buber talks about the power of encounter, like having a true encounter with the other. And I think, like, those more vulnerable soft emotions are what kind of usher in encounter. And I think we live in a world, frankly, where human encounter at that kind of deep ontological level is, frankly, really hard to come by.
PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, yeah.
MEGAN NEFF: And now we've really diverged from giftedness.
MATT ZAKRESKI: But yes and no because there's this concept within gifted psychology called overexcitabilities, right? So, this is Dabrowski's work. And the idea is that everybody has things they resonate with, right? Socially, emotionally, intellectually, creatively, sensory, right? And if you can conceptualize a neurotypical person's way of receiving and sending that information as sort of the satellite dish that you'd stick on the side of your house if you want to get direct TV, you know what I'm saying? Like, right? It's like a reasonably sized satellite dish. If you're gifted your satellite dish is the size that they put in the Nevada desert to look for aliens, right? Like, they're just giant arrays of things. So, you feel more things, more often, more deeply for longer, right?
And I think that feeling of otherness is felt more often, more deeply, that feeling of discomfort impacts us more because we experience the sharp edges of that discomfort at a much more personal level. I mean, you know, my colleague, Josh Shane, he always says that gifted people don't get sad, they get despondent. Gifted people don't get angry, they get enraged. You know, they don't like somebody, they love somebody, right?
And, you know, I mean, you know, it's like what Robert Williams was talking about in Dead Poets Society, you know, like, you know, the word very will not do. There are better words to use. We will use those better words because that's our experience.
And, you know, I had the good fortune to do a TEDx talk this year. And similar to you, Patrick, I was the last speaker. And it was so interesting because I could tell from the responses of my cohort who was neurodivergent and who wasn't because of the way they entered into that space, and the emotional cost on the back end of it. And the speaker who went before me, when she left stage, she stepped into my arms and crumbled into sobs. And I was like, this is a person who was on the bleeding edge of this emotional experience.
And it is not to say anybody's experience was worse than hers, right? I'm not trying to amplify that, you know, like, "Oh, she cried so she must have cared." It was the depth and intensity of that crying. There was something cathartic about it. And I felt very much like that was a experiential moment, that was something profound, honestly, because we shared something so raw and personal together.
And I think the true gift of giftedness is the ability to experience those transcendent moments. Have that satellite dish that can pick up that signal from, you know, Betelgeuse 7, or wherever the heck that's coming from. And that's pretty awesome thing.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, absolutely, I'm a big fan of positive psychology and kind of the study of awe and the study of transcendence. So, that's really interesting. I mean, I've definitely talked about how I think being autistic, specifically, makes me deeply existential, but I hadn't made the connection between kind of awe and overexcitability. But it makes sense to me. And I think, especially, those of us who are hypersensitive in our sensory perception, I think we're picking up on a lot of that a lot of the time.
MATT ZAKRESKI: And it can send us spinning into that perfectionist impostor syndrome space. Because if your sensory things are ramped up to 13, and I'm walking, and you make a micro expression, Megan, you know for a million reasons you were holding back a sneeze, or you had a flash memory of something awkward that happened to you in seventh grade, or maybe I did put my foot in my mouth, maybe I've got some mustard on my shirt. Who knows, right? But I see that micro expression, and because I'm super sensitive, I'm like, "Why should you do that?" Right? Did you see Inside Out 2?
MEGAN NEFF: I haven't yet, but I really am excited to, but I haven't yet.
MATT ZAKRESKI: There's a scene in the car where Riley is driving with her teenage friends, and the way they break down, like, the nuances of the social interaction, and envy, and anxiety, like sitting there I was like, "Yes, this is what…" Like, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like, it's just [INDISCERNIBLE 00:37:53]-
MEGAN NEFF: So, actually, I kind of want to segue to talk about giftedness and experiences in therapy, or maybe more broadly neurodivergence, neurodivergence, giftedness, because I know exactly what you're talking about. And one thing that I felt both as a client but as a therapist is the importance of being interpersonally honest. And so, like, I have definitely had those clients where they are tracking everything. And if I'm doing a Zoom session and I look at the corner of my computer to see the time they're noticing that, and they're going to ask me about it.
And if I'm bored, I have to be honest about the fact that I'm bored. If I got distracted, I have to be honest about that. And I feel like that is so foundational for psychological safety. I know with my therapist I worked with for a long time, I was constantly asking them about, like, interpersonal aspects. And it's because of that hypervigilance you just named of like, I'm tracking everything, and I have a narrative that I'm assigning to it.
