Gifted Support

A community of gifted people, here to let you know that you are not alone, and you are not weird or crazy. We encourage gifted individuals to be themselves. We hope to help one another re-encounter, explore, and value our gifted selves.

[giftedsupport]

[saxturn]

[giftedsupport]

Can you provide any insight on the correlation between giftedness and autoimmunity?

I had literally never heard of this before seeing this ask! I had to google it.

"Research suggests a higher prevalence of autoimmunity, allergies, and asthma among intellectually gifted individuals compared to the general population. This connection, often termed the "hyper-brain/hyper-body" theory (popularized by Dr. Ruth Karpinski), posits that an overactive nervous system, linked to intense intellectual functioning, may trigger heightened physiological reactivity and immune dysfunction."

HOWEVER:

Digging deeper, it looks like there’s no strong, well-established scientific evidence that intellectual giftedness is meaningfully linked to autoimmune diseases. The idea exists, but it’s mostly based on limited, controversial, or indirect findings—not a solid consensus.

It's one of those situations where a scientist published an article like, "Hey! Here's an idea! Here's an extremely limited study that suggests that we should probably look into this." And then non-scientists saw the article and went, "SCIENCE SAYS THIS IS DEFINITELY A THING!!!"

So it's possible that there may be some connection (there are have been some studied that also suggest there may be some connection between autoimmune disorders and ADHD/autism). But there isn't really enough evidence yet to say for sure one way or another.

[giftedsupport]

I've encountered several autistic people online who believe that giftedness is not a separate neurodivergence. They posit that gifted individuals are all autistic and in denial because a person would rather be gifted than autistic (purely based on the connotation and associations).

I'm gifted. I'm not autistic. My psychologist laughed and confirmed I'm not when I mentioned I had questioned if I was autistic when my wife got late diagnosed. (It was the red car effect and the overlap in neurodivergence. I saw autism everywhere for a year.) I took the RADs test in the back of one of Temple Grandin's books. I scored no where near autistic. I explain social situations to my wife and I have for the last 20 years.

Why can't giftedness and autistic be separate conditions that sometimes occur in one person?

I wish some autistic people didn't view giftedness as a threat. We didn't ask to be labeled or to be neurodivergent. The label itself is problematic and the idea of intellectual superiority (or any superiority) is problematic. That doesn't equate to gifted people are arrogant closeted autists. Can we support each other instead of attacking each other?

I am gifted and not autistic.

There are plenty of people who are autistic who are not gifted. There are plenty of people who are gifted who are not autistic.

I don't know where the idea that this venn diagram is a circle came from. I have definitely heard it before. But yeah, it's incorrect. There are lots of overlap in symptoms between quite a LOT of forms of neurodiversity, including autism, giftedness, ADHD, OCD, and more. But it's a messy venn diagram, not a neat, clean circle. And of course, there are a TON of people who are "twice exceptional / 2e" and have multiple diagnoses. Example:

(source)

And another one:

(second source)

I have not yet spoken to a person with ASD who saw non-autistic gifted people as a threat (thankfully). But there are definitely misconceptions out there. If anybody is interested in reading more on the subject, a quick google search of "venn diagram gifted and autistic" brought up a TON of information, including the above charts.

[giftedsupport]

Hi, I’m the person who left the message on your latest post.

In fact, during my childhood I went through several prolonged situations that caused trauma and stress... nothing severe like physical abuse, but my father’s abandonment and growing up with an autistic person who was never diagnosed and struggled with severe depression.

I haven’t reached this point with my therapist yet, so I deeply appreciate your response. I find it surprising to know about certain topics and still not realize they apply to your own life. I guess untangling what has been tangled for a long time isn’t a quick task...

Thank you again, and all the best!

I've gone through the same thing - looking up all kinds of things to try to figure out my own psychology and learn how to thrive in the world! It took me several years, but it can absolutely be done.

Your description of your childhood is 100% a recipe for C-PTSD. Mine was also caused by emotional abuse and stress rather than physical abuse. Our society really doesn't talk enough about how things that aren't physical abuse can also really mess a person up, especially a kid.

[If you DO have CPTSD, it can sometimes be hard to find a therapist who can actually treat it (most therapists THINK they know how to treat trauma but actually have not been trained to do so correctly). My own mental health journey involved finding an EMDR therapist who had been extensively trained in trauma therapy. Just mentioning because you said you hadn't gotten to certain things with your therapist yet.]

If you have a parent with undiagnosed autism, and you mentioned masking, you may want to look into autism on your own behalf. While some gifted kids without autism may also mask, masking tends to be more associated with autism than giftedness, and it sounds like you also may have a genetic predisposition to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD has such a diverse range of symptoms that it can sometimes be hard to identify at first!

