The UnScripted Mind
Join your host Professional Counselor, Jim Cunningham, as he dives into the complex world of mental wellness. From anxiety and depression to resilience and recovery, "The Unscripted Mind" offers candid conversations and expert insights, encouraging listeners to confront their own journeys while gaining tools and perspectives that promote healing and understanding—one unscripted conversation at a time.
The UnScripted Mind
Brilliance & Burden: The Duality of a Gifted Mind
But there's more to the story. Discover the fascinating world of gifted individuals' unique intensities, like imaginational and psychomotor intensity, often mistaken for ADHD. Hear about Chuck, a kindergartner with a knack for weaving elaborate tales, and understand the difficulties these kids face in middle school. From perfectionism to the challenge of choosing a career due to multi-potentiality, we discuss it all. We also explore strategies to help highly empathetic and altruistic individuals manage their intense feelings, offering practical advice for parents, educators, and gifted individuals themselves. Join us for an insightful episode filled with valuable takeaways and expert perspectives.
The goal of The UnScripted Mind Podcast is to give you fresh perspectives, practical insights and tools you can use to give you more choices, self-awareness and control of your feelings, reactions and behaviors.
Are you the type of person that overthinks a simple text message? Maybe you can see the side of every problem, but then not know where you stand on that very problem. Do you take tags out of all your clothes or wear your socks inside out? Do you ever feel out of sync with those around you? Well, today we're discussing the myths and the mysteries of giftedness, because being called gifted isn't always the present people think it is. We're going to dive into the blessings and the cursings of the gifted label, from the wild misconceptions people have to the things that most people never knew, like how these people can be both Einsteins on one hand and world-class warriors at the same time. It's not all smooth sailing in the land of the gifted. No, we're talking about sensory overloads, perfectionism and why gifted people, not just kids, might be the best procrastinators you've ever met. All on this episode of the Unscripted Mind. Welcome to the Unscripted Mind, where our goal is to give you fresh perspectives, practical insights and tools you can use to give you more choices, increase your awareness and have better control of your feelings, reactions and behaviors.
Jim Cunningham:My name is Jim Cunningham and I'm a licensed professional counselor, and today we're talking about giftedness, and that's kind of a vague term. So what do I mean by that? Well, giftedness is when someone has a natural talent or ability that stands out, whether it's in art, music, math, reading, leadership and a lot of different areas. But they tend to be in the 95th to 98th percentile in at least one category or skill. That means that only 5% or less people are as advanced as they are in that one particular area. So it's like having a supercharged brain that picks up on things faster, asks deeper questions and thinks very creatively. It's not just about getting good grades. Gifted people might excel in anything from playing an instrument to solving complex problems.
Jim Cunningham:People usually can spot this idea of giftedness or giftedness in their kids early on, noticing that they might be ahead of their peers in a lot of areas. So, for example, I see some clients who started reading chapter books when they were in kindergarten. But see, it's not all smooth sailing and being gifted can also come with the challenges like feeling different or setting really high standards for themselves. So while giftedness can be amazing and that's what most people think it is just being smart and very cool it sometimes needs a little extra support to help navigate the ups and downs. See, most people get the label of being gifted and nobody ever tells them that. By the way, there's some downsides to this and life is going to be a little bit of a different life experience for you than most other people. So being smart or highly intelligent in one area or very talented in one area is another way of saying. That comes with its own set of challenges. So, when you look across the nation, approximately 18 to 25% of our gifted students are high school dropouts nationwide, and that's from a variety of different studies. This statistic highlights the challenges that gifted kids face in traditional education settings, which might not always meet their unique needs.
