Science & Self-improvement

Many reasons can lead a person to deny his gift. He may simply fail to understand what it means to be gifted. He may be aware that he is different, that he has greater capabilities, and find that this is cause of others’ jealousy. He may decide (consciously or not) to hide those abilities to get by, and this hiding may become a lifelong denial.

If a person does not consciously realize that he is gifted, he will be alienated from himself. He will have troubles that he will not know how to solve and his adult life will be problematic and painful. He will have a drive that he will be unable to deal with because he will not understand its nature.

When a gifted person has acknowledged his special condition, he may still deny it for fear of failure to live up to the label of gifted. This label can also be rejected if the person thinks that it implies considering himself better than the others. Finally, a person may decide to deny that he is gifted if he concludes that there is nothing he can do about.

When a gifted child is not reared satisfactorily, a number of low and medium intensity emotional disorders may appear in addition to the problems caused by denial, all contributing to an unhappy life.

Rage and pain can arise from being punished for being gifted, anger and guilt from the conflict with his parents’ expectations. Low self-esteem, shame, and fear may obstruct self-actualization. Being told that one is not what one is may cause identity conflicts and depression, as well as frustration. The real self of the person may become damaged by oversocialization.

When a gifted child is not given schoolwork according to his capabilities, he will have low tolerance for frustration because he will be used to get by with little effort. Intrinsic characteristics of gifted people can cause troubles that need orientation and counseling: self-criticism and self-doubt may produce inferiority feelings; society’s injustice may throw a gifted child into despair. Important consequences of these troubles are an unsatisfied need of expressing creativity and a lack of sense of life that may lead to addiction or suicide.

Gifted people frequently experience a feeling of being different. However, noticing their differences does not mean that they know which way they are different and what are the implications. This lack of understanding can originate lack of confidence and avoidance of decisions. Being insecure, they may let other people take decisions, may decide using emotions as a guide instead of reason, or just let things happen.

This feeling of being different usually leads to try to make sense of the world and of the person’s position in it. Failure in this attempt may be the cause of sadness and disappointment, and may induce the person to seek counseling. Counseling is appropriate when the person has feelings of being frustrated, of being tied, of lacking fulfillment, and does not know the reason for these feelings. He may need a way to give an outlet to his capacities, and be unable to find it or even to see the need of it. Actually, he may be completely unaware of the source of his problems.

When the gifted person has multiple abilities, the lack of comprehension of his situation may make him face a career choice taking into account factors such as convenience or prestige, rather than considering personal fulfillment.

Gifted people have abilities that must be provided with a suitable environment to thrive. If this condition is not met, the person will be frustrated and will have feelings of anger, even if he does not know the cause. Not knowing what one’s abilities are, may lead to addiction or to a purposeless life.

Moral concern

Gifted people usually have a highly developed moral sense that makes them concerned about right and wrong behavior. They can be depressed when faced with circumstances characterized by a decline in moral standards, feeling angry or sad.

Having to deal with moral issues, they may choose to make the best of an imperfect world. An empathic gifted child, affected for what he can see around him, may feel responsible for what he is seeing.

Impostor syndrome

As a consequence of their increased intelligence, gifted people can make certain tasks with less effort than ordinary people. For example, a gifted person that does his office work in much less time than a non-gifted person may believe that success belongs only to those people who earn it with great effort. He will consequently think that he is deceiving those who praise him, and experiment what is known as the impostor syndrome.

A person who suffers from the impostor syndrome tends to attribute success to external causes, like having been helped or being lucky. He thinks that he is fooling other people by faking it. Consequently, he develops a feeling of being inauthentic and is afraid of being exposed as a fraud. He cannot believe that his success is deserved, he is constantly in doubt of his capabilities, and tries to play safe by avoiding competence. He rejects intellectual challenge by concealing his gift.

Sometimes people who are gifted do not manage to succeed. They are called ‘underachievers’ because it is usually believed that a person with superior abilities must give some demonstration of this superiority. In reality, there are no grounds for this assumption. The confusion between ‘gifted’ and ‘talented’ is responsible for this mistake. A talented person can make something better than the others: painting, singing, dancing, etc., generally in the arts.

A gifted person, on the other hand, is a person that sees differently and processes differently. He does not necessarily perform anything better than the others. A gifted person may employ his especial abilities in a field that is socially valuable, or he may not. He may for example become a scientist, or he may dedicate himself to solve crossword puzzles.

