Being gifted usually means being unusually able, but some who work with gifted people describe it as much in terms of depth, sensitivity and intensity. Therapeutic Shamanism has no separate teaching on giftedness, but some of its published teaching, on loneliness, on the mask we wear and on the shaman’s place a little outside society, may shed light on why being gifted can feel lonely, or like being too much for other people. Giftedness in this sense is different from the gifts of the Soul.
What does “gifted” mean? #
It depends whom you ask. Some writers define giftedness by ability. The psychologist Roberta Milgram, for example, describes four kinds of giftedness, two to do with intelligence and two with original, creative thinking, each found at different levels.1 Others look wider. The counsellor Paula Prober, who works with gifted adults, writes: “giftedness is not only mental acuity or cognitive ability. It is not only about achievement.” She goes on: “giftedness is defined as a set of characteristics, including sensitivity, empathy, and perfectionism.” Her image for it is a “rainforest mind”, which “includes heart, soul, body, and spirit.”2 People who are both gifted and neurodivergent are sometimes called twice-exceptional.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see giftedness? #
It has no separate teaching on giftedness. The nearest is its wider teaching on neurodiversity and the Wild Mind. See What is neurodiversity, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism see it?
There is also an old place for people who see differently: “a shaman is someone who is somewhat outside of normal society, and precisely because of this, can be of service by being able to see society clearly and more objectively.”3 Milgram writes of original thinkers that “They see things differently and notice things that others ignore.”4 This does not make every gifted person a shaman. It does mean that seeing differently has not always been treated as a problem. See What do tribe and belonging mean, and what is the shaman’s role in a community?
Why can giftedness feel like a burden? #
Often because of intensity and loneliness. Prober writes: “Many of my clients talk about feeling like they are ‘too much’ for people.” They are told to calm down or, as one client put it, to “shallow up”.5 She also writes that “Contrary to the mythology that ‘smart’ people will be just fine without help, what often comes with smart is excessive doubt, anxiety, depression, shame, and loneliness.”6 A chapter in Milgram’s book describes gifted children in a similar way: “They are more intense and have a more acutely affected nervous system. They have trouble screening out; they are dealing with more.”7
Loneliness, for Prober, “may be the number one challenge”.8 Therapeutic Shamanism sees a loneliness that runs through all of modern life. Being in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer “heals a deep sense of loneliness, isolation, and separation in us that, as modern humans, we all carry.”9 See What is the Lower-World?
What if I am valued for what I achieve? #
Then the burden can turn inward. The same chapter in Milgram’s book says that “Gifted children are particularly likely to feel that they are valued for what they can achieve.”10 Prober describes one result, an “unhealthy need to be right, be the best, and not make mistakes as a way to prove you are worthy of love.”11
Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on what Carl Rogers called conditions of worthConditions of worth. Carl Rogers’s term for the conditions placed on love and acceptance in childhood, internalised as conditions of self-worth: the wonky stories of the middle-world self that override the Soul’s original instructions. More about this may shed light here: “We learn to turn a ‘condition of worth’ from others into a ‘condition of self-worth'”.12 A child valued mainly for achievement can come to feel that achievement is the price of being loved. See What is the inner critic, and what other inner roles do we develop? and What is masking, and how is it linked to domestication?
Is giftedness the same as the gifts of the Soul? #
No. Talents of every kind, from painting to cooking to “listening to people well”, are gifts of the Soul, and using them “is our Soul finding a way to express itself in the world; it is us being able to be what we were meant to be.”13 That is something anyone can discover, whether or not they would ever be called gifted. Psychological giftedness, the subject of this answer, is something else. See What does rewilding Soul mean, and how do we discover our gifts and life direction?
Are gifted people more likely to struggle? #
Views differ. Milgram, drawing on a long line of research, reports that gifted learners as a group have “fewer life difficulties than their less gifted peers”, much of that research having studied children chosen by IQ.14 Writers such as Prober, from their work with gifted adults, describe real and common struggles. Both may be true for different people, and nothing here says what being gifted means for any one person.