But I think a lot of times, well, especially, in therapy, if we're trained to be a blank slate, then we're not trained to queue in and to give interpersonal safety to our clients. So, I guess I just gave you my cards of I feel like that's pretty important for neurodivergent therapy.
But I am curious, because that's a question that came up too, is like, do gifted people need a different kind of therapy? Like, are there some therapy modalities that just don't like work as well, or are more frustrating, especially, given how analytic many of their brains are.
MATT ZAKRESKI: I mean, my mentor in the therapy space was a classically trained Freudian. She-
MEGAN NEFF: Oh, fascinating. Okay.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Oh, yeah. She was the first African American woman to ever receive a PhD in psychology and a JD in law, maybe ever, but certainly in our general neck of the woods in Philadelphia. But like she didn't wear a wedding ring. I didn't know she was married until I worked with her for a year. There were no pictures of anyone in her office, right? And that blew my mind. Well, I was like, but like, I bear my soul to you in supervision twice a week and you are that black box, right? And you were just, you know? And I think that, especially, if we're training new clinicians, it is a safer place to put them, as in you're a black box because I think it's hard to know how to parse out some-
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, self-disclosure-
MATT ZAKRESKI: …information.
MEGAN NEFF: …that is for the client, not for yourself. Absolutely, that is a really important skill set. I appreciate you naming that, yeah.
MATT ZAKRESKI: It's so easy to overcorrect, right?
MEGAN NEFF: It's so easy, yeah.
MATT ZAKRESKI: One of my impostor syndrome is like, am I sharing too much? Am I centering myself too much? I don't think so, but you never know. But I think that if we're doing effective neurodivergent affirming therapy, authenticity has to be a piece of it, even if the authenticity is, I can't tell you that I would love to, right?
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, yeah.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Right? I enjoy one of my clients all the time, like, that's more the kind of thing that you talk about with your girlfriends, not with me, right? And I was like, "You can talk about anything you want to me, but I can only respond in some ways because of the boundaries of this relationship." And we don't always navigate those conversations well, right? And I mean, well, in the sense of that it's a pleasant conversation, but they're important conversations. And to me, I'm always able to authentically name the fact that, to me, that's how I show you respect. I honor our relationship by honoring what that process is and feels like for me. And when I get to train clinicians, or parents, or teachers, I'm like, "You are absolutely able to layer this out, right? And here's how you do it while being true to the person you want to be."
And I think that's the key to making meaningful connections with neurodivergent people in whatever your job might be. So…
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah, I think that authenticity… Because I think a lot of us, well, and maybe this is more about the autistic experience, but I know, like, we're getting mixed messages a lot because people will say something but mean something else. So, then when we encounter someone who is consistent and like, this is what I say, and this is what I mean, or let me unpack that for you, or let me tell you why I can't answer that, or why I won't answer that? That level of consistency and authenticity. I know, for me, that's those are the moments my hypervigilance can relax. Those are the moments I feel psychologically safe because so much of my life has been like, is that really what that person means, or is there a hidden meaning that I'm not picking up. And then, the analyst starts around that.
Beyond the authenticity piece, are there other things you've noticed with gifted clients around kind of how you work therapeutically, that either works well or perhaps doesn't work as well?
MATT ZAKRESKI: I think the biggest thing is understanding that everything is connected. Like, we might be talking about, you know, your relationship with your boss, and you feel underappreciated and overworked in that role. And you can point out how those are echoes of teachers and mentors, and maybe your parents, and maybe your significant other, you know, because through that framing we can do a lot of insight-oriented therapy that's very helpful. And I think that transcends modality, right? I don't think that's a CBT [CROSSTALK 00:43:59]-
MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely, right, right?
MATT ZAKRESKI: …therapy. And I actually think the other thing is speed. There are times in therapy session where I'm like, "Man, I just did like five sessions worth of therapy in this session." Because if people are really vibing on what you're doing, they're picking it up quickly, they're making associations, they're on to the next step.
And, you know, my mentor in grad school, a great psychologist by the name of Dr. Mike Casano, he was like, "You're never going to be good at manualized CBT treatment because you go too fast." I'm like, "Right? Is that bad?" You know? Like, he's like, "I was really good at this because I'm like, 'In session one we do these four things.' You hit these beats at these times, every session one looks the same." And I'm like, "But what about the differences?" You know, and that's why I'm never going to do National Institutes of Health Studies, and that's not my strength.
But in creating a customized, personalized therapy plan for a neurodivergent 11-year-old, then I am the guy you want to call because I've got a deep bag of tricks that we can send through the lens of what that kiddo needs and hopefully, make a positive impact.
