Do you fit in? Alone or in clumps it looks like it from here

How much do you need?

Read on . . .

Take a seat in the sky and look down at people on the move. See how they respond when they get physically closer to each other. In Japan they’ll touch. In Texas they’ll stand a foot apart

Yet these are minor differences. The basic process of flowing around each other and occasionally clumping into groups seems to be a mutually understood way that humans transport themselves.

From up here in the sky, in other words, all of humanity appears much the same.

Suspect the visual

For most of us, seeing is believing.

Seeing doesn't always make it clear what you should be believing.

This means that because we all look much the same we can easily fall into a dangerously false assumption: that we actually are all the same.

Even though we’re obviously not all alike, the ‘uniform’ myth can appear to have some validity.

After all, vast industries are founded on it.

Pharmaceutical companies, aeroplane manufacturers, clothing manufacturers, defense contractors all build their offerings around a ‘standard’ human being.

Services such as banking, law, and psychology all structure themselves round the assumption that we want the same things: money, justice, understanding.

Yet we aren’t the same and we don’t want the same things.

Commercial gain, individual loss

These broad brush commercial and political approaches to assessing the human being work within limited objectives.

Seeing humanity as a money tree makes it hard to have a meaningful conversation.

The organizations concerned are not seeking truth but sales.

They are essentially systems for converting the energy of individual need into a more flexible energy: money. They know they can appeal to a big enough chunk of the population to grow year by year. That is the limit of their interest in the human animal.

You and I might see the great mass of population the same way. People with visions of huge consumer empires, such as Rupert Murdoch and Sam Walton, must do.

But seeing ‘us’ this way isn’t going to help you meet the perfect partner and fall in love. Or even help you get to know yourself better.

So take a closer look

Sometimes a man in a red dress is not a soldier.

Generalizing won’t offer guidance in selecting a sports team or even a specific lawyer for a specific task.

Clearly, some human activities cannot be conducted on a global scale.

In close-up, our superficial differences of height, clothing choices, and speed of movement become more significant. The dress on that woman is sending a signal. And (to avoid further accusations of sexism) so does the one on that man.

At a more intimate level, we see a human and its appurtenances. We make a judgement based on past experience. We think we have a workable idea of who s/he is.

And we’re usually wrong.

Who do you think you are?

If the visual/behavioral view of humans was comprehensive it would be easy for the world population to divide itself up into happy like-minded enclaves.

All the men in red dresses would line up here. All the women in black trousers line up over there.

Then subdivide: all the men in red dresses who are soldiers form a group here. Of these, all who abstain from alcohol can group there. Those who don’t smoke either, go there.

Play this game of group-by-category to its conclusion and you end up with one person in each group – and the world goes back to looking a lot like it does today.

What’s this got to do with being gifted?

Gifted individuals have a hard time, as they put it, fitting in.

What's weird about a soldier in a red dress? Meet Corporal Hodge.

Well, trust me, so does a teetotal male soldier in a red dress.

Yet when you see him in his uniform marching along with thousand of other soldiers you’d never know it.

And perhaps when he’s in marching mode he feels as if he’s fitting in just fine.

I think therein lies the lesson for us gifted folk.

The person is not the picture

The point is that the soldier is not a man in a red dress or a man in a uniform. He isn’t anything you can see to judge at all. Not even in his material expression.

He’s just like you and me: a notional space.

As we saw at the start, we each occupy a space. However, this is not just the volume of our body and the air/energy buffer around it. We are more than 8 cubic feet of flesh and bone.

Ours is a notional space that includes ourselves and our perception of our position in the world.

We could call it a sphere of interests.

It is likely to be greater than our sphere of influence.

I think it’s most useful to see it as our sphere of potential. This is where we ‘see’ ourselves operating.

I also believe that if it’s in your sphere, you can do it.

Volume of a space

If this is your natural space, how will you ever squeeze it into a suburban living room?

The volume of this space is directly related to giftedness. It is not measurable by ruler or calibrated beaker.

Instead, it is measurable by topic, or awareness, or understanding.

Go to a party. Listen to the conversations. Strip out any that are specialized because of work relatedness.

Your gifted friend is not the one discussing the quality of the peanuts in the bowl – unless it’s to link them to the spread of aflatoxins in the general population and some garden birds.

The general talk swings from the weather to the need to bring back capital punishment for children under ten.

Meanwhile, the gifted group is having fun exploring the likelihood that blocktime might offer the first credible basis for a scientific proof of astrological predictions.

Or enjoying the way a curtain’s shadow creates a profound feeling of warmth and suggestibility within them.

Unfortunately these things are discussed only within your space because you’re the only gifted person there.

So you’re bored out of your mind – which you’re filling with alcohol or cheese and crackers in a desperate attempt to achieve equanimity within and affinity without.

You’ve resigned yourself to another evening of failure to make contact; more self-condemnation for being inadequate with small talk; more self-hatred for being an alien etc etc.

Why can’t you be like everybody else?

"What on earth did I come for? I knew it would feel like a punishment."

“I’m a bit of a geek,”; “I’m such a nerd,”; “I’m something of an oddball.” and, most of all: “I’ve never really seemed to fit in.”

These are statements I hear all the time. Sadly, they often come in the form of self-condemnation, as if difference were a crime or at least a major societal defect.

In fairness, these words are not often said with conviction. You can tell there’s doubt behind the words, as if the speaker’s really saying: “I don’t actually think I’m a geek but I must be because I don’t know how else to explain how I feel.”

Over-sized sphere of potential

The truth is, of course, that you really don’t fit in.

If you could see the size and shape of your notional space you’d see it filled the room. So either there’s only room for yours or no room for yours.

And your space is you.

So there might as well be a sign saying: “Please leave yourself at the door.”

Having met that request by numbing yourself one way or another, you’re left bereft of anything to say. So your healthy pursuit of social interaction peters out once again.

