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"The Gifted's Dilemma"
"Reframing Your Role"
"An Agent of Evolution"

The Gifted's Dilemma

"Adaptation"
"Crisis"
"Reclamation"

Adaptation

Until recently, the culture has had little understanding of the nature of giftedness. Giftedness has been associated with mental processes that are quantifiable and measurable. We now understand giftedness to exist in all realms of intelligences - from emotional to kinesthetic. Giftedness has more to do with unique ways of processing and relating to information than to a product or to what can be measured in a test.

It has been the nature and tradition of any group to maintain itself through common beliefs, actions and ways of living. Harmony is valued to carry on knowledge, habits and lineages. The gifted person is faced with the challenge of always seeing beyond, or outside of, what is currently accepted as “the way”. At the same time, most gifted people are intrinsically designed to value human interaction, and they desire to belong.

If you are gifted, your preferences for unusual ideas or ways of doing things, your passion and intensity, your sensitivity and your unusual level of perception are all qualities that have made it difficult for you to fit in or to be like others. To belong, you would have to slow down, curb your natural enthusiasms and self expression. Gifts of perception, which made you an astute observer, may have enabled you to use your gifts to manage the needs of others, to be socially adept.

Until you are at home with your giftedness you can experience:

• a highly critical inner voice
• an absence of joy or enthusiasm
• use of alcohol, drugs or food to self medicate
• disappointment with the lack of high standards in others
• inordinately high expectations of yourself
• despair resulting from feeling like an outsider

Until you understand the nature of your highly developed awareness, you may turn your gifts upon yourself – scrutinizing and monitoring yourself.

Growing up in a world that did not have a way to understand or support all the unusual qualities of a gifted child, you most likely lived with your gifts in one of two ways. You may have responded to your otherness by unconsciously creating a false self that blended in. You used your gifts to fit into the world. As an adult you may have become highly successful in your field of endeavor. Otherwise, you may have felt like a failure, or that you had missed the boat somehow, because your gifts prevented you from adapting or feeling that you belonged. Your gifts may have overwhelmed you and left you unable to cope with the world’s expectations, unable to find “your groove”.

Crisis

You may have reached a time when using your gifts to align with the culture's expectations fails to provide meaning anymore. A loss of engagement with your life, a need to forge a new direction with no idea of how to do that, these are the crises that point you back to yourself. When part of your core discomfort derives from misunderstanding the nature of your differences from others, you may also be called to explore this notion of giftedness.

A life time habit of using one's gifts to edit and control one's self - to camouflage one's differences in order to fit in - can be an elusive talent to surrender. It takes an enormous shift to sit in one's uniqueness, to accept the gifts as being what define you. It is new territory to live by and care for the very qualities that make you unlike others.

The process involves reframing your childhood experiences from the vantage point of the gifted child:

~ Owning the injury and pain that was experienced when your innocent and pure spirit of curiosity was misunderstood.
~ Realizing how disappointing it was to find that others did not share attention to the truth, to subtleties, to kindness or decency.
~ Learning how you used your giftedness to navigate a world that was so different from you.

With a clear understanding of the radical differences between your way of relating to the world and that of most people, you actually begin to be safe in the world. You can begin to take care of your core self and focus inwards, instead of always attending to external promptings.

Before coming home to your gifts, here are some thoughts that may haunt you:

• There is no meaning
• Everyone is sleep walking
• Nobody understands
• People don't make connections fast enough
• People are lazy
• People don't want the truth
• I have to be like them, I have to slow down
• I can’t be me
• Others must be like me - why don't they....
• Everyone is having fun but me
• There is not enough time to do it all
• Everyone wants something from me
• I don't belong
• There is no place for me
• Gifted people are geniuses, I am not a genius
• I can't be gifted, I have never been successful
• I don’t have…. marriage/children/career x – I have wasted my time
• If people really knew what I think (want to do) – they’d think I’m crazy
• I will be burned at the stake if I am my authentic self
• If people really wanted to, they could…
• I am a fish out of water
• I am a trouble maker
• I am difficult
• I am not a team player
• I always disrupt things

It is an enormous sea change to relate to your gifts as qualities to be taken care of. Considering your gifts as rich sources of unique information and inspiration allows you to tap into the wellspring that is the nourishment for an authentic and meaningful life.

Reclamation

The path toward authenticity is hugely challenging for many gifted people. Standing fully in your gifts is what you have always avoided. From the beginning, you knew that to be yourself (to be authentic) would be dangerous in a world where, what was real to you, was unreal to others.

Your giftedness can prevent you from accessing the very information you need to forge your unique path. A lifetime of using your gifts to fit into the world around you is a hard habit to break. It takes strength to release habits and beliefs that are not authentic, to tolerate the absence of the ways that you have identified yourself.

It is an enormous challenge to begin to look inward and learn where your gifts and your personal needs intersect. If your giftedness lies in the mental realm, your mental dexterity can make it hard to quiet the mind and find the emotional and spiritual truths that lie within.