The term ‘gifted’ when applied to high intelligence people has been the source of much confusion. This usage conflicts with an older usage of the word exemplified by the phrase ‘gift of the gab.’ The person who is endowed with a natural talent may also have a high intelligence. The two things have no relation, in the same way that having a good voice for singing is not related with having blue eyes.

The gifted adult that shares the belief that only achievers are gifted will fail to recognize his condition if lacking achievement. His emotional responses may then have to be shut down. If he was identified when a child, he may suppose that his gift has disappeared, or he may let denial expunge the memory of this identification.

The fact is that circumstantial factors can stop gifted people from making use of their abilities. These factors can be poverty, ethnicity, opportunity, lack of understanding in the family, or gender. Poverty and ethnicity can make that the person does not receive the proper education. To have an opportunity one must be born at the right place and at the right time. Families sometimes do not know how to deal with a gifted child, perhaps for lack of antecedents in the family. To be a woman may prevent access to certain types of education or work.

A child may have his gift inhibited by way of abuse or criticism. Parents and teachers can contribute to this attack to self-esteem. Lack of respect and disapproval can cause more damage to a gifted child than to a normal one. An incident that would affect only temporarily a normal child may be the cause that a gifted child back off permanently from expressing himself.

Being gifted in an environment where there is none of your kind is very difficult, and not every person is suited for this situation. To handle it, people usually hide their intelligence. This hiding may become so perfect that intelligence is shut off forever.

There are many fears that can prevent a gifted person from making evident his intelligence. One of them was already mentioned: the fear to be different, which is common to all people, but there are other fears specific to gifted people.

Oversocialization is the situation in which the personality of a person is absorbed by his social role. Sometimes the fulfillment of a social role stops the development of potentialities. For example, a daughter who must take care of her parents may not be free to move to another city to get higher education.

Low self-esteem and self-limiting beliefs can also be the cause of poor achievement. It is well known that one will never go beyond what one believes to be his capacity. Lacking a counselor that tells him what he can achieve, a gifted person may never discover it by himself. The situation is aggravated when the person suffers from low self-esteem as a result of parental criticism or abuse.

Some factors that prevent achievement are peculiar to gifted people. While others are eager to be admired, gifted people may stay away from situations where they may be seen as superior. Increased sensitivity can make gifted people avoid expressing themselves for fear of criticism.

There are some traits of introvert people that can contribute to the feeling that most gifted people have of being different from the rest. The extroverted is easily accepted in society because his tendency to share his emotions make the others feel comfortably with him. If he is gifted, he may use his intelligence to assume a leader position. An introverted gifted person has a double challenge in his attempts to socialize. The distrust that inspires an intelligent person in those of lesser intelligence is aggravated because the introvert is reluctant to open himself emotionally. The feeling of insecurity that most gifted people experiment can also be made greater for the introvert’s tendency to think before acting, contrasting with the normal behavior of acting first and then think.

Over-excitability

According to K. Dabrowski’s, gifted people are over-excitable–they have a higher than average responsiveness to stimuli. Stimuli may affect one of the psychomotor, sensual, emotional, imaginative, or intellectual areas, or a combination of them. Over-excitability in the emotional area of the personality can be matched with the emotional intensity and sensitivity already mentioned.

Nonconformity and independence

An independent behavior that is not restricted by social rules is a characteristic of gifted people. They do not mind acting in a way that may be disapproved by society. In addition, an independent thinking is observed, which is not guided by common prejudices.

Divergency

Divergency is a modality of mental processing in which the mind, faced up with a problem, seeks non-conventional responses. The divergent thinker is able to provide creative solutions.

Sense of humor

A ‘weird’ sense of humor is usually present in gifted people. Things that make them laugh are not the same that make the rest laugh. This type of humor is produced by a philosophical point of view that leads to perceive the incongruity of many everyday situations and even to laugh at oneself, which is not comprehended by the majority.

Consistency

The gifted person strives to maintain consistency between actions and values. This is related with the moral concern already mentioned–a part of morality consists in keeping parallel what one says and what one does.

Purpose

A sense of purpose is innate in gifted people. Sometimes called ‘entelechy,’ it means that life must have a goal for the person, that something must be actualized and must not remain as a mere potentiality. If the accomplishment of this purpose is thwarted by circumstances, the person may be led to a life of mere subsistence.

