interview by Mark Fielder

"Giftedness these days in the research community is being understood more as an inner experience or process than external products like symphonies and films and dance companies and things of that order. And the research community is far more interested now in studying the nature of that inner process, and expanding the scope of it to go beyond just high intelligence, which we know is a component of giftedness, to include other qualities like sensitivity, perfectionism; a quality called entelechy, which is associated with being a visionary, having a personal vision, and being able to actualize that vision from within - rather than needing other people externally to realize it. Qualities like introversion are also common among gifted people, and another quality called the autonomous factor - which means that if you're gifted, you're not interested in whether other people see the value of what you're doing, and you don't relate your work so much to other people's opinion, but more to how that vision seems to you, how important it seems to you. There's also idealism with a lot of gifted people, where there's a sense of disparity between what we are and what we could be, and that disparity becomes the fuel for an inner self-becoming toward perfection. And we see that in a lot of our actors and artists here in this community.

When I was nine or ten, giftedness was looked upon as snobbism or elitism, or as setting one child above another. Fortunately, I happened to have educational people around me that just saw that as differentness, not betterness. As a result of the counseling I obtained, I was able to gain entry to the University of Chicago at fifteen years old, and went off to study at the University of the Philippines, and Cornell, and the University of Colorado. I have now a Master's Degree in Cultural Anthropology, and one in Psychology as well. So I've studied all over the world, and worked all over the world, too. I was out in the field at 17 or 18 by myself, doing my own studies in a place where they hadn't seen a white person since World War II.

At one time giftedness was determined solely by IQ testing, and that is still a very important measurement for people with IQs above 140, or the highly gifted, over 170. But it's an imprecise measure because it typically doesn't give a fair shake to people that are second-generation Americans, or who are minorities, or people who just don't perform well on tests. So we look at a composite of qualities in addition to IQ in order to assess an individual's giftedness, and we also look at areas of creative expression that are not particularly culturally valued - like being a gifted auto mechanic, or a gifted housewife; those are areas that people wouldn't necessarily associate with giftedness.

So IQ is an important feature, and it is genetically inherited. A gifted person would typically have one or two gifted parents, there's a giftedness among other siblings, possibly. The tests for IQ have been standardized forever, and in fact that's one of the problems with them. If you want to get your IQ tested, you can go to any educational testing center. But it becomes very insignificant in a certain way after a while, and it the focus becomes much more on the process of what you're going to do with your life: now that you know this, how are you going to actualize that and feel that you've accomplished as much as you're humanly capable of in your lifetime.

To evaluate someone's giftedness I use a very broad scale questionnaire, that goes into things like what is sensitivity, what is overexcitability, what is perfectionism - things like that that really help a person to feel and sense that they identify with those qualities. For example, if you feel yourself just overwhelmed being around people for very long, and I need a lot of alone time, and do my best work when I'm by myself, and I could never live with anybody: all of a sudden you're going down the introversion list.

Not all of those characteristics apply to all gifted people, but a gifted person might come up strong in four or five of those categories. The questionnaire I use is about seven pages long, very simple and accessible, anybody can utilize it. And for people that would like to cultivate some of these qualities, it's possible to do that. An ordinary person can look at the inner experience of the gifted and go, 'I think I could develop some of those qualities; maybe I could sit in my room and try working quietly and stay away from people a little bit more - how might that be for me?'

I think most gifted people that are not recognized, and certainly not self-recognized, typically find themselves in an acting class and suddenly discovering a particular talent, or finding themselves in a writing class and realizing, 'Wow, I can do this.' Or there's some inner discovery that seems to signal something for them, and is confidence building. But one of the stumbling blocks is most gifted people have such extraordinarily high standards for themselves that they feel a lot of inadequacy, and a feeling of inadequacy isn't what you would think would go with giftedness; you'd think arrogance, or a high level of confidence would go with giftedness, and it typically doesn't. There are certainly some arrogant gifted people, but that is less the norm than the exception.

Gifted people need some validation and encouragement. Let's take the example of the gifted housewife: if the husband and children say, 'Wow, mom, everything you do, you do creatively' - suddenly something sparks in there, and even though it's "only being a mom", something starts to germinate: 'If I get reward for this, or people notice, maybe I will want to do more of it'.

Creativity is one dimension of giftedness. It has now been taken off the product, and put on the process. There's been a lot of research done that suggests that a creative person does everything creatively. So an actor, for example, when they get home they're going to be creative in their homemaking, they're going to be creative in their gardening, they're going to be creative with their children - they're just going to be creative across the board. Some of them may be very impressive cooks. It's a personality trait, like these other things.

For actors, leading a creative life is, I think, a very important thing. There's an acting teacher who is a part of my school, and it is her thesis that actors, when they are not working, need to have their lifestyle set up in such a way that they continue to be creative, or move on to other projects that they have control of, so that it doesn't feel like dead time to them, and they feel like they're moving on to a script that they're working on, or working on some other creative thing, and that acting is just part of life, not all of it, or the only place to experience one's creative self.

