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- Hacker News
- Ugh. I hate the whole trope of "gifted children". Most of them (well, us) are high functioning autistics. And the worst phrase that plagued us all school years was "you have soooo much potential".by nekusar
- I recognize many of these behaviors from my childhood. Fortunately I’ve grown out of most of them. These ways of framing issues and feedback are very valuable, even in adult life.by JSR_FDED
- https://www.pangram.com/history/2f3ba7f0-b35b-414a-a0bf-2c96...
Don't waste your time.
by duhhhhh1212 - An almost trifecta. I am almost gifted, autism and adhd ( or add, you wouldn’t call me hyperactive…). My trick was to “use” my autism to filter out rejection clues. I am still sensitive in a sense, can get obsessed over detail of something that could be perceived as a rejection, but I actively refuse parsing anything as such. People tell me I am over-confident to a fault.by cgio
- > When adults consistently praise a child’s intelligence rather than their process or effort, mistakes stop feeling like normal setbacks and start feeling existential.
Isn’t this a good reason to stop using the term “gifted”? Isn’t it now widely acknowledged that effort (among other things like creativity and self-conception) actually is part of intelligence?
“Gifted” children are historically identified and classified via IQ tests (typically with the threshold IQ >= 130 - though the definition of what ‘gifted’ should mean is being debated), and using “gifted” for smart kids emerged and was popularized in the 1920’s when IQ tests were being developed by people who basically believed in eugenics, in the heritability of intelligence, and they wanted to identify the kids with the smart genes. [1] Using language like ‘profoundly gifted’ and ‘genius’ for high IQ has always been (mis)leading since IQ is a ranking, not an absolute measure of intelligence.
I just searched and found an interesting recent paper arguing that ‘gifted’ is problematic and attached to science that is no longer valid, and should be improved or replaced. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Overvi...
by dahart - "autistic individuals may have difficulty consciously processing social evaluative cues in the moment, meaning a child may not always recognize that what they are experiencing is a reaction to rejection, even while the physiological load of it is very real"
Alexythemia is like a that, I can have anxiety without realizing it, all I see is that my hands are shaking, blood pressure rises but in the head I'm like whatever, I don't notice.
However alexythemia also means no psychological reaction to physical emotion sensations.
I would interpret this like some subconscious processing of social cues does occur in this case and it does trigger inner changes,but why it occurs does not make it into consciousness, so the alexythemia hides the reason for the body sensation but the sensation is strong enough to be noticeable and the lack of understanding for the strong reaction can cause people to flip out.
I am not rejection sensitive at all btw, too dense to give a shit but its interesting.
by hoppp - Ugh. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable giving the sensitivity its own diagnoses. I feel as if it's a secondary reaction to a chronic condition.
I'm "on the spectrum," which, of course, means that my K-12 days were a living hell. It was bad. I spent most of my early years, acting as a punching bag for any bully or proto-bully that was feeling the need to let off some steam.
Needless to say, I tended to be a bit "sensitive," during that period.
I also learned, early on, that I was absolutely terrible at determining motivation in others. I have learned to ask, explicitly, before assigning motive, so the sensitivity has extended far past my bully-magnet days.
These days, I'm fairly old, and have developed highly effective compensation/coping mechanisms, but it took a long time to get here.
All that, to say that, in my case, I feel as if the "sensitivity" was real, but as a secondary symptom of my "normal" autism lite.
- One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.
Even the core idea, 'rejection sensitivity' is acknowledged not to be a diagnostic entity: so then how can we make definitive comparisons? Maybe clinical gestalt... but the author is not trained to see and evalaute patients.
by bonsai_spool