And you go home kicking yourself for your awkwardness.

What’s to be done?

Our cross-dressing soldier might be able to help.

Can you spot the soldier in the red dress?

His ability to ‘fit in’ with the troops offers a guide to enjoying social interaction without having to poison yourself with ‘comforting’ substances or just sitting abjectly in the corner.

Before heading anywhere social:

• Start by calling up that wonderful resource: your giftedness;
• Envision yourself, not as free to roam the full extent of your space but as a soldier, temporarily subject to external and limiting regulation;
• Think about where you’re going, its nature, its awareness level;
• Ask what you want from it (this deserves a book in itself but if you have a clear idea where you’re headed you won’t expect too much) ;
• Strategize and stay focused on your goal.

In other words, instead of trying to fit the whole of your space into a room too small for it, select a subset of space relevant to your environment and use it to its full.

"I've always been fascinated with human sensitivity. Can you feel this?"

Or you might conduct a survey in such a way that your respondents are unaware of your intent but flattered by your attention.

Basically, it’s all about lowering your expectations. You are rare, so the chances of finding a soulmate are few. However, if you simply want to feel like an acceptable part of the human race, you can bring that about.

How to mess up

As in all things, it’s wise to take care.

When I set out to a gathering with the intention of feeling popular, or being loved or important, I almost invariably screw up.

"Let me delight you with my new invention! . . . Please!!"

As I head home afterwards I kick myself for being such a conversation hog, for being so insensitive, for forgetting my own instructions to myself.

It usually happens when I’m most anxious about the gathering in question.

However, when I go with the intention of making others feel good about themselves it’s a different story. I enjoy seeing them relaxing into a warm sense of their own lovability.

I may even have the fun of having them flirt with me.

And I go home – often quite early – with a warm feeling derived from the pleasure I’ve absorbed from others’ enjoyment of my words.

Job done. Reward received.

In conclusion

Know your space. Know the volume of potential you occupy in the world.

Then operate from a subset of that space depending on your immediate social environment. Make your choice of subset conscious, or you will feel distressed.

"When it comes to long-term relationships I insist on finding an exact match for all my space."

It will probably be hard to find a like-sphered partner but it is essential – in love or in work – for ongoing happiness and growth.

And if you ever find yourself in a room – or even a virtual ‘space’ – with a gifted equal you will discover that rooms have no walls and that the virtual can be real.

Go seek!

Which one's Kate? The triumph of love over fear.

It can be a painfully distorted condition.

But at its best it’s the most powerful statement a couple can make as to their mutual faith in the power of love over fear.

I’m happy for William and Katherine, royal bride and groom.

I hope they’re able to build something of sense in the nonsense of their societal context.

And therein lies the rub.

No gifts for the gifted

I wish I could doff a union jack hat

Happy birthday, big guy! You're looking great!

and join the Royal Wedding Party.

But I can’t. It would feel like sharing a bottle of scotch with a chronic alcoholic in order to celebrate his birthday.

Typically gifted, I can’t bring myself to support destructive behavior when it is clear before me.

And the royal wedding is emblematic of the destructive nature of the English monarchy.

To try and explain

The value of the monarchy can be challenged on four grounds, of which I think the fourth is the most significant:

• Morality. It is unfair. And even if nature is unfair that’s no reason to build unfairness into human institutions.
• Absurdity. The idea that the desired qualities of a head of state can be passed on genetically is nonsensical. Just look at your children – or your neighbor’s children – to see how different they are from their parents.
• Democracy. Democracy, a delicate flower at best, can only exist within a meritocracy. Once people are granted powerful positions by right of birth, or by association with it, any hope of democracy goes out the window.
• National wellbeing. This is the reason that drives me most powerfully. It is also the one that will probably speak loudest to other gifted individuals because we tend to be highly motivated to correct those things that we see to be causing damage.

A necessary caveat

When it comes to the English royal family it’s almost impossible to separate the people from the posts.

Calls to end the monarchy are often greeted with responses such as: “But the Queen’s a wonderful woman and does an impossible job incredibly well.”

Indeed she is and does. But it’s not a job that she should be required to do. Or her offspring.

It’s hard to look desperate when you’ve two palaces and a couple of castles to run and hide in. But the reality is that the royal family is locked into an impossible (as in non reality-based) situation by determinants way beyond its control.

And the collective English public responds in a classically co-dependent way to take care of them.

Let Wikipedia explain:

Trapped into a fiction. The ever-smiling Windsors in the co-dependent zoo.

Wikipedia includes, as part of its definition of co-dependence: “It [codependency] also often involves putting one’s needs at a lower priority than others while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others.”

The English public demeans its own needs by embracing a form of social structure in which inherited wealth and, in particular, inherited titles are recognized as being of higher social standing than real-life achievements.

This is anathema to the gifted. And, I believe, poison to all the healthy.

Bowing and scraping

The English routinely put their own healthy needs aside to maintain the fiction of the superiority of the royal family.

Gender confusion? More bow than curtsey but still the achiever deferring to the inheritor.

At royal events, powerful achievers from many domains demean themselves as they bow or curtsey to a royal person who has done nothing to earn his or her position.

The goal of a knighthood or some other royal-bestowed honor is a singular focus for legions of politicians, business-people, and even entertainers.

And this means that their behavior and their methods are constrained because in the end their actions can’t be allowed to threaten the possibility of the desired  outcome.

What a neurotic and codependent way to force conformity.

What a brilliant way to ensure that nobody of real excellence or creativity will ever get close to power.

And yes, that includes you and me, fellow gifteds.

A new king at (tennis) court

People have a lot of difficulty with the idea that the monarchy is so destructive.

So here’s an analogy to try to explain how fundamental the problem is: how it ultimately distorts the psyche of every cogniscent being.

