As a gifted person or parent of a gifted child, you may well understand the inherent challenges and rewards of what it means to be tuned more intensely than others. Or your journey to make sense of it may be just beginning. Quite commonly though, grappling with one’s inner experience is solitary; many feel uncomfortable, elitist, or fearful of exaggerating one’s own or their child’s abilities when sharing with others. From a young age, gifted people come to understand, they are not like others. They are outsiders. And yet research shows, there are more gifted people around us than we may realize. While some states have done away with a mandate to identify and support gifted children in education, here is a brief list of characteristics that may define you or your child.

Some characteristics of gifted children:

• Unusual alertness as early as infancy
• Rapid learner
• Retains much information; very good memory
• Advanced comprehension of word nuances, metaphors, and abstract ideas
• Unusual emotional depth; intense feelings and reactions; highly sensitive
• Thinking is abstract, complex, logical, and insightful
• Preoccupied with own thoughts; daydreaming
• Imaginary playmates (preschool age children); vivid imagination
• Concern with social and political issues and injustices
• Longer attention span, persistence, and intense concentration
• Impatient with self or others’ inabilities or slowness
• Tendency to put ideas or things together in ways that are unusual or not obvious (divergent thinking)

Along with giftedness comes extreme sensitivity, idealism, worry, intensity, concern for fairness, and loneliness. As a mental health provider, appreciation for and working with giftedness includes

• Working with perfectionism, procrastination and underachievement, feelings of alienation, and internal asynchronies
• Understanding overexcitabilities that cause dysregulation across settings
• Preventing burn-out and stress
• Advocating for one’s self or your child
• Understanding your purpose in the face of existential depression
• Building resilience to meet social challenges and cope in a neurotypical world

Twice Exceptional Clients/ 2e

This identifier refers to having a learning disability(ies) and/or a neuro-developmental disorder like AD/HD or Autism Spectrum Disorder and giftedness. Our work is to shift the focus onto one’s capabilities, validate the head and tailwinds one experiences in social, academic, and professional realms and uncover one’s true self.