The trauma of giftedness

“It’s just a simple sum like six times four and I have to draw twenty-four houses.”

My five-year-old son said this with extreme frustration. He could see the answer instantly. The requirement to prove his thinking through drawing felt absurd to him, like being asked to walk backwards to demonstrate he knew how to walk forwards. He complied for a while. Until the daily accumulation of being forced to think more slowly, to show his working when the working happened in a flash of pattern recognition, to conform to a pace that felt like moving through treacle, became unbearable.

He developed almost a phobia of writing and drawing. When Sam said “No” he meant it.

Just one year later, he kicked a supply teacher who had insisted he must write like every other child in the class. An exclusion letter arrived calling him “a danger to the other children and to the staff.”

A small child who saw straight to the heart of new mathematical concepts, whose mind worked so swiftly. A child who had taught himself to ride a bike without any adult help, through sheer determination. A little boy who had climbed out of cots and up trees and disappeared in shops because staying still felt impossible, was now officially labelled dangerous.

This is where the trauma of giftedness begins: with a neurological difference that creates complexities and intensities that the world too often mistakes for defects requiring correction.

What giftedness actually is

I've come to understand that giftedness isn't about scoring highly on IQ tests. This is a strong indicator for giftedness, but not a requirement. Giftedness is a complex neurological difference that creates experiences most people don't have words for.

Jennifer Salin of Intergifted has identified six areas of giftedness: intellectual, emotional, creative, sensual, physical, and existential. These manifest as complexities—different domains where depth, nuance, and multidimensional thinking and experiencing emerge. You might see connections others miss, feel moral questions viscerally, create rich inner narratives, or experience physical movement as a way of thinking.

For example, Daniel Tammet is an autistic man who experiences numbers as shapes, colours, and textures—a form of synaesthesia that allows him to perform extraordinary mathematical calculations and learn languages with remarkable speed. His books, including Born on a Blue Day and Thinking in Numbers, offer rare insight into a mind that processes the world through patterns most people cannot perceive.

Olympic athlete Simone Biles possesses a combination of spatial awareness, proprioception, strength, and neuromuscular control that allows her to perform gymnastics skills no one else in the world has achieved—some moves are literally named after her. Her body processes movement and space with a precision and speed that represents the outer edge of what human physicality can accomplish.

These are extreme examples in terms of what these two individuals express outwardly. There are different levels of giftedness as well as different domains and each gifted person is, of course, a unique individual and not defined by what they achieve. There is much that stands in the way of an individual expressing their particular constellation of giftedness in the world.

Two of Sam's particular flavours of giftedness showed up in his intellectual meta cognition and skip thinking—and in his deep sense of morality and ethical behaviour that was entirely his own and which he upheld with unswerving voracity.

Alongside the six ‘flavours' of giftedness, Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski identified five “overexcitabilities”—not as pathology, but as a description of different ways that people can experience the world with heightened intensity. And for gifted people, more intense ways of experiencing their complexities. His research showed that many gifted people have an individual profile that includes one or more of these.

Psychomotor overexcitability: High energy, constant need for movement, rapid speech, intense physical responses to emotion. My son could never sit still. From the womb he was restless. As a toddler he climbed everything, disappeared in seconds, moved through space like water finding cracks. At school this was called a lack of self-control and deliberate disruption.

Sensory overexcitability: Heightened responses to sound, light, texture, smell. The chaos of school assemblies, crowded playgrounds, unexpected changes in routine could send Sam into a hyperactive and defensive mode. The world was too loud, too bright, too much. But schools don’t accommodate nervous systems that process sensory input differently. They demand that you cope.

Intellectual overexcitability: Relentless questioning, a need to understand deeply, capacity for complex abstract thought. He grasped new situations so swiftly and he solved puzzles at great speed. And when he asked questions, the answers had to make sense. “Because I said so” or “that’s just how we do it” weren’t answers. They were dismissals. His physics teacher later wrote that his “talent and insight were extraordinary.” But for years before that, his questions were treated as challenge to authority.