Jim Cunningham:Now, when I say intense desire to learn things, I don't mean school things. I mean things that they are interested in. They're really good at doing a lot of self-study, spending hours on YouTube, watching videos, being on Pinterest, googling or searching things. So this intense desire to learn things is very cool, but it also gets them into a lot of trouble because they will what if themselves? To death, what if this, what if that which leads to a ton of anxiety and a lot of the kids who do this. Unlike most kids, they have the second and third order way of thinking. For example, when 9-11 happened and planes flew into buildings, most kids said, well, that's tragic. People who have second and third order ways of thinking and go down the rabbit hole think well, we have planes here too and we have buildings here too, it could happen here. So that leads into a whole different level of concern, anxiety just because of more awareness, and again, it's that way of thinking that can kind of get them into trouble. They also need to know why things need to make sense, which, if you have a kid that has this, they're going to ask you a lot of questions and they'll want you to explain every rule and all of that. If things don't make sense, it's really hard for them to get on board with that, and I see this in a lot of my high school clients as well. A lot of the things they feel like they're being taught aren't preparing them for adult life. So they don't think it cares, it doesn't matter, and they plus they also think they might have a better way of doing things.
Jim Cunningham:The other thing that this looks like is not being able to turn the brain off to go to sleep at night. So there's a lot of the brain is kind of always going. It's an amazing machine when it has something to do, and what I have found is the biggest Achilles heel for a lot of these overthinkers and big thinkers is boredom, because the brain isn't going to stop when it doesn't have anything to do. Instead, it just starts making up things, and usually bad things, not the good things and so that leads to also very dark places. So, for example, during COVID, I saw a lot of very intelligent people, adults and children who were all of a sudden having panic attacks and worrying about things, and they're like I think I'm going crazy. I've never felt this way before and when their brain didn't have anything to do, being stuck at home or in isolation, it leads to very bad things, and I've had a lot of these folks tell me I hate being alone with my thoughts for too long, which is a problem that most of us don't relate to too much. So this analytical thinking and all these curiosities also leads kids to ask what you might think are odd questions, very deep questions, though. Things like why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food? Or if you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? Why do they call it lipstick if you can still move your lips and one from a client said if you were in a coma for 10 years, would you live longer? Now, these are great questions, imponderable questions in a lot of ways. So that's a good example of some of the ways that they think a little bit differently than most of us do.
Jim Cunningham:A second intensity is an emotional intensity and I've had a lot of clients who tell me I don't know where my emotions end and yours begin. They can be overwhelmed by a lot of big emotions. Again, we're kind of going through life on steroids. So if I'm at a 10 and you're at a six, things are going to sound a lot different to me. If mom and dad are talking more sternly to me or someone else is, it might feel like yelling Not really the case, but it feels that way.
Jim Cunningham:So a lot of these folks are very uncomfortable with big emotions, crying anger, and so they want to make sure that everybody is good. What does that end up looking like and why does it cause problems for them? Well, they start trying to manage everybody's emotions, to make sure everybody is good, to placate, or sometimes they just want to be out of the situation. The problem is that curiosity we talked about in the intellectual part wants to stick around and make sure it's informed in what's going on, which again creates more problems because now they're exposing themselves to all this emotional overwhelm. So this is one of the other challenges.
Jim Cunningham:If you've got friends or children who fit this category and this criteria is that you have to be careful and they have to be careful what information they feed into these brains, because it's going to create a lot of emotional worry and anxiety that they hadn't anticipated. So one of the challenges is that these folks come across as very mature, gifted kids. You can have great adult conversations with them. The problem is emotionally they may not be at the same level as they are intellectually. So intellectually they can apprehend and comprehend what you're saying. Emotionally it could be completely overwhelming for them. So I tell a lot of folks it's great to have these conversations, but you have to be careful and you have to titrate the dose a little bit. So, for example, talking to your kids about, say, a late payment on a credit card, I've seen some kids who will go way down the rabbit hole with that, thinking oh my gosh, we're going to lose the house, because that's the way they think about things.
Jim Cunningham:Second and third order and they'll take it to the nth degree. So sometimes it's better just to discriminate on what information you share. Now, understanding that their intense curiosity also leads them to overhear a lot of conversations. So you have to be particularly careful sometimes if you're discussing something sensitive, so they don't get kind of sucked into that. So those are the first two intellectual, emotional. So they don't get kind of sucked into that. So those are the first two intellectual, emotional.