Other traits

Other traits that have been mentioned as appropriate to gifted people are: creativity, imagination, insight, intuition, openness, impulsiveness, curiosity, high energy level, perceptivity, low tolerance for frustration, easiness in getting overextended, reluctance to delegate, projection of exorbitant standards onto others, persistence, resilience, risk-taking, self-discipline, self-efficacy, tolerance for ambiguity.

Many traits have been viewed as characteristic of gifted people. Nevertheless, the great majority of them is not well defined, lacks a standardized measurement tool, or is just contradictory with other reports. While some of the following traits are easily detectable in every gifted person, some others can be present but not be observable because the person has chosen to hide them. Some gifted people live in an environment that is hostile enough to force them to adapt themselves as the only way to avoid madness or suicide. As part of this adaptation process, they recur to hide those traits that make them different from the average person.

Perfectionism

A trait that can be observed already in gifted children is perfectionism–the need to do things as best as they can. The word ‘perfectionist’ is almost always used disapprovingly. It is usually employed to try to discourage any attempt to do anything better. However, the so-called perfectionist may be not a fool that tries to reach something impossible, but a person who knows that something better can be reached–even if it is still imperfect. The idea of perfection changes with the age and the knowledge of the person, and also the idea of what is attainable and even acceptable. In the case of the gifted child, the appearance of being a perfectionist may be the consequence of the asynchronous development of the child. The early development of the mind may enable him to imagine things that his neurological system may be not in condition to accomplish.

Perfectionism can be understood as an attitude of pursuing an ever-higher performance, or as a strong will to not make errors. In either of these senses, it will be the source of anxiety and worry, so it is justified to call it bad or misguided perfectionism. Bad perfectionism may be induced by parents and teachers when they set unreasonable goals for the child. These goals become later the goals of the adult and prevent satisfaction because the person will never reach them.

Perceived expectations of parents and teachers, and the desire to please them may lead the child to excessively criticize himself and to concern with producing a flawless performance. He will doubt of his capacity, avoid doing his work for fear of failing, and employ a great deal of time when he does it.

As well as bad perfectionism, which looks for an ideal result not minding reality, there is good perfectionism that takes reality into account and is satisfied with a result as good as possible. Good perfectionism allows the person to derive pleasure from his work even if it is not perfect. Problems derived from trying to observe an ideal behavior are avoided when the person accepts that perfection is not to be expected in the real world.

Introversion

Introversion has been associated with intelligence: the more intelligent the person, the more introvert. The consequence would be that the majority of gifted children would be introverts, but this is not what can be observed. The characteristics of introversion, as were defined by Jung, dealt mainly with the relation of the individual with the others. From this point of view, it cannot be said that among gifted people there are more introverts than extroverts. What happens is that, as a result of being isolated among people that are not like himself, the gifted person is led to observe behaviors that are similar to those of the introvert. Only when the gifted person is watched in the company of similar people, one can say if he is extrovert or introvert. It has been reported that people who were considered shy changed this behavior when they at last find congenial people.

At school, there are many possibilities for the gifted child to have feelings of strangeness and loneliness. If he does not know that he is gifted, he will not understand why he has to do things that are boring, or why other children find that are fun activities that he does not find so. He will not understand that the way he is treated by peers is due to a difference in intelligence, and will feel that he is not liked by them because there is something wrong with him. He may even think that other children are cleverer because they see complexities that he does not perceive.

In reality, there is not much that the gifted child can do if he has to attend a normal school. Knowing that he has an increased intelligence, he will still have to learn that he does not fit in, that he has interests that do not match up with those of anyone else. Additionally, many gifted children do no understand social issues (such as dressing choices) and, in a normal school environment, will be considered weird because they are shy, use glasses, read more than others (or just read), or have a “bad” personality.

All these troubles are the product of an education that does not acknowledge gifts and a society that does not invite gifted individuals to fulfill their potential. Long lasting damage can be the effect of such an education. For example, when confronted with teachers that he finds illogical, unjust, or simply wrong, a gifted child may develop a resistance to authority that may obstruct his way to success.

The family of a gifted person can influence his life at least in two ways: during his childhood, by setting a friendly or hostile environment for the development of the gift; after childhood, by setting the goals that the person will pursue in his adult life.

