I am glad kids these days are getting support. I am currently being evaluated for autism. I am in my 50s. On the one hand there were teachers that labeled me as literally mentally retarded. Others called me smart. It depended on which year I was in or what subject I was being taught. i was reading at a college level by the time I was in 6th grade. I graduated high school with a c- gpa, but I graduated early because I just couldn't stand being there. I graduated on independent studies. I went to college as an older adult and I had a 3.96 GPA all the way through grad school. And I did that as a single mom. Highly perfectionistic. Life would have been easier for me if I had been spotted as a kid, given tools to deal with being autistic. It is really confusing to have an extraordinary command of language but you can't read a clock, use a keyed lock, tell your right from your left. I can see why some of my teachers thought I had brain damage. I would never have labeled myself "exceptional" or "gifted". My son had similar experiences. He has been diagnosed with 3 anxiety disorders. I think he is autistic too. His homeroom teacher in junior high wanted to give him an exception to put him in gifted classes at one point, but since his grades were low the school district said no. And then his psychologist and some of his teachers tried to get permission for him to skip high school altogether and go directly into college because he passed the exit exam as a freshman, again, he was told no because his grades were low. He never graduated as a result of this. So many exceptional people have been denied a seat at the table because we did not jump through the right hoops, society saying we did not deserve that seat because we didn't "earn" it with good grades, etc. The cure for cancer is probably in the noggin of some exceptional kid like my son who didn't get high enough grades.
36:59 That is literally the truest thing I've ever heard in my life haha. I have felt conflicting feelings about myself my entire life, like "I have so much potential and can be outstanding at certain things but then there's always something that's holding me back and getting in the way, as if there are two people living within one body...the gifted one and the one who just crawls into a hole and avoids life entirely, whenever something is too overwhelming"
@@joshwhitworth4646 well I'm glad we both now know that we are not just personally failures at life haha. Understanding that there is a reason why you are this way, that you can't actually help it, you aren't just a flawed person that can't hack it and that there are many others just like you...it's empowering, imo. Does it change the struggle? No. But it can shift your perception about yourself and you can give yourself more credit and empathize more with yourself. At least that's how I think!
@@amaebarnes I just found this a few days ago and it's been blowing my mind I haven't been able to stop researching about it! Icrazy how accurate it is! Yes there is a sense of relief knowing that I may be able to meet people that have the same mindset as me and can have a better connection because I do tend to isolate to my garage and build things!! . The struggles that I had to endure through school have been insane but only because I really didn't give a shit about school it just didn't interest me. I then go to college and excelled beyond most of my peers. A person can look at my Facebook and see everything they are talking about in these videos.. it tells this story itself lol. Oh and I have a big problem with the government and unfairness with police and such and this isn't such a good thing!!
The former gifted but fragile kids are more and more realizing they’re autistic with ADHD, myself included. Look into it. It may change your life. The gifted diagnosis seems like the ego’s way of sugarcoating autism and ADHD, and all the examples the woman on the left is talking about screams autism to me. She clearly doesn’t know enough about autism and her ego is locked into the gifted thing and I’m afraid it will fuck up smart autistic kids, like I was fucked up.
I cannot express how thankful I am that you are sharing this...this explains SO much of what we've gone through with my son. He's in 5th now but I knew there was something different about him since he was 3. It's so helpful that there are resources for how to best guide them❤
Thank you, I've been misdiagnosed with autism and now I have a new diagnosis as twice exceptional, gifted and adhd, and it's so hard to find good content that explains it all, so, thank you for opening the conversation, and I would love to hear more about it.
Why do you believe the autism was misdiagnosed? I was a gifted child with high IQ but otherwise dysfunctional and never got any help and it messed me up bigtime. 41 now, and just realized I’m autistic and have ADHD and now every detail of my traumatic life is crystal clear. The whole gifted diagnosis seems like ego speak for autism. When I listen to the woman on the left speak, I hear her speak about autism. Her ego is running the show and it’s dangerous. We need more awareness about the different ways autism can present instead of sugarcoating it and calling it giftedness.
