As parents, we worry when our children are stressed out, sad, or impulsive in ways that may make us wonder. When to reach out for professional counseling. This article will review some of the therapy for a gifted child. The main reasons parents of talented children should seek counseling. And how to select the right professional and provide special considerations for counseling gifted children within the context of therapy.
When Should I Seek therapy for my Gifted Child?
Gifted children present a unique challenge to parents because of their asynchronous development and intensity around different topics. It can be hard for parents to parse gifted characteristics and developmental milestones from real causes for concern. There is no one answer to the question of when to seek therapy for your gifted child.
This will depend on your child’s personality and habits and why you want to talk to a professional. However, there are several situations where finding a gifted therapist could benefit your family. From the beginning, gifted children pose unique problems for themselves and their parents. As a result, some parents feel that “being gifted is no gift!”
How can parents give their gifted children enough love, support, and resources without making them feel entitled and arrogant? These are painful and unanticipated choices for parents. A gifted child may have strange personality traits, extreme physical symptoms, and strong emotional reactions.
The reasons for therapy treatments on a gifted child
The most important reasons for bringing children and their parents into treatment are listed below.
Dependence – Independence
Gifted children have an intelligent need for autonomy, which makes them pursue independence early. The pursuit of independence makes them push their parents away, thus missing out on the normal phase of dependence. When parents respond reliably to a young child’s needs, they begin to depend on them for safety and comfort.
This sense of trust, safety, and emotional connection become part of the child’s strength and resilience. When gifted children become toddlers, however, many often resent being children. They may decide at an early age, possibly earlier than three or four, that they don’t need “mothering.”
When parents attempt to collaborate with them in making important decisions, gifted children may feel as if they are being controlled and manipulated. Although talented, intuitive, and brilliant, no young gifted person can “bring themselves up.” Without some parental guidance, a gifted child can feel isolated, humiliated, and overwhelmed when facing the unique challenges of using their gifted endowment.
Read the related articles here: Challenges of a gifted child
A gifted child’s “false independence” often comes from teachers and mentors. For example, a gifted child who insists their way of learning a piano sonata is better than fingerings and phrasing (leaving them vulnerable when the demands of the music get harder) or a gifted high school student who rejects a teacher’s recommendations for improving a term paper or a gifted graduate student who dismisses.
Many talented college students don’t finish their degrees because they are too proud to admit their need for help. Academic “incompletes” or failures can often create an ironic situation for the pseudo-independent gifted adolescent.
Gifted children often misunderstand their parents’ attempts to advise them. When parents set limits on risky behaviors, children see it as their parents” desire to control or manipulate them. Some parents may feel scared when their gifted child is resistant and don’t want to step in. Most parents want their relationship with their children to be loving and free of arguments. However, parents of gifted child need to “hang tough” and insist that their child needs therapy.
Read the related article here: Parenting a gifted child
Parents need to remember their life experiences and hard-earned maturity. It lets them figure out the short and long-term effects of their child’s abnormal behavior better than their child. Giving a gifted child or teen the last word can put them in a dangerous situation.
Having too much power in the face of confusion and overstimulation can make a gifted child anxious and overwhelmed. If these feelings aren’t dealt with properly, they can make a gifted child more resistant and defensive. Leaving them with no choice but to become more stubborn, rude, and self-centered and to ask for even more freedom.
Perfectionism – Obsessionalism – Procrastination
Gifted young people often succeed well beyond expectations for their chronological age. Their amazing accomplishments seem to come naturally, with little effort. However, trouble may start in school when they elaborate grand visions but cannot execute them perfectly. The desire to create a “perfect” project can reach a fever pitch in high school when their dreams of being admitted to the best colleges intensify their need to get the best grades.
This type of procrastination can lead to endless requests for extensions. At this point, the gifted child may receive therapy rather than live in denial and avoidance, not realizing that each extension may come with a new punishment. This trio of perfectionism-obsessionalism-procrastination can morph into magical thinking:
More time to do a perfect project will result in a higher grade, not a lower one. Although gifted adolescents may attempt to turn in their best work and get the best grades, their perfectionism-obsessionalism-procrastination has the opposite effect: grades that are not commensurate with their true potential. Perfectionism-professionalism-procrastination, individually and together, may also serve another unconscious function: creating a struggle where no need exists.
Agonizing over their already excellent work can make them feel less guilty about their superior abilities and more like their less gifted friends. In addition, individually and together, perfectionism-obsessionalism-procrastination act to inhibit the overall development of their giftedness by maintaining their focus on the minutia of their project rather than on their creative input.
