- Superior abilities and sensitivities are frequently experienced as both powerful assets and annoying disabilities.
- Desires for friendship and intimacy conflict with privacy needs.
- Leaps of creative insight can often seem less reliable than 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 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.
