MyGiftedLife.org

barefootwriter wrote:
Trillian, one thing you said in particular piqued my curiosity.

I expect more giftedness will evidence itself, if childhood trauma is a causal factor.

Who's speculating that, what evidence is there so far for the diathesis-stress explanation, and how does it work? It implies that more people could be gifted but are never subjected to the trauma that makes them so. What do those people look like? Merely bright?

I'm fascinated by this idea.

Okay, given the magnitude of the subject, I thought it warranted its own thread.

First off, let me say that although there's a load of support for the notion that giftedness actually requires childhood trauma or abuse to bring out the intensity/fighter in us by forcing multiple methods of coping, I didn't mean to give the impression that I, personally, hold this as truth or that it has been proven. It would be a fallacy to assume that such a correlation constitutes causation, without any clinching support outside of mere observations (the trouble with case studies). Both the fields of psychiatry and psychology are rife with correlational observations and we must be wary of our conclusions. At the present time, abuse/trauma is considered highly suspect as a major causal factor in bringing out giftedness in those who have the genetic potential to be gifted (but how do you determine that, beyond testing for "g"?). For me, this boils down to the very old Nature vs. Nurture question. Both are required. That being said, I believe that there could be some truth to the notion that trauma is the great teacher, as it intuitively makes sense to me. "Necessity is the mother of invention," " if you don't use it, you lose it," and all that.

If this is a real causative factor, it will be found in an "optimal" parenting environment: the trauma or abuse or disadvantage will likely be of a chronic and low-grade, possibly group of stressors. That would affect the function of the amygdala, and hence, the motivation. I expect many gifted children are gifted because they wish to please their somewhat dismissive, absent, neglectful or rejecting parents. That's one way perfectionism can evolve: gain attention by doing it right - and whatever you do, don't mess it up! Also, it's a well-known fact that partial reward is much more motivating than constant reward. Just look to the gambler's fallacy to see evidence of that. No stress would lead to no motivation... and extreme trauma might tweak giftedness, but negate the motivation through shutting the child down. It's also a well-known fact that association of emotion to knowledge enhances recall, and that has a great deal of survival value - provided the experience isn't so acute as to block out the learning altogether in a kind of state-dependant learning.

Since digging up evidence for or against is a huge undertaking, I'm hoping you'll all help answer this question by posting your evidence for or against. To start, I'll try to post a few links to peer-reviewed public access doozies for you to nibble on - some for, and some against over the next few days as my time permits. Let's see if we can't figure this out to our satisfaction.

My main "trauma", if you wish to describe it that way, was in being gravely ill at the age of 4 months and barely surviving. I was given huge doses of antibiotics, which although they saved my life at the time, they completely shredded my immune system and caused lasting damage to my digestive system. It is only now I am getting older that I have started to really notice the effects of candidiasis, which is getting worse, and is very difficult to get under control. I've heard it can be extremely difficult to kill it completely. Unfortunately, when candidiasis is well-entrenched, it spreads all the way around the body, getting into every organ, including the brain. When the latter situation occurs, M.E. can be the result. This would explain the lack of energy that started to set in at puberty, and has gotten worse ever since.

I suppose you could argue that a physical situation like this would put the body under constant stress. The downside is I am always on red alert, I'm extremely jumpy. Boyfriend calls me eek-a-mouse. The upside, if there is one, is that I suppose my mind is always scouring the environment for data. Mother always said I'm like an information sponge.

Yes, I had a terrible time at school with bullying, etc. but my precocity had already shown itself long before the age of 4.

So if trauma had to be the "trigger" for a person's natural endowment to manifest itself, then I suppose my illness would have to be the turning point.

Well, Sue, that's the question: whether trauma does have to be the trigger. The theory is self-consistent, but plausibility isn't evidence.

I also barely survived severe febrile illness as a newborn which theoretically might have affected me neurochemically, but there's no real way of determining whether it actually did or not. I certainly can't think of any causes of psychological trauma before I showed signs of high ability.

Some of us will undoubtedly have had traumatic events, but even in our small community, I think some would say that at the very least they were unaware of any. We do, however, possibly have a bias in our small population towards having had trauma at least after demonstrating ability, since we joined a community that has peer emotional support.

I think any investigation into the idea needs to gather some evidence from larger samples, so that we can compare the similarities and differences in those populations.

Ha. I've always wondered the opposite...what I would have accomplished had I NOT been in a traumatic upbringing instead of trying to rescue all my family members from one thing or another, or have to constantly be on "high alert" against attack (verbal, emotional, or to a lesser extent physical).