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah.
PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, that makes total, total sense because I would relate hard to that. Can't do the manualized step-by-step, this is how everything has to be every single time. Like that just does not work for my brain.
I'm just paying attention to time, and I really want to get to something you said before we started recording. And I don't know how much time what you said would take up, but I was curious about your statement, about when you said 80% autism, 80% ADHD, and you made the smooshing sign with your hands, and then, we started recording, so, yeah [CROSSTALK 00:46:03]-
MATT ZAKRESKI: [INDISCERNIBLE 46:04]. Yeah.
MEGAN NEFF: Yes, well, because you mentioned how you have listened to our podcast on 1.5 speed, and I like how you said, you're like, "I was doing the gifted kid syndrome thing." I think you said, "…and I was doing 1.5 speed." And I was like, "Oh, I thought that was an ADHD thing because I do that too." And that's when you were like, "Yeah, well, giftedness 80%, ADHD 80% autism, smoosh.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Smoosh.
MEGAN NEFF: Smoosh.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Yeah, well, and that's really, if you dig into the brain scans on this, you know, you can see, you know, a neurotypical brain, a gifted brain, and a twice-exceptional brain, and you can see how different things light up in different intensities, right? So, you know, there's so much overlap between the autistic brain and the gifted brain. And then, some of the stuff that doesn't overlap is best explained by things that are more consistent with the ADHD brain.
You know, Russell Barclays team, you know, they found that, you know, one of his grad students calls it spider-sense, that the ADHD brain makes connections between things faster than it realizes it can. So, then you have knowledge but you don't know where it came from. And I was in there was like, right? You might think, "Well, gosh, isn't that more of a gifted thing?" Maybe, right? But it's also the idea of an ungoverned executive functioning system can operate in hyperspace. And that's unbelievably awesome because I think that you really are seeing the creativity and outside the box thinking that exists in ADHDers, but can be amplified by the particular strengths of the gifted brain.
MEGAN NEFF: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah. Like, I see a lot of kids who are, like, get really frustrated in math because they're like, "I know the answer, but my teacher needs me to show my work, but I don't know how to show it."
And it's like, a lot of that, well, I know the answer, but I don't know how I got here. And that experience of that needing to show your work in school can be really frustrating for many.
MATT ZAKRESKI: Oh my gosh, if I had a nickel for every time I had that conversation, I could pay my student loans. I mean, just, like, sometimes it's just no. Like, the kid on the basketball team who pulls up and hits a Steph Curry three-pointer, she's like, "Where was your elbow? What was your range of motion?" Like, we don't ask kids that in other aspects. A kid who hammers out a guitar so low, you're like, "Why are your finger placements where they are?" When we hit that flow state, I mean, it's really sort of beyond time. I mean, like, this is going to get very existential, but like, I think it's the closest thing we get to, like, being superhuman. I mean, we really are outside ourselves. It's kind of amazing.
MEGAN NEFF: I've thought about that a lot with like, hyper-focus, monotropic focus, and like flow state and transcendence, kind of the overlap of the experience of getting… And quiet ego, the idea of like getting outside of ourself and how peaceful that is. Yeah, yeah, I like that.
PATRICK CASALE: I just want to say that the only class I ever failed in my life was freshman year college statistics when I could find out the answers, but I couldn't figure out how I found out the answers. And I failed that class because I could not give concrete examples of how I got to my results. And when you said that, Megan or Matt, one of you, that really jogged my memory for what a horrible experience.
MEGAN NEFF: Well, and that probably feeds impostor syndrome too, because it's like, well, I got the answer, but I don't know how I got it. So [CROSSTALK 00:49:49]-
PATRICK CASALE: Yeah, it's like were you cheating?
MEGAN NEFF: Yeah.
PATRICK CASALE: And I'm like, no, everyone around me failed. What are you talking about? I just knew the answer, and I don't know how to explain that, and how I'm really questioning my own self in all of this is what it was like.
MEGAN NEFF: Well, Matt, I know you've got to go here in a minute. We talked about executive functioning, and we literally haven't talked about it at all. Do you have any, like, good bumper stickers for describing the executive functioning experience of, you know, neurodivergent or 2E humans?
MATT ZAKRESKI: Maybe I'll just come back. I mean, if you'll have me.
MEGAN NEFF: I would love that. This has been a very, like, energizing conversation. I'd personally love to have you back. And I think based on the feedback we've gotten so far, I can tell this is a conversation that there's a lot of energy and interest around.
PATRICK CASALE: For sure.
