ARTICLES

Reflections on Counseling Gifted Adults
reprint from Advanced Development Journal, Volume 8, 1999

Annemarie Roeper, Ed.D. humanistic educator, author, co-founder of the Roeper School for the Gifted and of Roeper Review, currently runs a consultation service for the gifted and advocates for the education and nurturing of the Self. During her career, Annemarie Roeper has consistently seen the Self and its development as the central point of human reactions and fears. This focus was established in her early contact with Freud and his work. She has since expanded and to some extent departed from this view.

Even though I have worked with gifted people for many years, I continue to be surprised by the most unexpected expressions of intensity, passions, gentleness, empathy, and creativity as well as frustration, disappointment, and a certain puzzlement at the strangeness of the world. All these emotions exist in the Soul, the Self of the individual, which must try to find a place for itself in this most confusing world. Gifted people see life in the most brilliant colors and are capable of the greatest joy and the greatest desperation. They try to build all this into a functioning Self.

They try to live in their crowded inner world and look for ways to make this possible. They sometimes build inner walls to protect themselves and then find themselves lonely in less than splendid isolation. They often crave and need the help and support of other people. They may need help to access themselves as well as the world outside. Many gifted people are driven by a desire to explore their Self just as they need to explore the world outside. Making sense of themselves and feeling fulfilled are often the forces that lead toward seeking counseling.

The Purpose of Counseling

Counseling strives to aid those who feel this desire for greater fulfillment and are suffering some emotional pain. Many of those are gifted. I have always regretted that the concept of counseling is defined in terms of need rather than in terms of inner growth. The gifted strive toward emotional and intellectual fulfillment, which means growth.

How do we then define the role and task of the counselor? The task will be defined in different ways, by different people, for specific purposes. Some hope to prepare an adult client to perform a job in the world or to help a child accept the learning of necessary skills. In my definition, these are secondary tasks. The first and major task is to help and support the Soul of the individual in coping with the demanding inner and outer world. This also means bringing clarity to many overlapping inner structures and layers within this human Soul. It means helping to find an inner switch, turning it on, and bringing the shine back to the Soul, which may have become tarnished over time.

In most of the people whom I have counseled, I have observed the desire for inner growth. There was a need to partake more fully in each one’s own Self and the world. And, of course, there were also specific issues that make the care of the Soul even more difficult and which might need resolving. Over the years, I have counseled many people in both formal and informal situations. My goal has always been the same, namely to help them see, feel, value, and understand their own Soul.

When my sister was about eight years old, she told my mother that she really liked one of her playmates. When my mother asked what she liked about him, she said, I looked into his eyes and saw his Soul. I have never forgotten this statement because I was awed by it. This is what I look for in counseling people, and this is what everyone is searching for¾finding the access to one’s essence or Soul. It is a person’s Soul or Self which often gets lost in the daily hustle and bustle of life. It is our most valuable possession. To find it is the real purpose of counseling.

Finding the Self

How do we find the Self again? The first prerequisite is the desire and motivation on the part of the counselee and the understanding that in the end she does the seeking and the finding herself. The counselor can only give a helping hand by reflecting back what the person discovers, by opening hidden doors, by allowing the unhindered flow of feeling, and by working toward overcoming resistances. The counselor must be motivated by a true desire to help the client discover the needs of the Self. This motivation of the counselor is the most important aspect of the process, for it endows the counselee with importance and a realization that she is not alone in her endeavor. It may be necessary to try, in a careful gentle manner, to overcome the client’s resistance to revealing secret parts of herself, or, at times, to know enough to leave them undisturbed.

We must remember that these resistances serve an important purpose: They are nothing but the emotional walls that protect the hidden treasures of the Self of the gifted. The goal of counseling, therefore, becomes a contradictory one. On the one hand, it is concerned with the protection of the necessary resistances, and on the other, with their removal, to explore the hidden treasures of the Soul. For this reason, working with resistances becomes the most sensitive aspect in the process of counseling the gifted adult.

For example, I once worked with a woman who was most unhappy with her alcoholic husband. She did not love him and was angry with him. But, for years, she resisted any thought of leaving him because she could not give up her need for being needed by him. She needed to feel that she had to sacrifice herself for that was the basis of her self-esteem. It was only when she developed awareness of this and found some other way to love herself that she could tackle the real situation. I had to be careful not to take away her accustomed definition of herself before she could discover some other inner resources. I might have overlooked this need if I had allowed myself to act on my desire to be of help to her.

Whatever the situation is, counseling must be based on a deep trust relationship which may not be compromised by the needs of the counselor. It is an act of faith on the part of the client to reveal his or her emotional nakedness. We must, therefore, begin with an exploration of the wall of resistance. We must ask such questions as “Why has it developed? Is it needed, and, why is it needed? What is clamoring to get out and is yet afraid?” For the client, there may be a terrible danger lurking in the outer or inner world. Timing and empathy are some of the tools necessary to avoid making mistakes.

