Reclaiming the Self: What Giftedness Means After Identification

Become a Substack paid subscriber and gain access to our Blog Post PDFs.

Check out Substack for article voiceover

When You Name What Was Always There

I didn’t grow up knowing I was gifted.

I knew I felt things deeply. That I thought about things other kids didn’t. That I was sensitive to injustice, curious about the stars, and endlessly preoccupied with the inner lives of people, systems, and stories. But for most of my life, those traits weren’t seen as strengths. They were quirks. Overreactions. “Too much.”

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties — after already being formally diagnosed as Autistic and ADHD — that I came across the concept of multi-exceptionality. When I completed my giftedness profile in early 2024, something clicked.

It wasn’t just a label — it was a reclamation.

A reconnection with parts of me I’d long abandoned in order to survive.

The Fractured Self Before Naming

Many late-identified gifted adults carry a kind of chronic dissonance. We move through the world sensing there’s something different about how we engage — but without a framework, it gets misnamed. We get called intense, dramatic, difficult, selfish, weird, smart-but-scattered, sensitive-but-rude.

And so we mask.

We fragment.

We split the self into pieces small enough to be palatable.

Before identification, my intellect was often celebrated — but only if I softened it. My creativity dismissed as a distraction. My emotional depth seen as instability. My existential pondering labelled rumination. I felt internally rich but externally incoherent — like all the parts of me were speaking different languages with no interpreter in sight.

The Mirror: A New Kind of Knowing

Receiving a formal identification of giftedness as an adult was more than a relief. It was a profound re-mapping of my internal world. My profile acknowledged not just cognitive giftedness, but also emotional, sensual, and existential forms — the full constellation of what had once felt like “too much.”

What came after was a profound process of integration — the act of bringing coherence to disparate life experiences through identity reframing. For gifted individuals, whose traits often go unmirrored, this can be life-altering.

What the world pathologised — my pattern sensitivity, my overwhelm, my refusal to accept superficial explanations — suddenly made sense. These weren’t failures to cope; they were signs of a different operating system.

Grieving the Lost Years

But identification doesn’t just bring clarity. It brings grief.

Grief for the self that was contorted to fit.

Grief for the unmet potential buried beneath perfectionism, trauma, or invisibility.

This grief is complex. It’s not about regret in the traditional sense. It’s about recognising how much energy was spent surviving in environments that never saw the full picture. Gifted trauma often stems from chronic misattunement and forced adaptation — not just to the neurotypical world, but even to gifted stereotypes that don’t reflect multi-exceptionality.

I had to mourn the child who intellectualised her feelings because no one validated her sensitivity. The teen who turned down the volume on her joy to fit in. The adult who masked so well that even therapists didn’t see what was underneath.

Self-Reclamation as a Lifelong Process

To reclaim the gifted self is not to simply “accept” a label. It’s to radically restructure your inner narrative. To re-story your past through a new lens of compassion. To stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and begin asking, “What has my nervous system been trying to survive?”

This reclamation is slow, spiralling, and often non-linear. It involves:

• Deconstructing internalised narratives: Unlearning the belief that giftedness is only valid when it looks like academic achievement or corporate success.

• Making space for underexpressed domains: Especially emotional, sensual, and creative giftedness, which are frequently masked in order to be accepted.

• Navigating imposter syndrome: A frequent companion in the post-identification journey, especially for multi-exceptional individuals whose challenges have been misread as incompetence.

• Reconnecting with desire: Learning to follow what truly sustains and excites you — rather than what you’ve been taught to pursue for validation.

The Cultural Lens: Why This is So Hard in Australia

In Australia, this reclamation journey comes with additional hurdles. Tall poppy syndrome — the cultural tendency to cut down those who stand out — creates an environment where giftedness is often shamed, dismissed, or erased.

The word “gifted” itself can feel like a provocation.

Even in therapeutic or professional spaces, acknowledging one’s giftedness can be met with discomfort or minimisation. Many late-identified gifted adults carry an inner conflict between the relief of recognition and the fear of seeming arrogant. This conflict is amplified when their giftedness doesn’t look like conventional intelligence — when it’s embodied in intuition, emotional sensitivity, or moral depth.

Therapy as Integration, Not Repair

What I’ve learned — both as a therapist and a client — is that gifted adults don’t need fixing. We need remembering.

Therapy, when done well, is not about reining in intensity. It’s about giving it somewhere to land.

It’s about helping clients reclaim the parts of themselves they buried to survive — their wild thoughts, their unspeakable grief, their intense joys. It’s about offering relational safety so they can unmask without losing themselves in the process.

Gifted therapy isn’t a process of containment.

It’s a sacred practice of integration.

Beyond Individual Healing: Systemic Implications

This is not just a personal journey. It’s political.

When giftedness goes unnamed — especially in those who are also Autistic, ADHD, queer, disabled, or otherwise marginalised — it reinforces systems of erasure. It upholds the myth that intelligence is linear, testable, and neutral. It denies the reality that many forms of giftedness are suppressed by capitalism, colonialism, gender norms, and ableism.

Reclaiming giftedness isn’t about elitism. It’s about justice. It’s about naming the ways brilliance survives under pressure — and creating conditions where it can thrive without apology.

Final Thoughts

To discover you are gifted — late, layered, and lived — is not just to understand your mind. It is to come home to it.

To no longer pathologise your sensitivities.To honour the constellations within.

To reclaim a life that was always yours — but never mirrored back.

Identification is not the end.

It’s the invitation to begin again,

this time in your own language.

If you’ve recently discovered you’re gifted — or suspect you might be — you’re not alone in the complexity of that experience. At Cathartic Collaborations, we specialise in working with multi-exceptional adults navigating unmasking, identity reclamation, and post-identification integration.