The Gifted Adult

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I am reading The Gifted Adult, a book about "everyday genius" by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen.

It's very interesting. Giftedness is not defined (in this book) by IQ, but by characteristics.


Here are a few excerpts:

"What they have been taught about their idiosyncratic nature and atyical characteristics is often either incorrect or insulting".

"The greatest obstacle to claiming one's gifted identity comes from the modern Western world's insistence that fairness is bound to sameness, that the concept of giftedness is elitist".

"Some everyday geniuses have talents that are highly specialised, or single tracked".

"To varying degrees, everyday geniuses possess the following characteristics:[/b]

Capacity for keen observation

Exceptional ability to predict and foresee problems and trends

Special problem-solving resources, extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity, fascination for dichotomous puzzles;

Preference for original thinking and creative solutions;

Excitability, enthusiasm, expressiveness and renewable energy;

Heightened sensitivity, intense emotion and compassion

Playful attitude and childlike sense of wonder throughout life

Extra perceptivity, powerful intuition, persistent curiosity, potential for deep insight. early spiritual experiences

Ability to learn rapidly, concentrate for long periods of time, comprehend reality, and retain what is learned, development of more than one area of expertise

Exceptional verbal ability, love of subtleties written and spoken words, new information, theory and discussion

Tendency to set own standards and evaluate own efforts

Unusual sense of humour, not always understood by others

Experience of feeling inherently different or odd

History of being misunderstood or undersupported

Deep concern about universal issues and nature, and reverence for the interconnectness of all things

Powerful sense of justice and intolerance for unfairness

Strong sense of independence and willingness to challenge authority

Awareness of an inner force that "pulls" for meaning, fulfilment and excellence

Feelings of urgency about personal destiny and a yearning at a spiritual level for answers to existential puzzles.


It's a very thoughtful book, and makes the point that few EG's realise that they are gifted - because of the values and prejudices which are dominant in society.

I see a lot of the characteristics on WP everyday. Do you?

Interesting.
Here is another quote from the author.

"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."

Yes! I also found her charts on (p267 following) on Complexity: Qualitatively Different really interesting. As I tracked my own responses across the three columns, I could see where I needed to make changes and this was very helpful.

I do see a lot of the characteristics in people here on WP.

I was great reading through the list because all of it describes weird traits that I have and I guess they're not weird after all. With every line it was like "hey that's me!"

Playful attitude and childlike sense of wonder throughout life

Hey!
that's my primal gift to WP
Don't tell me some idiot wrote it down and got it printed!

I was here first and i"m giving that guy the finger!

here it is!

The finger

I think now many (if not most) people who suspect themselves of being on the spectrum are just gifted and that's the whole source of their difference, what do you think? When I read about AS at 19, in spite of so many similarities between the boy from the description I read at first and myself, I thought that it couldn't be me too, for the boy was affected much more severely than myself. I certainly did and still do deal with so many problems myself, nevertheless my traits could be boiled down just to personality traits (though strong ones) - no, it couldn't be me, too. I wonder whether AS isn't be any means something different than most of us think - maybe just the most serious cases are real aspies and the whole rest of us are just gifted adults/teens/kids with sensory integration issues.

I'm inclined to divide "aspie wannabes" into such categories as:

a) gifted ones with all the problems and untypical inclinations it entails plus SI issues
b) folks with personality disorders (schizoids mostly and sufferers of avoidant personality disorder but I read on the Polish board for aspies that one dude admitted to getting diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder - his coldness and low empathy turned out to have its source in the fact of him not having problems with mirror neurons caused by AS but in his just being a garden variety psychopath , lol)
c) people who are shy/introverted/just not endowed with good social skills - afer all, social skills are just a gift like any other; Jimmy doesn't have a gift for languages, Jane isn't good at music, Andy is hopeless at all the things social - you get what I mean
d) combinations of all above

What do you think about my theory?

when I was a youngster, I had the "Experience of feeling inherently different or odd" - but then again, in my naiveté, I thought EVERYBODY else was ALSO different and odd, it did not occur to me that I was the only one.

I think it all depends on what you mean by "aspie wannabes." There are people who think they might has Aspergers although they might not, and I think there are people who were diagnosed with Aspergers while their difficulties are described better by a different disorder. But since there is no there is no defined group, the possibilities are practically limitless. Some mental disorders mimic the symptoms of Aspergers and vice versa. And there is the fact that the only real, or at least the most tangible, cutoff between having Aspergers and not is the severity of the symptoms. That's pretty much why there is what people call "broad autism phenotype." I think your theory is good at telling part of the story, but I think there is much more than just that.

