Chris: Hi, this is Chris Costello and I've teamed up with Michael Senoff to bring you the world's best health-related interviews. So if you know anyone struggling with their weight, with cancer, diabetes, ADHD, autism, heart disease or other health issues, send them over to Michael Senoff's hard to find seminars dot com. Today we're talking with Catherine Crawford. Catherine is a licensed marriage and family therapist and registered art therapist in Mountain View, California. She is also the author of The Highly Intuitive Child. Catherine, great to have you on the show today.

Catherine: Thank you so much for having me, Chris.

Chris: So Catherine, how does one define the highly intuitive child?

Catherine: Well, I think I'd start by just identifying for everybody that we are all intuitive. So every child is born with these abilities, but some kids are born with this as an innate trait occurring more frequently. And because of that, it impacts most areas of their life. It's going to impact who they are in relationship, how they make sense of life, and it certainly impacts their stress levels and because of that, how they take care of their body. Parents are probably noticing that these qualities of intuition or that ability to know something in a way that bypasses the rational linear mind is there from a very early age. So they're going to see this even as soon as that child is able to talk. They see it in toddlers. They'll see it in their speaking children who are able to identify the needs for babies and the pet and the family. They're often very concerned about the feelings of others. They're even concerned about the world at large. And many of these kids will also express a sense of feeling really different from their peers. They certainly don't look different. They really would never even know that these kids are highly intuitive in a classroom or in the soccer field, but their way of being able to make sense of life and move through life can feel quite different.

Chris: And so what kind of things can parents look for? What kind of things will kids be saying if they tend to be a highly intuitive child?

Catherine: Well, when they're young, they may say something like, they're very good at being able to pick up on the unspoken. So perhaps if parents are in the midst of a conflict but they're being very discreet about it, that child might come up to them and say, are you mad at mommy or are you mad at daddy? So they're going to go right into it. And for a child like that who is able to have a high level of perception, it's important not to lie to them. You don't want to give them too much information. Certainly, they're still kids. And some parents, when they have a child who's very perceptive, they might err on the side of treating them almost like little adults, and we don't want to do that. But we also don't want to be dismissive with it. So something as simple as, you know what, you're right. Mom and dad are in a conflict right now, but we're working it out and it's not your responsibility to fix it and is there anything you need from me? So in doing so, you're identifying and validating what the child's experience is, just a little bit of age-appropriate information, and then letting them know that it's not their responsibility to fix it or take care of it. That's really important because these kids are often very perceptive about what's going on for other people and other people's stress. And when they tune into that, the inclination then is to try to fix it. And we don't want kids overworking those abilities. So paying attention to it, just being open to it, I think, is the starting point. Being respectful, knowing that high level intuition is a very natural ability to have. It may be perplexing to parents, but if parents could just stay open and not inflate it or deflate it, that's going to help a child greatly because they're going to take the cue from the parent that this is just a normal part of life. And then that's also going to let the child feel safe to be able to bring their concerns or worries to the parent that they might stumble upon from the kinds of information that they pick up on in the world. For example, you know, trying to figure out what do I do about the stress that I feel in my classroom when I notice that my friends aren't talking out their conflict or just things that they notice in the family. If they're wrong to that and shamed for that, then pretty soon they learn to be very quiet about it and they might even shut it down. And the problem with that is that they can start to cut off from their sense of self trust. And then that's something that they have to recover later in life as adults. And we really can prevent that from happening. So you're normalizing it just like, you know, it's a gift just like any other gift. But unfortunately, it's one in which within our culture, it's been sensationalized so much that there's a lot of baggage and fear attached to it. And these perceptive kids will pick up on that and then they'll go very quiet about it. So if you can just treat it like it's just a normal part of life, but as you're saying, you know, let the child know that we think it's great that you have these abilities. And if you ever have questions, you can talk to me about them. It's also helpful for kids to hear about if there's another family member who has an extra helping of intuition, maybe it's a grandparent or an aunt, and that person can talk with them. And, you know, as questions come up for the child, give them some of their experiences of how they dealt with it. Because kids often they're looking for other people who share these abilities. And that's really going to help them minimize that feeling of feeling so different in the world.

Chris: Now, Catherine, there's 20 questions that one can ask themselves as a parent if they suspect their child might be highly intuitive. Can you share with our listeners what those are?