The client may wonder, “What is it that I will be revealing? How can I trust anyone, including myself, or possibly mostly myself, with the content of my Soul? Will it really be touched gently?” In thinking of this process, I see, in my mind, a picture of a man holding my husband’s heart, taken during his heart bypass operation. Even though the surgery was successfully completed, a waver of apprehension overcame me in seeing this photograph. How could we have trusted a stranger access and jurisdiction over his precious heart?

Counseling is allowing someone access to our emotional heart. Just as the heart bypass, it is a question of emotional life and death. Both the client and the counselor become deeply involved in their common task of handling the resistance with care. It takes great courage on the part of the client and, of course, the motivation for an improved state of heart. It takes enormous intuition and sensitivity on the part of the counselor.

In the process of this cooperation, one of the difficult parts is that there is often the discovery of the dark side of the Soul which we want to hide from others and most of all from our Self. We relegate this dark side to the unconscious. The goal, therefore, remains to learn to trust both our Self and the counselor enough to allow us to let go of the inner judge. The walls of resistance will be the inner center of this process of counseling. They may be as small as a fence or as big as the Great Wall of China.

The Counseling Process

How actually does this process of counseling take place? What is really the relationship between counselor and counselee? I would like to highlight these questions by describing a few situations with which I have worked and then explain how I feel the counseling process takes place and how this relates particularly to the gifted.

Just as we find the element of surprise and complexity in any encounter with the gifted, we find it also in counseling the gifted. In reviewing my experiences with former counseling situations of gifted adults, I realize that I work mostly with women. The manner in which I came to do this particular type of counseling shows the intricacies of relationships between parents and children and among gifted adults. I will present here a few examples from my earlier years of counseling.

For several months, I worked with a highly gifted young girl about the age of nine. She had the usual problem of the highly gifted¾feeling isolated socially and underserved academically and intellectually. Her family’s living situation was flexible and favorable. A combination of school and homeschooling was finally worked out, partially based on my counseling of the child. The program functioned well. It became a positive schooling and homeschooling situation. The child blossomed emotionally and intellectually.

At this point, I felt that it was time to terminate the counseling with the child. But something stopped me from going through with this plan. There remained some subtle signals in the demeanor of the child that made me feel that she was carrying a burden, some strange responsibility, and a sadness. There was no explanation for it in her daily life as far as I could see. She seemed to enjoy her home life, activities, and her learning, which were tailor-made for her. The only thing unusual was that she continued to be enormously tied to her mother. She was always anxiously looking for her. Yet, she seemed secure and safe, at peace with herself and her life. There was a strange contradiction between the reality of her life and her apparent discomfort. Then it struck me that whatever it was that burdened her was not really her problem and that it was to be found somewhere else. It felt like a borrowed problem. It seemed as though her unusual awareness made it hers.

I developed an intuitive sense that this had some connection with her mother. I never had any actual clue on which to base this feeling. It was, however, so strong that I decided to share it with the mother. There was an immediate reaction by the mother at this revelation. Her eyes filled with tears; she could hardly talk. Once she had gained control of herself, the words just flowed and could not be stopped.

She told me that she carried a great burden and now wondered whether somehow this had relayed itself to her daughter, who is most sensitive. Her own sorrow actually threatened to overwhelm her many times. It became difficult because she had never spoken to anyone about this. As a child, she had been raped repeatedly by her maternal uncle. After her father’s death, the mother’s mother turned parental authority over to this uncle, and he was not to be criticized by anyone. So the child had to experience this terrifying encounter with her uncle against the background of the fact he was seen as a person who had no faults. She was alone with her pain and inner struggle for many years. She never spoke to anyone about this. She, in fact, felt very humiliated by this experience. It proved to her that she was a worthless human being. This feeling of her worthlessness was in some way supported by the fact that her daughter was so gifted. She expressed the following feelings, realizing they were not realistic. How could she have committed the crime of allowing herself to be raped when she had produced such an outstanding child? It made her feel even more insignificant and guilty. At the same time, she had the task of raising this wonderful child. In other words, she had strong motivation for her task in life but no support for healing her wounded Self.

Her revelation forced her to open her inner doors. She no longer could keep them locked. It became a breakthrough in many ways. I worked with her for several months until she was able to talk to someone else about it. A psychiatrist continued to work with her. Through this process, we opened the door to her recognition of her own giftedness and her value as a person.

Even though the child was not told at that point about the events in her mother’s life, she sensed that something had changed. She realized I was now seeing her mother and she was relieved of some kind of responsibility. The change in her was dramatic. She became a playful child and no longer had any need for seeing me.

I brought up this example because it demonstrates a most important fact relating to counseling. As counselors, we must listen to our own inner voice and believe it, even if we cannot support these feelings logically. Our intuition often tells us about unusual inner experiences of our clients. We must hone our intuition to such an extent that it will be open even to an unusual situation like this one where the problem really belongs to someone else. The possibility of incorporating someone else’s problem adds another dimension to our understanding and working with the gifted Self.