But really, yes, in some very important ways, I can see how being in MY situation caused me to be more resourceful in order to fight for my right to make my own way.


It definitely made me hyper-aware and interested in psychology and history, that's for sure.

I recently wrote this on a comment of my blog posts (about the Fallen Caryatid of Stranger in a Strange Land).

I lived under a totalitarian regime in my family of origin. I am not really joking. I spent a great deal of time analyzing my family situation and really recognized that the iron-fisted rule of my patriarchial grandfather turned my mother into quite the megalomaniac as she projected all her undealt-with crap onto us kids. I have thought my mother had narcissistic tendencies, but I also realized that was a limited view of her. When I was in high school, I compared and contrasted the ideologies of various forms of government through a series of novel analysis and essay writing. I had my mother pegged pretty accurately when I called her a megalomaniac. Why I downgraded her to a mere narcissist I do not know…

I found this quote from Betrand Russell. I may have to write a new post about it.

"The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history."

But she went even beyond that…she was a bit sociopathic in her treatment of me and her handling of my relationships with young men (she herself was a man-hater as a result of her poor choices in husbands). And the gaslighting that went on in my household…it almost got to be that could not take a crap without fear of causing an uproar. Difficult stuff.

My mother…boy she was a force to be reckoned with. She was, just like my grandfather (who was a pretty ruthless lawyer and was a general contractor on the side), a ball breaker in her relations with people. For the past 20 years, she’s sat on the school board of her local school, ALMOST thought about running for local government, and managed to finagle her way onto the Board of Directors for a major “entertainment” type company. She is a power hungry freakazoid.

Anyway, long story short…

To deal with her, I had to fight my way out of the system. I escaped…barely…with hardly much of anything.

I didn’t become a raging liberal as knee-jerk response to that upbringing. On the contrary, I was quite uptight and rigidly conformed to rules for the longest time – probably one of the major reasons why I chose applied science as a career path – everything was ordered, rigid and consistent. I felt very calmed by that environment. It took many years to deprogram from the familial brainwashing, but the scientific path afforded me the safety and consistency I needed.

I carved a path for myself out of hard work, choosing a financial stable career path for myself, taking calculated risks, and dealing with the consequences whatever they might be. And I value personal freedoms – if I can’t be free, then kill me. That almost happened when I was 18…but that’s a story for another day.



And in addition to what I learned back then, I am STILL learning, driven to understand why I continue to have anger and resentment issues to work out, so I'm researching even more, because unfortunately, even though I'd like to say all the pain and hurt is past, I still continue to deal with it on a daily basis. Sometimes it's because of my spiritual crisis, sometimes it's because of my frustrations of wanting to do too many things (go back to the scientific field, get my master's degree in SOMETHING, become a writer, become a science teacher).

Anyway...

There's tons of stuff I couldn't do as a result of being in this patriarchy - notably wanting to go to intern at the Smithsonian one summer, and also not going to the university I really wanted to attend. I ALMOST dropped out of college completely during a bad fight where I moved out for 2 months my junior year of college. Instead, I got a laboratory job and STILL stayed in school.

There seem to be two major categories of trauma a child could experience, the "natural" or unavoidable sort, like major illness or death of a parent, and then the "induced" variety which is caused by another person or persons. The only scientific way to measure the former would be to take a diverse population, identify which of them suffered a trauma of this nature, and then look at percentage of "gifteds" in the traumatized and non-traumatized populations.

I'm not convinced by this. And I'm just being a troll here. This has been a lifelong interest of mine and I have a degree in Psychology and a Diploma in Professional Counseling.

Any overwhelming experience is potentially a traumatic one. So, it's completely subjective. In my case, my first traumatic experience was having stones thrown at me by a troupe of boy scouts led by my brother after I explained why aluminum burned with a green flame when it was thrown onto a fire. Age eight, already feeling a misfit, this seemed the ultimate rejection.

A few years later, during study period in a boarding school, bursting for a pee and too shy to parade past 300 hundred teenage boys to ask to go to the loo, I decided to just let a few drops leak into my pants - just to take the pressure off. Unfortunately, I kept going and, very publicly, wet myself. Some people have reported being traumatized by such experiences but in my case, I just had the normal reaction of being embarrassed.

So, to me, noone escapes trauma. But it might be that it shakes some people out of their complacency and gets them looking at the world differently. I used to drive my mother wild with our 'Why - Because it is' sessions.