Imagine this:

Rafael Nadal wins the men’s tennis championship at Wimbledon. As he lifts the cup over his head he proclaims:

King Rafael I. By Divine Right, with all his successors, Eternal Champion of Wimbledon and all other tennis venues.

“From now on, this cup will be won each year by me or one of my children and by one of their children thereafter down through the generations.”

The spectators cheer.

The officials nod their approval.

King Rafa is born.

And from now on into eternity the rules of the game and the reporting of the game will have to be constantly amended to keep up the appearance that King Rafael and his offspring are indeed the best fitted to be the crowned heads of Wimbledon.

• Better players will have to be persuaded to take second place or take up another game.
• Promoters will constantly have to present the Nadals as the highest tennis family in the world.
• Legions of amateur players must be taught to start seeing themselves as subjects of the tennis monarch, a personage whose athletic supremacy cannot be questioned even if s/he’s in a wheel chair.
• Millions of people must distort their thinking and build aberrations into their inner psychological architecture so as to accommodate the tennis fiction.

This is exactly what’s happened in the English game called “Head of State.”

Its ramifications are destructive from the highest family in the land to the lowest (to borrow a royal designator).

Also, though it may not seem relevant, this perverse structure threatens the integrity of everyone in the world.

Humans cannot tolerate an unlimited number of logical inconsistencies and, let’s face it, the English queen is pretty much queen for the world.

Create your context

As with all things gifted, we must develop strategies in order to remain unaffected by this massive daily absurdity.

To protect yourself, first recognize that you didn’t create this situation and that there is something you can do about changing it: http://www.republic.org.uk/

Change won’t happen fast but it’s very relieving to make a healthy assertion in the face of a suffocating national neurosis.

Then recognize that you are unique and that if you adopted the same labelling system as the royal family your uniqueness would be as obvious in your name as it is in theirs.

Not just Tom, Dick or Harry but Thomas I, Richard III and Henry VIII. One only of each.

Selling your birth . . . right

The Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha family – or the Windsors, to use their alias -  have done a brilliant job of selling their birth up, making it into a luxury brand that supersedes all others.

Each one a bold and unique work of art. Keith Tyson's "Large Field Array"

And you can do the same. Make of your giftedness a golden crown of specialness. Be grateful for it and humble in your accepting of it. Noblesse oblige.

Too often we gifted individuals suffer so much that we become angry and resentful (Moi? Surely not!).

Instead, we can try to be gracious, recognizing that we have been given much.

Don’t let the sheer size of the world’s population defeat you. Instead of seeing yourself as lost in a crowd, or a loner outside the crowd, imagine yourself as a unique object in a collection of unique objects: an original artwork of the MaPa school.

And wait, there’s more . . .

Do the other things the royal family does.

• Epithet yourself. To differentiate yourself is to take power. I’ll be Christopher the Gifted, worthy successor to Ethelred the Unready or William the Conqueror. And happy counterpoint to dreary Edward the Confessor. When you pick your own designator make sure it feels just a litle bit ostentatious or surprising. Ivar the Boneless might not sound too terrifying (except in a Stephen King kind of way) but he was a potent Viking whom we still remember.
• Point to the Divine Right of the Gifted. This is your source of power. Put simply, it means you recognise that you are a child of the universe and it is to the universe that you owe your accountability. And no-one else.
• Publicize yourself and your message. Put: “By the grace of the universe, Gifted and Defender of the Truth” on your metaphorical coinage.
• Have a Gifted Wedding. Learn to appease the multitude – or your immediate family – with flags and geegaws while you get on with the serious business of consolidating your power.

You will not perpetuate codependency by doing these things. Unlike the poor old royal family, you have fundamental truth on your side. Truth – as in natural law – must ultimately prevail. Even when we don’t know what it is.

A toast to the happy couple

And so a toast, to send them on their way:

"I wish I'd been less of a gent, more of a Robespierre. For the good of the country, of course."

“Good luck to you both.

“May you have a long and happy marriage.

“And I hope you, William, will never be king and you, Kate, will never be queen.

“I hope you’re freed to head off and enjoy the billions you’ll inherit without fear of paparazzi or having to live within the constricting shell of a forced persona.

“If this happy state of affairs should come about, please recognize the debt you owe to the gifted who’ve been pushing for it for centuries. John Ball; Oliver Cromwell; Thomas Paine and all the rest.

“Set up an Institute to Promote the Interests of the Gifted.

“And I’ll forego the Baronetcy.

“Ciao!”

cjc

It is much harder to write authentically.

Before you start you have to feel yourself inside your authenticity.

"If only I could stop running I could really fly."

You must feel an undeviating connection with universal law and know that you are presenting your unique vision of truth as only you can experience it.

You must feel it pass through you, untrammeled and unquestioned.

You must allow it its own life.

And that’s hard to do when you’re running for your own.

Uncertainty impedes access to truth

My last few months have demonstrated some truths about gifted functioning and have also confirmed – for me at least – the truth of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

The primary truth is that gifted adults need environmental stability in order to maintain a sense of their gifted identity.

And here’s how I found out:

Last October, Susan and I moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Bournemouth, UK. It was a big move.

Not only did we have to move ourselves, our belongings and our cats, we also had to sell our house, car, and loads of ‘stuff’. A coordinating nightmare.

I also had to start a new practice in a new location as soon as I arrived.

Maslow’s pyramid of . . . woe?

A major transition of this kind is a real test of persistence and resilience.

Maslow was right: upstairs is more fun.

For us, higher life issues such as meaning and spirituality went out of the window as we dropped down through the layers of Maslow’s  hierarchy, finally touching bottom in the basic food and shelter section.

As the corporate bods are prone to say: “When you’re up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp”.

Only now, four months and a few days after we drove out of Tulsa, do I feel I’ve reduced the alligator population sufficiently to be able to write anything more thoughtful than an angry note to the telephone company.

What has this to do with being gifted?