I have worked with several other situations where the gifted child became, actually, the catalyst ¾the pathway¾for the mother to seek my counseling. There were similarities among these situations. In many cases, the fathers were well known, generally accepted gifted adults who were successful in their professional lives. While the child turned out to be equally gifted, the mother, who had been brought up to be the supportive element in the family, had almost no chance to develop her own strengths. She was there to serve both her child and her husband. Even in our enlightened times, she could not experience her giftedness in the presence of her “more important” husband and child. The fact that she was truly gifted often made it even more difficult for her to surface as a highly functioning Self. These women all had enormous feelings of responsibility. They were extremely sensitive to the needs of their children and their husbands. Their life experience and upbringing led them to take on the role of the facilitator, but not a role that would allow them to express their inner Selves. They had not given themselves permission to love themselves and, in addition, lacked awareness of this fact.

Therefore, they could not seek me out for their own needs. In their minds, the only acceptable help for themselves would be the understanding that without such assistance they could not help their child enough otherwise. In our developing relationship, there had to be a point where each needed to make an internal change and realize that they really came to see me for themselves and had a right to do so. My real task was to help them discover themselves and their right for expression and growth. That remains my goal in counseling.

The Counseling Relationship

How then do I work toward this goal? The basis for my approach to counseling is the type of relationship that is established between the client and me. It requires an unusual connection, an unusual confidence on the part of the client to reveal her innermost feelings to a stranger. Expecting someone to open up to an unknown person creates a seemingly unnatural type of intimacy between two people. An enormous depth of trust is required on the part of the counselee and a paradoxical commitment for the counselor. On one hand, she must become an empty slate. There is no place for her personal agenda. In fact, this is one of the basic ground rules in order to make this process work. Triggered by the outpouring of feelings by a client, an issue might touch something in the Self of the counselor. If the counselor reacted in a way that would be based on her own agenda, the situation would be compromised.

Clients, particularly gifted clients, are most sensitive to this. I have known of many therapeutic relationships that were ended prematurely by the pain created in the client when the counselor’s needs came to the forefront and suddenly the client’s own importance became diminished. There must be careful vigilance and admission if this situation occurs. If it does, it can be remedied by open discussion between client and therapist.. This requires that the counselor remain relatively clear about her own Self and sensitive about the areas where her ego might interfere.

On the other hand, a strong and even passionate commitment to the client is also a requirement. This, of course, sounds like a contradiction. As counselors, we must concentrate on the needs of the other person with all of the passion that we have to help. We must be open to the other person’s Soul with all our pores and senses. We must be able to listen with our “third ear.” We must try to help the other person look at his or her Self without any judgment on our part, but much empathy. Both counselor and client need to look at the situation without censoring, to allow a free flow of information and receive it without judgment, but with deep, intuitive understanding. And we must be passionately involved.

A relationship must be established where the channels of communication are open. The counselor must create a special inner space reserved for this person in him- or herself. This means we establish an impersonal/personal emotional involvement, which sounds contradictory, but serves as the foundation of a deep, powerful therapeutic connection.

Once that empty slate is established, we can react freely with the information flowing from one Soul to the other. With this information, we can react to the content of the communication and begin to use our cognitive knowledge of these processes, our understanding about resistances and defenses, and our intuitive awareness of the client. The content of the communication determines the future nature of the counseling.  A counselor needs to hone her own intuition and sense the client’s resistances.

Whatever the client brings to the therapy, the counselor must sense the next step to take, like sensing a partner’s next step in a dance. For example, if a gifted woman has not felt entitled to have her own voice, the counselor creates a safe place for this voice to be heard, and then listens. Likewise, if the counselor perceives strong resistance in the client, a more passionate, active participation is needed from the counselor. I am convinced that much of the work is done by non-verbal, intuitive communication. This fact has been understood unconsciously for a long time by artists, poets, and musicians, as well as dancers, who communicate in non-verbal ways. The knowledge of this fact has also resulted in different types of therapy, such as movement and dance therapy and others.

Beyond Formal Counseling

Actually, there are different forms of counseling. Counseling goes beyond the formal therapist’s setting. I believe that much of it takes place in informal, relational settings. In fact, more counseling takes place between people who have a close relationship with each other than between strangers. Parents counsel children; children counsel parents. Friends and lovers counsel each other. A basic requirement¾and a difficult one it is, is the ability to turn off our own inner agenda and empathize deeply with those around us. It is my belief that most close relationships include such counseling between people who help each other grow. The motivation to help others overcome their resistances and the mutual trust might be greater among friends than strangers. These situations are basically different from the client-counselor relationship. Because of the emotional bond, the passion to help might make the helper overstep some of the necessary boundaries. On the other hand, those who are helped may possibly enter more deeply into themselves if they are driven by a safe love relationship.

The variety of hidden treasures is as great as the variety of unique Souls. Allowing these treasures to see the light of day and to fill the emptiness their absence has created is a most worthy goal. I often wonder how many treasures are hidden in our Souls and how much the world misses because we hide them or cannot find them. Counseling is high drama, a combination of art and adventure. If it is successful, it is well worth the effort. The resulting outpouring of hidden creativity is an exciting reward for both client and counselor and a real cause for celebration.