I had that thought, too. Especially about sensory problems. For instance, I thought everybody hated nasty, tickly water as much as I did and that the difference was that they were better at controlling their reactions.

I guess that was our respective TOM deficits showing up.

When I was young (until I was like in my later teens) I was sure that everybody was mentally identical as myself - I mean, the same thought processes, the same emotions experienced, the same feelings evoked by the same stimuli. When I was a young child, like 4-5-6, every time I heard adults saying they felt bad for someone or that they forgave someone who caused them harm, I thought they actually didn't but it was just some custom to pretend that you are such a good person capable of doing this at all, to present yourself in the better light. I wasn't able to do this and I thought NO ONE really were. I thought it's just pretending.

I still find it hard to believe that there is a reason for which I was always so different for my entire life. I always thought that if there is something wrong with your brain, it means you are either a sufferer of mental retardation or mentally ill - I never thought one could be that fundamentally different without those two reasons which weren't considered by me as hiding behind my difference. I thought I was just smart and mature for my age and that's all. I think many kids of this kind are suspected of having AS. I remember that once on a Polish board there was a girl of 12 who asked if she could have AS - only that nothing indicated it. But for her smartness but then again - AS is something entirely else. She stated that while replying to her posts, the folks from the aspie board should imagine she was twice her age (and indeed, she wrote like a thirty year old with a higher education) and complained that every time she posted on a board, people claimed her posts were way too intellectual for the folks to understand. Everybody was like: "You are 12? I thought that when I started to read your post describing you, that you are the mom of your kid with AS and at first that you began your post with describing yourself before you took to describing your child". Well, it's not Asperger's, it's called intelligence. Once I read in Danielle Steel's book "His Bright Light" about her gifted son suffering from cyclophrenia who finally took his own life, that when Nick (the son) was 12, he met a woman he managed to convince that he was a man of 21 suffering from hormonal issues that prevented him from growing and made him look like he was still a kid. The woman later talked to her, saying she should be proud of her son -"such a smart young man and it doesn't matter he looks like he does due to his illness, for it's enough to talk to him for a moment to know he's an adult, that he's already a man". Well, this is just intelligence, that's all and this is all I can say.

I do NOT think so. There are large differences between Aspies and "normal" gifted children.

Gifted chlidren are MORE suitable to world than someone with average skills. Aspies are LESS suitable than average person and of course "typical" gifted child (unsuitable to a different degree) and look "odd", "inept", "weird" or worse.

Obsessiveness in AS is a serious problem. If someone is not an interest, routine or something similar, it may be hard. AS has pathological obsessiveness in it. Interests looks often strange, impractical, repetitive, stereotyped. There also are odd customs, routines, rituals.

AS has severe social ineptitude. It gives severe impairment in nonverbal communication which may cause someone looking like handicapped person. Eye contact tends to be very poor, gestures and facial expressions are abnormal. They often have restricted or idiosyncratic social needs (lack of social reciprocity) and often tend to be gullible, naive, so literal etc.

People with ASD have other emotions and thinking than others. It make them more odd. They may have inadequate emotional reactions, such as paradoxical laughter, bizarre fears. They are easily noticed as "abnormal".

They tend to present "activity disturbances" such as stimming, hyperkinetic behaviors, hyperactivity, concentration deficit disorder, attention deficit disorder, tics etc.

People with PDD tend to have cognitive anomalies, such as speech and language difficulties (not always speech delay), visual-spatial problems, motor disorders...

Sensory integration problems are very common.

PDDs tend to have genetic or (and) perinatal factors.

And autism and giftedness may lie on the one spectrum And I think that most of aspie wannabes belong to it. Normal gifted child is not socially inept, pathologically obsessive, emotionally disturbed etc. There are normal gifted children also Probably about 35% of gifted ones have sesnory problems and only 5% of "average". But SI anomalies are only one of the groups of symptoms. I think that "wannabes" often "carry" something which I called "phenotypical aucorigia". Aucorigia is developmental condition characterised by autocontrast (asynchronous development) and originality ("bizarrity"). Many gifted children (ones with "weird" behaviors, atypical speech (too silent, somewhat childish, dysprosodic), sensory issues, learning disorders) appear to be "phenotypical aucorigians" for me. Or even have "mild aucorigia", which is mild AS for me. More serious cases of aucorigia (moderate, severe, profound) are just ASDs and PDDs and give characteristic impairments.

I have AS diagnosis (made in professional centre). They gave me it easily. I was socially inept, obsessive, also kooky (other aspies about who I read were not nutty as a fruitcake...). But I have doubts about it. I am not traditional, profound case of AS. I am really strong "neurocognitively". It helps in life, but I may feel larger responsibility due to it...