The gifted population doesn’t take kindly to being forced to dwell for extended periods in the hand-to-mouth domain.

Our talents and drives push us rapidly up the requirements scale with a powerful need to satisfy our lust for original thought, creative action, and the joy of connection to the universe.

This doesn’t sit well with the need to restrain one’s impatience with a slow-witted clerk at Sky HQ who’s never heard of anyone installing two separate telephones in their house before.

Or the utility company that can’t tell you whether it supplies you or not.

We lost hundreds of valuable hours in ought-to-be trivial pursuits that were made significant by the poor planning, customer contempt and systemic stupidity of the institutions we were forced to deal with.

G – r – r- r – r – r!

No identity, gifted or otherwise

While battling unseen enemies, I continued to function at a reasonably high level. I was organizing, working, planning, ‘moving in’.

"Can you see the real me?" 'Quadrophenia', The Who.

But from a gifted perspective, I felt “I”  had completely disappeared.

My true self had been fragmented by a hail of logistical and administrative shrapnel.

To maintain balance, I would regularly and consciously regroup and re-centre myself.

However, I found it hard to feel a direct connection with the universe when physically tired, logistically disconnected, and under constant bombardment from the mundane world.

I was a classic case of being out of my comfort zone.

The psychological comfort zone

For the gifted, our ‘comfort zone’ begins with a simple truism: we are super sensitive.

"You might think you can see my carapace but I promise you it's really invisible."

We are as aware and as prone to injury as any sea anemone. And our awareness and vulnerability is even more psychological than physical.

So we develop a psychological protection – an invisible carapace or impermeable membrane designed to enable us to thrive even in risky psychological worlds.

This invisible covering is a structure built from rationalizations, denials, compensations and other  defensive constructs.

We use these as filters to reduce the painful impact of ugly sights, hostile encounters, and our powerlessness in the face of ‘stupidity’.

Because so many of the factors we need to defend against are local and cultural in nature, much of our defense is not universally applicable. It is adapted to our current bio-psychosocial environment.

So when we move to a different environment our existing cover no longer works. We feel raw, exposed, in pain.

Until we’ve built a new one.

Constructing a new comfort zone

From the comfort zone perspective, a major move is actually a process of deconstruction, fragmentation, reconstruction.

It would have looked silly in Tulsa but it works fine over here.

It is not that “I” have changed. It’s my environment, the things that impinge on me as the simple result of being human.

These include the daily pressures and stimuli, the cultural assumptions and expectations, the impact of the weather, political attitudes, laws, the way ‘they’ dress.

And I experience each of these differences as a separate physical, emotional or  intellectual jab.

As we have seen, the protective covering I created for myself – albeit unconsciously -  in Tulsa doesn’t work at all over here.

Its psychological battlements, curtain walls,  turrets, towers and arrow slits are the wrong height, misplaced or facing the wrong way.

(Not) Feeling the heat

Also, some of the things I had to armour myself against over there do not exist here, and vice versa.

To take a physically-related example, I worked hard to build the mental ability to tolerate the great heat of an Oklahoma summer and even to thrive in it.

For a long time I couldn’t stand it, staying resentfully inside my air-conditioned home

Then I found – or created? -  an inner sense of a pioneering self who would tackle the heat head on, rowing, running and mowing the lawn to the point of heat exhaustion. My sweat was the mark of my heroism.

Modern British hero?

Perversely, here in the UK, I find no relief in the knowledge that I won’t have to go through that pain again.

Instead, I miss the sense of triumph, the small plank of victory that contributed skeletal support to my amorphous feeling of integrity and identity.

So my inner hero must put aside the Tulsa experience, tolerate a period of uncertainty, and then construct a new victory plank to contribute the same support function.

I’m not sure it’ll be climate related. Somehow, putting on a raincoat and splashing through the grey mush of a soggy English day doesn’t have quite the same heroic feel as sculling into the teeth of the wind in 40C heat.

But give me time and I will find a new structure and a new sense of the same ‘me’.

Recovery time

And maybe this is the point. There are some things that are simply time-dependent.

Physically, we know that it is the time of recovery between workouts that actually builds our muscles and improves our fitness.

I believe it’s the same psychologically.

And I believe we gifted adults are perfectly placed to make our recovery times unusually valuable, because:

• We are much more conscious of what is going on.
• We are readier to let go of things that no longer work.
• We have a zest for life that promotes creative solutions.
• We can’t tolerate being locked in air-conditioned rooms for long!

Trust the change

Trust the process and your life will become a merry dance.

Not all moves are geographical.

We ‘move’ jobs, partners, belief systems, activities.

We experience ‘moves’ as others come and go, laws change, economies stutter.

But I suspect that all moves follow a similar deconstruction, fragmentation, reconstruction process.

And if you trust your giftedness by allowing your ‘moves’ to happen in a conscious but non-interventionist way, they will serve you well.

And the swamp will be drained.

And I’ll return to blogging again.

Ciao!

"Do we have a message for you?!"

I’ve been jumpy and unable to concentrate, constantly looking over my metaphorical shoulder to see if I’ve overlooked something more important and urgent than attending to these words.

Yet I can’t see anything there beyond a gathered phalanx of self-destructive messages:

“Who do you think you are?”; “Stop trying to be so clever!”; “What makes you so special?”; “What right do you have to pontificate?”.

This experience does seem rather personal but I don’t imagine it’s unique to me. Its insistence tells me it must be what I’m required to address.

What follows is a mixture of fantasy and reality but I hope it’s interesting and useful nevertheless.

The source of self-condemnation

The root of those dismissive messages is not hard to find. Just recently a revered family figure responded to a thoughtful remark of mine by dismissing it to the assembled gathering: “Don’t take any notice. It’s only Christopher.”

And so it is . . .

And only Christopher has his complement in only Jason, only William, and only Andrew; in only Susan, only Sarah and only Britney.

