Challenged By Being So Smart

"Being smart is really hard."

Samuel Kohlenberg adds in an article: "There may be people with high IQs who have an easy time in life; relationships are simple, work and school are a breeze, and they long ago addressed the existentialist questions that some of us might carry with us until the very end."

Therapist?Sharon M. Barnes?works with children, teens and adults who are creative, sensitive, intense, and often gifted people.

She comments in an article of hers about some of the qualities and challenges she sees in her practice of many years:

“Creativity and creative expression can be fun but can also be a?great burden.

“Creative ideas show up whether we have time to pay attention to them, or do anything with them or not.

“They also often arrive in tandem or multiples, and the creative person has to choose which idea gets to see the light of day.

“Being aware of things that most people are not may lead to exciting AHA! moments.

“At the same time it can create questions of what’s real and what’s not when no one else sees what you’re seeing.

“It may also carve a canyon of separation between the acutely aware person and others who are less aware.”

Being highly sensitive is a common aspect of high ability and giftedness, and has many values, but also challenges

Barnes notes that “sensitivity is a double edged sword. High sensitivity…often brings a capacity for depth of feeling and thought along with a high level of conscientiousness, compassion and empathy."

Through her counseling and online programs, she details how?gifted and creative people?“can cope, heal and transform their perceived deep defects into their greatest gifts which, in the end, will enable them to make a unique, creative contribution to the world.”

Psychologist and creativity coach?Eric Maisel?says that ‘smart’ people often experience characteristic challenges including “difficulties with society and the world, issues at work, challenges with your personality and your racing brain, and special meaning problems.”

[From my article?Intensity and Being Creative.]

In his book “Why Smart People Hurt,” Dr. Maisel relates the story of a client of his,?Jeanette, who recalled:

“My first negative experience of being too smart was in fifth grade. I had gone to a rural school (a tiny village on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge) in a three-room school that combined grades since there were very few of us.

“I was in the largest class (five students). Whether it was intentionally progressive or not, we had stations and were free to roam the room and read or do arithmetic or work on puzzles as we chose. It was heaven.”

But, she continues:

“Then my family moved to a Portland suburb, and I was in a regimented fifth-grade class with a Nazi teacher who made us sit with our hands folded if we finished an exercise before the others, which I always did.

“I learned how excruciating boredom can be; I began to eat sugar to soothe myself, and I acted out. I was in trouble a good deal of the time from then on."

See much more, including videos and links to resources, in my original article:

Challenged By Being So Smart

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