I had the honour of attending the Symposium on Gifted Adults in Boulder, CO this spring and heard this essay read aloud. I thought it well worth the read and wanted to share it with you. Many of the gifted students I am working with are young adults and this has some good insights into the life ahead. Many of the parents I work with are gifted adults themselves and I think you would also find this information beneficial and interesting. Enjoy! Carmen
FOR THE SYMPOSIUM ON GIFTED ADULTS
Annemarie Roeper
March 5, 2011
A gifted adult, of course, develops out of a gifted child. The gifted go through a number of emotional experiences that differentiate them from others. This is more puzzling when they are young.
All of their lives, the gifted live with a sense of isolation because of their greater intellectual power, greater awareness of why things are happening, and greater capacity for logical conclusions that don’t always coincide with the way other people see reality.
Their ability to predict certain events frequently meets with general disbelief by others. Often they realize that some plan is bound to end in failure because certain aspects are not being considered, but their environment won’t accept it. People have a tendency to think in terms of one cause and one effect, but don’t know that everything has many causes and many effects and that one positive action may result in a number of negative by-products.
Gifted adults do not make decisions easily. With every step they take, they are aware of a multitude of available alternatives, as well as the possible unexpected consequences that could occur because of their decision. They rarely feel absolutely certain of doing the right thing or of the right answer to a question, because the available alternatives are endless.
The gifted are aware of the enormous complexity and total interdependence of all living things. The more gifted a person is, the more he or she realizes this fact. They penetrate more deeply into that which they experience. A person with good hearing ability can hear an airplane long before other people do, long before the others even know it exists. This, I think, is symbolic of the experience of the gifted adult.
Gifted adults think faster and with more complexity. They draw conclusions at a faster rate. Their horizons stretch beyond those of others. It could be called greater emotional and intellectual eyesight or else insight. Often, a gifted adult will interpret what others say in a more sophisticated manner and have a broader understanding. The gifted learn more quickly, they react more quickly—or sometimes more slowly because they have to consider so many factors. They have a drive to invent, a drive to explore, a drive to understand, a drive to go beyond that which we already know. I suspect that it is the gifted who have created the world in which we live, not only with their inventions but also with their actions and behavior and insights. This could have both positive and negative consequences. A gifted adult with a background of anger can use the same insights in a negative way and the same resources to make others suffer. The gifted adult, like the gifted child, can be a very inventive teaser, with the ability to tantalize others to the point of cruelty. Manipulation and deception are two other qualities that may come with giftedness.
Many people think that giftedness can be identified by only an IQ test, but there are other aspects of giftedness which may not be represented by an IQ test. There is emotional giftedness that might be called wisdom, which represents the quality of feelings that many people have. I think it is very akin, if not identical with, sensitivity. There are those people who can sense what goes on inside another person and they react not to what the person says, but to what they know the person feels. There are also people whose giftedness is purely intellectual; for some reason, the entrance to emotions is closed. Sometimes people are aware of this fact and feel it as a painful lack.
The gifted may have more anxieties than others because they are more aware of dangers but they also may know of more means to counteract their anxiety. The gifted adult deals with the complexities of the world, which include the negative as well as the positive. Their ability to predict and sometimes prevent events is often awe-inspiring. Gifted adults are usually driven by the need for action and invention and sometimes have difficulties finding appropriate outlets for their drives.
There has been much discussion about overexcitability in the gifted. There is definitely an emotional overexcitability, which might express itself in nervous behavior. The highly gifted are often difficult for other people to take, because their mind moves so fast and so easily from one subject to another that it is tiring to participate with them in a conversation.
Everything in the gifted adult’s life relates to his or her particular depth and complexity of experiencing the world. Nothing seems simple, particularly when it comes to the questions of right and wrong. There are so many levels at which we can experience the correctness of our conclusions and behavior. The gifted have a need to qualify what they say by limiting it with, “maybe,” “it looks like,” “by all appearances,” etc. They are reluctant to make a statement that is absolute. In fact, that may be an outstanding quality of giftedness – the realization that there is not absolute right or wrong. Finality is a difficult concept for the gifted because they can always find something that would disqualify the very statement they made.
At this point I need to say that many gifted people are also very goal oriented and driven to reach the goals they passionately pursue. I believe that this is a clear contradiction if we desire to understand the gifted. All of it is true, but nothing is 100% true. For this reason, it doesn’t happen infrequently that gifted people are seen as wishy-washy or undetermined because their extended complexity of view does not allow an absolute answer. Yet, their emotional astuteness will often make them aware of an absolute moral truth. The whole question of morality becomes much more complicated for the mind of a gifted person than the more average person. Things are simply never clear-cut and obvious the more we become aware of unexpected factors involved in the decision. It is like a mobius strip that ends up exactly in the opposite direction that it starts out. I think understanding the gifted mind works like the mobius strip. It might reverse what we start out with.
As we get older, we experience certain declines and changes with the same complexity and awareness as we experience the growing up years and adulthood and a new kind of pain enters our feelings when we realize so strongly our physical changes and deterioration. I am now 92 years old and observe myself as well as other old people. Some deteriorate emotionally, but I am also under the impression that there is asynchrony between physical ability and the emotional and intellectual awareness of one’s own deterioration. This has both advantages and disadvantages. I now notice that since I am insecure in my movements I have to watch them intellectually more carefully. It takes careful thinking whenever you put down your foot. Many old people fall and break an arm or something because they forget to be careful. I have learned that watching your own movements is a requirement of old age. The discrepancy between the body and the mind keeps on growing. I think that as they age, gifted people have more alternatives, but even for them there is a limit. I think gifted people are more lonely or isolated in general, but a lot of it depends on the temperament or constitution of the individual.
Now I would like to end this with a brilliant statement, but I have become overcome with senility and I can’t think of one. I am so sorry that I was not able to be there in person, but send my wishes for a successful symposium!
Most is taken from her newest book, Beyond Old Age.
Annemarie Roeper, Ed.D., is an educational consultant with more than 50 years of experience specializing in the psychological and educational needs of gifted children. In addition to hundreds of articles, she has published Beyond Old Age, Educating Children for Life: The Modern Learning Community and My Life Experiences with Children. In 1941, she and her husband, George Roeper, founded the Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; they also co-founded the Roeper Review Journal. She developed the ANNEMARIE ROEPER METHOD OF QUALITATIVE ASSESSMENT and practitioners are now being certified throughout the United States in this methodology. She was the first person to be filmed for the Legacy Series of NAGC.