And it’s no coincidence that ‘only’ rhymes with ‘lonely’. There are many lonely gifted people, absent-mindedly kept at arm’s length by the society they strive to subscribe to and support.

Down the street

As I write, my mind offers up a visualization of my inner experience of being haunted by these messages.

I’m in a terraced street, narrowly enclosed by nineteenth-century red-brick and rigid sensibility.

It’s the kind of street that led to these words from William Blake:

"My way or the highway."

“I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

“In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.”

Yes, ‘Blake’ is an anagram of ‘Bleak’.

I am being driven out of this street by thousands of contemptuous words. The letters race at me, jeer at me. Sentences form and chase me, teasing me as if in a cartoon.

Feeling hurt and betrayed, I see I’ve been marked as a foreign body, an intruder. I try to explain but already I know the assaultive words are in service to the society of the street. I must be expelled to maintain the homogeneity of the larger society ‘they’ call ‘us’.

“You’re not one of us!”  The words are never said but fill the air as I’m pushed from the street. I feel the pain of separation but it’s not my connections I’m being parted from. It’s my efforts at forming connections, my struggle to fit in.

 I never really belonged. These houses were built for those who fit.

And I am unfit.

The imagery fades, its point made. But I can’t stop thinking . . .

It hurts, this virtual exile, but my gifted nature compels me to see through the pain so as to make sense of the experience. It’s odd. I’m being kicked out but I don’t feel like a victim. It’s as if I’ve been given my freedom.

The mutual pursuit of authenticity

"Don't worry! We're leaving! We're destined to taste knowledge rather than live under your protective ignorance!"

Suddenly I see I owe a debt of gratitude to that persistent stream of incomprehension and dismissive disinterest.

By driving me away it protects me from work which, though honorable, I am not suited for. It defends me against relationships doomed to failure. It contains a certain knowledge of the universal benefit of rejecting that which is incompatible.

The fact that the messages are sharp and I experience pain is just a designed-in feature of human nature. It’s a quality that ensures that variations will be forced out into the open.

There they will either thrive or die but at least they will do their part.

We’re always ready to settle for a little comfort so it takes a lot of pain to move us. Especially when the future is unknown. It’s not as if there’s a guarantee of a place where “only Christopher” or “only” anyone else will feel as if they belong.

Nevertheless, we do belong. In the universe, on this planet, at this time. We are that special – and no more.

Just like you.

Your experience of ‘only-ness’ will be different from mine.

Perhaps you were accused of: “Doing a Jonathan” or: “Just being Gemma”.

Possibly your mother said: “Paralegal” every time you said: “Artist”.

Maybe you were condemned as “fresh” or “above yourself”.

"How come the other ducks can't see how beautiful I am?"

The variations are endless. But the message is the same as to the Ugly Duckling:

“Quack! Quack! Get out!
Quack! Quack! Get out!
Quack! Quack! Get out of town!”

Do yourself a favor. Hear the rejecting quacks and don’t try to distort yourself into being a duck just so you can stay.

Better for everybody to be a lonely swan on the lake than a scorned mallard wannabe in a miserable puddle in the gutter.

And it might just turn out to be better than you think . . .

See you at the swannery!

"There are more of us than you may realize!"

"Each day I see my giftedness more clearly reflected before me."

In itself this is not too much of a surprise. Many clients react to the realization of their giftedness in the same way I did: initial relief, often accompanied by tears, is followed by a dismissive shake of the head and a state of defiant skepticism.

However, for most clients, initial rejection dissolves in the face of reality as their life events and responses consistently mirror the criteria for giftedness so aptly identified by other writers.

For others, however, acceptance seems impossible. “Don’t call me gifted!” they cry, as if threatened by the label.

And it seems to be the women who resist harder than the men.

Real women aren’t gifted

I find it hard to write: “I am a gifted man.” It feels like an invitation to be scorned and dismissed. “Real men aren’t gifted,” says the distorted logic inside me, “so if I’m gifted I’m not a real man”.

In the same way, it seems, gifted women are not real women.

How come? Presumably it’s because “gifted” is a label that, unlike “helpful” or “neighborly”, is perceived in a negative way.

So who might object to a gifted woman? Here is a list of possible culprits:

"Don't cry darling. You can forget those nasty books and be just like mommy now."

• Mother. Not only is her daughter a younger and prettier version of herself, but if she’s gifted she’s special in other ways too. Any mother-daughter competitiveness will swing into action around this one.
• Father. The man who says: “I want her to have the best education available.” is the same one who later says: “I’m your father and I don’t have to listen to your darn fool ideas.”
• Female friends. Women in groups can be brutal in discouraging difference. The need for affiliation has quenched many a woman’s acknowledgment of her giftedness. It doesn’t do to break ranks with the sisterhood.
• Male friends and would-be mates. Heterosexual women still seem to be largely convinced that they need a man to complete them as human beings. The male of the species is not renowned for his embrace of female superiority – other than sometimes in fantasy – so the man-needing woman keeps her enhanced sensibilities and giftedness firmly under wraps.
• Everybody else. Gifted people can be pretty high maintenance. We constantly (and often unconsciously) challenge the prevailing comfortable mood. We are emotionally intense. We are highly sensitive – to physical phenomena as well as human ones.

Given such a comprehensive list of potential offendees, why wouldn’t a girl prefer a J-Lo butt to being gifted?

Maybe the reasons start here:

An imbalance of power

Giftedness is power.

One of the most intriguing statistics in “A Woman’s Nation,” a recently released survey by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, is this: 69% of women think men resent women who have more power than they do. Only 49% of men agree.

Don't recognize yourself? The distorted visions of frightened inner males are not the truth about you.

My personal hunch – based on decades of observing people in the corporate workplace as well as my work as therapist and coach – is that the women are probably right and the men have a hard time admitting it.

