Resources
Articles
Nancy Christie: Living on Automatic: Helpful and Not Helpful *NEW
Nancy Christie: Mindfulness Practice: Why the Buzz? *NEW
Nancy Christie: Taking Care of Stress on a Day to Day Basis *NEW
Lisa Walter: Working with Gifted Adults *NEW
Nancy Ross: A Gentle Reminder to be Mindful
Nancy Ross: Oh, My! Those Blooming Relationships
Nancy Ross: Three Wise Words
Working with Gifted Adults
In the last several years, I have been studying and developing an appreciation for the way that unidentified giftedness has been a factor in the emotional and psychological difficulties of adults who present themselves for psychotherapy.
I had never thought about intelligence or talent as a psychological stressor, or even as a significant factor in human psychological development. “Giftedness” was completely unfamiliar territory to me. Psychologists in Europe had been thinking and theorizing about the development of children’s mental and emotional throughout the 1900s but the only fragment of this considerable body of work that made it into my graduate studies were passing references to the Swiss educational psychologist Piaget.
With the surge of interest in neuropsychology, brain mapping and neurological training and rehabilitation, the work of the European theorists is now being published and discussed in English speaking academic circles. Researchers in Poland, France and Scandinavia have been working out a model of mind and behaviour they describe as “over-excitabilities”. Essentially the model suggests that different areas of the brain handle stimulus of different kinds differently and that a mind with a high capacity for abstract reasoning or visual artistry may perceive, process and respond to a good deal more than others exposed to the same event. So experiencing and expressing intense emotion when others have only some is understood to flow from perception rather than character. Limited capacity for figures of speech or sentiment frequently is a clue to the “over-excitability” of a mind endowed with a high capacity for logical analysis or object recognition. Clinical and education strategies have been developed in Europe and used around the globe for strengthening executive functions [cognition, memory, differentiation etc] in children and adults to promote the integration of the talent or giftedness to allow for better social functioning.
As new models of mind are being introduced from neuro-psychology and rehab neuro-physiology and making inroads into North American psychology, educational psychologists are becoming more sophisticated in viewing children in the classroom. Among students who have been identified as gifted, additional psychological challenges have been identified. These include:
- social dislocation – feeling alien from peers, feeling different from the norm,
- relational distubances - surpassing teachers, siblings and parents,
- asynchronous development, and
- personality disorganization – motivation, affect and mood.
Exploring these themes in children in elementary education has led to more understanding of gifted underachievement, and to refining other diagnostic regimens to rule out common psychological effects of giftedness when assessing for other diagnostic categories [eg. ADHD, Bi-Polar and other mood disorders] and learning disabilities.
Slowly, the stereotypes of giftedness as “nerdy interests or preoccupations” or “extra good at school” are being replaced with models that imagine our minds as composites of parts put together as differently as our bodies. Giftedness is slowly beginning to be recognized as a hidden source of psychological difficulty; the intensity of affect commonly associated with high degrees of intelligence, asynchronous or uneven psychosocial development, and patterns of alienation and underachievement are all topics for study in centres for research into giftedness across North America now.
But what about the people who are adults now but who did not have this lens of ‘giftedness’ to understand themselves and their experience of the world growing up?
