Bio: Sandra Clifton, Ed.D., BCET, PCC, CEP, SLDI. After a decade of teaching high school English, Sandra became a certified coach in positive psychology and was hired at Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence as a Master Trainer, where she worked for the RULER team. She then opened the Clifton Corner, a safe space to support overwhelmed students who struggle with issues of perfection, motivation, organization, learning differences, school shame and academic anxiety. Now as a Board Certified Educational Therapist, she runs a private clinical practice supporting the special needs of Gifted, Sensitive & Twice-Exceptional individuals. During the pandemic, Sandra studied at Bridges Graduate School, completing an internship at the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa. Dr. Clifton successfully defended her dissertation, a qualitative research study that focused on the lived experiences of highly sensitive, twice-exceptional students, and has now received a doctorate in Cognitive Diversity.

Session title: Sensitive Students: Exploring Another Angle of Twice-Exceptionality

Highly sensitive students are in every classroom, but few educators know of their presence or the problems that they face in the learning environment. This group of children often struggle in silence as twice-exceptional individuals who have both significant gifts but also encounter particular challenges to navigate a neurotypical school environment. Both teachers and parents, often unaware of this innate biological trait, can increase stress by “coaching” these children to toughen up and develop thicker skin. As a result, some of our brightest children turn to self-medication to numb their emotions or opt out of education entirely. This presentation will involve sharing the multi-case qualitative study of my recent dissertation, which was designed to explore and describe the academic experiences of highly sensitive, twice-exceptional adults who managed the stress of school despite mental, emotional, and physical demands. This investigation included the perspectives of 13 individuals through the lens of their educational journey, as well as their lived experience in their biological family constellation. Depicting these retrospective narratives for participants at the Dabrowski Congress would hopefully help to illuminate the secret, subtle struggles of a particular population in our society who “hide in plain sight” in order to survive an intense, toxic school environment of competitive achievement that is consistently critical of their insight, intuition, empathy, and artistic expression—often at extreme cost to the individual. Despite these struggles, the construct of Positive Disintegration was present in each of these cases and served as a framework to explore Vantage Sensitivity, a theory that Highly Sensitive People may struggle greatly but that they also benefit exponentially from interventions and accommodations. One goal of this sharing this research is to highlight how we as a greater society can recognize the unique trait of sensitivity in our students as a strength to celebrate and not a weakness to remediate—and thereby help to prevent both mental illness and suicide.