Imaginational overexcitability: Rich inner worlds, vivid imagination, capacity to see possibilities others miss. This can look like daydreaming, like being disconnected from reality, like not paying attention. It’s actually a different quality of attention, one that sees patterns and connections others don’t notice.

Emotional overexcitability: Feeling everything intensely. Joy, fury, injustice, others’ pain. My son felt injustice like a physical wound. He couldn’t bear seeing other children treated unfairly. He couldn’t tolerate hypocrisy. His anger at his own exclusions wasn’t just about himself—it was about the fundamental unfairness of systems that punished difference.

These aren’t behavioural problems. They’re neurological differences. But when you’re five, and six, and seven, and you keep being told to calm down, sit still, do it this way, show your working, stop asking questions, stop moving, stop doing it your way, stop, stop, stop—you learn that who you are is wrong.

And that learning becomes trauma.

Twice -exceptionality - when giftedness meets neurodivergence

Twice-exceptional—or 2E—describes children who are both gifted and neurodivergent. They might be gifted and autistic, gifted and have ADHD, gifted and dyslexic, or any combination. The giftedness and the neurodivergence interact in complex ways that schools are often spectacularly ill-equipped to understand.

The giftedness often masks the neurodivergence. A brilliant mind can develop sophisticated compensatory strategies that hide struggles with executive function, sensory processing, or social communication. Teachers see a child who can discuss advanced concepts but won’t follow simple instructions, who understands complex systems but can’t organise their pencil case, who asks profound questions but melts down over unexpected changes to routine.

Sam was known to be dyslexic, but since he taught himself to read and was not significantly lagging behind his cohort in this, or in spelling, it was not taken seriously despite causing him massive frustration.

Without understanding twice-exceptionality, adults default to behavioural explanations. The child must be lazy, defiant, manipulative, attention-seeking. “He can do it when he wants to” becomes evidence of wilful non-compliance rather than the reality of inconsistent executive function or sensory overload.

I suspected something beyond giftedness was at play with Sam. The intensity of his responses, the rigidity around certain expectations, the way sensory overwhelm could tip him into fight-or-flight, the genuine distress when routines changed unexpectedly—these weren’t simply about being intellectually advanced or emotionally intense. But I didn’t have the language. Autism and ADHD weren’t widely understood in the 1990s, especially not in obviously bright children who could hold complex conversations.

So Sam continued to be treated as if he was simply badly behaved or emotionally disturbed. Each exclusion letter focused on his “refusal to comply,” his “disruption,” his “anger management issues.” No one saw a neurodivergent child trying desperately to navigate systems that weren’t designed for how his brain worked whilst also being intellectually under-stimulated and socially isolated.

Now, I understand Sam to have been twice-exceptional. Highly gifted intellectually, but also navigating sensory processing differences, likely ADHD, possibly autism. The combination meant he needed both intellectual challenge and sensory accommodation, both advanced curriculum and executive function support, both recognition of his exceptional thinking and understanding of his neurological differences.

He got neither consistently. And that failure—to see the whole child, to understand that giftedness and neurodivergence can and do coexist—was catastrophic.

The spiky profile

Many gifted children also have what’s called a “spiky” learning profile. Their abilities across different areas are dramatically uneven. As a child my son could grasp mathematical and physics concepts that university students struggled with, but he couldn’t write well at all. Dyslexia and immature fine motor skills meant that getting thoughts from his brilliant mind onto paper was excruciating for him. So he refused to do it. Point blank.

Schools see this and think: lazy. Defiant. Not trying hard enough. They don’t see a child whose brain processes spatial patterns and abstract concepts at exceptional speed but whose hand-eye coordination develops at a different pace. They don’t accommodate the unevenness. They demand uniform development.

“He’s not working to his potential,” they said, again and again. What they meant was: he won’t conform to our delivery method. What he heard was: there’s something wrong with you.

