"That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make theses people sane."- The Sane Society, by Erich Fromm
The first time I went to see her, I sat in her waiting
office making a list of all the things that were wrong with me so I would
remember to mention everything. After all, I thought, if I was paying this
woman for every 15 min of conversation with her, I was going to make sure I got
enough crazy into each visit to make it worth the cost.
A lot changes in five months.
This time I sat making
a list of all the unreasonable expectations I have grown up with. It pains me
to do this, because I am both a passionate advocate for education and a loving
daughter, but despite my loyalty to my family and my continuing work in public
education, I am now forced to admit that both my parents and the public school system had a large hand in making me feel psychotic.
For me, childhood was a landscape carved from paradox. To
give you an idea of what I mean, I will summarize what I was told in grade
school:
“Work hard and don’t procrastinate, but don’t work ahead or finish early. If you have the misfortune to finish early, look over your work. Of course it’s not already good enough—even one mistake shows you finished too quickly. No your mistakes are not the same as the ones of the child next to you. Her mistakes are okay because she tried really hard and took a long time.
It’s called living up to your potential.
Don’t ever talk about your potential. That’s rude. And don’t tell me that something is too easy for you—if it’s easy just do it quickly and get it done—but remember, not too quickly, and if you finish early, check your work and wait quietly for the others to finish. I’m not responsible for entertaining you just because you are done. And make sure you don’t dilly dally—get started right away. And no daydreaming, drawing, or reading when you’re not supposed to. Don’t expect a reward—you don’t get rewards for doing things that are easy for you.
You need to learn some respect for authority—don’t point out the teacher’s mistakes and always do what everyone tells you. Don’t do everything your peers tell you even if you want to fit in. You also need to set a good example for them and be a leader, but make sure you don’t argue with them and don’t tell them what to do.
If you manage all of that, we’ll reward you by not singling you out for criticism and tell you that doing well is its own reward. You can never do well enough to change any of these rules.”
If that sounds reasonable to you, you are not a gifted adult…or
a normal adult. In fact, I’d question whether you are human or not. These rules
are the same for everyone on the intelligence spectrum, but they come into play
far less for people who are in the “normal” range. I even find myself enforcing
them sometimes when dealing with students at school. It’s built into the way we
are taught to teach, an unspoken yet hauntingly familiar underpinning of
instructional pedagogy, oft justified by the claim that the needs of the many outweigh
the needs of the few. It even makes some sense when viewed through the eyes of
the teacher. An example:
If Johnny reads
ahead, he’ll ruin the prediction activity for everyone, you think. So you tell
him not to read ahead. But then he starts clicking his pen incessantly and
looking out the window and other kids stop working to look out the window because
they want to know what he’s looking at. So you tell him to do something
productive or at least quiet. He gets out a different book and reads that. But
then one of the kids asks you why she has to do the reading if Johnny doesn’t
have to. She hates reading because she’s a slow reader and you don’t want to
make her feel bad by telling her that Johnny already finished reading but if
you don’t tell her something she will put down her book in rebellion so you do
and she glares at him.
Later, Johnny doesn’t
get started right away on his vocabulary because he is busy playing making
piles of eraser shavings in his desk and marveling at how fluffy they are. One
of the other kids is watching him and giggling. Get started! You say. He makes
a face and says he already knows all the words, and can’t he just not do the
activity? Now the other kids look up. Johnny just questioned you. If you don’t
punish him for it, your classroom management will suffer because others will
follow his example any time they don’t want to work. You send him to the
hallway to buy time to think.
In the hallway you tell him that he needs to follow
directions when you give them—he’s setting a bad example for the other kids. He
bows his head because he has gotten this speech before. You ask if he wants a
harder vocabulary list to work with. He shakes his head and says he wants to
work on his drawing—that he doesn’t want more work, he just thinks he shouldn’t
have to do it if he knows it already. That’s not an acceptable solution, so you
recommend he do the easy sheet and draw when he’s finished.
You feel bad, but there is nothing you can do. He was tested
for the gifted program at the beginning of the year, but they only use IQ as an
indicator and he doesn’t like tests so he did poorly. You can prove he has a
college reading level but that doesn’t matter to the specialists. Back in the
classroom Johnny just puts his head down at the group table and refuses to do
anything. You know it’s because he’s upset, but you send him to the office for
disobedience. The other kids are watching to see what you’ll do and you can’t
make his behavior an acceptable standard…
Everyone does it. When I taught 5th grade I had thirty-five
students present on any given day and forty on my roster. Over half were below
grade level in major skills and there was enormous pressure to help them catch
up before state testing. Because only the percentage of proficiency mattered,
gifted kids did nothing to boost our school rating so we did nothing for them. “They’ll
manage,” Administration would tell us, “our duty is not to the students who
will succeed in spite of us.” That’s the logic. It’s insane logic because we
know from research that the high school dropout rate among gifted students is
three times the average of the general population. Because we know from
research that many will have trouble holding down jobs that fail to challenge them
and that continued problems in adulthood will lead many to eventually be
diagnosed with various psychiatric disorders.