Empathy – Morality – Anger – Gender
Empathy for others is a common hallmark of many gifted children. They have an unusual sensitivity to the emotional distress of their friends. They often used their exceptional ability to help them resolve their emotional conflicts. However, these valuable personality traits may also create painful moral and ethical dilemmas and emotional conflicts for gifted children when they feel misunderstood and mistreated.
These moral and ethical problems are especially hard for gifted kids who want to show their anger but are afraid they can’t do it properly. When people show their hurt and anger, they always feel guilt and worry that they will hurt other people’s feelings.
For example, repressing anger and not letting it out can lead to depression, mood swings, low self-esteem, trouble learning, cutting, or thoughts of killing yourself. Unacknowledged and unspoken anger can sometimes be so hard to deal with that it can mess up a gifted child’s sense of who they are, making them feel like they are both good and bad.
Sexual identity issues have often plagued gifted adolescents. Gifted girls who feel strong and gifted boys who are sensitive may question their sexual identity or even whether their external and internal sexes match. These conflicts can become serious preoccupations for young people and their families. If left unresolved, they can become a source of serious symptomatology.
A Psychodynamic Approach
The Need for a Comprehensive Assessment
Assessing a gifted child and their problems needs to be comprehensive. Family history, how a couple interacts, how kids interact with each other, medical issues, education, and how a person grew up all give a full context. Giftedness and contextual factors alone do not cause problems, but unresolved emotional responses may.
The unique feature of the psychodynamic assessment of the gifted child is its explanation of how the child’s conscious and unconscious emotional reactions to their giftedness and the context within which it developed have caused troubling behavior, psychological symptoms, and academic problems.
a Psychodynamic Formulation of the Gifted Child’s Problem
A child or adult therapy assessment summary is called a “psychodynamic formulation.” This is a concise description of the psychological pathways and mechanisms that led to specific behavioral and educational problems and psychological symptoms. This psychodynamic formulation is the initial framework within which the therapy begins.
The psychodynamic formulation also has several other functions. It allows the therapist to distinguish a gifted child’s emotional responses to his/her problems from the emotional causes. It also aids in avoiding the pitfalls of misdiagnosis, such as mistaking an emotionally based problem for one caused by a neurobiological defect or a psychiatric disorder.
The consequences of misdiagnosis are serious. Helping a gifted child with a neurobiological defect only focuses on ways to compensate for it. It reduces their chances of solving their basic emotional problems. Conversely, treating a gifted child as if they have an emotionally based problem is inappropriate when a neurobiological defect is the cause of the pain.
The Assessment Process
The assessment begins by meeting with the parents. They are the “experts” on who the child is. This includes knowledge of their child’s history, family background, and the issues that bring them into the office. A thorough assessment depends on understanding how the school setting, family dynamics, peer relationships, and general developmental issues interact with the child’s giftedness to create the current problem.
This allows us to put the child’s giftedness and his/her problems in context. These meetings inform us about what to look for in our subsequent meetings with their gifted child. Before we meet with the gifted child, we might begin with a school observation to determine how she/he engages with classmates, teachers, and the demands of a structured situation.
We then meet with the child in the office for several visits. Does the child make good eye contact? Can the gifted child engage the therapist in play and/or discussion, or does she/he seem quiet and remote?
What is the content of the play? What does the child know about our visits? Does she/he have a sense of the problems that brought him/her in for an assessment? Meetings with parents and children provide the therapist with the raw material needed for a preliminary formulation, establishing the cause of the problems and providing the treatment’s initial focus.
Therapy with Gifted Children
Fiercely independent, gifted children jealously guard their thoughts and creative impulses. Not surprisingly, they are suspicious of any therapeutic interventions. Gifted children want to know that the therapist appreciates their gifts.
The best way to apply therapy to a gifted child is to find the solution to his pain. Therapy with the gifted child begins with what all children do: with play. Play serves several functions in a child’s normal growth and development.
It allows children to experience their feelings in safe, vicarious ways. Play is also a non-threatening way of discharging tensions about troublesome conflicts with family, friends, school, and in one’s self. In therapy, children use play to communicate their problems.
Gifted children will often create a complex and highly imaginative story using drawings, Legos, the dollhouse, car chases, or anything else at their disposal. At first, these stories may seem unconnected to the child’s problems. Therapists who work with gifted children need to know that these seemingly unrelated stories are a sign of the child’s vivid imagination and a way for him or her to use symbols to explain and talk about feelings like anger, sadness, jealousy, and worries.
Also, read this article: Understanding who a gifted child is
These stories introduce highly emotional material that she/he is not ready to discuss more directly. One of the first things the therapist has to do is figure out what the symbols mean so they can tell a story about the child’s real concerns, conflicts, worries, and feelings. Connecting these metaphors to the child’s real problems is very important. If you do it too soon, the child might not be able to empathize with you, and if you do it too late, you might miss the chance to connect the symbols to real life.
