Why Gifted People Tend to Struggle in Relationships

Often, life isn’t as harmful to us as we are, unknowingly, to ourselves. Some of the worst things that happen to us happen because of us. This may manifest in the way we understand ourselves and respond to others based on that understanding.

The Impact of Self-Perception on Relationships

We may believe ourselves to be brilliant, beautiful, and special. And, we may consequently believe that those traits make us important and should. Many of those with some sort of talent or quality that allows them to stand out can attest to this.

We frequently see this with our gifted patients. Thus, their relationships struggle. In a household where talent and innate ability are highly prized, some of these individuals grow up believing they’re entitled to certain privileges due to them. They may believe being exceptionally smart means they should possess the power to veto decisions. They may believe that others should defer to them if they disagree. And they may believe that they don’t owe it to anyone to explain their choices. Fundamentally, there’s an overvaluing of some desirable quality. While they sincerely believe in their rights to these privileges, unfortunately for them, the world seldom agrees.

Brilliance, Talent, and the Struggle With Entitlement

Does brilliance or talent equate with importance? Not necessarily. Gifted individuals may struggle when others don’t take them seriously, and consistently struggle to perceive their entitlement as anything but justifiable. At times, for example, these individuals (in this respect, the intellectually gifted) enter couples therapy with the perspective of: I’m always right, so I should be allowed to make the decisions for us. This can mean their partner doesn’t feel like a partner; they feel like an accessory.

Taking for granted that they indeed are gifted, we may ask: Does being smart imply that you’re always right? If you’re wrong some of the time, can that mean that your partner should have some input to reduce the likelihood of you making a bad choice?

Exploring the Value of Being Right

Here, we explore the value of being right and how important it is in the real world. Does being right matter if you’re constantly pushing people away with your arrogance? Moreover, does it matter if you consider persuading any of them, especially your partner, of your perspective a waste of time? With that line of questioning, we begin to disentangle being right from being important in the way that we would disentangle being right from being smart. Because there’s a tendency among gifted individuals to think in a black and white way, all of these concepts tend to get lumped together.

If being important means being right and being right means being smart, losing one means losing them all. Rather than collaborating with their partners, some gifted individual instead may use them to shore up an inflated self-image. “I’m right 98% of the time, so why can’t you just listen to me?”

The Consequences of Stubbornness and Arrogance

Returning to our line our questioning, we may ask: But what is it all for? While, objectively, the gifted individual may be smart, additionally, they may have failed at making multiple relationships work, treated their partners as children, failed to account for the times when they were wrong, failed to grow from their mistakes, and wasted their talents. Their own stubbornness is often their great saboteur.

But all isn’t necessarily lost. Somewhere down the line, they’ll have to ask themselves: How should I live?

Hope and the Challenge of Change

Based on my own experiences as a clinician, I can say that there’s hope. But, the most challenging aspect of keeping it alive lies in the potential decision to revoke their own self-perceived privileges, to give up some of their unearned power. Philosophically speaking, all of us have to decide whether to live in reality or continue to feed our delusions; it’s a choice that defines our lives. We have to resolve how important being a person in the world is to us and how much we value truth. Because gifted individuals grow up in homes where their talents are overvalued, in part because they create the shared perception of the prospect of a better future for the surrounding family, they have to decide to become skeptics and question most of what they know about themselves and what they’re owed if they want to make use of their talents.

Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams, in referring to narcissistically-structured individuals, wrote, “This grandiosity may be felt internally, or it may be projected. There is a constant 'ranking' process that narcissistic people use to address any issue that faces them: Who is the 'best' doctor? What is the 'finest' preschool? Where is the 'most rigorous' training? Realistic advantages and disadvantages may be completely overridden by concerns about comparative prestige.” Thus, being the best doesn’t equate with knowing and doing what’s best for oneself, another set of concepts to disentangle.