To the small boy inside every man, a powerful woman carries the threatening demeanor of a posing body-builder. It’s true that not every man is dominated by his inner small boy. However, a good many are and, in the turmoil of inner male voices, the small boy always makes his contribution.

Forbes magazine recently asked a few from its list of the 100 Most Influential Women in the World for their personal reflections on power. Here are some of their responses [together with some examples of threatened inner-male reactions]:

• “Power is the ability to create change in the world” - Tensie Whelan, Executive Director, Rainforest Alliance [Oh my God! Napoleonic ambition! Worldwide change! And rainforests are only good for turning into superyachts anyway!]

• Power is not being tied to any person or any thing. “If a deal or a relationship does not make sense, I can walk.” – Lynn Tilton, CEO, Patriarch Partners [She can walk?! Leave me? I know - I'll get her pregnant and economically dependent  and then she won't be going anywhere!]
• “Power is one’s ability to inspire positive change…to impact the global village.” – Tina Sharkey, Chairman [sic] and Global President, BabyCenter [Complete male-terror. New-age globalization combined with baby expertise.]
• Power is confronting “the demons that prevent us as human beings from living up to our full potential.” – Cheryl Dorsey, MD, President, Echoing Green [Demons? The only demon is a woman who can be an MD as well as a President AND be running a social entrepreneurship investment company. (And that's only the start. Check her out.)]
• Power is having “the ability to change the world in powerful ways through collaborative and collective efforts.” – Linda Avey, Co-Founder and Co-President, 23and ME  [There it is again. Changing the world - and in that touchy-feely socialist way rather than just by stamping your boot on it.]

Once my inner little Christopher gets over his fears, what I find most interesting about these women’s words is that they express their interest in power in abstractions and process-oriented statements.

Of course, they are speaking for publication and would probably hide a truth such as: “What I really like about power is rubbing my mother’s/father’s/teacher’s face in their own BS!”. But on the whole I suspect that what they say is true.

Women, after all, are the process-driven gender. Males read the “Tao te Ching” to learn about power. The Tao tells them to adopt the way of the female.

Women have more power than ever before.

In  “A Women’s Nation” Mary Ann Mason reports that women receive:

• 52 percent of high school diplomas,
• 62 percent of associate’s degrees,
• 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and
• 50 percent of doctoral degrees and professional degrees.
• Women are running more than 10 million businesses with combined annual sales of $1.1 trillion.
• Women are responsible for making 80% of consumer buying decisions.

80 percent! So much for the idea of the all-decisive patriarch.

But three problems persist.

• First, I’m committing the sin of confusing giftedness with eminence. I’m doing this quite deliberately up to this point because I believe the world can benefit hugely from women being able to see that they can attain eminence. And that this eminence does not have to come by adopting the male way.
• Second, women have babies.
• Third, women have parents.

Hi there gifted one! Meet your grandmother . . . father . . . mother . . . child . . .

A major elephant in the gifted woman’s living room is that nearly 86% of women agree that women today still bear the primary responsibility for caring for their sick and elderly parents.

In addition, 85% of women believe that where both partners have jobs, it is the woman who takes on more responsibility for the home and family.

I do not believe that this should be so, and not just from the perspective of injustice. The widespread acceptance of this caring ‘responsibility’ too often results in resentful parents and correspondingly resentful children, or resentful carers and tortured elders.

However, it is a massively reinforced social pressure and may not always be denied. So, I suggest that when gifted women have babies they can be gifted mothers. Or if they must be carers, then be gifted carers.

You don’t have to be captains of industry or firebrand politicians. You can pass your unique influence on through your children, your children’s friends and your parents’ social groups.

Embrace your gifted female-ness

The recognition and understanding of the gifted is largely a female-led discipline. This is unusual in the world of psychology and human development that has largely been dominated by males. For every Melanie or Karen there are three Sigmunds, Karls, Carls, Josef’s, BFs and so on.

However, in the specific field of giftedness it is female insight and intellectual rigor that holds sway. Here are just some of the most influential names in the gifted universe:

• Leta Hollingworth
• Annemarie Roeper
• Mary Rocamora
• Linda Kreger Silverman
• Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

This is not to detract from some very significant male contributions but is intended to focus female readers on the possibility of creating a new sisterhood, one in which the chaos and difference of giftedness is embraced rather than shunned.

Don’t be eminent, be gifted

Even though I’m stuck in a male-centric view of giftedness which, taken to its full potential, results in some form of eminence, you can do better. Here’s a definition of giftedness that says nothing about achievement:

• “Giftedness is asynchronous development in which advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm. This asynchrony increases with higher intellectual capacity. The uniqueness of the gifted renders them particularly vulnerable and requires modifications in parenting, teaching and counseling in order for them to develop optimally.” The Columbus Group, 1991

As you can see, being gifted does not force you into some branch of the elite. It merely means you’re different.

I’ll conclude with this extract from a paper by Linda Kreger Silverman, founder of The Columbus Group. It explains why it is so important to claim your label even if you want to do it quietly.

"Shall I embrace my giftedness or just drown it?"

“Gifted children and adults see the world differently because of the complexity of their thought processes and their emotional intensity. People often say to them, “Why do you make everything so complicated?” “Why do you take everything so seriously?” “Why is everything so important to you?”

“The gifted are “too” everything: too sensitive, too intense, too driven, too honest, too idealistic, too moral, too perfectionistic, too much for other people! Even if they try their entire lives to fit in, they still feel like misfits.

“The damage we do to gifted children and adults by ignoring this phenomenon is far greater than the damage we do by labeling it. Without the label for their differences, the gifted come up with their own label: “I must be crazy. No one else is upset by this injustice but me.”

So please. Don’t settle for crazy. Don’t be a woman. Be gifted.

Thank you.

A triumph of collaboration: pork tenderloin with chocolate beef cream broth.