My school provides an ongoing learning environment for gifted adults, where they are able to be with their peers, and get support for their, to handle the inner stress factors of being gifted, which looks like neurosis in the general population. That kind of passion and inner frenzy that goes on in the creative process sometimes, really needs support. And the more gifted adults know about the experience of giftedness, how to cope with these stress factors, the better they are able to actualize their potential and not kill themselves in the process. And also how to set up their lifestyle to support it - I feel that's a very important dimension: you cannot be acting normal, and leading an ordinary life, and really marshall all of your energy to actualize your resources. So my particular contribution then is to provide this container where other gifted adults can come and support each other's growth. And you see exponential explosion of creative expression in that environment. The energy in our classes is staggering - sometimes I'm afraid the windows are going to break. It's very exciting. And exhausting and draining, all at the same time. That's what the gifted experience is - there's this incredible inner high and intensity and passion and drive, and then the exhaustion and depletion you experience when something is finished.

Even those people that come to use our facilities that maybe are not as gifted as some of the others there - it's infectious, and before long you see these people starting to think more of their potential could be realized.

People might be scared or intimidated of gifted people because of our societal stereotypes that the gifted are somehow above everyone, and that's not the case. A gifted person is not a morally superior human being, necessarily.

Also people may fear others will think they're stuck up if they think of themselves as gifted - and there's the stereotype, right there. And that's one of the real struggles of embracing one's own giftedness is that we have these ideas in this culture that gifted people are arrogant, gifted people are snooty, that they think they're better than others. And that's typically not the case; they're more likely to feel inadequate to others, because of their own high standards.

The school has a couple of hundred students, and there are seven faculty members now, each of them with a group they have been working with for six months to a year. The program takes at least six months to complete, and there are other adjunct programs as well. The point is to get these people into a place where they can feel the movement, and feel that it's at an accelerated pace, which gifted people thrive on.

Children have gifted education support programs in the school system, but they're just dropped on the sidewalk after they're adults; there's nothing that's ongoing for them that says 'This is now how you take what you've learned in school and mobilize for life that fulfills all this capability that you might have inside that now needs to be realized.

There are really an infinite number of possibilities in which giftedness can be realized. A number of people at the school are in the arts and sciences, but there are people there that are gifted in ways that aren't associated with the arts and sciences particularly, people that are just immersed in another dimension of their own process.

Someone who produces a movie, for example, may not necessarily be gifted, because our criterion would be do they have these personality characteristics, roughly this level of IQ, are they operating off of inner vision, do they have a capacity for self-becoming, do they draw other people to their vision? And producers typically do that, if there is a vision there to be drawn to, and we see our smart, gifted producers have those characteristics, and they're perfectionistic, and they're extremely sensitive to everything - that's why we see a lot of screaming and yelling going on sometimes. And they're very idealistic. The traits show up. But anyone who is high functioning and a bright human being could probably be a producer. But that's not necessarily the gifted producer.

My own actualization has gone through expansionistic phases over my lifetime, and I see that happening with a lot of gifted adults; we reinvent ourselves every so often, and that's an inner urge: one phase feels completed, and now it's time to start up something that's new or more original, or serves the times in which we live better, or just a different population. It's a lifelong process, and it's not about hitting plateaus and staying there indefinitely - even a high plateau.

I've never seen giftedness expire. I've seen it get worse - that the sensitivity deepens, the perfectionism gets more intense, the excitability factor - all this energy will erupt, just makes more of itself. All of these things refer to people who are self-aware; for people who don't have the awareness, they could easily just die on the vine. And this often happens to gifted girls: because of cultural conditioning it's known that gifted girls lose one IQ point per year growing up in the school system. They don't get the mirroring and they don't get the mentoring - and they're 'just girls'. That is changing now, a lot since I was a child. But still women are struggling to prove themselves and be equal and demonstrate their abilities. The school system has always been inadequate for gifted children; it just can't accommodate gifted children, it's intent is to handle a mainstream education, so if you have a gifted child, your best shot now - and you don't have a lot of money and can't afford private school - is to provide optimization, or supplementary home schooling, or art lessons or music lessons.

My dream has to do with the school: it's about expanding the scope of our spiritual development and our creative development at a time in our world when things are in deep trouble, and we don't know how to turn things around. And our gifted people have the highest potential for vision, for leadership, they have the energy, they have the drive. They probably are not going to be socially rewarded for their efforts, because there's not a lot of permission to fail, but my vision is to be able to make these people into the best they can be, so that they can serve this very ailing world that we live in. That's what my plan is here."

[Mary was interviewed 8-16-95 by Mark Fielder for his cable TV program "Fielder Dreams"]