To provide a comprehensive array of psychotherapy services for gifted children, adolescents and adults.

Common Problems Of Gifted Children, Adolescents, And Adults

Gifted individuals have an unusually intense drive to explore and master their environment. For the "profoundly" or "exceptionally" gifted individual this drive may feel like a physiologic or biological force that is not only difficult to control but also hard to channel. Because of their moral/ethical sensitivities and a highly developed aesthetic sensibility gifted individuals often have visions of a unique "destiny" and of making unusual contributions. Despite enormous potential however, their grand plans often fail to materialize. Why does this happen?

Many gifted individuals fail to make use of their full potential because they cannot effectively resolve the conflicts and anxieties that accompany each stage of gifted development.

• The most obvious conflicts are those with school, work, parents and peers.
• Less familiar but often more important are conflicts about the "inner experience" of being gifted.

Gifted individuals often resist adapting their unique gifts to conventional work or educational settings, as well as in freindships and intimate relationships. Frustrated and disappointed, they may also stop searching for a niche that permits meaningful self expression. Failure in these areas often leads gifted individuals to become underachievers, to engage in self-destructive behavior and to develop serious forms of depression and anxiety. Many gifted people give up hope and end up living marginal lives -- never able to use their gifted endowments productively.

For a detailed analysis of these problems and how to treat them see Dr Grobman’s paper, Underachievement in Exceptionally Gifted Adolescents and Young Adults: A Psychiatrist’s View.

Personality Characteristics Of Gifted Individuals

1. An intense curiosity and drive to understand, explore and master all aspects of the human experience.
   
2. Unusual sensitivities to:
   • Food
   • Fabrics
   • Sound
   • Temperature
   • Light
3. Aesthetic Sensitivities
   A strong affinity and appreciation for the beautiful aspects of objects, processes or concepts.
4. Exceptional Intelligence in Many Different Domains
   This intelligence may be hard to classify or measure as it combines clarity of logical linear thinking with an unusually accurate intuitive "feel" or insight that goes beyond the ordinary.
5. Uncanny Physical Abilities
   Precocious abilities in art, music, dance, athletics, languages
6. Moral/Ethical Sensitivities
   • An acute sense of fairness and justice
   • Heightened sense of empathy for objects, processes, people
7. An insistence on independent thinking & action.
8. Perfectionism, oppositionalism and impatience.
   These personality traits are often thought to be maladaptive aspects of a "gifted personality". They may also be ways a gifted person attempts to preserve the integrity of their special endowment.

How Do Gifted Personality Traits Evolve?

• A spirit of passionate independence drives curiosity and the need to know, explore and master.
• As physical sensitivities, aesthetic sensibilities and uncanny physical abilities mature, spectacular precocious accomplishments become possible.
• A sense of personal power, a feeling of a special "destiny" and a vision for making unique contributions often develop.

The Conflicts And Anxieties That Accompany Gifted Development.

Feelings of isolation and strangeness because of:

• A general capacity to perceive and "feel" things that go beyond the ordinary.
• An ability to see special relationships between things and processes that superficially appear to be different.
• An offbeat sense of humor.
• An affinity for beauty.

Feeling controlled by strange internal forces.

• Curiosity: A boundless desire to explore and know.
• Mastery: An intense drive to make things work successfully.

Guilt

Accomplishing things with very little effort often makes gifted individuals feel they've been given an unfair advantage over others - winners in a zero sum game in which their extraordinary capacities resulted from someone else's loss.

Feeling like a failure

• Reproducing in the real world what they have imagined often falls short of their expectations.
• Perfectionism can make gifted individuals feel that they have failed to achieve by their own standards.

Feeling defective or disabled

Gifted indiduals they misinterperate their unconventional intelligence, off beat aesthetic sensability and uncanny intuaition as a form of learning disability.

How Do Gifted Individuals Attempt To Resolve These Conflicts?

Despite their high ability and intellectual sophistication, gifted individuals often use maladaptive methods of conflict resolution:

• Denial, avoidance, withdrawal, procrastination, and self-destructive behavior rarely achieve results.
• In difficult work or school circumstances gifted individuals frequently see possibilities for success, but are reluctant to compromise their ideals.
• Instead they see flexibility, adaptability, strategic sacrifice, and calculated ambition as contaminating the integrity of their gifted endowment.
• In supportive work/school environments or in personal relationships that encourage and value giftedness.
  Surprisingly, gifted individuals may also have difficulty flourishing in supportive circumstances. They may feel guilty and ashamed of their extra endowment and abilities. Support, encouragement, praise, and admiration from peers, teachers or parents may be experienced as merely a cover for jealousy, envy, and exploitation. Restricting their accomplishments or hiding their capacities may seem like the only option for protection.