(As a side note, If you'd like to have any of these conversations in private, you can also come off of anon and message me directly! When you send anonymous asks to my inbox, my only option is to respond publicly. If that matters to you lol)

[giftedsupport]

Hello,

I recently discovered that I’m a gifted person and that I had been masking my whole life (I went to therapy because I was going through a meltdown after a phase of extreme perfectionism).

For a moment, it was actually comforting to make sense of many things in my life, especially things from childhood. After reading and researching about it, I understand myself better, but what I’m experiencing right now is a deep disconnection from everything around me.

It feels as if I’ve moved into a different, higher mental plane, and it’s really isolating. I’m a strong person (I’m not going to do anything reckless), but it’s like witnessing, or having stepped into, that mental frame where many people become disconnected and eventually end up taking their own lives.

I’ll say it again: I’m a strong person. This is not a cry for help or anything like that. I know my way around exploring my inner world. Right now I’m simply hovering over what I described, and by sharing this I might find voices with more experience, and perhaps help make this experience more visible.

So grateful to have found this account. Thank you very much :)

Thank you for writing!

I think what you're describing might be some form of dissociation. I would strongly recommend discussing how you're feeling with your therapist. It also sounds like there's a possibility that you're dealing with Complex PTSD, which might be something to look into. I run a blog on that as well ( @c-ptsdrecovery ), and I can recommend the book "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving" by Pete Walker as a way to explore the condition and see if it matches your experience.

Again, I strongly recommend talking about this with your therapist! Putting together a bunch of facts that make sense of things about our lives is a very intense experience, and it's really helpful to get an outside perspective on it!

[delphinidin4]

[giftedsupport]

1.6K views · 12K reactions | Why gifted people are actually neurodivergent | Kyle Cox

Why gifted people are actually neurodivergent

Eyyyyup.

[giftedsupport]

"Perfectionism is learned when one is valued only for doing [and not for being]. When parental acceptance and love is dependent upon performance - perfectionism is created. The performance is always related to what is outside the self. The child is taught to strive onward. There is never a place to rest and have inner joy and satisfaction.

"Perfectionism always creates a superhuman measure by which one is compared. And no matter how hard one tries, or how well one does, one never measures up. Not measuring up is translated into a comparison of good versus bad, better versus worse. Good and bad lead to moralizing and judgmentalness. Perfectionism leads to comparison-making. Kaufman writes, 'When perfectionism is paramount, the comparison of self with others inevitably ends in the self feeling the lesser for the comparison.'"

--Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw

[lamignonette]

[giftedsupport]

[homunculus-argument]

Hey, sorry if this might be weird, but you've mentioned in posts before that you're around 30 and I just wanted to ask if it really does get better when you're not a teenager.

I'm currently still in high-school and it sucks a lot, and I've been holding onto this hope that when I turn into an adult my brain will level out and I'll stop being scared of the judgments of people my age and I just want to know if that's indeed what I can be hoping for.

Sorry if this is weird :/

Every once in a while I look back at my teen years and think "holy shit that shit sucked. Glad I'm not there anymore." The only reason anyone manages to get through being a teenager is because they have no idea how much better things can be.

[c-ptsdrecovery]

[delphinidin4]

I listened to a youtube video the other day that described the boredom of being gifted: "Imagine you're watching a movie and it's in slow motion, but you're in a theater full of people who think it's moving at regular speed." I have never felt so Seen.

[giftedsupport]

Documentary on high sensitivity

[giftedsupport]

hiya! I got accepted into the PPS gifted program. I didn't know I was gifted before this, because I went to a private school with no gifted program. I was in advanced math and generally got straight As (with two exception when I got a B, one in 4th grade math and one in 8th grade foreign language). My standardized test scores generally fell in the 99th precentile since 6th grade, when I started getting my results. If I'm being honest, I'm pretty scared. I'm 14, not very big for my age, and kind of a doormat. My social skills consist of complementing people and talking about my hyperfixtations. Oh yeah, I have un(semi?)diagnosed ADHD and diagnosed OCD and anxiety. I'm not the greatest at making friends, and I've been bullied before. What do you suggest I know, do, etc? Thank you!!!

I don't know very much about your school and how its gifted program works. Do you have any more specific questions? Avoiding bullying is the same for gifted people as it is for anybody else (I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing...).

Anybody else have any words of wisdom?

[giftedsupport]

As a perfectionist and an anxious person, I decided when I set up my art table that I needed to put down a couple of rules for myself. These have been up there for almost a year, and they genuinely have helped! I was showing my most recent project to one of my besties, and I said, "It's not the NEATEST piece of art I've ever made..." and she immediately responded, "The point of art is to enjoy making it." Which I did. So there.