Many twice exceptional people are autistic. I am not being argumentative, or dismissive, I am autistic myself and I am twice exceptional. Autism is primarily a sensory disorder caused by an overactive brain
The heartbreaking part is adults that were not identified as L.D. as children and had “emotional problems”. Once you know the neurologic underpinnings then you know the emotional problems were reactive and secondary to L.D. This is why neuropsychological or psychoeducational testing is essential for anyone with chronic overwhelm, anxiety, personality disorders, underachievement because quite frankly once you see the testing report, it makes sense. Even OCD with checking behaviors is most likely impairment in visual memory and thus the visual checking makes sense - this is called visual memory impairment in OCD and the VMI comes before OCD not vice versa. One huge risk factor for LD is premature birth. Anyone born at 38 weeks or less should be screened
My 3 year old was just diagnosed with ASD by the pediatrician, based on an ADOS-2, and I have a hunch my son is twice exceptional. "Giftedness" runs in my family. I am one of those kids that was points away from the GT program, both my brothers were in the program. My dad is extremely extremely intelligent. We are being encouraged to see a developmental pediatrician to confirm pediatrician's diagnosis. What is the difference between a developmental pediatrician's and a psychiatrist's diagnosis and if I suspect this which is a better choice?
Wow thank you so much for the conversation and book recommendation! I just started meeting with a doctor who specializes in adhd to discuss getting an autism evaluation and grew up in the gifted program as well. I can see how this would be difficult to figure out even for professionals and I am extremely grateful and excited to learn more. I've had a very difficult life and have struggled a lot with my health and staying in school or work consistently so I finally decided to get checked out by a psychologist and they said after one appointment autism and Adhd very evident and he acknowledged the bit about being gifted but we only talked once so I am hopeful to read this book by Dr Webb and show it to the doctor I'm seeing. I came up with autism after my own research and hearing a little about the difference between a gifted kid and a twice exceptional gifted/autistic kid I still think there could be autism but that makes me wonder if I may actually be even more gifted than I realized. I was tested 142 iq in first grade when I started gifted but I felt both smarter than the other gifted kids and most adults but also way behind socially and very innocent and very scattered as well as having more difficulty expressing myself. If I have autism I could actually have a higher iq working behind the scenes, right? I do things like weave my motor function irregularities into improvised guitar playing by ear to make music that fits the pulse of my own nervous system and it has healed me to some degree and helped me learn to survive and communicate better. I've learned to deal with lots of functioning disabilities by studying massage and natural healing and work as a massage therapist but struggle severely with nervous system issues and regulating my weight (120lbs 6ft tall 30 year old guy :3) and my entire life I've just seemed to become unexplainablly ill when I am unable to take off and I function my best after laying down for a few hours. I can function at a super genius level but burn out so fast I need to just lay down suddenly all the time but usually can't. I have a lot of sensory issues and social issues but also grey up with a physically disabled single mother and didn't get out much and took care of her a lot growing up. We grew up poor and when I became an adult I discovered I couldn't work hard enough to support myself without having breakdowns and feel best if I only work 20 hours a week. Being a massage therapist has given me a great opportunity to make more money and really put my gifts to use helping people but it's a difficult industry to get time off because of managing the appointments. I've lost a few jobs already doing massage because of having sudden breakdowns at work and so I've been seeking doctors help for an autism diagnosis. Guess I'll have to read to book to understand more but it seems to me that there is so much potential in the world just by making the effort to understand people who function different in a genuine way, we will one day be able to know the true capabilities of humanity and experience the full range of potential for culture and technology and harmony. And also to relieve the massive amounts of suffering so many of us go through for being misunderstood and being forced into a box that doesn't fit out nature. It's funny telling a doctor you don't fit in in a society that is separated from nature which is our true root and way of being to live in harmony and choose to cultivate and protect diversity and vitality in the environment and ourselves. To be custodians of nature we have to understand our true nature. I believe autistic and other neurodivergent types of experience hold the keys for humanity to reintegration with nature and discover a technology which is both advanced and also nondestructive. If I could make some beautiful art and leave a few books behind and help a few people and help myself enough to raise a family with my sweetheart I could die happy knowing it was worth it going through all the pain and struggles to know I planted a seed of love and beauty in the world as a response to the beauty and love I experience being here that I desperately wish to share with others. Thanks