You may be called to find an authentic way to live your life, yet you find yourself imprisoned by helpers who lack the ability to adequately illuminate your complex inner world. Traditional therapy and other modalities of healing often fail to provide the multimodal framework that the gifted person needs to work within. Many gifted people complain that they have never met a therapist or healer who could hold the whole picture. They feel they have to slow down or hold back in order to be understood. There is also an absence of adequate vocabulary (even in the fields of psychology and medicine) to express the subtle levels of the gifted's experience.

Our work together involves reframing your past experiences through the lens of the gifted. We work in the numerous fields of awareness that you are responding to, attending to and sorting the complexity of themes that present all at once. You are finally able to create a full map of your inner landscape. You obtain a vocabulary for your experience, learning how to manage and nurture your multi-modal way of attending to things.

In our work together you learn to:

• Decipher what is adaptive and what is authentic in your habits of interaction
• Untangle intrinsic confusions, identifying where cultural norms and expectations have displaced core knowing and values
• Trust that focusing inward is what will insure alignment in the external world
• Gain tools for self care

Reframing Your Role

"Leaving the World Behind"
"Creating an Internal Yardstick"
"Redefining Success"

When childhood experiences of ridicule or neglect are cleared, when you have surrendered the habit of repressing or denying your gifts, you can finally untangle yourself from the needs and realities of others. With a vocabulary for your extraordinary potential in the realms of emotional, spiritual, physical, mental or energetic awareness, you are ready to head off the map, charting new territory.

Leaving the World Behind

The world lags behind the gifted. Whether the gifted person is inventing new forms of dance, music, or poetry, or anticipating cultural changes decades in advance of the culture, the world will never be up to speed with the gifted. At best, this is frustrating, at worst, it is debilitating and heart breaking for the gifted person.

If you have healed from the wounding of being misperceived, pathologized or criticized during your formative years, then you can stand fully in your gifts while the world evolves at a slower speed of consciousness. It takes courage to be fully yourself, to explore and inquire into the areas that move you. In order to do this, you have to leave others behind.

It is a huge step for gifted individuals to stop using their gifts to meet the needs of others. There can be a great deal of conflict in making this change. Part of the complexity in all of this is that the gifted person was often counted on, valued by family members for the very qualities that went unrecognized. In some ways, to step into one’s gift is to risk being obligated to others for one’s specialness*.

* While I do understand we live in a culture where being “special” is the rage – and where new age doctrine asserts the “oneness” of us all, there is an unavoidable uniquenss to gifted people that they do need to step into in order to find alignment. This has nothing to do with superiority. Once you step into your gifts, you are actually better able to be part of the "oneness".

Creating an Internal Yardstick

When you no longer consider your uniqueness a threat - disruptive to the status quo - your personal truths and ways of sensing and knowing can become your compasss. When you can distinguish between external expectations and your internal needs, you can recover your original inclinations and establish healthy ways of relating to your uniqueness.

Whether your gifts lie in the realms of the mental, emotional, energetic, spiritual or physical – you have a need to feel a deep connection to life. You have a need to feel meaning in your life and this meaning may come from a place that is unique to you. Your sensitivity and commitment to truth mean you will always be driven to evolve. Thus, your life will not have a trajectory that is like that of someone who is content with things as they are. You will need to allow for your own continued evolution.

Your highly elaborate imaginational or mental world means that you may always need time to process on your own. You need to find ways to value and respect your need for solitude, rather than believing you should be like others.

Your advanced level of integrity, compassion, and insightfulness will mean that you make decisions about, and attend to, aspects of relationships that may be invisible to other people. You hold yourself to standards that can not be the standards for other people.

The new yardstick by which you assess your own life may include:

• Attending to the things about which you are passionate
• Honoring your specific dietary and sleep needs
• Choosing social engagement based on what suits you
• Defining your own level of saturation in given settings
• Distinguishing work settings and qualities that suit you
• Clarifying your values and goals and how they may differ from those of others.
  

Redefining Success

When you redefine success, you surrender a universal standard of success. When you identify and clear the internalized cultural expectations about what are "appropriate" life paths or goals, your ability to honor your own inclinations is strengthened. You are able to listen to subtle promptings that call you in unforseen directions. You more easily allow your passions or absorptions to be the path to guide your unfolding. This may mean there is no goal or outcome by which you define yourself. You may be destined to explore the unexplored - there may be no maps for your destination.