That means that once again these are much longer than typical posts and cover these topics:

• Prorexia: a cure for a jaded appetite for life.
• How to maintain your autonomy in a collaborative partnership.
• How effective a collaborator are you?

The articles on collaboration have a link to a PDF containing the test forms described in “How effective a collaborator are you?”. You can download the PDF and copy it as many times as you like, using it to test your friends, family and work colleagues.

You’ll find the new articles by clicking here or on the “Dynamic Living Archive” tag at the head of the page.

I hope you find them tasty and easily digestible.

These articles tend to be much longer than typical posts and cover these topics:

The compelling power of "Dynamic Living" as portrayed by John Singer Sargent.

• What is Dynamic Living?
• Issues for Gifted Adults (By D. Lovecky Ph.D.)
• Profiting from your own intelligence system.
• Is there such a thing as a Geographical Cure?
• Love: a practical understanding, and
• Love yourself and grow powerful.

You’ll find them by clicking here or on the “Dynamic Living Archive” tag at the head of the page.

Happy reading!

The first question from the floor was very positive: “How do we proceed from here?”.

How scornful the very gifted can be

Her spontaneous response was unguarded and arrogant. Her look said: “What planet do you live on?” and her voice dripped with scorn: “Isn’t it obvious?”

Her mentor and major supporter, sitting at the back of the room, could not quite stifle his groan. How could she have done that?

How indeed. Sadly, not every gifted characteristic is dipped in brilliance. In fact, there is one frequently seen quality – asynchronous development – that challenges even those who love the gifted dearly.

Just as we gifted adults are likely to declare: “How can they be so stupid!?” so the rest of the world, witnessing our seemingly inexplicable gaffes, are going to say the same. And they’ll often often preface it with: “You think you’re so effing smart?”.

Asynchronous development in the gifted

Asynchronous development can take many forms but in the opening example we have a fairly common type: situational judgment lagging behind intellect.

Such judgment calls for an understanding and constant awareness of complex unwritten rules about social behaviors. These are precisely the sorts of nuances which the gifted, in their race to explore, discover and reveal ‘the truth’, will often overlook.

It starts in childhood, when the young gifted person’s facility with logic and reason amazes everyone who comes into contact with her or him. Parents and family, however, quickly discover that logic and reason are not useful tools to develop judgment, social adroitness and tact.

When we learn such things we do so through exposure to a variety of experiences and interpersonal situations. And that’s another challenge for gifted adults. We learn early on that we are our own best company so we can easily ignore social challenges if they get in the way of our fascinating internal adventures.

As a result, we may not learn social interaction at the same rate that other children and adolescents do. Even so, by our mid-twenties, the gap between judgment and intellect will typically have closed considerably.

"How could you ask such a thing!?"

But we will continue to have lapses, especially when under stress. And our brilliantly-wrought presentations will continue to miss their marks.

I have an unfortunate tendency to greet newcomers to our local rowing club with a jocular cry of: “How much do you weigh?”

This is a vital piece of information in a sport dominated by power ratios and boats tailored to strict weight ranges. However, most would regard the individual’s name as being of higher priority, at least on first meeting.

I am trying to cure myself of it. And, being gifted, I call my perceived strengths together to give me the leverage I need to change.

Shedding the scorn: focus on your desired outcome

Those strengths are my (and your) above-advertised powers of reason and intellect. If I remember to use them beforehand to work out what I’m really trying to achieve, I can then focus more successfully on what’s important.

For example, the young woman presenter would have realized that her goal was not to make a brilliant presentation but to win her managers to her way of thinking. From that point she could have analyzed their strengths (good hearts) and made accommodation for their weaknesses (their executive vision). And she would have managed the interactions much more skilfully.

As for me, I will remind myself that a rowing club’s first priority is enthusiastic members. Weight and age data can be gathered once they’ve joined up and understand its relevance. And then they won’t be driven away by important but momentarily inappropriate questions, however friendly their intent.

And I shall still feel as if I’ve contributed to the success of the whole.

I thought I could apply the same study model to other prospective clients.

Another good study?

I took a carefully prepared copy, complete with all its tables, spreadsheets and detailed business development options, along to an old friend who was in a position to create new opportunities. I thought it could be both interesting and profitable for both of us.

He didn’t open the carefully presented ring binder but simply weighed it in his hand: “Good study,” he laughed, “At least eight pounds!” And he put it aside.

I was deeply hurt. This was my precious work that he was dismissing and degrading. We didn’t do business together and our friendship gradually ceased as well.

In retrospect I was probably demonstrating a typical gifted characteristic: hypersensitivity. In fact, he wasn’t dismissing my work. He was merely making a comment based on his understanding of our marketplace: the mass of a study was an essential sales quality. Its content was arguably of less significance but in any case he knew that anything I produced would be of high quality.

So he didn’t really need to look at the study. It was me that needed him to. I wanted him to be astonished and delighted by what I’d done.

In his brisk way he may even have been congratulating me on my perception of the market needs. But I was too hurt to even think about asking what he meant.

Acute sensitivity of the gifted and creative

Gifted and creative adults tend to be acutely sensitive. Or maybe that should read “sensitized” because our rawness results from ceaseless abrasion from an early age.

As a result, we have a tendency to experience insult, whether mild or serious, where none was intended. Perhaps someone turns away from us while we’re talking to them. Or makes a joke about a piece of our creative work.

Can you imagine how Leonardo would have responded if a monk had nudged him after he’d finished the Mona Lisa, whispering: “Looks like she bought her gin from old Paolo down the canal!”? And if that had happened, would Leonardo have laughed uproariously at the jolly fun of it all? I rather doubt it. Creative artists put themselves on the line when they make manifest their visions and deserve respect for their courage, not humor.

However, the written words alone aren’t sufficient to tell us whether Leonardo should respond with a tired smile or an angry retort. That’s because the words alone cannot reveal the monk’s intention.