to anyone who read my absurd story I can see now why other kids thought I was arrogant when all I wanted to do was share things I was excited about and I have continued to be so excited about them for so long mostly by myself that I have come up with some great gifts to share and really need to figure out how to get well but it's really difficult for many neurodivergent people to seek help and many just struggle until they eventually become homeless and every one treats them like scum for scuttling around anxiously on the bus babbling and constantly asking the bus driver if they're gonna miss their stop and the bus driver yells at them for standing up and some bystander asks what's wrong and they say they're trying to get to the homeless shelter and then you see the bus driver intentionally skip the stop they were being badgers about and the homeless guy cries and calls someone for a ride and you realize that people will judge you instantly for being different without knowing a thing and they don't realize that 99% of people have not questioned reality enough to even have a grasp of who they are, why they're here, what matters... and so we live in a noisy sick environment living half lives that could be so much more if we only questioned and really observed and learned from direct experience rather than assumption. You don't have to make conclusion to hold knowledge. Within the bank of all of our experiences is hidden wisdom if we just act and observe and look closer, PAY ATTENTION to every minute detail without trying to stuff it into a box. Just experience and observe. Then when you need to use your logic and thinking the best conclusion with what evidence you currently have will naturally develop and if you observe that and feed new experiences you can train yourself to become an intuitive expert in any area without having to take a single class or know any terms and yet you could teach that thing to someone else using very direct common terms that come out of your own experience. It seems like until you do this, you are not really getting the full application of logic and end up drawing from too narrow a box to come to conclusions which are able to evolve and integrate new experien es and evidence. Thats why science takes so damn long to integrate a new idea. Basically everybody has to die and let a new generation handle it because a conclusion is meant to be held they say. Jesus it'sterrifying that so many people can think so narrowly and be given so much authority over other people's autonomy and things that affect it. What I see is a majority of people half asleep with much more to offer and experience in life but a thousand half asked excuses why no one is passionate or fascinated with anything everyone's too distracted, if you have to practice it's too hard, I try to tell people that breathing exercises are the key to unlocking the gate between conscious and unconsciousness and will cure their anxiety and give them energy and they try it and say oh yes you're right this works... but its really just too much to bother with, and boring and dull to sit down and do it... or that stretching everyday is too tedious when most people hardly even move their bodies to begin with. Everyone seems stressed out, I massage a lot of people and the average persons body who doesn't thing they're too stressed is also twisted in 4 different directions and they couldn't really feel it but then you show them and they say oh it makes sense now and they realize for the first time they have been crooked for years without noticing. It's bizarre to me that no one seems to notice how many details in life are going unnoticed!!! And when I try to share what I see people don't usually see it. Even physical things like when there's a fragment of rainbow shining inside a cloud and you point it out and a whole group of people look and only 2 out of 10 people see it it's not because of vision problems it's a mental problem of checking out and not making an effort to really perceive and experience the world that'd there. When more people do that I wouldn't be suprised if all humans are actually geniuses all along.
Thanks for your reply:) are you neurodivergent too? Yes I know a lot of autistic seeming people who have high empathy but also stim, have balance issues, struggle to interpret social situations, have sensory issues, special interests, need to be on own rhythm. From what ive learned, autism with adhd is the most like me and many friends and that having the two together looks different becasue the adhd will hide autism in some ways. Someone with just adhd drives me crazy, but the realllllly weird quirky shy creative adhd people are all my best friends and have all those autism traits. I guess thats why they call it autism spectrum now becasue there's a range of qualities with a mixture of over and under sensitivities. For me anyway, learning about autism + adhd helped my life more than learning about other disorders and basically answered most of my questions about all of this. And also I am doing much better after taking up exercise almost every day and eating more the past year, has helped with sensory issues a lot. The doctors helped very little and were too expensive. Learning to not judge myself for being different around people has helped the most. Whether it's autism or a learning disability or something else, I know its okay to be me now.
It is interesting to note, at the 56 minute mark (approximately), it was mentioned they were passed the 1 hour mark. BUT, behind one of the presenters is a clock to refer to. In the future, could this clock be used to provide a more accurate time frame to work as a backdrop?
