Help gifted children to learn from conflicts

Workshop

People are often afraid to get into conflicts. We collected many cases and studied multiple experiences of gifted persons of different ages who experienced (serious) conflicts. We discovered specific patterns concerning giftedness. We see these patterns start at young ages already. Many admitted as adults that they have not learned from these conflicts in their lives but have experienced a lot of damage and also mental health problems.
As we see giftedness basically as a set of positive characteristics, not as a disease or a handicap, we wonder whether the gifted can learn to get more insight and cope better with conflicts. We developed theoretical and practical insights that we want to share with people working with gifted of all ages.
We show you in a practical (and humoristic) way how to ‘make’ a conflict. We then offer theoretical backgrounds about conflicts, we explain the patterns we see in conflicts of the gifted and we tell some case studies. We then want to discuss these examples and invite attendees to bring in their own examples. We hope this can be done in small groups in break-out rooms. Together we want to explore the ways to deal with conflict situations constructively.
We believe that studying the conflicts of the gifted can prevent escalation and serious damage. We recommend looking at a gifted person more as part of a system (e.g. home, school, peer group). The gifted are not victims but taken together with the system, an action is possible. Action for us means: maintaining a connection, always looking for the dialogue.
This workshop aims to give insight into the specific process of conflicts of the gifted from a young age, to explain these situations, and to give suggestions for other scenarios. When gifted children learn from for instance parents and teachers how to cope with conflicts then they can learn from these situations in finding back their autonomy. This will be a great benefit for them for the rest of their lives.