Jim Cunningham:The third one is a sensory intensity. So that's some or all of the five senses. What does that exactly look like? Well, it looks like taking tags out of clothes. It looks like wearing socks inside out. It looks like aversion to certain sounds, certain food textures, certain clothing textures. It also looks like an affinity for certain soft things. So I will see a lot of kids who would wear the exact same hoodie every day or when they came home from school, put on their pajamas right after school. They can also have very strong senses of smell, they notice all kinds of sounds, and so again, it's kind of like going through life on steroids and they just again feel more because they sense more. I've had to stop sessions in the middle of a counseling session because I've had to rearrange books on my bookcase because they weren't properly aligned and it was just too distracting. I've removed ticking clocks from my office because it annoys way too many people.
Jim Cunningham:The sound of somebody chewing could drive these folks crazy. When they turn up the volume on the television it has to be multiples of two or multiples of five, things that most of us don't really notice or think of. They are just hyper in tune with that and that can again lead to kind of overwhelm. So when you think of putting a kid in a school environment and if you've ever been to an elementary school recently, or many classrooms, every ounce of the wall is covered, wall to wall. It's very overstimulating. There's a lot of noise, the teacher's going, other people are talking, so there's a lot going on. So this overwhelm can cause these folks to have to come home, maybe in the afternoon and they just need time to decompress, to take some time away from a lot of that overwhelming and overstimulation.
Jim Cunningham:So the fourth one is an imaginational intensity that looks like getting lost in fantasy novels and stories, open world games like Minecraft, very common for a lot of these folks to have imaginary friends as pets. I knew one kid who had imaginary friends with imaginary pets. So very creative minds, very visually in-depth way of thinking about things. When I worked at the school, I saw a kindergartner one day and he went by the name of Chuck and he was telling me about how he had broken his arm when he had been skiing in the past and all the details that went along with that, very specific details. Well, when I talked to his mom and said hey, by the way, I met Chuck today and she said, well, who's Chuck? And talking to his teacher, we found out that he goes by Chuck, charles or Charlie, depending on the day, depending on what he felt like, and he had never broken a bone in his body. Now, he wasn't there just to lie to me. He was there because he had this great, amazing story and this imagination and this world that he had built and he was just sharing it. So it's really amazing, it's very cool, it's very creative, it's much more than most of us are used to. And so, getting lost in those worlds one of the things that they tend to hate too is they like fantasy novels that have a series, so a series of 10 books, and that way the story can go on and on, and I've had a lot of them tell me that they hate when those stories end or when those series end, because then they'll make up alternate endings. They'll put themselves in the alternate ending. So there's a lot of very cool things that go along with that. But you have to kind of understand what you're dealing with, otherwise it can be very confusing. And the last intensity is a psychomotor intensity and that means a lot of wiggling, toe tapping, shaking. I think it's just a function of the brain and how it's always moving and always going.
Jim Cunningham:These tend to be the most misdiagnosed group for ADHD, because it looks similar in a lot of ways, in the sense that they daydream a lot. They don't pay attention, they get bored. If it's a class in school, for example, that they have are very interested in, they've done a lot of self-study and a lot of the research would suggest they know 50% of the material before the school year starts. So you put them in that classroom and they get bored. Additionally, they might hear something that's of interest to them. So they go down the rabbit hole to think about this new concept that they've heard. 20 minutes later they come out of the rabbit hole and they have missed a lot of material. It also leads them to ask questions that have nothing to do with the conversation. That's interesting because I had a hard time understanding that with some people, because you would be talking and all of a sudden this question comes out of nowhere and then you realize 20 minutes ago that had come up in the conversation. That person had gone down the rabbit hole. They came back and now they're still thinking about that and everybody else had moved on.
Jim Cunningham:So in elementary school things go pretty well for the gifted kids in my experience. Right, they get along with their peers, they play Everybody's good. The problem starts to come, and where they start diverging from their peers is in middle school, and that's where you see a lot of these kids say, yeah, I miss my friends. But honestly they feel kind of immature and so that can be frustrating for them and for a lot of these kids they don't really find their own tribes until they get into high school, depending on the size of the school and people that they can connect with. And even a lot of these folks will have to find several groups of people to kind of meet all of their needs One group to have the intellectual conversations with one group to just be kind of have fun with maybe an athletic group, and so you find that they kind of bounce around from those groups quite a bit.
