Acknowledging our gifted adult personality
“I did not perform well socially in junior high. I was a strange girl and I was in a lot of pain because of that, like most teenagers.” Claire Danes
Elaine Aron, PhD comments on some of the consequences of being very sensitive as a child: “…family and school problems, childhood illnesses, and the like all affected you more than others. Furthermore, you were different from other kids and almost surely suffered for that.”
[From post: Sensitive and suffering as a teen: Claire Danes on being shy and high achieving]
If identified early in life as gifted, a prodigy, a Wunderkind, genius etc – that label can be another kind of burden, along with not fitting in socially.
Many highly talented people do achieve great things or feel creatively fulfilled as adults, but there can be many challenges on the way, including coming to terms with an identity as ‘gifted’ or ‘exceptional.’
In her article Growing Up Gifted Is Not Easy, Elaine Aron (author of The Highly Sensitive Person) writes about people being put into a role as a beyond-human exemplar, which can start in childhood or as a teen.
She writes, “There’s one thing about archetypes: No one can be identified with an archetype without being greatly damaged by it. It’s just too much.
“Women who identify with the Great Mother, or are identified by others with Aphrodite (e.g. Marilyn Monroe), for example, or men who identify with the Hero (JFK, Martin Luther King Jr.) will sooner or later try to do things or be expected to do things beyond human capabilities, or be scapegoated for failing, or martyred in some way.”
From post Gifted, talented and archetyped
Both idolized and resented
In her article Young + Brilliant, Blessed + Cursed Patti Hartigan writes about young people with exceptionally high levels of intelligence often struggling “to balance the life of the mind and their place in the regular, workaday world, a struggle that intensifies as they reach adulthood.
“Starting with their first social or academic encounters, they face conflicting reactions to their talents. On one hand, they are viewed as anomalies, strange beings who don’t fit in with other children and who are sent out to the school hallway (or, in one humiliating case, to the classroom closet) to work independently.
“They are often resented by teachers and peers. Such treatment can do irrevocable damage, especially for those who are awkward or shy.
“At the same time, learning comes so easily that they are used to excelling, and they are frequently singled out for their extraordinary abilities.”
They are no longer alive to ask, but maybe my parents had some awareness of these kinds of problems – not that I was a prodigy, by any means – and chose to pretty much ignore my differentness, except for allowing my grade school to advance me a couple of grades “on account of my height” as they explained it.
Why bother acknowledging your gifted qualities?
In her post Gifted Adult – Pros and Cons of a Label Elisa notes, “There is a lot of debate about whether it’s good to apply the label ‘gifted’ or bad. Certainly a lot of people reject the label, possibly because gifted is a terrible word and there is ambiguity as well as misconceptions about what being a gifted adult is.”
But, she adds, “For me, having the experience of my life explained by someone else, having words put to it, is affirming. To re-consider some of the qualities that I thought were particular to me as part of a shared experience is helpful. I think differently and have emotional responses that are are often out of step with people around me. I appreciate having some context for my unusual perspective and I am less likely to see it as ’something wrong with me’ personally but to recognize it within the framework of my being a gifted adult.”
Life coach Lisa Lauffer affirms, “There is a point to exploring giftedness as a grownup, and this is it: if you are a gifted person, you can only live the life you were meant to live if you acknowledge and integrate your giftedness into your adult life.” [From her post Exploring Grownup Giftedness: What’s the Point?]
One aspect of that recognition is authentic, positive self esteem.
Stephanie S. Tolan notes in her article Self-Knowledge, Self-Esteem and the Gifted Adult, “Many gifted adults seem to know very little about their minds and how they differ from more ‘ordinary’ minds. The result of this lack of self-knowledge is often low, sometimes cripplingly low self esteem.”
It may not be comfortable, or help us be as “ordinary” or compatible with the majority as we may feel we want to be, but recognizing and accepting ourselves as exceptional can help us realize our talents. Isn’t that worth some discomfort?
Book: 
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Douglas Eby and Douglas Eby, Betsy McCall. Betsy McCall said: http://tinyurl.com/yjgcvre this is what my last novel was about… the damage done by being archetyped [...]
OP: “If identified early in life as gifted, a prodigy, a Wunderkind, genius etc – that label can be another kind of burden, along with not fitting in socially.”
Whoa, there. I know enough people who never got the label, but who suffered all the same social problems anyway. In their cases, they had no idea why they didn’t fit in, so they concluded it was because they were defective, unworthy people — and in two cases I’ve heard of, concluded that they must be mentally retarded if they couldn’t think the way everyone around them thinks. No, it’s not the fault of the label, it’s the fault of being gifted.
It angers me to hear people blaming the label. The label isn’t the problem. The label acknowledges and validates the reality of the difference for the kid living with it. The label isn’t at fault for the misfit between GT kids’ social skills and the social demands of normal childrens’ environments, the actual, material difference is. Without that label, the kid has no other way to figure out what is happening to them or how to respond to it; they conclude they must be going crazy. Calling it what it is is never wrong.
Good grief: GT people are not the one minority on earth where growing up in ignorance of what you are is somehow developmentally beneficial.
Calling it by name allows kids and the people around them the opportunity to handle that difference consciously and maturely. Opportunity — one not always taken: sometimes the label is also used as a grounds for very bad behavior. But that’s not the fault of the label, that’s the fault of a lot of other things which are much less fashionable to be concerned about. It’s so much more popular to pretend that if we just don’t name the elephant in the room, if we just don’t ever talk about it, it magically goes away. Like all such elephants, it doesn’t.
Get criticized for being “different,” then for being “lazy” when you slow down to fit in, by the same person… it ain’t the “label” they want to make go away, it’s the giftedness itself (and if you don’t resolve the conflict for them, they’ll happily kick you out on your butt somehow and believe it’s your fault). Not having a recognized label or name for something make something easier to dimiss, mis-attribute as illness or punish as misbehavior for folk whom it makes uncomfortable anyway.
[...] See my post Acknowledging our gifted adult personality. [...]
Labels are a tool for communication and understanding. Labels are misused throughout society. Being gifted, identifying the label and the body of knowledge expands personal choices. Acknowledging our being gifted allows us to choose or not choose mediocrity. It also allows us to know our differences and experience the joy of the gifts.