I am glad kids these days are getting support. I am currently being evaluated for autism. I am in my 50s. On the one hand there were teachers that labeled me as literally mentally retarded. Others called me smart. It depended on which year I was in or what subject I was being taught. i was reading at a college level by the time I was in 6th grade. I graduated high school with a c- gpa, but I graduated early because I just couldn't stand being there. I graduated on independent studies. I went to college as an older adult and I had a 3.96 GPA all the way through grad school. And I did that as a single mom. Highly perfectionistic. Life would have been easier for me if I had been spotted as a kid, given tools to deal with being autistic. It is really confusing to have an extraordinary command of language but you can't read a clock, use a keyed lock, tell your right from your left. I can see why some of my teachers thought I had brain damage. I would never have labeled myself "exceptional" or "gifted".
My son had similar experiences. He has been diagnosed with 3 anxiety disorders. I think he is autistic too. His homeroom teacher in junior high wanted to give him an exception to put him in gifted classes at one point, but since his grades were low the school district said no. And then his psychologist and some of his teachers tried to get permission for him to skip high school altogether and go directly into college because he passed the exit exam as a freshman, again, he was told no because his grades were low. He never graduated as a result of this. So many exceptional people have been denied a seat at the table because we did not jump through the right hoops, society saying we did not deserve that seat because we didn't "earn" it with good grades, etc. The cure for cancer is probably in the noggin of some exceptional kid like my son who didn't get high enough grades.
36:59 That is literally the truest thing I've ever heard in my life haha. I have felt conflicting feelings about myself my entire life, like "I have so much potential and can be outstanding at certain things but then there's always something that's holding me back and getting in the way, as if there are two people living within one body...the gifted one and the one who just crawls into a hole and avoids life entirely, whenever something is too overwhelming"
same
@@joshwhitworth4646 well I'm glad we both now know that we are not just personally failures at life haha. Understanding that there is a reason why you are this way, that you can't actually help it, you aren't just a flawed person that can't hack it and that there are many others just like you...it's empowering, imo.
Does it change the struggle? No. But it can shift your perception about yourself and you can give yourself more credit and empathize more with yourself.
At least that's how I think!
@@amaebarnes I just found this a few days ago and it's been blowing my mind I haven't been able to stop researching about it! Icrazy how accurate it is! Yes there is a sense of relief knowing that I may be able to meet people that have the same mindset as me and can have a better connection because I do tend to isolate to my garage and build things!! . The struggles that I had to endure through school have been insane but only because I really didn't give a shit about school it just didn't interest me. I then go to college and excelled beyond most of my peers. A person can look at my Facebook and see everything they are talking about in these videos.. it tells this story itself lol. Oh and I have a big problem with the government and unfairness with police and such and this isn't such a good thing!!
The former gifted but fragile kids are more and more realizing they’re autistic with ADHD, myself included. Look into it. It may change your life. The gifted diagnosis seems like the ego’s way of sugarcoating autism and ADHD, and all the examples the woman on the left is talking about screams autism to me. She clearly doesn’t know enough about autism and her ego is locked into the gifted thing and I’m afraid it will fuck up smart autistic kids, like I was fucked up.
😢@@mikaelangeloh2316
I cannot express how thankful I am that you are sharing this...this explains SO much of what we've gone through with my son. He's in 5th now but I knew there was something different about him since he was 3. It's so helpful that there are resources for how to best guide them❤
Thank you very much.
Thank you, I've been misdiagnosed with autism and now I have a new diagnosis as twice exceptional, gifted and adhd, and it's so hard to find good content that explains it all, so, thank you for opening the conversation, and I would love to hear more about it.
Why do you believe the autism was misdiagnosed? I was a gifted child with high IQ but otherwise dysfunctional and never got any help and it messed me up bigtime. 41 now, and just realized I’m autistic and have ADHD and now every detail of my traumatic life is crystal clear. The whole gifted diagnosis seems like ego speak for autism. When I listen to the woman on the left speak, I hear her speak about autism. Her ego is running the show and it’s dangerous. We need more awareness about the different ways autism can present instead of sugarcoating it and calling it giftedness.
Because occult LD looks like autism but is not.