Catherine: Well, I've got just a couple of things that I'll put out right now here for our listeners. One is that you may notice that it's difficult to keep a surprise from your child. For example, these kids will often get a birthday present or they'll get kind of close in the neighborhood of what that birthday present or Christmas present is, even though you've got it very well hidden. They're often very good at being able to detect incongruencies. So if your words and your body language are not matching up, they're pretty good at being able to detect that white lie is coming through. Another thing is do you have a child who really connects to the feelings of others? Is this a child who will feel for the pain of their classmates or feel for unspoken conflicts going on in the classroom? Do they tend to pick up on those feelings that are going on in their classroom and then either act them out by essentially being a lightning rod for the unspoken feelings in the classroom or maybe go to the extreme of really overusing their peacemaking skills or trying to make that better or perhaps they experience extra headaches and stomach aches when they're around stress that is not being attended to, wherever that may be. So migrating aches and pains, that would be a sign of stress for these kids because when you have high empathy levels, the body is designed for being able to attune so well to other people that you gather information and so if somebody else is in great distress, an empath may also experience that kind of distress within their own body. So for these kids it's really important to notice it and let it go. That's a huge skill for them to learn. Some of the other things that might be happening for highly intuitive kids is that they often ponder the big questions of life from a very early age. There's often a fascination with the meaning of life and death, lots of questions about death and they're really trying to make sense of the big picture. You might also notice, and this can get quite tricky to spot, but they may have high levels of stress before cataclysmic events that happen on our planet. One of the things that I noticed as a parent, I was parenting my daughter in preschool right before 9-11 and boy, I sure saw the stress levels shoot through the roof for kids. Proceeding and directly right after 9-11, I saw mimicking of the 9-11 attacks in kids' art and in their play and especially for those highly intuitive kids, very, very hard to settle them. Of course, as parents, we didn't know what was happening until afterwards and these were also kids that weren't exposed to news broadcasts either. The point being that for some intuitive children, their intuitive antenna can extend very far, not just to the kids or the people that are directly in their lives, but it can be quite far-reaching. It's just a tricky thing to figure out as a parent how to soothe your child and sometimes you just don't know until you hear the information on the news and piece it together. It's a bit of detective work. Of course, we're never completely sure, but when you see the patterns as I do, I've been able to piece that together over the years. When that happened, I was with little preschoolers, so we weren't discussing 9-11. For parents who were school-age children, they had the ability to share more information with their kids and then when a child is able to see that they're feeling stress, possibly related to something that's going on in the world, then they have some data that they can work with. This is true for us as adults, too. If adults are feeling stress-related to larger world events and we're very sensitive and can feel that in the world, then we can set about the business of being able to comfort ourselves to know, like, wow, maybe I was tuning into that or feeling really burdened by that right now. Then it's time to set about whatever our personal stress management plan is, whatever makes us feel really good. As parents remembering that our kids need that, too, just as much as we do, the top one is being able to comfort our children. You're helping them reset their emotional thermostat. Play is a great one. I'm an art therapist, so I use a lot of play, a lot of art for kids. It's such an easy, elegant way for them to be able to reset their emotions because they just naturally, many of them, not all kids are artistically inclined, of course, but they can be creatively inclined in other ways. They naturally can release those emotions that are feeling pent up. That's very important for those kids to pick up on a lot of stress, to have an outlet, a healthy outlet, for sure, where they can let that go and they can move on to whatever else they want to be focusing on during the day.

Chris: I'd like to also ask you a little bit about what are some of the common challenges faced by intuitive children, challenges at home, challenges at school? Can you talk with our listeners a little bit about that?

Catherine: Sure. Let's do the challenges at school because I haven't really touched on that one yet. I have mentioned the empathic challenges that a child might have in terms of picking up on the unspoken feelings that might be going on in the classroom. That may cause them to be distracted. It's really important if a child is picking up on the emotions of their classmates, if they do notice it, to just remind themselves that it's okay to just come back to focusing on their schoolwork, too. The other thing that might happen, the intuitive mind is capable of making lots of intuitive leaps. It works a little bit differently at times in contrast to a child who works through their learning style in more of a linear fashion. Let me give an example of that. Perhaps a child is sitting in math class and all of a sudden the answer pops into their head or they want to bypass the steps that their math teacher wants them to take in order to get to the solution of that problem. There's been some research that shows that kids who are especially intuitive and have particular math ability, when they do that, they've been able to see that there's a very harmonized brainwave pattern that is occurring for those kids. Then when they're asked to be able to do the linear steps, there's some incoherence in those brainwave patterns. It's something that could benefit from future research in that area.