When a child is in school, their play may seem less creative, but it is still hidden and has meaning. This kind of play may include board games, cards, or video games. The style of this kind of play is sometimes as important as the content. It can communicate the child’s problems with competition, the need to win, or (no matter how brilliant) the desire to lose.
Sometimes play can be more than an expression of unconscious conflicts. For example, a group of smart, older girls who had outgrown imaginative or structured play asked to play Candy Land, a game for young kids who aren’t yet able to read. Even though this seemed like a step back in therapy, it was a way to help the gifted child feel less uncomfortable as they started to talk about their questions and conflicts about their new sexual feelings.
Therapeutic Work With Parents of Gifted Children
Parent Guidance
Most gifted children and their parents come for therapy in a crisis. Before a parent can be helped to manage the crisis of a gifted child, its origins need to be determined. Serious problems in school, anxiety, depression, physical symptoms, mood swings, and thoughts of suicide could all be signs of a neuropsychological or psychiatric disorder.
The next part of therapeutic work with parents is to help them understand the elements of a gifted endowment and a gifted personality. These elements include intense, unusual, and passionate interests, a precocious need to function autonomously, uncanny intuitive insights and abilities, and a variety of extra sensitivities.
It also helps parents to know the typical developmental struggles of a gifted child: choosing which passionate interests to pursue, whether or not to strive for excellence and expertise, and how to manage conflicting emotional responses to giftedness as it threads its way through adolescence and young adulthood.
Parents are rarely in agreement about these questions. The philosophical, emotional, financial, and social issues are all intertwined. Often, these worries come from the fear that encouraging giftedness could lead to elitism, narcissism, a sense of entitlement, arrogance, “nerdiness,” and social isolation.
Read this article here: “A gifted child’s mental health challenge.
On the other hand, parents worry that they will always feel unfulfilled if their child doesn’t use their gifts. Sharing these different experiences with the therapist often helps parents agree on how much time and money to spend developing their child’s giftedness. Parents’ next concern is improving their gifted child’s school experience.
Parents often need help educating teachers and administrators about giftedness and the unique needs of their gifted children. This usually means requesting an enhanced, enriched, and sometimes accelerated curriculum.
Even in the best cases, parents of gifted children need to ensure that their kids do things outside of school that matches their interests. In designing extracurricular activities, parents should guard against being overzealous. Gifted children, like all children, need downtime. Parents also often wonder how much control a gifted child should have over their proficient development.
Gifted children can be very stubborn and defensive when parents encourage them to take their gifts seriously and work hard to develop them, or conversely when they try to protect them from their grandiosity. The gentlest suggestions and encouragement can provoke fierce opposition. Parents always want to avoid explosions that might ruin cooperative and loving family relationships.
No matter how painful these fights between parents and children may be, parents need to remember that their hard-won life experience helps them spot signs of self-destructive behavior. Parents can pay a much higher price if they don’t take responsibility for making important decisions that either help their gifted child grow or hold them back.
Battles in the family can be the proving ground for helping a gifted child engage in productive disagreements in the real world.
Also, read this article here: the needs of a gifted child.
Parents are often frustrated by how long it can take for psychotherapy to work on their kids. It is very difficult for gifted children to believe that the therapist “gets them” and is also smart enough to help them. Establishing a therapeutic alliance with him/her can take time and patience. Gifted children, like other children, often blame others for their difficulties. It’s hard for them to admit that their suffering may be due to internal conflicts.
Once they can locate aspects of the problem within themselves, the treatment can “take off. Most parents find it hard to help their gifted child because there are many complicated issues and conflicts at every stage of development. As depleting as this therapy process may seem, the rewards of helping a gifted child develop his/her full potential are enormous.
Conclusion
The gifted child may, at one time or another, need therapy. Giftedness also exposes a child to many social and emotional issues. Giftedness does not make a person superior, although many gifted individuals may have superior functioning or potential in one or more areas. What is important to remember when considering therapeutic support for gifted individuals is that they may have qualities that are outside the norm; they are different, and with those differences come unique challenges and ways of experiencing.
Therapy support groups must understand a gifted child and appreciate how giftedness shows up in different children. It must also be able to connect with people on an intense level, honestly.
Read more of our articles here: https://abundanceandkiddies.com/
Shop for Children’s winter clothes and sweaters here
Children’s bikes and bicycles here
Musical toys and, children’s tricycles & home furniture here
Pingback: Overexcitability In A Gifted Child: The Best Approach - PARENTING