GIFTED ADULTS PROFESSIONAL
Through your professional training, you were encouraged to be aware of your own personality style, issues, needs, and struggles, in order to be fully present and helpful to your clients.
KNOW WHETHER YOU ARE GIFTED & WHAT YOUR UNIQUE COGNITIVE PROFILE IS Here is some of what I have learned, and some key points of what I teach to therapists and coaches in my Gifted Psychology 101 Courses :
GIFTED ADULTS HOW TO
It started with specializing in coaching gifted adults, and has grown to founding InterGifted and for the last several years, training and mentoring therapists, coaches and other helping professionals who want to learn how to best support their gifted clients. She inspired me so much, and did so much to save my life, that I was, in turn, inspired to support other gifted people in a similar way, which is what I’ve been doing for most of the last decade.
GIFTED ADULTS FULL
I met her when I was in a full positive disintegration, and I don’t know what would have become of my life if she had not uttered the words to me: “You have a gift, and the question is: are you going to accept it?” That question, and her accurate mirroring and support, allowed me to make it through to the other side of my positive disintegration. She knew what giftedness was, had years of experience supporting gifted people, and was able to legitimize my struggles and give me hope in a way no other person had before. Instead of looking at me as a usual client with usual goals, she looked at me as one of the many unusual-minded people she supported: someone with my own unique values hierarchy, potential and need for support that required a completely unconventional approach and a lot of validation. But, with my mentor, it was completely different - she validated a whole part of me that, before her, no one had really seen or understood. I did find a therapist and a coach before her who while she did not validate my giftedness per se, she did nothing to invalidate it, and that was certainly helpful. In my own case, I finally did find the help I needed, in the form of a mentor who recognized my giftedness but it took years. Not getting the help I truly needed led me to making decisions for myself that only deepened my problems, and got me more entrenched in the trap of seeming exceedingly smart and capable, yet suffering in silence. Maybe she was right and I was okay? I started to doubt my own inner reality, and then I doubted therapists in general (irony of ironies, since I was one myself) and became scared to reach out to a therapist again for years. This unfortunate misattunement mirrored back to me that my struggles were invisible, or I feared, invented. Yes, I was knowledgeable about them, and I knew how to discuss them in complex ways that sounded impressive but at 22 years old, knowing about and being able to discuss my problems did not translate into me knowing how to heal from them.
In my early 20’s, I sought help from a therapist who very quickly diagnosed me as mentally healthy, since, in her words, I was very knowledgeable about and understood my “issues”. I have heard stories from countless clients about their search for, and failure to find, a therapist who could help them understand their (gifted) mind. But then, what about those less than 5%? What are they supposed to do when they need to reach out for mental health support from professionals who are missing essential information about how their unusual brain works? These are moments when ignorance really can hurt. I know a training program can’t cover everything, and when the numbers of gifted people are so very small (common research says that less than 5% of the population is gifted), it somehow makes sense that giftedness as a topic would get low priority. But still, many of the psychologists, psychiatrists and other helping professionals I train today report that they either had a short mention of giftedness in their training, or, like me, none at all. Admittedly, that was nearly twenty years ago and I was specializing in clinical psychology rather than research psychology. We didn’t even hear about IQ testing, unless it had to do with measuring disability. When I was studying to become a psychologist, I never once heard the word giftedness brought up.
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