New notions of success might include:

• maintaining your equilibrium/center in times of chaos or crisis
• maintaining clarity about your values when you are in the minority
• ability to self sooth
• ability to be fulfilled by what occupies you
• finding meaning in what you do
• being authentic
• ability to be honest
• being fearless
• comfort with emptiness
• absence of ego
• allocating time in a way that works for you
• focusing on inner promptings, not external expectations
• being comfortable in your role as a maverick
• stepping into the role of a change agent
• independence from the actions of others
• equanimity
• the ability to love and accept others where they are
• cultivating your potential in spiritual and creative realms
• increased alignment in all dimensions of your being

An Agent of Evolution

I believe that the gifted are here to reenchant the world. By stepping into your gifts you offer: new solutions to old problems, new solutions to current crises and new ways of interacting in the world. You are a bridge builder to new worlds and new perspectives. You assist other agents of change in their own unfolding. At a time when the human race has run out of options that will sustain an outdated level of consciousness and mode of relationship to the world – the gifted’s time has arrived.

Your tendency to attend to what is potential, what is not yet in form, is one of the key qualities of your giftedness. In order to have inner trust and peace you need to support this need you have to nurture the realm of possibility – in whatever domain you attune to. You are more of a vehicle or a vessel for what is coming into form then you are the driver. This can be a challenging role to accept.

At a time in human evolution when the old structures are breaking down in every realm and the new is not yet here – your ability to find and sustain balance is hugely significant. Attaining and maintaining your equilibrium in a world where the panic, negativity and fear are accelerating is an enormous task. Trusting in emptiness - the place for unfolding and allowing - is a huge, huge key to your ongoing stability. What you are about, what you attend to is new and unfolding – and much of it is not here yet.

The job of increasing the alignment between your mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic and physical dimensions is always ongoing. You continue to explore what was previously unexplored and deepen your relationship to your authentic self.

The more you unattach from the culture, the more you shift your focus from product to process in how you live your life, the more anchored you will find yourself in the nest of belonging. Your lack of interest in the contemporary culture indicates the staleness of the culture, not any problem in you. The hollowness you experience in places, ideas, and activities encourages you to attend to your own inner promptings.

Your tendency towards innovation, divergent thinking, imagination and focused attention are the hallmarks that make you who you are You see patterns where noone else sees them. You know that everything is connected to everything else.

As you clear your dependence on external validation, you become your own authority. You understand the news of the falling apart empire is not your news. You understand that the urge to grab onto ancient traditions or traditions of other cultures is a grab for security. You tolerate the time of disintegration and not knowing. You recognize and clear your personal fears as they arise. More and more you honor and live by internal promptings. You are always available to people/things/concepts/experiences that loosen the old framework and facilitate new perceptions. You surrender to ongoing alteration in who you are and how you relate to information and the world.

I always suggest that you create your personalized self care manual. If any of the statements below feel true about you in your field(s) of giftedness, they may be good touchstones to include in your manual:

• You challenge stereotypes.
• You are drawn to the unique and unusual.
• Just as quickly as something absorbs you, it may leave you.
• You can get overwhelmed by too many areas of interest, or too much information in any specific area of interest.
• You are intense and complex.
• For you, the simple can be complex.
• The complex can be simple for you as you see underlying themes and layers of meaning.
• You experience things in a different way than most people- seeing complexities, patterns, subtleties unavailable to most.
• Your motivations for what you do tend to be different. You are moved by intangible outcomes – you are moved by the desire to explore, to try, to learn.
• You are out of synch with the world because the world is out of synch. You see how things should be or could be – the world is behind.
• You can be quite empathic. You can know how things are for others. You identify with others.
• You may tend to be introverted – gaining your energy from an internal world of information.
• You tend to find little of merit in contemporary culture.
• You see below facades.
• You care about essence, not fashion.
• You need the truth and can feel crazy when someone is dishonest.
• You see through complexities to find the heart or core of the matter.
• You are always available to see connections and patterns.

To be your healthiest- you need to be available to what compels you rather than what you think you should want.

Obstacles that may recur in the life of the gifted:

• Commitment to harmony with others. You don’t want to cause distress in others because of your evolution. You want to prevent disruption in relationships.
• Terror at being alone forever- without friends, without a mate. Fear of being burned at the stake. The need to belong.
• Taking on too much. Getting ahead of yourself. Getting too swamped by interests, themes or subtexts to know where you are. Dropping threads that are essential to consider.
• Pain at being misunderstood. Needing to be understood.
• Despair when you hold yourself to conventional expectations.
• Intrusion of cultural (friends, family, media) noise.
• Fear of emptiness. Looking to the past for meaning when meaning is absent in the present.

Tools to maintain equilibrium and health:

• access to change agents (healers, therapists etc)
• immersion in what absorbs you
• time to come undone
• opportunity to change regardless of external systems
• flexibility to be unattached to form
• identity independent of success as culture defines it – personal definition
• focus on what brings inner sense of balance or peace
• tolerance of mystery
• locating others who share interests/ways of being present
• respecting timing – your time frame may not be the time frame for unfolding
• personalized self-care manual that reminds you what YOU need to be well

Please note: there are several superior websites and books addressing the nature of adult giftedness. My intention is not to educate the reader on the field of giftedness. Since there tends to be an aversion to even considering that one might be gifted, I have tried to create a gentle invitation to even consider the topic.