- Superior abilities and sensitivities are frequently experienced as both powerful assets and annoying disabilities.
- Desires for friendship and intimacy conflict with needs for privacy.
- Leaps of creative insight can often seem less reliable that knowledge gained from logical cognitive processes.
- Feeling grateful for supportive parents and mentors conflicts with feelings of resentment for the prolonged dependency required to develop expertise.
- Feeling proud of a superior endowment but feeling ashamed and frightened of envy and retaliation.
- Conflicts about gender identity: wanting to and explore masculine and feminine qualities but feeling confused and embarrassed when attempting to do so
- Feeling exhilarated by the inner forces of giftedness but afraid of feeling out of control
- Conflicts of the gifted polymath: Desires to explore and master many ideas of interest conflict with desires to excel in only a few.
Failure to resolve these conflicts can lead to common problems experienced by gifted children, gifted adolescents and gifted adults.
Jerald Grobman, MD Dr.Grobman is a a graduate of Tufts University School of Medicine, a board certified psychiatrist, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. .For the past 40 years he has been in private practice specializing in the assessment and psychotherapy of gifted adolescents and adults. His website, his publications on 
Madelon Sann is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Social Work. She is a licensed clinical social worker, a certified supervisor of the psychotherapeutic process and a certified group psychoanalyst. She maintains private practices in New York and New Jersey.