MATT ZAKRESKI: I mean, I think if you're going to distill the whole executive functioning thing into one bumper sticker, as it were, right? Is that executive dysfunction is always a question of can't. It's never a question of won't. And that's a thing that a lot of parents, and teachers, and frankly, mental health professionals forget. Like, I remind all my clients when their sessions are even though they get an email reminder because it's not that they won't pay attention to it, it sometimes they can't pay attention to it.
You know, and I sat on the panel on this at a conference, I'm like, is it ethical to charge ADHD clients cancelation fees? Right? Like, are we punishing a part of a person's brain that we're actually trying to help, right? And we could spend another hour on that idea together. So, I always tell my clients that what gets in the way the most when loading in skills of executive functioning is the amount of mental energy it takes to opt into something, to choose to do the thing takes a lot of mental energy. So, if you can hook the thing you need to do the stuff you're already doing, then you've minimized the hardest step and stepped into a space of look at us playing to your strengths. Like, the example I always use is, like, I hate going to the gym, right? And I will have free time during my day where I could go to the gym, but I never do. So, I always make it so I go to the gym on the way home from dropping my kids off at school, right? Because the gym is between me and my kid's school.
If I don't go, then if I don't go, between 8:30 and 9:00, I don't go because it's hard for me to convince myself to do the thing. It's not a willpower thing. It's not a strength of character thing. It's a dopamine thing. But when I've hooked it to something else, then it just becomes a thing I do.
And so, for all my ADHDers out there who struggle with this stuff, connect the thing to something that you would rather do. And if you can't connect it beforehand, then connect it during, using that body doubling technique, right? And be on the phone with your mom while you do your dishes, right? You know, put on an awesome podcast like this one while you fold your laundry. You know, have a friend come over and pay bills together. Like that sounds stupid, but it's better than not doing your bills, and then you're done with your bills so you can hang out with your friend, right?
So, I spent way too much time in my life just trying to white-knuckle my way into executive functioning. Now, as a grown-up person, it's like, hey, here's the things where I got to be a little bit more out of the box. Here are things that I can grit my teeth and do. And approaching your journey there from a place of compassion means you're much more likely to build the skills and hang on to them than trying to shame yourself into being able to pay attention.
MEGAN NEFF: Absolutely. And partly, also, I think sometimes the fact that we need accommodations or we need external motivation can induce shame. So, I think, like, coming to a place of acceptance of accommodations like this is a thing, I can't, and I need accommodations. I think that can also help melt some of that ADHD shame, absolutely.
Yeah, well, I'm now feeling anxious about your time because I'm looking at the time and I know we're over. Like, tell folks where they can find you. Feel free to share. I know you have a book coming out. Feel free to share a little bit about that. Anything that you'd like to share with our listeners?
MATT ZAKRESKI: Well, yeah, so here's the book, The Neurodiversity Playbook. I'm very proud of it. It's basically everything we talked about today. It's marrying neuroscience, and my best talks as a speaker, and my best therapy practices as a psychologist. And once again, squishing them together.
And then, I have two primary online presences. Our therapy practice is theneurodiversitycollective.com. That's where me and my team provide therapy virtually all over the country. And then, if what I'm talking about makes sense for your organization, like, oh, wow, we actually need to learn more about neurodiversity, or whatever that might be, then it's drmattzakreski.com. I have a very Googleable name, so it's easy to find. You know, like, yeah, I'm chronically online, what can I say? But, you know, I mean, there's a lot of good work out there to do and I'm trying to do it.
PATRICK CASALE: Love it. We'll have all of that in the show notes, including, oops, sorry, Megan, go ahead.
MEGAN NEFF: I think I was just going to say some awkward niceties like it's appreciated or something. Go ahead, Patrick.
PATRICK CASALE: Awkward niceties fast forward into all of Matt's information will be in the show notes, including his 900 talks, not his 400 talks. We'll update that bio for you. Thank you so much for coming on and being a part of this. We'll definitely have you back on. Sometimes we get pitched by PR companies, and we're always like, "I don't know how this is going to go." But I've really enjoyed this. So, thank you for having the conversation.
MATT ZAKRESKI: It was a pleasure. You guys are just so knowledgeable, and passionate, and you've created such a great place for us to connect here. I mean, yeah, like, I feel like if we had more time, we would just keep going, and that's always the sign of a good podcast. Frankly, it's a good sign of good people. So, let's, yeah, awkward niceties, Megan, awkward niceties.
PATRICK CASALE: Now that we're all uncomfortable, new episodes out on Fridays. Like, download, subscribe, and share. And, goodbye.