Many people have sons when they do not want to. Gifted children may be born to non-gifted parents. Even if the parents are gifted, they may not know how to handle a gifted son. If the parents are not gifted, and they do not love the child, they may consider him a nuisance, yell, and use physical punishment. He will be imposed perfect obedience: any manifestation of his intelligence will be considered a challenge to the parent’s authority and any objection will be dismissed.

Some parents will consider precocity as a behavioral problem and will try to bring the child to ‘normality,’ imposing him a behavior that conflict with his need to actualize his potential. Other parents, who recognize the special condition of their child, may nevertheless prefer it to be concealed so that other people do not see the child as weird. If the gifted child has non-gifted siblings, his parents may choose to praise the other children’s achievements instead of his on the grounds that they must be impartial. In both cases the result is that the gifted child becomes ashamed of what he is.

On the other hand, parents may misunderstand the nature of the gifted child and place on him excessive expectations or demands for an adult-like behavior. They may forget that besides being gifted he is a child and will display a childish behavior in matters not connected with his gift such as, for example, tidying his room.

Excessive expectations may reinforce the tendency to perfectionism and make that the child feels obliged to replace his own goals for his parents’. Parents who expect too much from their gifted child will usually not admit his need for counseling.

Unlike the children of Terman’s study, Hollingworth’s subjects had no notice of their special characteristics and, therefore, considered themselves to be normal. Therefore, when the other children could not perform activities that for them were easy, they considered the others to be dumb. This was, of course, a cause of trouble with the other children that could have been avoided if knowledgeable teachers had told them about their special condition and taught them to appreciate the other’s strengths.

The fact that teachers did not give the gifted children class work related with their capacity was also unfortunate because it made that the children did not respect school authorities that obliged them to carry out tasks that they considered being foolish. A circumstance like this can lead to a generalized lack of respect for authority, and can cause that the gift adult be unable to understand that he must accept a subordinated position before being in a leading one.

The gifted child is normally compelled to control the exactness of every argument and the conflicts with his teachers for this cause can lead to anger and hostility that can influence his adult life. The negativism and cynicism induced in the child as a result of being treated incorrectly can make necessary in adulthood a program of emotional education to prevent his career from being seriously affected.

According to Hollingworth, an IQ between 130 and 150 makes the child to be sufficiently smart to occupy a leadership position among his schoolmates, but no so smart as to be much different from them. Beyond that intelligence level, differences with the other children are too great to make interesting to him to integrate within the group. In this case, isolation is likely to occur.

Contemporary research about gifted people’s characteristics established that most gifted people have reading as their main entertainment. Typically, they were raised in homes with more than 500 books. The amount of books at home and the diversity of subjects are greater as the intelligence of the individual increases. The literature gender preferred by the young gifted person is scientific fiction.

The fact of having children of the same age as schoolmates can have a negative effect on the self-esteem of the gifted child; the feeling of isolation and confusion caused by his differences with the others is more intense as are greater his intellectual abilities. If the child is placed in a class with schoolmates that are older than him but with the same intellectual development, he will have the opportunity to build a good self-esteem.

Young gifted people may worry about topics such as life and death, the origin of life, and the relation of men with God. They prefer intellectual games that correspond to an older age. Their concern with ethics and morals leads them to take values as relative and to doubt of things that other children have as assumed.

Lewis Terman, the creator of the Stanford-Binet test of intelligence, studied from childhood until adulthood the life of 1,500 gifted children from California State in the first half of the 20th century. It was observed that gifted children had less interest than normal children to participate in games that demanded social interaction. Terman attributed this greater degree of self-sufficiency to the fact that they were more able to entertain themselves. He also indicated that social adjustment was difficult to a gifted child, and that to achieve a normal adjustment the child had to have a very well balanced personality and excellent social abilities.

Games that may be preferred by a gifted child as quizzes, puzzles, chess, checkers, are not generally of interest to the other children as a result of the intellectual effort that they require. That is why when children with different interests and preferences are placed together in the same school class, the gifted one appears as less sociable, perhaps because he has already lost interest in games that the others still find to be acceptable.

Besides observing, in the whole group, a tendency to solitude that he considered to be intentional, Terman also noted that children of higher IQ (above 170) did not manifest in their grades the outstanding level that would be expected. On the contrary, some of them had average or bad grades.

Among the aspects researched were honesty and sincerity. It was found that gifted children attained high levels at this respect, what sometimes made them to get into trouble because they were deemed as impolite.

