About

Our Wild Minds offers online community and programs that help gifted BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) unleash their natural gifts.

Informed by best practices in psychodynamic psychotherapy, gifted psychology, racial trauma healing, and ecopsychology, courses foster a combination of intellectual inquiry, emotional processing, and community building not typically found in clinical therapy groups or strictly academic courses.

Not sure what is meant by "gifted" in this context? Start here.

Why BIPOC?

Being a gifted or twice-exceptional member of one or more of these groups can be inherently challenging as it flies in the face of expectations placed on many of these social groups. To exhibit intellectual giftedness as a Black woman, for example, is to elicit confusion, derision, disbelief, amusement, suspicion, pathologization, and even rapt fascination—all of them dehumanizing and disorienting.

Healing the trauma responses (including numbness and hopelessness) that stem from these persistent misrecognitions is difficult to do in the absence of community. Together, we can peel back the many layers of the challenges that confront us and explore tools we can use to thrive, even in their midst.

In the face of those who would urge us to shrink and restrain the reach of our minds, we can recapture the unruly brilliance that is our birthright—an intelligence that coheres the living world as it also shines through us.

NOTE: The Feminine Brilliance course intended for all woman-identified people is currently in development.
If you are interested in being notified when this course opens, please complete this interest form.

Founder & Facilitator
Kaitlin Smith, MSW

Kaitlin Smith, MSW is a Boston-based scholar, writer, and former psychotherapist passionate about disrupting the forces that dispossess us of our own expansive consciousness and authentic sense of belonging. Her projects integrate a multidisciplinary array of scholarly resources and modalities to nurture an earthly sense of agency, community, wonder, and aliveness.

Kaitlin is a PhD student at Harvard in History of Science where her research critically interrogates some of the conceptual foundations of modern psychology and some of its unelaborated connections to core themes in African American Studies. This research agenda is informed by past training and work as a psychotherapist at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and in other settings, as well as continuing education in various critical paradigms that complement prevailing psychodynamic and behavioral approaches (e.g., gifted psychology and ecopsychology). For a more comprehensive overview of Kaitlin's work, visit her personal website.

A Little Backstory

Following a series of formative professional experiences within the fields of mental health and higher education, Kaitlin developed a deep and abiding interest in prevailing conceptions of knowledge (including what counts as knowledge, how we come to know, and who can be a knower) as well as their limitations in a more-than-human world brimming with mystery.

Since 2017, Kaitlin has been engaged in experiments dedicated to freeing consciousness from various types of enclosures including mainstream sites of learning and healing, and prevailing ways of knowing that devalue bodily knowledge (and other extracognitive intelligences), disavow neurodiversity, and obscure our place as vital components of an intelligent, living world. These experiments included Wild Mind Collective—a retired project whose aims now find fresh expression in Our Wild Minds. Kaitlin's current portfolio of projects speak to these broad concerns in multiple registers and locations: on abstract and embodied levels, from the traditional classroom to the forest floor, and with audiences ranging from the general public to communities whose knowledge practices have been devalued and misrecognized.

Education

Ph.D. History of Science, Harvard University (in progress)
M.S.W. Clinical Social Work, Smith College School for Social Work
B.A. Sociology and Anthropology, Swarthmore College

Certificate in Ecopsychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute

Certificate in Gifted Psychology, Intergifted

Connect with Kaitlin