Many twice exceptional people are autistic. I am not being argumentative, or dismissive, I am autistic myself and I am twice exceptional. Autism is primarily a sensory disorder caused by an overactive brain
The heartbreaking part is adults that were not identified as L.D. as children and had “emotional problems”. Once you know the neurologic underpinnings then you know the emotional problems were reactive and secondary to L.D. This is why neuropsychological or psychoeducational testing is essential for anyone with chronic overwhelm, anxiety, personality disorders, underachievement because quite frankly once you see the testing report, it makes sense. Even OCD with checking behaviors is most likely impairment in visual memory and thus the visual checking makes sense - this is called visual memory impairment in OCD and the VMI comes before OCD not vice versa. One huge risk factor for LD is premature birth. Anyone born at 38 weeks or less should be screened
My 3 year old was just diagnosed with ASD by the pediatrician, based on an ADOS-2, and I have a hunch my son is twice exceptional. "Giftedness" runs in my family. I am one of those kids that was points away from the GT program, both my brothers were in the program. My dad is extremely extremely intelligent. We are being encouraged to see a developmental pediatrician to confirm pediatrician's diagnosis. What is the difference between a developmental pediatrician's and a psychiatrist's diagnosis and if I suspect this which is a better choice?
Wow thank you so much for the conversation and book recommendation! I just started meeting with a doctor who specializes in adhd to discuss getting an autism evaluation and grew up in the gifted program as well. I can see how this would be difficult to figure out even for professionals and I am extremely grateful and excited to learn more. I've had a very difficult life and have struggled a lot with my health and staying in school or work consistently so I finally decided to get checked out by a psychologist and they said after one appointment autism and Adhd very evident and he acknowledged the bit about being gifted but we only talked once so I am hopeful to read this book by Dr Webb and show it to the doctor I'm seeing. I came up with autism after my own research and hearing a little about the difference between a gifted kid and a twice exceptional gifted/autistic kid I still think there could be autism but that makes me wonder if I may actually be even more gifted than I realized. I was tested 142 iq in first grade when I started gifted but I felt both smarter than the other gifted kids and most adults but also way behind socially and very innocent and very scattered as well as having more difficulty expressing myself. If I have autism I could actually have a higher iq working behind the scenes, right? I do things like weave my motor function irregularities into improvised guitar playing by ear to make music that fits the pulse of my own nervous system and it has healed me to some degree and helped me learn to survive and communicate better. I've learned to deal with lots of functioning disabilities by studying massage and natural healing and work as a massage therapist but struggle severely with nervous system issues and regulating my weight (120lbs 6ft tall 30 year old guy :3) and my entire life I've just seemed to become unexplainablly ill when I am unable to take off and I function my best after laying down for a few hours. I can function at a super genius level but burn out so fast I need to just lay down suddenly all the time but usually can't. I have a lot of sensory issues and social issues but also grey up with a physically disabled single mother and didn't get out much and took care of her a lot growing up. We grew up poor and when I became an adult I discovered I couldn't work hard enough to support myself without having breakdowns and feel best if I only work 20 hours a week. Being a massage therapist has given me a great opportunity to make more money and really put my gifts to use helping people but it's a difficult industry to get time off because of managing the appointments. I've lost a few jobs already doing massage because of having sudden breakdowns at work and so I've been seeking doctors help for an autism diagnosis. Guess I'll have to read to book to understand more but it seems to me that there is so much potential in the world just by making the effort to understand people who function different in a genuine way, we will one day be able to know the true capabilities of humanity and experience the full range of potential for culture and technology and harmony. And also to relieve the massive amounts of suffering so many of us go through for being misunderstood and being forced into a box that doesn't fit out nature. It's funny telling a doctor you don't fit in in a society that is separated from nature which is our true root and way of being to live in harmony and choose to cultivate and protect diversity and vitality in the environment and ourselves. To be custodians of nature we have to understand our true nature. I believe autistic and other neurodivergent types of experience hold the keys for humanity to reintegration with nature and discover a technology which is both advanced and also nondestructive. If I could make some beautiful art and leave a few books behind and help a few people and help myself enough to raise a family with my sweetheart I could die happy knowing it was worth it going through all the pain and struggles to know I planted a seed of love and beauty in the world as a response to the beauty and love I experience being here that I desperately wish to share with others. Thanks to anyone who read my absurd story I can see now why other kids