Special Focus

If Only I Had Known: Lessons from Gifted Adults

Volume 9 / Issue 2 / Winter 2009

Editor's note, winter 2009: One of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had in my years working for TIP’s summer programs has been the opportunity to see gifted kids be in an environment where they can be themselves and to be with people who are like them. Too often, gifted students struggle to find peers who share their age or geographic location. The internet and programs like TIP offer opportunities for gifted students to connect with peers. However, the first step needed to take advantage of such opportunities is the recognition that gifted kids aren’t alone.

Too often, gifted students struggle to fit within the standard academic and social structure. This article addresses the important issue of helping gifted students understand themselves and work within those systems to achieve their own goals. The guide to valuing differences and dealing with criticism provides the kind of “big picture” useful information that is often easy to take for granted while in the thick of decision-making.

Every week since the publication of my first book, The Gifted Adult (previously Liberating Everyday Genius), I have received phone calls, letters, and e-mails from gifted people around the world and have been fascinated by the similarity of their impassioned comments. Whether from New York City, rural Arizona, Costa Rica, or France, each of them has voiced astonished relief: “For the first time I feel like somebody gets it.” “At last I can see myself clearly!” “Finally I have figured out what has always been wrong with me, and it’s not wrong at all!” “If only I had known!”

No matter what their background, they confess to having felt misunderstood for years; to being bored, held back, and plagued by self-doubt; and to struggling with loneliness. Yet once they had a legitimate explanation of their difference, they quickly began a life review process. Armed with new information about their abilities, they set off on a journey of rediscovery to unearth self-truths that had been lost. They soon realized that their distorted self-concepts were largely the result of uninvited commentary about their difference. Their identity confusion is not surprising, given their lack of useful information about giftedness and given that as they grew up they were defined by others’ views of them more than by their views of themselves.

The first two years of school I colored pictures; then I became a student teacher.

Identity formation occurs gradually and becomes a central task during adolescence. Teens are on a mission to figure out who they are, what they stand for, and where they are going. A formidable task for everyone, it is an even greater challenge for the gifted. This wouldn’t be so if giftedness were better understood by teachers, parents, and peers. The characteristics of the gifted that are the underpinnings of excellence (e.g., extrasensitivity, intensity, complexity, and above-average energy and drive) are the same ones so often criticized by others as excessive or annoying.

Gifted people often grow up with a pervasive sense of being considered an extremist—having too much of just about every personal trait to fit everyone else’s definition of acceptable. The criticisms they face often are leveled not at their performance but at their personhood. A performance complaint sounds like this: “That essay is not acceptable, because it does not address the topic I assigned.” A personhood attack sounds like this: “Once again I see that you decided to make up your own assignment. Why do you think you always deserve special treatment?” The first statement implies the student has done something unacceptable; the second, that he or she is unacceptable. Paradoxically, such criticisms are often mixed with praise like “You’re so smart; you can do anything!” It’s no wonder that gifted people, faced with conflicting information, find it nearly impossible to develop an accurate self-view.

How can we help the gifted value their difference and deal with the criticism? This is what I asked my gifted clients and readers. As adults who had gained a life-changing understanding of what it meant to be gifted, they were able to impart practical lessons for those of us who teach, parent, and guide gifted youth today:

• Stay on track with important goals. Conceptualize and operationalize them from start to finish. Identify clearly what you want to achieve and then find people who can help you develop a step-by-step plan, who have gone where you want to go, and who can share with you what they have learned.
• Become a skilled negotiator. Find a counselor who can help you learn to do more than complain about or put up with the status quo. When you want to change something but are not the decision maker, come to the table with three things: a respectful attitude; a brief, positively stated reason for the change that sounds like a win-win solution; and a specific suggestion that others will find doable.
• Don’t let your strong reactions to unfairness lead you astray. Before you go off on a mission to correct some injustice, ask yourself, “Is this something I am willing to go to the wall for? Is this the right time? If so, what will be the probable versus the preferred result?”
• Get the mundane tasks out of the way without getting sidetracked by how much they annoy you. Save your energy for your greatest passion.
• No matter how many talents or interests you have, do not allow yourself to become scattered. Develop a self-care plan and practice a technique like meditation, yoga, guided imagery, or deep breathing to center yourself each day. This will help you spread your energy around and lessen the risk of coming apart at the seams.
• Look for and take advantage of opportunity and luck, but don’t expect them to come to you. Do expect setbacks and make room for them in your plans. Be prepared to have your dreams ridiculed and your hopes dashed from time to time—it’s what happens to creative producers. Tell yourself again and again that few things come about by chance. When you are knocked to the ground, get back up, dust yourself off, and keep going. Don’t let anyone tell you that the fulfillment of high potential works any other way.

Of course, even when gifted people fully understand their difference, they may discover that the world is not the haven for creative development that they had hoped for. But no matter how rocky the road, my gifted adult clients surely agree that it is their giftedness that has carried them. Giftedness holds fast to optimism and dreams in the face of adversity. And the dreams and ideas of self-starting visionaries are nearly impossible to suppress.

Moreover, once the gifted know who they are and who they are not, they gain strength, confidence, and resilience. From then on it’s a matter of building skills—of getting smart about being smart. Once equipped, they find that the world in which they must make their way is far more manageable.
—Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, PsyD

Mary-Elaine Jacobsen is a clinical psychologist and consultant to schools, gifted individuals, and their families; chief psychologist at the Amherst Wilder Foundation; and director of OmegaPoint Resources for Advanced Human Development.