relationships - or not
Being exceptional - creatively gifted and talented - may include and encourage social isolation, since true peer relationships are both rare and demanding. People who are hypersensitive may find they need protective separation, even from well-meaning family and friends, and likely romantic partners, to protect and more fully realize themselves.
Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., head of the Gifted Development Center, comments in her article Different Worlds at the Extremes: “Gifted children and adults often try to repress the real needs of the Self in order to maintain connections with others. They feel they must choose between loneliness and the negation of the Self.”
In his “Learn to Be Lonely” lyrics for The Phantom Of The Opera, Charles Hart acknowledges loneliness, but also encourages:
Ever dreamed out in the world / There are arms to hold you?
You’ve always known / Your heart was on its own
So laugh in your loneliness / Learn to be lonely
life can be lived / life can be loved / Alone.
For many highly talented people, isolation or reduction in social contacts can be a way to better incubate self development, and creative thinking and projects.
Most of us when we were adolescents felt needs and pressures to be accepted and acceptable. But being intellectually or creatively exceptional, being gifted and talented, often includes having temperaments and qualities such as divergent thinking, asynchronous development and introversion which make fitting in difficult, even if you want to. And many of us never really wanted to that much.
Actor Kristin Kreuk (tv series “Smallville”) has commented that girls in her high school didn’t like her: “I am shy and I don’t start relationships with people normally. I guess I have a way that can seem aloof and sort of cold. They didn’t like me that much, but I never resented it. I was different than they were.”
Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D., in an interview about her book The Highly Sensitive Person In Love, says people with more sensitive and excitable constitutions and personalities “need help with intimacy. Maybe we are afraid, have been hurt, and can’t forget it. Or we have trouble being known and appreciated for who we really are. Or we have trouble in relationships because of our different needs, so that we always feel “too much” or “overly sensitive.”
She also says highly sensitive people are “more likely to find sex to be mysterious and powerful, to be turned on by subtle rather than explicit sexual cues, to be easily distracted or physically hurt during sex, and to find it difficult to go right back to normal life afterwards.”
And she has found in her research there are as many men born with this trait as women, despite the cultural ideal for men to be aggressive. High sensitivity can be an underlying inner pressure for many to avoid relationships that could become more than casual friendship.
related pages :
relationships
relationships: teen / young adult
solitude
GT Adults - giftedness
- Related Articles