At sixteen, Sam would arrive to class with his dark curls all dishevelled and a biro in his pocket, borrow some paper from a friend, tip his chair back to the point of perfect equipoise then banter his way through each lesson. Somehow, he would still take everything in and pass every assessment with flying colours.— Sam's Story: It Takes a Village not to Lose a Child

This is spiky profile trauma—being exceptional in ways that don’t count while struggling in ways that define you as broken. The message is clear: your gifts don’t matter if you can’t perform in the prescribed way.

How the trauma accumulates

Educational trauma doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It accumulates through daily, hourly messages that your authentic self is unacceptable.

Pre-school: You refuse to do things our way.

First school: You’re dangerous.

Gifted school that should understand: You need to do as you’re told.

Progressive school: You’re too much, even for us.

Special school: You’re OK as you are, but you are rather arrogant.

Secondary school: You need to do what everyone else does. You need not to get upset.

Each exclusion compounds the message. Each time a teacher sighs with exasperation. Each time you’re sent out of assembly for fidgeting. Each time you’re punished for asking why. Each time you’re told to just try harder, be normal, fit in.

The body keeps the score, as trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk1 describes. The nervous system learns: I am not safe being myself. Hypervigilance develops. You learn to scan rooms for danger. You learn where exits are. You learn to mask, to perform neurotypicality, to hide the intensities that mark you as different.

Physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté2 describes this impossible bind: children need both authenticity and attachment, but when these needs conflict, attachment wins. The child suppresses who they are to maintain belonging—and this suppression becomes trauma.

I know this because I lived it too. I was expelled from school at fifteen for not conforming. I was told I was too intense, too questioning, too much. I fell into destructive patterns—alcohol, drugs, relationships with people who confirmed my unworthiness. It took decades to understand that the problem wasn’t me. It was systems that cannot make the space for difference and then punish us for reacting against them.

I didn’t have language for it when my son was small. I had shame. When his first school called me in to collect him after he’d kicked a teacher, I felt the familiar heat of being marked as wrong. My child, my parenting, my family—all being judged and found wanting.

The loneliness of being different

There’s another layer to this trauma that’s rarely discussed: gifted children often cannot find belonging with their age peers either.

The intellectual intensity that allows a five-year-old to grasp complex mathematical concepts means their interests, their conversation, their way of engaging with ideas often aligns more naturally with adults or much older children. But their emotional development, their social skills, their physical coordination typically develop at age-appropriate rates.

This creates a profound mismatch. My son could discuss mathematical concepts with university students but struggled to navigate playground politics with eight-year-olds. He was intellectually lonely among his peers—their games bored him, their conversations felt superficial, their interests didn’t match his—but emotionally he wasn’t ready for the complexity of older friendships.

So he existed in between. Too intellectually advanced for his age group, too emotionally young for those who matched his cognitive level. Never quite fitting anywhere.

Other children sense this difference instinctively. The child who asks too many questions, who doesn’t care about the same things, who speaks in a way that feels oddly adult, who gets excited about subjects no one else finds interesting—that child becomes a target.

Not always through overt bullying, though that happens too. Often it’s subtler: being left out, not invited, talked about rather than talked to. The steady social exclusion that teaches you that difference means isolation.

My son learned early that showing his intellectual intensity made him vulnerable. If he demonstrated what he actually knew, if he answered questions in class with the depth of understanding he possessed, other children mocked him. Teachers sometimes felt threatened. So he learned to hide. To dumb down. To pretend the work was harder than it was. To laugh when he was confused about social situations and to act confused when he was actually fully engaged.

Being asked to make yourself smaller

But it wasn’t just about hiding to avoid mockery. He was actively asked to diminish himself for the comfort of others. “Let someone else answer.” “Be patient whilst we explain this to the other children.” “Don’t work ahead—wait for everyone to catch up.” The implicit message was clear: your ability is an inconvenience. Your understanding makes others uncomfortable. Your role is to stand aside, to slow down, to make yourself smaller so that less able children don’t feel bad about themselves.

This is a particular cruelty of how giftedness is managed in schools. Rather than providing appropriate challenge and allowing gifted children to work at their natural pace, we ask them to be perpetually patient, perpetually waiting, perpetually pretending they don’t already know.

