High IQ and Therapy?

I don't think high IQ really affects therapy. Motivation, interest and introspection seem to have more of an effect. Anyway not all people with high IQs are interested in psychology.

LOL! To clarify, she did say that mine was not high enough that i would have problems understanding other people. It wasnt like over 160 or anything.

What I'm reading is that is more of a problem of being misunderstood (by anyone, really), and even being misdiagnosed and misunderstood by T's (or anyone in the MH field) than it is an issue of not understanding others.

And that is probably a case in point. A lot of people tell me here they dont understand my posts! Truth be told, a lot of times i go back and i dont understand them either. But ya know what?

A few years ago i was in the bookstore looking at "penny dreadfuls" - some i liked how they were written, some just sounded sooooo awkward. I realized at that moment - buy the one i like. Keep the other one out of my house. s

I'm very smart, and when I'm talking to my therapist is one of the few times when I'm not sure I'm the smartest person in the room. She does at least feign ignorance of a lot of pop culture but if I bring up an obscure reference from physics she totally gets that.

And I didn't have any trouble finding her I got a great reference from my first psychiatrist.

Does IQ really correlate with any meaningful kind of smartitude? In my experience it's a limited tool that only measures a very narrow kind of intelligence. IQ testing in general was developed to help understand more precisely the difficulties of people with intellectual disabilities. It was not really meant to tell us much about people with superior intelligence.

I suspect that one reason that people with extremely high IQs often have interpersonal difficulties and specifically have difficulty understanding other is that they are frequently on the autism spectrum. While Aspergers is not coterminous with genius, Aspergers-type personalities are often part of the picture of people who do extraordinarily well with the type of reasoning that IQ tests measure.

How this plays out in therapy is variable. Therapy probably won't be very helpful if you have contempt for your therapist's intelligence. Certainly, some therapists are not bright enough to get some clients. But I suspect that there is a kind of defensive special snowflake attitude that very bright clients bring to therapy. For example, I once almost completely dismissed something important my therapist said because she said in an ungrammatical way. It is easy to dismiss people or feel that we are uniquely hard to understand. This is a special trap for highly intelligent people who have felt misunderstood by peers or poorly served by the schooling they received in childhood. Your tendency to feel like folks don't get you is worth exploring. Your issues are likely fairly similar to everyone else's and the destructive patterns in which you are caught up are likely evident to your therapist even if she's not a genius. So take a breath and contemplate that!

I think being smart has helped me get more out of therapy...

I am anti special unique snowflake, yet it is the therapist herself who tells me I am unlike any client she has had before. I assume she is lying, but she does say it.

Caveat: there are some in our midst who truly are special snowflakes. (Perhaps it's like the Monty Python rule about the messiah: if you say you're it then we know you're not.) Who knows SD? It is not impossible that you number among them.

I am rather garden variety - the therapist just lies.

Now I just have the Violent Femmes stuck in my head.

Special special whaddya get
Another day older and deeper in debt...

SD, I suspect you are anything but garden variety when it comes to therapy . . .

I thought that was Tennessee Ernie Ford

Favorite jeans: my favorite new word - smartitude!

Yes it is a problem if you're smarter than the therapist. Well in my case anyway. I need therapy because of what people did to me as a kid that ****ed me up for life.

I have a very good t who is also a leader in his field and I can easily discuss his research and findings.

I get lonely because not many people think the way I do. I know we are all different and we just accept each other. It is what it is.

Being deaf and depressed isn't much fun. I say to T, logically I know what I have to do, but I don't seem to have a solid base or foundation to start with. Basically I have very low self esteem thanks to the paedophiles for screwing me up.

By reading your posts, which I am always interested in, I get the impression that what your therapist says is not a lie at all. You appear to be a very unique thinker.

Oh you two...
I go in with my portable lectern and personal folding chair and request she not talk just like everybody else.

. . . . . Lol

>>>>>>>

You still havent stated what it is you want. Do you want support or do you want to argue? It seems you want to argue, in which case, there are plenty of better places to go for that than therapy. A brilliant therapist will work past your defences... and you have a choice in how easy you make it for them.

I studied the sciences in university--very rational. Now I am a writer. Literature, to me, is an example of unrational truth. Most of my favourite writers say that the process of writing and reading is not at all rational. However, it is intellectual. (These are not writers who write fiction for the purpose to escape but to understand). A lot of work in the social sciences also shows us that we cannot be completely rational and we often use the assumption that we are more rational as a way of defending ourselves from new ideas. Rationality is not a bad thing. However, neither is not being rational. It doesnt sound like you are willing to give a therapist a shot. I get frustrated since therapists do not often understand me the way they understand their other clients. However, I have had to learn that they are human and I can learn from them.

But this is a perfect example of how arguments can be used to deflect--so--what is it that you want? This will depend on the type of therapy you would even start looking for...

My therapist often comments on much smarter than him I am, but due to my early life experiences, I am missing major gaps of common sense knowledge and relational intelligence than most people he sees. We often talk about how there is a "ten year-old" stuck inside of me who doesn't know many of the rules of interacting acting in the world, even though the adult me has an IQ over 140. I'm very grateful for therapy to help me make up for my very clear deficits.

For real? Sometimes I can't tell if you're being sarcastic

This was largely what I was meaning to say... I haven't been at my most articulate. There are plenty of types of therapy out there but the one that works best for me is the person-centered approach... basically states that it isn't a matter of whether or not we have knowledge of our problems (indeed, it assumes that we do have knowledge), but that we must learn new ways of being in the world and we learn this through the relationship with the therapist.

This works for me because, while I do have insight, I lack the ability to feel my emotions, feel safe in relationship, etc.

And there are other approaches but I think that intellectuals often work best with person-centered. We also tend to resist it because it is easier for us to discuss knowledge rather than to reveal our inner truths or get close to people.

I used my intellect to fight the system for a long time but I just got too *******ed tired. And I have good reason to resent the system. It's just... eventually I had to try to trust someone. Not argue.

I have been misdiagnosed, mistreated, misunderstood, and refused help because no one with my memory could have a mental illness (I was told...). But I had to learn to have relationships and be vulnerable...

I was not being sarcastic. I was exaggerating a bit and kidding (no portable lectern in real life).

You just ruined all the fun I was having picturing you doing all that.

I do the other things if that helps any.