Self-esteem and the gifted person
Low self-esteem in the gifted adult is often the product of his lack of knowledge about his condition when he has not been formally identified and is not socially recognized as an achiever. Not understanding his differences and not identifying himself as gifted, he will be driven to isolation and will have emotional disorders. He will feel frustrated without knowing the cause of his frustration and without knowing how to mitigate his frustration. When the gifted adult is recognized as an achiever, he may still suffer from the impostor syndrome.
When a gifted adult is aware of his condition, he may blame himself for not being good enough as a result of comparing himself not with other people, but with an idealized image of what he should be. As a product of the socialization stage, the internalized voice of his parents may constantly accompany him telling him his deficiencies.
Another frequent cause of low self-esteem is that gifted people usually take their abilities as normal and granted, and think that people with different abilities are the really smart. They give more value to something that they cannot do or that they have to work hard to obtain while someone else can do it easily.
A feeling of inadequacy and incompetence can be the result of focusing on weaknesses, comparing with out of the norm people or idealizations, and valuing other people’s abilities. A gifted person may consider that his abilities are ordinary, and that a colleague is brighter because he has, for example, a better memory. In addition to the general feeling of oddity that almost every gifted person experiments, this leads to an unreal self-image and an inadequate self-esteem.
Knowing oneself is a requisite to a good self-esteem. This is not easy for a gifted child because introspection is not common in infancy. The child tends to assume that he is like the children that he can see around him. The absence of knowledgeable people (like parents and teachers) that tell him what his differences with the other children are may cause problems that arise because he cannot discern that he has other capabilities.
If the gifted child is confronted with the fact that the other children leave him alone, he will conclude that something is wrong with him, but he will be unable to ascertain what it is. He will not realize that he is simply different, but will deduce that he is bad. He may not understand that his strangeness is the cause of his isolation. Being unable to comprehend why the others feel uncomfortable with him, he will reason that he is like the others but worse, and will think: “I must be really bad if nobody wants to play with me.”
In addition to arising in the interaction with other children, problems can also arise at the child’s home. The child’s parents may not be themselves gifted or they may not be aware of the right manner to raise a gifted child. If the parents are not gifted, they may reject the gift of their child as being an ‘abnormality’ that must be corrected to make him ‘fit in.’ They may even become envious of the child and may try to make him a ‘normal’ one by imposing harsh punishments.
Parents not always love their children. Children are often an unwanted byproduct of sexual desire and it is not guaranteed that every child that comes to this world will have a couple of loving parents to take care of him. If the parents are not gifted and they do not love their child, he may become the subject of verbal and physical abuse.
There may be parents that are not gifted but whose love for his child leads them to seek counsel on how to raise him. The result can be better than if the parents are gifted and do not know about the special care that they should have with their gifted child. These parents could be inadvertent of their own peculiarity because they were never detected as being gifted. They may suppose that they are only a little different from the rest and that the same happens with their child.
Some people incorrectly suppose that because the gifted child’s intelligence corresponds to an older child he has also to show a social behavior corresponding to that age. However, the social resources of a gifted child can be those corresponding to his chronological age or may correspond to an earlier age. He may feel confused when certain events occur because he is unable to understand the rules that govern them. This contributes both to his feelings of inadequacy and to his doubt about his capacity.