Jim Cunningham:They also have this other problem called multi-potentiality. Most of them are very smart, very creative, and so they can do a lot of things really well. The problem with that is when it comes time to decide on a career, how do they pick? I can do so many things really well, how do I choose one? The other challenge that I see too is that their interests change rather frequently. So I know somebody who in high school went through four different sports and honestly they probably could have had scholarships in two of the four. But they get to a certain level of mastery of that pretty quickly and then they kind of get bored with it and they want to go try something else. So that's hard as a parent or a friend to keep up with. These kinds of changing interests and desires can also be expensive when you go down that road as well. So I say all this to say is that understanding this and as many parents don't understand this and they get frustrated with their kids because they seem argumentative and they ask a lot of questions and they need to know why, and that can be very frustrating.
Jim Cunningham:Another problem a lot of these folks have and this tends maybe to be their biggest problem is how critical they are of themselves. They tend to be perfectionistic and they tend to be big procrastinators, and those things go hand in hand. They will beat themselves perfectionistic and they tend to be big procrastinators and those things go hand in hand. They will beat themselves up like nobody's business and I often have to tell parents you don't have to beat them up too much and you're probably not going to say anything to them they haven't said to themselves. 10 times worse procrastination and perfectionism. I've had a lot of people tell me that if I study for a test and get a B, that's no good. If I don't study and get a B, I'm fine with it. The same holds true for starting a big project at the last moment, and it's kind of the way to build in this way of addressing self-criticism, because if I do poorly on the test that I didn't study for, it's not really me, it's just that I didn't study, so it doesn't reflect directly on me, it reflects on just well, I got started late on that thing, so it's a different way of understanding the perfectionism and procrastination, and that's a topic of a whole different podcast.
Jim Cunningham:This list could go on and on. Of all the challenges that they have, I'll mention one more, and that is in middle school and even into high school often feel more mature than their peers. It leads them to gravitate towards older people. I know some people who will go hang out at their friend's house and spend all night talking to their parents because those are adult conversations and they just connect with older people a little bit better in middle school and high school. Obviously, that can lead to some other challenges, right? Because kids who are seniors hanging out with freshmen, they're just in different places in life and so that can create challenges as well.
Jim Cunningham:At the end of the day, what do we do and how do we help these folks? Not that they need a ton of help, and not that they want a ton of help because, again, they're very smart and they know a lot of things. So want a ton of help because, again, they're very smart and they know a lot of things. So there's about three or four challenges that I work with clients on to try to help them. Number one to normalize how they're feeling and how they're thinking about things, understanding why they are having anxiety and panic attacks, and what are the strategies to get that brain to slow down a little bit? So one of the ideas that we talk about is these brains are kind of like having an IndyCar and you're driving through a residential neighborhood. It can get away from you. So you have to be careful what you put into the brain. Just because you're curious about something doesn't mean that you need to start looking it up From an emotional intensity standpoint.
Jim Cunningham:These folks are very altruistic, very caring, very empathetic. Usually they feel a lot. So for them to get curious about what's going on in world politics or wars or anything, and they start doing the research, that can be very upsetting for them. Even if somebody they see somebody pull a dog's leash too hard, that can be very upsetting as well. So the advice for them is to be careful what they put in their brains and if you have kids who are like this, be careful what you say around them and how you say it, because again, they're listening to everything and they can just take the ball and run with it and go to dark places with it and overthink it too much and that can cause some anxiety as well.
Jim Cunningham:Another strategy is to help them explore and understand the emotions that go with all the thinking and everything else that's going on in their minds. So, especially for the younger kids, they can have a lot of very big feelings and thoughts and not be able to verbalize them and might struggle with that. Instead, they'll get wrapped around the axle debating facts and those kinds of things. One of the strategies I think that when you find someone who wants to debate a lot of these things, to help make the connection between what we're talking about and the emotions that go with that is to have a conversation about the conversation. So I don't want to get wrapped into talking about all the details and the specifics. I want to point out how I feel when you say these kinds of things, how I'm feeling in this conversation and in this moment and I can put words to those emotions and connect the dots for them a little bit.
