31. A lot of Complexity! Meet Lotte van Lith

Sep 13

Lotte van Lith is a lecturer, instructor and senior trainer on the psychology, practice and art of personal and creative development (amongst others at the School of Thinking at Free University of Brussels and the Buckminster College). In her own company, A Lot of Complexity, she guides intense and driven adolescents and adults in their personal and creative development and regularly organizes vivid seminars and courses on topics ranging from sense making and creative giftedness to emotional development. She often gives presentations and is known in the Netherlands and Belgium for her work with the theory of positive disintegration. In 2021, her book "Intens mens" is published.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

Gifted people tend to have difficulties working for someone else. Mostly they don’t like norms and rules, they need space. Space for a creative freedom to do their work.
Gifted children in a non-gifted setting at school struggle because they don’t receive the educational resources they need.
Gifted children can get disillusioned at school quickly. Some gifted children try to understand the environment instead of getting to know themselves and try to cope with the differences that they noticed that are there immediately.
One big aspect of the topic of giftedness is the emotional wellbeing of gifted people as it is part of being human but also very important for the creative and personal development.
Giftedness can be described with these complex thoughts and complex thought processes, which often come along with complex emotions.
Gifted people have a need to connect on a very deep level with another human being. A need to contribute to society and to fulfil their growth needs.
If gifted people are in an environment where they are not mirrored you will see emotional and motivational consequences.
It is important to know about your own giftedness as you need context to understand your experience.
A coach (and therapist) specialized in giftedness is aware of these complexities and that the person is part of a neuro-minority which means that this person probably did not receive adequate mirroring and thus may struggle with trying to understand what is happening inside and outside that person as a consequence of being different.
Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration (including the OEs) is mainly about emotional and personality development,
Positive Disintegration comes along with several of the many existential crisis that actually creates the conditions in which you can become aware of the inner conflicts that you experience and the deeper values that are actually expressed by these conflicts.
Positive Disintegration is an individual trajectory about psychological development and it is often triggered through external experience.
We all have a lot of creativity, but people who are gifted, you tend to see a certain drive towards creativity, a potential to be creative, to think and to act creatively and to find creative solutions because being creative demands a bit of intense fascination to learn about a certain topic.
It is important to have a safe and brave space for gifted people so that we can be vulnerable, but so that we are also challenged to be more than what we are now.
The take away message is: Give yourself the opportunity to be just a little bit curious about who you are and what your experience entails, the complexity of it.