An Interview with Michael M. Piechowski

By Ellen Fiedler on April 11, 1999

Continuing our celebration of Michael’s life and work in honor of his 90th birthday, I’m pleased to share this interview I’ve enjoyed many times over the past five years.¹ During a visit with Dr. Michele Kane in October 2018, I received videos on DVD and VHS containing interviews by Dr. Ellen Fiedler², which Ellen collected during a sabbatical. She traveled around the United States, interviewing experts in gifted education. Ellen asked each of them to discuss an underserved population of gifted students.

One of the videos was with Dr. Michael M. Piechowski. Ellen drove to Washburn, Wisconsin, to interview Michael at his home on April 11, 1999. He retired from Northland College that spring and moved to Madison later that year.

The post contains an abridged version of the transcript because the original is too long for Substack. Enjoy, and don’t miss Episode 48 with Michael if you haven’t already listened!

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Ellen: As you know, my project relates to underserved gifted students, and I’m wondering if you can tell me what group, or groups, of gifted students you feel are particularly underserved these days.

Michael: Well, the first ones that come to my mind are the free spirits. Those who do not function well in structured classrooms and function best if they are unrestricted, free, and that’s when they are creative, imaginative, engaged, always finding new things to do and learn. So that’s the one group, the free spirits, the very creative free spirits. The other one that I thought about is the delinquents. Because as we know from many studies, and Ken Seeley’s especially, there is a very high proportion of gifted youth in prisons and homes for juvenile delinquents. So they certainly are not served very well. They are not served at all.

Ellen: I know a number of people who suggested I come talk to you also suggested to me spiritually gifted students. Is this a category you would add to the other two?

Michael: I don’t know if it’s a category to be added to because spiritual life is for the most part very hidden. And people talk about experiences often years and years later in their life that they had as children. I think the principle here that applies is the same everywhere. When the child talks about an unusual experience, the best and the only right thing you can do is to listen and appreciate it. But, as it happens, children are told that this is either wrong, or people get scared and that it’s too unusual, that it’s weird. Or they are accused of lies. I mean, that’s very common that people don’t know anything about it, or to whom it is occult or something like that, or they disbelieve that the children actually report a true experience.

I have seen accounts of it in several places where someone in the family—grandmother or someone else—said that the child should be punished. Or they were punished. For telling lies. Which is no different from children who bring in an original piece of work and the teacher doesn’t believe that they wrote it.

People who go through counseling learn to listen. Unless they go through a counseling program that gives them formulas, you know. Put people in categories or something like that. But the basic skills of counseling are listening skills, the basic skills of conflict resolution are listening skills—to hear what the person has to say. Well, it applies to children. All kinds of children. And it’s particularly critical with gifted children because they are so disbelieved by adults and because they don’t fit in so well.

Ellen: Talk to me a little bit about gifted kids and particularly the ones that you’ve expressed concern about: the free spirits and the delinquent kids, the kids at risk, the spiritually gifted kids. Kids that don’t fit in.

Michael: Well, the free spirits…schools sometimes can be so hard for them that they come home and get sick and vomit and have all kinds of horrible somatic reactions. And, you know, and we push them back in the classroom. They then come across as abnormal. They are labeled with some kind of pathology, which is simply the lack of fit between the child and the environment. In this case, classroom. Or the peer group, or whatever it may be.

We know of many gifted children who are in families that don’t understand them, or the families are dysfunctional, so they don’t get any support. Because they don’t get any support, they don’t feel that they are worth anything. It’s very hard from the outside to persuade them to capitalize on their gifts because 90% of them don’t have the resilience.³ From the studies that have been done, we know that 10% of those who come from very dysfunctional, abusive backgrounds have the resilience, but 90% of them do not have the resilience. The resilient ones are—in strange ways, they are able to figure out that what’s being done to them shouldn’t be happening. They somehow are able to step out, have a different perspective on it, and see that they don’t belong there.

Together with that, they have the gift of taking the little bit that someone else would give them or find such people and make the most of it. The little bit of support, the little bit of recognition, the little bit of kindness. And the studies that have been done show that it’s really not very much, but they can really draw huge interest on it. They can, in their imagination, they can go back to it and elaborate on it, or the cases of the people who go to childhood experiences and remember the days when things were good.

