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  • Being Seen is an experience of feeling deeply understood by another person. According to self-concept theory, such positive and understanding reflections are crucial for self-concept development. However, when interactions produce negative reflections, self-concept and emotional stability may suffer. In gifted people, asynchronous development and overexcitabilities create experiences that differ from the norm. Because few people are gifted or understand the social-emotional aspects of giftedness, gifted people may have more difficulty finding people with whom they feel deeply understood. This is likely to be even more true for highly gifted people, who are only about 0.1% of the population. In this exploratory study, 24 highly gifted adults participated in conversations about being Seen as part of refining the concept itself. They then each wrote answers to reflective questions about their experiences being Seen. Transcripts of those conversations and participants' written reflections were analyzed using thematic analysis to find common threads of thought among the participants. The findings suggest that being Seen is a positive but rare experience for participants. More often, participants received negative or disapproving reflections to behaviors that are typical for gifted people but atypical for others. This was called being misSeen. Participants also described interactions when they neither felt understood nor received negative reflections. This was called being notSeen. In most interactions, participants felt misSeen or notSeen. To avoid the negative repercussions of being misSeen, participants learned to self-conceal among most people. Rather than reveal their self-described "true" or "authentic" selves, participants restricted their natural ways of being and attempted to perform to others' expectations. However, doing so required conscious thought, could be exhausting, and was not always successful. Although only a few participants acutely felt the effects of being misSeen and notSeen, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction was detected in the participants' responses. This comports with self-concept literature about negative reflections and with literature about the social-emotional aspects of giftedness. Discussion includes additional ideas about how self-concept literature and gifted literature might intersect to explain findings. Future studies might investigate how being Seen might change one's self-concept or compare highly gifted adults' experiences to those of other groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Última actualización de la base de datos: 4/10/26, 6:08 (CEST)

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