Chris: That was interesting. You mentioned that about Einstein, I think. How did that work?

Catherine: The mind is able to shoot out there and find the solution. Einstein was able to take an intuitive leap, get that theory of relativity, but then to be able to explain it to the rest of the world, he had to then fill in with those other steps to be able to explain it to us. That's a little bit how that intuitive process works. You get the gestalt of something, you get the big picture, you get the aha place. Then the work is, okay, how am I going to fill in with words or steps or with teaching? That can be a little frustrating sometimes to the intuitive. It can feel a little slow. A child in class who already is getting where their teacher is headed can also get a bit impatient with the lesson. That doesn't mean that they're all brilliant like Einstein either, but there can be the impatience that goes on. The child might look extra distractible in the classroom, but that's just because they might be feeling a little bored. That might not be happening in every subject area as well, but it is something just to keep in mind as parents and teachers and counselors that the intuitive learning style can be a bit different. The children might also be a little bit distracted if they are intuitive about, let's say, they're thinking about what's happening with a student in another classroom perhaps. Maybe their intuition brings them over to a sense that their friend is in pain. That sometimes will happen for these intuitive kids. Then they might be so distracted by something happening outside of their classroom that they're missing out on the lesson that's going on there. So for these kids, they may need to learn how to refocus on what's going on. Make sure they're staying focused with the task at hand so they're not losing out on what's going on in the classroom. There's a lot of kids that are feeling stress when our traditional classrooms tend to be kids who, Carl Jung would say, the more sensate instead of the more intuitive. Those kids where they can tolerate things happening at their fast-paced classroom. There's a lot of data going on. There's not a lot of time for processing emotional feelings in the classroom. Not always. There certainly are teachers who really value that in the classroom. I say thank you. My hat's off to those teachers. But intuitive kids who want to be more self-directed and follow what it is that they're interested in, take it at their own pace, maybe take a break and do some art that expresses some stress that they're feeling. Those kids could be marginalized a bit more in the classroom. Or what happens is because they're very perceptive, then they will work extra hard to fit themselves into what's expected of them within the classroom. And that can create its own stress. And sometimes it creates sort of an instability within the child because they're getting further away from what their true nature is. So parents, if you have a child who's feeling stress being in a traditional classroom, just offering your child plenty of time at night to be able to decompress and talk about what their experience is, let their nature be really anchored at home. That's going to help your child a lot. And hopefully what it's going to do is build that flexibility muscle where they know who they are, what they're capable of, but then they can also be adaptive out in the world and in a world that is not as inclined to see life as they do.

Chris: Would it help sometimes to even seek out alternative education settings for them? Is that a worthwhile approach?

Catherine: Well, I think so. And I think, you know, there's no cookie cutter model. I've given this a lot of thought and I intentionally left it out of my book because I truly have not found the perfect educational model because I don't think perfect exists out there. But I will say that there are some qualities that I would look for in a school and those are one, emotional health within a school, within the classroom and as a school value, that social emotional learning is valued within the environment and within the culture of that school. If it's truly valued and put into practice through things like really honoring conflict resolution for kids and making sure that kids know that they can be heard and that they're being taught how not to bully, things like that, that's going to just feel so much safer for all kids and for those perceptive, intuitive and empathic kids, it's going to bring their stress levels way down. I would also say in terms of just the learning style that's going on, if there's room for creativity and thinking outside the box and pursuing what a child is really interested in, that's going to go far for an intuitive kid as well.

Chris: And Catherine, you also have a website, lifepassage.com. Can you kind of share with our listeners what they'll find on there?

Catherine: Well, you're going to find some upcoming events that I'm hosting other places where I'll be on the radio and on TV. You'll hear more about the counseling services that I offer with my husband, Dr. Brian Winkler and some of the other things that we are up to here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I invite you to come and visit us on the web.

Chris: Wonderful. That's lifepassage.com. Catherine, I want to thank you so much for joining us and we look forward to hearing more about your work. We highly recommend it. Everybody pick up a copy of the highly intuitive child. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Catherine: Thank you for having me, Chris.