In the 1920s, Leta Hollingworth made a study of children with an IQ greater than 180, which furnished interesting results about the troubles they meet in a conventional school environment. Such children, said Hollingworth, were considered to be inattentive, unable to attend to class work, and socially immature.

Terman had observed inconvenient attitudes and laziness in the subjects of his study. Hollingworth postulated that there was no such laziness but rather a lack of motivation caused by a class work that did not excite them and that accustomed them to little effort in learning and working.

She concluded that, in reality, the gifted children were not lazy but bored and unmotivated because they were given class work that they had mastered much earlier than their classmates. Usually, exposed Hollingworth, a child that was given a task too easy for him would try to avoid boredom by daydreaming or teasing his classmates.

One interesting finding of Hollingworth was that having to study with children of lesser capacity and being subject to the authority of teachers without the adequate capacity has an effect on personality. The result of schoolwork too easy for the gifted children was that they did not acquire the habit of hard work.

To be a person with a high IQ does not necessarily mean that the person has to stand out in such a manner as to be qualified as a ‘genius.’ This term is usually applied to those people that are prominent in some field of human activity. It can be stated that to be intelligent does not ensure to be a genius.

To arrive at this conclusion, one has only to think that a person with an IQ of 145 or higher is certainly a gifted person. Tests administered in the USA indicate that in this country there are about three of these persons for each thousand (0.3%). This may seem insignificant, but, considering the population of United States, approximately 800 thousand of USA inhabitants should be regarded as geniuses, which obviously it is not the case.

The reason that this does not occur is that geniuses are not self-made people who overcame every sort of obstacles employing nothing more than his intellect.
This was made evident by Catherine Cox who made a study of three hundred eminent historical figures. In this research, it was found that the majority of them was educated at home or received specialized education. These people had as a common trait a negative attitude towards formal education. They had troubles with it or directly rejected it. A usual circumstance was the strong support from their parents and, especially, from their mother. Those that had fewer difficulties to apply their abilities were aided by a family environment that conformed to their particular characteristics. But everyone, said Cox, had experiences or people that give them the drive they needed.

Similar results were obtained by V. and M. G. Goertzel, who studied four hundred famous personalities from the XX century. At least a parent, and often all the family, helped the gifted child to attain a position of preeminence in the field of his choice. They give the child an opportunity by letting him access books and other assets, by furnishing private teachers, and by allowing alterations to normal school schedule. It was usual to find cases of school quitting due to lack of patience with the normal educational process.

The parents’ attitude was, exposed the Goertzel, to stress the importance of intellectual or creative work and to ignore or diminish the role of normal schooling. They did not participate from the usual concept that schools provide a knowledge that everyone must acquire. Rejection to school was, however, diminished when the child found a teacher that could establish an adequate communication.

Another study by Benjamin Bloom of people who earned fame in a given area shows that the majority exhibited abilities in the area once they were acquainted with it, and that this was made possible by the action of the parents rather than the school. Parents that had an interest in giving their children an opportunity to receive education in the area were decisive in the career of the subjects, who acknowledged that the greater part of their learning occurred out of school.

Family support was essential, says Bloom, to the accomplishments of his subjects, as well as the teaching of hard work’s value. Occasionally, they were also fortunate to have a teacher or private instructor who could give them the impulse to develop.

The statistical distribution of IQ scores can be used in order to define a gifted person. Every intelligence test gives scores that follow a normal or Gaussian curve, although the values of the mean and the standard deviation (SD) may vary from test to test. I will take here as an example a very usual test–the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS).

This test is standardized so that the average corresponds to a score of 100 and the standard deviation is set to 15 points. Assuming that the scores’ distribution is normal, 68% of the scores will be between the average minus one SD and the average plus one SD, that is, they will be between 85 and 115. Ninety-five percent of the scores will be between the values of 70 and 130. The small number of individuals whose score is greater than 130 (only 2.5%) are usually called ‘gifted persons’ to emphasize that their intelligence is significantly greater than the average.

When two persons have IQ scores that differ notably, let us say 20 or 30 points, this is not the only difference but there are as well other differences that affect personality. The interests of a child with an IQ of 120 are not the same than those of a child with an IQ of 140. They will prefer, for instance, different ways to spend their leisure time. The probability that a child had an IQ of 140 is about one in fifty, so that from fifty children only one may be in this situation. In a school class, this child will probably be the only of his type. Most certainly, his interests and his values will have little in common with the rest of the class.