Hostile or only clumsy?

This picture shows a broken ornament. But the picture can’t show whether the ornament was broken by clumsiness or or aggression.

Is this the result of hostility or clumsiness?

Now imagine that the ornament represents you and me when we are hurt. How are we to know whether the hurt was an accident or intentional?

I abide by the general idea that there’s no such thing as an accident. However, it’s certain that some actions are more consciously intentional than others. It’s the nature of that conscious intention that I’m seeking to identify correctly.

It takes only one thing for us to feel hurt: the perception that we’ve been slighted, attacked, insulted or injured in some way.

This perception is trained from an early age. According to Kathleen Stasser Berger, in “The Developing Person Through Childhood”, there are two types of children who are more likely than average to perceive another’s action as a deliberate attempt to hurt.  She classifies both as rejected but in different ways:

• aggressive-rejected, which means they’re rejected for their antagonistic, confrontational behavior.

• withdrawn-rejected who are rejected because of their timid, withdrawn, anxious behavior.

These apparently different types are actually similar in several ways:

• They misinterpret social situations.

• They dysregulate their emotions.

• They are likely to be mistreated at home.

The social cognition of gifted and creative  individuals

To take just the first of this list, our ability to interpret social situations accurately  is known as social cognition.

In general, social cognition leads  contented and averagely well-liked children to assume that social slights – from a push to an unkind remark – are accidental and not intended to harm.

Therefore a social slight does not provoke fear or self-doubt in them as it does in a withdrawn-rejected child who might lie awake at night wondering why it happened. Nor does it provoke anger, as it might in the aggressive-rejected child, who would respond with the reactive hostility that opens the door to an escalation in aggression.

Many gifted children fall into one or the other of these two categories. Their chronic sensitized state leads them to feel attacked by the rough clumsiness of ‘normal’ life.

Hostile or just plain clumsy?

Worse, their own sensitivity where others are concerned further encourages them to believe any social slight must be deliberate. This is because they know they would only have said such a thing if they’d intended to hurt.

Of course, gifted children become gifted adults and may, because of their confusion around social intention, slowly begin to avoid social situations.  They may even experience themselves as clumsy, awkward, hostile and inept in a group.

Learning to tell hostility from clumsiness

In order to proceed with confidence into social situations – whether at work or elsewhere – it is clearly important to be able to read the signs of intention accurately.

Sometimes it’s obvious. If someone greets you with an expletive or a punch on the nose it’s safe to assume they’re being hostile.  It is when an action or statement is ambiguous that we may have more difficulty. Here’s a checklist of hints to help you make accurate assessments:

1. Give them the benefit of the doubt. The average person is amazingly tolerant and/or sloppy by the standards of a gifted perfectionist. They don’t mean anything by it.
2. Ask. If you know them you can say: “Ouch. That hurt. Did you intend it to?” If they are quick to say sorry or to deny any hostile intent, accept their word for it. If they do it again, you have reason to start to wonder.
3. Learn to listen to apologies. This is hard for gifted adults because they become so used to listening to themselves and making their own assessments they can forget others may actually have something relevant to say. By listening to apologies you will learn to discern the difference between the false and the sincere even when both are clumsily expressed.
4. Ask yourself how well the person knows you. If the answer is “not well” then even if they are showing hostility it can hardly be aimed at the real you. Rather, they are insulting some image of their own that they have projected onto you. This can happen quite a lot because gifted individuals can sound very authoritative and can thus stir up all kinds of anti-authority stuff.
5. Ask yourself whether you feel hostile – contemptuous, scornful,  dismissive etc – toward them. If so, your own judgement may be coming back to bite you. So try to foster a state of benign compassion toward all.

And above all, try to see that normal social discourse is not unlike trying to find your way out of a packed subway car. You’ll be pushed, elbowed, impeded and possibly cursed. But casually, without malice. And you will find your way out onto the platform. At the right stop, too.

Good traveling!

• - Their sense of the value of time makes it hard for them to communicate without a specific purpose. So if they’re not looking for a hook-up or a job, for example, they become very twitchy.
• - Their inability to make small talk “like everybody else” makes them feel inadequate and nervous – and excluded.
• - Their compensatory behaviors – drinking, eating, smoking, flirting, etc – actually make them feel worse about themselves.

How the rest of the party sees the gifted individual.

For many of us, the only thing worse than being at a party is not being invited in the first place. Even though we might comfort ourselves with references to ugly ducklings and Groucho Marx’s “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member,” we still end up feeling pretty lonely and rejected.

How the gifted can thrive at a party.

Despite any gloomy history of failed party-going, there are ways that gifted individuals can use to overcome the them-me perception gap.

How the gifted individual feels in relation to the rest of the party.

You can actually do more than just survive a party: you can leave it in a warm frame of mind and with your sense of integrity intact. Here’s how:

1)  You can practice seeing yourself the way others see you, not as you experience yourself (see the pictures on this page). You really are a handsome or beautiful human being who looks as if you have a lot to offer the other people there.  And it’s true: you do.

2) You can modify your expectations. If you go along with the hope of meeting a matching combination of intellect  and creativity you’re probably going to be disappointed. Just go along hoping to find a friendly – not necessarily stimulating – conversation or two and to indulge in some contemplative people-watching.

3) Drop any idea that you’re going to make people love you. It doesn’t matter how attractive you make yourself or how interesting your thoughts and experiences are – they don’t want to know. Your vitality, originality and wit will blow over them and they’ll find someone less intimidating to talk with.

4) On the contrary, go with the intention of making them feel loved. Congratulate them on their outfits or their choice of music, compliment them for their home-made dip, and – above all – listen to them. They will reward you with warmth and admiration that you can live off for weeks.

And one day you will find yourself listening to someone and something they say will really click with you and you’ll feel the power of human contact when it takes place between two potent equals. Irresistible!