“Gifted” is a word that always belongs in quotation marks
because it is so ironic we might as well mark it as the sarcastic term it is. “Gifted”
is often just another brand of “special”. It isn’t something to be desired in a
society that values the mean. Over time, gifted traits which are not
capitalized on can become collapsed—acting to the detriment of the individual.
Here, it is important to remember that giftedness is not solely
a measure of IQ. The gifted traits include a range of abilities, from faster
processing to greater nervous system sensitivity to different modalities of
thinking. To show what I mean by collapsed traits, let me take an example which
is not strictly academic in nature: typically, gifted children and adults
display a tendency to quickly find the source of problems even in complex
systems. This leads to a sense of confidence that one has correctly identified
the issue even when it is not obvious to others and grows into a valuable
problem solving skill. When this ability is nurtured, the gifted person can be
a capable leader able to confidently reassure others that the direction taken
will be fruitful.
Now assume that a person with this trait, let’s call her
Mary, gets the same diatribe Johnny and I got in the public school system. She
routinely gets punished for “not respecting authority” and many of her teachers
resent her ability to see problems and paradoxes inherent in their classroom management
systems. They repeatedly tell her that she doesn’t know everything and that
they have reasons she doesn’t know/can’t understand for why they do things the
way they do. So Mary learns from an early age to distrust her problem-finding
skill. She further generalizes and decides subconsciously that, since the “reasons”
for something are often only known by authority figures, that she should always
wait for reassurance and approval from authority figures before acting on any
of her insights. When in a working environment where she feels
underappreciated, Mary is “reassurance needy” and chronically doubtful to the
point of hindering forward progress when she is involved in group work. Her trait could be said to be “collapsed”.
Traits can also become problems when they are exaggerated—meaning
that some traits will end up blowing out of proportion and swinging too far in
the opposite direction, often as an internal attempt to cope with, and
compensate for, collapsed traits. Someone who has the same trait as Mary only
in an exaggerated sense, may find themselves too reliant on problem-finding
skills to the point of thinking themselves infallible, becoming obstinate when
others try to point out errors in their judgment. They may be overly confrontational
with authority and chronically overconfident. An “exaggerated” trait, thus, is
as much of a problem as a collapsed one.
The important take-away here is that collapsed and exaggerated
traits are both, in a way, a failed attempt to cope with the paradoxes of
expectation encountered in early childhood and adolescence*. Reframing
experiences and identifying ones collapsed traits can go a long way toward reclaiming
those abilities. By the same token alternate methods of coping can be presented
and utilized and, over time, exaggerated traits can be minimized until they are
more reasonable and useful.
So I sit in my therapist’s waiting room and ponder the dilemma
of one of my own exaggerated traits which has long compensated for a fleet of
collapsed ones: for me, introspection and acute self-awareness have become a
sort of psychological hypochondria. I have convinced my therapist that I am
insane. This is a problem because I’m not, but how do I prove that now? I found
a TED video recently which struck a chord with me:
I may not be a psychopath, and what I have subconsciously “pretended”
my way into may not be as dire, but a catch-22 of sorts still exists. I have
been preparing my way out of it for weeks. I have learned what to say and how
to say it. I have spent the last two months “improving” at a steady but
believable pace. Today, my strategy works: my therapist decides we can now go
to “as needed” appointments. I don’t know if she realizes that “as needed”
translates to “never again” in my vocabulary, but it gives me a quiet way out of
therapy (that doesn’t alarm family and coworkers) as I decide what my next move
will be.
Unfortunately, I am now saddled with labels I cannot easily
get rid of even if I personally choose not to use them: not needing therapy is
not the same thing as being cured. My therapist makes certain to remind me of
that: my conditions don’t stop existing; they just get easier for me to cope
with. People who know about my therapy and my diagnosis will still see me a certain
way because of it. At least until I can find a way to believably explain what
is really going on, because “I’m not crazy, society is crazy” won’t do it. And
I’ll have to bring my traits back into some semblance of balance first, so that
the “symptoms” which led to my misdiagnosis are less pronounced and I have some
evidence with which to back up my claims.
Thus the journey. As I leave my therapists office and walk
out into the unseasonably warm evening air, I am keenly aware of how many miles
I’ll have to walk before I reach that distant summit. I have twenty-eight years
of history to rediscover and a lot of owning up to do. There is a lot I will
have to forgive myself for and a lot I will have to forgive others for. There
are risks I will have to take and, undoubtedly, failures I will have to
overcome.
The rest of this narrative is personal. It can’t be found in
any book or any theory. It is also inextricably interlaced with my faith, as I’ve
discovered. It turns out that when I go back and start really evaluating and
examining things; the fact that my giftedness has been, until now, mostly a
curse is in itself a kind of gift. A gift from a Red Lord who can be found at
every turn along the path…
Ahead in Part 3 of this series: the unique problems of the
gifted pagan and encounters with the Master of Trials and Tester of Kings.
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*for a more in-depth discussion of collapsed and exaggerated
traits, see this book.
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