Jim Cunningham:And I think for a lot of kids that can be very helpful, understanding that a lot of the high degree of justice that a lot of these folks have, how things ought to be right, it's kind of black and white thinking in a lot of ways and that can kind of get people into a little bit of trouble, and and not not in the sense that it's a huge problem, but emotionally it can be a problem because it's either good or it's bad and there's no middle ground in that. Additionally, with that high degree of principle and high degree of justice, some folks feel like, well, if it's true, I can just say it and without regard of how other people feel about that, because it's a true statement, I don't like it, and so I should be able to say what I don't like. So, understanding and connecting the dots of like, okay, I have to titrate the dose for other people, and just because it is true doesn't mean that I can just be as blunt as I want to be, because that causes other problems for people as well. Another strategy and I've mentioned this before is that the greatest enemy seems to be boredom for these minds that are so busy because they come up with all kinds of bad things. So the challenge, of course, is to keep the mind busy and occupied, have some downtime, but do it through hobbies puzzles, gardening, whatever it is. That's a hobby, but it's a different way of challenging the brain. So you're not just getting burned out on doing math and sciences and those kinds of things, reading books, but there's, there should be some other way to keep the mind gainfully occupied, gainfully employed and occupied, so that it's not going down the rabbit holes and creating all kinds of bad ideas.
Jim Cunningham:The other thing I would say, too, is journaling can be very helpful to get a lot of these thoughts out of people's heads. I mentioned that, since the brains are going a lot, sometimes it's hard for these people just to go to sleep, and so I've known people who have strategies where they write down everything they were thinking the night before to help them go to sleep, sometimes music, some kinds of distractions, like there are some apps like Calm C-A-L-M that have like sleep stories where people are just narrating stories or audiobooks that they can listen to, let the brain focus on something else, so they can actually go to sleep. So, understanding that this is a challenge and that giftedness is not just a present, and people who have been given the label of gifted, but if these things tend to resonate with you, understand that this is kind of a normal way of life for you and a lot of these challenges are to be expected because you're kind of outside the normal bell curve and that's a blessing and a curse, because it means a lot of really great things but also means that there's some things that come with that, and just being able to understand that normalizes it. And what I say to a lot of people is that if you're going to be exceptional, you have to be the exception.
Jim Cunningham:Lot of people is that if you're going to be exceptional, you have to be the exception. You're not going to look like everybody else. I think this is an important point and I could have made this earlier. But the need to look like other people and not stand out and be differentiated is very uncomfortable for a lot of people.
Jim Cunningham:So a lot of these folks, particularly in middle school, where they start diverging from their peers, they want to fit in. So there's this thing called imposter syndrome and I've seen kids who will fail classes, fail tests, so they can fit in a little bit better. I knew one student who was fluent in a language but the girl next to her had to study really hard for the tests and she felt so bad about that, even though she didn't need to. She would go home and study for an hour and a half on something that she could have easily passed without studying. So imposter syndrome is a very real thing too, and allowing people and allowing yourself just to be you and appreciate the, the qualities and traits that you have, these are gifts and they are blessings in so many ways. And so how do we begin to appreciate that, not to beat ourselves up for it, because, ultimately, being gifted is just a journey filled with both highs and challenges, like most people, but it's your unique strengths and perspectives that make the world a richer place. As someone once said, being gifted means you sometimes have to color outside the lines, and that's okay. So embrace your gifts, nurture your passions and don't be afraid to dream big.
Jim Cunningham:Thanks for checking us out on the Unscripted Mind today. If you found this episode helpful, share it with somebody who might need it Also. Please subscribe, follow us and leave a review, and if you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, please include that also. Until next time, remember life doesn't come with a script. So embrace the unexpected, cherish the unplanned, always stay curious and have an amazing day. We'll see you next time on the Unscripted mind.
