Gifted Adults: Cognitive-Feeling Paradox
Many gifted adults crave immersion. You want to disappear into something meaningful, challenging, absorbing. You want flow. But just as you settle in to fire up your mind, an emotion crashes in: Loneliness, and a craving for connection. Emotional baggage. Relationship stress. Sometimes it’s existential heaviness with no name at all. This isn’t a […]
Gifted Adults: When Potential Hurts
There’s a quiet disorder at play in many gifted adults—not clinical, but costly nonetheless. I call it Inverted Attention Disorder. It’s what happens when we give too much of our attention to the urgent, the imagined, or the external—while neglecting the deeper part—the one drawn to meaning, contribution, and growth. This inversion keeps us from […]
Interesting? Or good?
Even though your inner perfectionist will demand it. And your harsh inner critic will punish you for falling short of impossible standards. Truth is, you’re not meant to be good at everything. I think we gifted folks miss out because our perfectionism gets the best of us. We try things—painting, public speaking, learning guitar—and expect […]
What Does It Mean to Be a “Gifted Adult?”
What does it really mean to be a gifted adult? The research doesn’t always agree. But one thing is clear: being gifted isn’t about having the highest IQ or being the smartest person in the room. Sure, intelligence might be a by-product—but it’s not the point. In my world, giftedness is about the lived experience […]
When Gifted Child Becomes Gifted Adult
Did you know that in over 100 years of research on giftedness, less than 15% has focused on gifted adults? Most of the research centers on children — identifying talent, tracking academic performance, designing early interventions. And my suspicion is: many gifted adults weren’t even identified as children.Which means much of the research on gifted […]
Depth Decision-Making
One of the hardest parts of decision-making for gifted adults isn’t lack of options — it’s too many. We see possibilities. We see pitfalls. We see all the paths — and all the problems on those paths. Our minds race ahead to solve every obstacle before we’ve even chosen a direction. And in that flood […]
Gifted & ‘Talented’?
For many gifted adults, childhood was marked by talent —Fast learner. High achiever. Bright. Advanced. But gifted adulthood feels different. And for many, far more confusing, and impossible to ignore. At some point, “giftedness” stops being about measurable talent…and becomes something far more existential: Potential. And potential is a double-edged sword. Because while talent once […]
The 3D’s of Gifted Adulthood
I think one of the reasons I was okay being labeled gifted was because it felt like there was a built-in permission structure inside the label. I don’t usually like labels — they often feel like life sentences — but this one fit in a way that made me feel seen, maybe for the first […]
The Contradictions of Gifted Adulthood
For me, Stoicism worked for a minute. Then Buddhism worked too. I thought maybe Internal Family Systems was the key. Then came the guided MDMA. It all worked — and none of it worked — all at the same time. One of the most misunderstood aspects of being a gifted adult is that it’s not […]
Gifted Adults. Mutants?
For a long time, I thought I was broken. I was too sensitive. Too intense. Too driven.I didn’t fit in with my family. I didn’t think like my peers.People asked if I was adopted—I wondered the same. And underneath it all was one painful question:What’s wrong with me? It wasn’t until I discovered the research […]
