It has always been accepted that gifted little girls know how to adapt and therefore do not attract attention. Rebellious boys take tests early, parents already have a lead to understand and help them. They rejoice in their sister’s calm and wisdom: she works well without being forced to do so by all sorts of means. She is well liked in her school and she has girlfriends whom their parents find suitable.
Gifted little girls are like the others except that they love to read, but they always have one or two friends who share this passion, they lend each other their books, they discuss them. It is during adolescence that the situation changes, surreptitiously at first, then suddenly, which completely disconcerts the parents. Suddenly, the friends disappear, the teenager, who continues to devour books, explains that her friends bore her. Their discussions have become without interest, they talk about clothes, make-up, series, and especially boys, any subject which, for the gifted teenager, does not deserve attention. They no longer use the same language. If, by chance, she had a tender feeling for one of her classmates, she would take good care not to tell them about it: afterwards, the whole class follows the twists and turns of the idyll step by step, comments on them, waits for a eventual failure or the rival who will not fail to arise, delighted with this situation and the particular challenge to be met.
The gifted teenager is quickly annoyed to hear them gossiping ad infinitum on facts so ridiculous that they lose all meaning. and especially on adolescents who themselves do not know very well how to behave in this new mode of relations. It is sometimes relaxing to hear more trivial subjects mentioned, but they must not take up all the space. The gifted teenager has fun putting on makeup from time to time. It is an artistic manual activity that requires a strong concentration of mind, with the relaxing effect that this kind of exercise provokes. She pays attention to her clothes, without following what absolutely must be worn and knows what colors and style suit her. She doesn’t need to think about it often and for a long time.
She prefers to continue reading more and more serious and exciting booksbut she realizes that they will not interest her friends, the subjects they cover will seem too austere to them, boring no doubt, nothing obliges them to read them, they are not on the program.
school education
These readings enrich her knowledge incredibly: school education seems to her more and more bland, she learns nothing. Her boredom and her disdain begin to show, the teachers upset at no longer capturing the attention of this student, who seemed promising, are not very nice to her. Her comrades no longer seek her company, but this exclusion does not bother her unless, sometimes, it is accompanied by discreet harassment. All the elements are in place for what appears to be school phobia to take hold. The teenager does not know why she must continue to go to class, she has understood that it is not there that she will find answers to the deep, existential questions that she asks herself.
His parents, distraught, try to answer as best they can, but they have long since neglected philosophy, even if they retain a tenderness for this field which enchanted them in its time. IThey feel a little weak when it comes to quantum physics. IThey kept the fuzzy and too light memory of an intermittent chat, quite insufficient to talk about it seriously.
Drop in grades and eating disorders
The teenager experiences the feeling of bumping into walls whichever way she turns. She has no more friends, no more interlocutors. She feels fundamentally different from the others, that is to say of the norm, alone with its questions, its dreams for the future in spite of everything, without knowing how to concretize them since the obligatory passage by the school seems prohibitive to him. With the best good will in the world and despite her ardent desire to move on, she can no longer return to class. It’s too difficult, nothing attracts him.
For some, who have always been good students without really working, the anxiety reaches a peak when they are confronted with the need for effort, while they know nothing about it. Their grades start to drop, they don’t always know how to react, they no longer recognize themselves. Not only does school not provide them with the answers they expect, but it risks placing them in this unbearable situation of failure, even relative, which they wondered how others could face without dying.
Then sometimes begin what are called “eating disorders”. The gifted teenager is anorexic, bulimic and alternates without finding relief and even less response in this search for extremes and the paths to take to achieve them. She can indulge in a sport until exhaustion. This perfectionism that had permeated her whole life is now expressed differently, as if she was looking deep within herself for answers to all her questions while trying to go all the way. She will never be thin enough since it would be in extreme thinness, rid of all cumbersome flesh, that she will touch the essence of what she is, even if it means dying of it. It is an absurd, hopeless quest, so it fills up to know the peace given by satiety, and beyond. She, who was surprised to see her friends become plump and didn’t worry about it, sometimes overtakes them, but she hates herself, she sees no way out of her quest, she eats to stop thinking.
anxieties
Her distraught parents consult doctors, sometimes recommended, sometimes chosen at random, for proximity or availability. So all verdicts are possible. Gifted people often confuse those who don’t know them well. They have many aspects of their personality often attributed to Asperger’s syndrome. They are easily considered as “borderline” or else it is a beginning of bipolarity which would result in these aberrant behaviors, adolescence in search, with excessive demands, marginalized by its remarkable maturity of mind, evolving with delight in the meanders of complex reasoning, on the condition that he follows a rigorous logic, sees himself cataloged and above all put on medication in order to alleviate his anxieties and regulate his appetite.
It is true that these dives into the depths of anguish are impressive. These teenagers implicitly ask for help, but do not want to know anything when they are offered a meeting with a psychologist. They fear a conclusion that will place them in the category of patients forever condemned to live in this malaise. A classic doctor would ultimately be more reassuring, he is not going to explore a soul, immersed in dark clouds. VSare teenagers know how to deceive and appear reasonable, they encounter the ordinary difficulties specific to their age, a tablet for better sleep suits them.
They panic all the same when we talk about hospitalization, their horrible fear of being considered as definitively ill risks tipping them into a truly depressive state this time. They are helpless with terrified and equally helpless parents.
| Advice : it is really essential to know that it is indeed about a gifted teenager, she herself must know it. It is an essential reading grid to bring coherence to these excessive manifestations of unease. She absolutely needs to feel understood, and therefore reassured. She will have gone through a difficult passage, but it was only a passage. |