thought I was arrogant when all I wanted to do was share things I was excited about and I have continued to be so excited about them for so long mostly by myself that I have come up with some great gifts to share and really need to figure out how to get well but it's really difficult for many neurodivergent people to seek help and many just struggle until they eventually become homeless and every one treats them like scum for scuttling around anxiously on the bus babbling and constantly asking the bus driver if they're gonna miss their stop and the bus driver yells at them for standing up and some bystander asks what's wrong and they say they're trying to get to the homeless shelter and then you see the bus driver intentionally skip the stop they were being badgers about and the homeless guy cries and calls someone for a ride and you realize that people will judge you instantly for being different without knowing a thing and they don't realize that 99% of people have not questioned reality enough to even have a grasp of who they are, why they're here, what matters... and so we live in a noisy sick environment living half lives that could be so much more if we only questioned and really observed and learned from direct experience rather than assumption. You don't have to make conclusion to hold knowledge. Within the bank of all of our experiences is hidden wisdom if we just act and observe and look closer, PAY ATTENTION to every minute detail without trying to stuff it into a box. Just experience and observe. Then when you need to use your logic and thinking the best conclusion with what evidence you currently have will naturally develop and if you observe that and feed new experiences you can train yourself to become an intuitive expert in any area without having to take a single class or know any terms and yet you could teach that thing to someone else using very direct common terms that come out of your own experience. It seems like until you do this, you are not really getting the full application of logic and end up drawing from too narrow a box to come to conclusions which are able to evolve and integrate new experien es and evidence. Thats why science takes so damn long to integrate a new idea. Basically everybody has to die and let a new generation handle it because a conclusion is meant to be held they say. Jesus it'sterrifying that so many people can think so narrowly and be given so much authority over other people's autonomy and things that affect it. What I see is a majority of people half asleep with much more to offer and experience in life but a thousand half asked excuses why no one is passionate or fascinated with anything everyone's too distracted, if you have to practice it's too hard, I try to tell people that breathing exercises are the key to unlocking the gate between conscious and unconsciousness and will cure their anxiety and give them energy and they try it and say oh yes you're right this works... but its really just too much to bother with, and boring and dull to sit down and do it... or that stretching everyday is too tedious when most people hardly even move their bodies to begin with. Everyone seems stressed out, I massage a lot of people and the average persons body who doesn't thing they're too stressed is also twisted in 4 different directions and they couldn't really feel it but then you show them and they say oh it makes sense now and they realize for the first time they have been crooked for years without noticing. It's bizarre to me that no one seems to notice how many details in life are going unnoticed!!! And when I try to share what I see people don't usually see it. Even physical things like when there's a fragment of rainbow shining inside a cloud and you point it out and a whole group of people look and only 2 out of 10 people see it it's not because of vision problems it's a mental problem of checking out and not making an effort to really perceive and experience the world that'd there. When more people do that I wouldn't be suprised if all humans are actually geniuses all along.
You are describing learning disability not autism
Once tip off to LD vs autism is that extremely high emotional empathy is common in LD not autism.
Thanks for your reply:) are you neurodivergent too? Yes I know a lot of autistic seeming people who have high empathy but also stim, have balance issues, struggle to interpret social situations, have sensory issues, special interests, need to be on own rhythm. From what ive learned, autism with adhd is the most like me and many friends and that having the two together looks different becasue the adhd will hide autism in some ways. Someone with just adhd drives me crazy, but the realllllly weird quirky shy creative adhd people are all my best friends and have all those autism traits. I guess thats why they call it autism spectrum now becasue there's a range of qualities with a mixture of over and under sensitivities. For me anyway, learning about autism + adhd helped my life more than learning about other disorders and basically answered most of my questions about all of this. And also I am doing much better after taking up exercise almost every day and eating more the past year, has helped with sensory issues a lot. The doctors helped very little and were too expensive. Learning to not judge myself for being different around people has helped the most. Whether it's autism or a learning disability or something else, I know its okay to be me now.
It is interesting to note, at the 56 minute mark (approximately), it was mentioned they were passed the 1 hour mark. BUT, behind one of the presenters is a clock to refer to. In the future, could this clock be used to provide a more accurate time frame to work as a backdrop?