We frame their capability as a social problem—something that creates inequality in the classroom that must be managed by suppressing the gifted child rather than stretching to meet their needs.

The trauma of this is profound. You learn that your gifts are not something to celebrate but something to apologise for.

That taking up space with your actual abilities is selfish.

That the appropriate response to being capable is to hide it, dampen it, parcel it out carefully so as not to make others feel inadequate.

You learn that your job is to make other people comfortable with their limitations by pretending you share them.

This social isolation isn’t separate from educational trauma—it’s integral to it. School isn’t just where you learn academics. It’s where you learn whether you belong in the human community.

When you cannot find connection with your peers, when your authentic self creates distance rather than closeness, when you’re lonely even in crowded playgrounds, the message becomes cellular: there is something fundamentally wrong with being me.

The research on gifted children and social relationships is clear about this pattern. Many gifted children report feeling profoundly lonely throughout their school years, even when surrounded by other children. They describe feeling like outsiders, like they’re watching social interactions from behind glass, understanding intellectually but unable to participate authentically.

Some find refuge in books, in solitary pursuits, in rich imaginary worlds. Some find one or two friends who share their intensities—often these friendships become lifelines. Some mask so successfully that they appear socially adept while feeling utterly disconnected inside. And some, like my son, oscillate between all of these strategies, never quite finding stable belonging anywhere.

The cruelty is that schools, by grouping children rigidly by age rather than interest or intellectual level, create this isolation structurally. Then they blame the child for struggling to connect. “He needs to work on his social skills.” “She should try harder to make friends.” “He’s too intense—he needs to learn to tone it down.”

But the problem isn’t the child’s social skills. The problem is being forced into social groups based solely on birth year when your actual peer group—intellectually, conversationally, in terms of shared interests—might be years older. Or being isolated from adults who could engage with your thinking because “children should play with children.”

My son thrived when he could spend time with the university students in my mathematics lectures. He belonged in those conversations in a way he never quite belonged in the infant school playground. But that wasn’t available to him. School insisted he stay with his age peers, regardless of whether those were actually his peers in any meaningful sense.

The physiology of being “too much”

The research on chronic stress in children is clear. When you experience repeated social rejection, when you’re consistently punished for your natural responses, when you cannot predict when you’ll be safe and when you’ll be shamed, the nervous system changes.

Cortisol floods the system. The amygdala becomes hypervigilant. The prefrontal cortex—responsible for planning, impulse control, sense of future—goes offline. The result is a body that never returns to baseline. You live in a state of perpetual threat.

For gifted children with overexcitabilities, this is compounded. They’re already experiencing the world at higher intensity. Already processing more sensory input, more emotional complexity, more intellectual stimulation than their nervous systems can easily regulate. Add systemic rejection on top of that and you create conditions for profound suffering.

At sixteen, my son would tip his chair back to the point of perfect equilibrium and then banter his way through lessons while somehow absorbing everything. This looked like not caring. It may have actually been sophisticated self-regulation—finding the precise balance point where his body could be still enough not to be punished while his mind stayed engaged.

But at home, the mask came off. The anger, the frustration, the accumulated shame of being told he was wrong erupted. And it was scary.

When giftedness meets inflexibility

The trauma of giftedness isn’t about the giftedness itself. It’s about the collision between neurological difference and systems designed for a narrow definition of normal.

Schools are organised around conformity. Same age, same curriculum, same pace, same methods, same behavioural expectations. This works reasonably well for children whose neurology fits within a certain range. For everyone else, it’s daily violence.

Not physical violence—though sometimes that too, through restraint or isolation. But the violence of being corrected, punished, excluded, and shamed for the way your brain works.

The violence of being told your natural learning pace is wrong. The violence of being forced to prove you know something in a way that makes no sense to you. The violence of having your questions treated as disruption rather than engagement.

I watched my son transform when I took him out of school completely for a while at age seven. At home, learning football skills from a friend, exploring mathematics at his own speed, he was calm. Cooperative. The “impossible” child became easy.

The problem was never him. The problem was the environment’s inability to flex.