For instance, Eleanor Roosevelt lost her father when she was 8 or 9, and all her life, she carried his letters to her. He was not a reliable father; he had disappointed her many times by forgetting about her and things like that, but she felt, when she was that young, that he was the only one that she said who didn’t treat her as a criminal. Because from everyone else, she was criticized for not being pretty, or being too lively, or too sensitive, or whatever. But that sustained her, and I found other examples of people who really were sustained by memories. They had this inner faith, and they can use these little bit that’s given them and get themselves out of situations which to others is unbearable, destructive, and leads them to mental illness and suicide. And there is a difference. That’s 90% of everyone else. So there is a huge amount of work to do for the whole society.

The other trouble is that we live in a society which does not value children. I have lived in this country now so many years, I didn’t know how much I have absorbed the daily climate here. One day, I was watching a film about Kurdish people who decided to scrape up everything, take one of their boys, and leave their other children with their parents. They were very poor farmers. And arrange to be smuggled into Switzerland. So they traveled from Turkey to Italy, and traveled through Italy to meet the smugglers in the mountain region, where they made arrangements to be smuggled across the border. The three of them. When they arrived there, the smugglers looked at them and said, we knew nothing about the child. And what did I expect—that the smuggler would be rough, aggressive, unpleasant to the kid. Instead, they responded to a child in a kind, even loving way. That was when I realized, with a shock, that I expected them to act the way we see people act in grocery stores, supermarkets, or in movies toward children. An angry, aggressive way. Children being an inconvenience. That’s it.

I found evidence of that somewhere else, an anthropologist who spent two years, I think, in India. And their boy was growing up, he was only seven years old, people were interested in him, they played with him, interested in him, and then, when they got on the plane going back to the United States, he realized that something was different. Because people were telling the children hush up, and all that, and he caught on very quickly that the climate he was moving to was not friendly to children. So, is it any wonder that we have such a hard time getting the programs for the gifted? Because they are children.

Ellen: Does this have an impact on them differently because of their giftedness?

Michael: Well, anything outside of the norm. School is a place of socialization. Of, as Miraca Gross said, cutting the tall poppies so that everything is even. OK. To fit in, and carry out the program that has been set out. That’s what we have. So there is anyone who is doing something different becomes an inconvenience. And teachers are overloaded. We cannot blame the teachers, always, because they have become overloaded, overburdened. The pressures and demands on them are too great. They have too many diverse kinds of children to deal with because we have exceptionalities all over the place, and we have now different cultures entering the picture. It’s expecting too much of a teacher to deal with all of that. And then, also, be able to differentiate curriculum for the one or two highly gifted children who all of the sudden are there.

Ellen: What about the response of the gifted child himself or herself to this attitude towards children that you’re talking about? Does it affect them differently because of their own… is their own internal response different because of their giftedness?

Michael: Well, because they see what’s going on much more clearly than other children. They are quite capable some of them to adapt on the surface and play the role of the model student while at the same time knowing that they are not learning very much in school. They are just doing time. Now, these are the ones who find ways to adapt, but then that conflict has to be handled somewhere else. So either they become difficult at home, or they spend time playing Nintendo games all the time, which engages their energy, or something else is happening that they have to unload because they are really serving time every day.

So, that is one thing that happens. Now, the other ones are so offended by having to work below level that they refuse to hand in work. And they rebel. Which is pretty good because there is still a lot of life and energy in them to rebel, but it’s trouble for everyone. It’s trouble for parents, trouble for school, and so on. And then the others get depressed. They become ungifted.

Ellen: Well, a lot of people don’t think you can become ungifted. They think the gifted will always make it.

Michael: No.

Ellen: Tell me a little more about this becoming ungifted.

Michael: Stephanie Tolan has said it best. If you have an athlete who runs well, if you draw lines and say, well, you have to put your feet in between the lines. You cannot run faster than that. That athlete is not going to develop his abilities. He will be frustrated. And that’s what is happening to gifted children. There are other dangers—that gifted children are not presented with the challenge that is appropriate to their level. They develop the habit of coasting, and then because they are always the best because it’s so easy for them, then they are afraid to meet the challenge and avoid it at any cost because the fear of failure all of the sudden being shown with something they cannot do—their status is threatened. Which is quite understandable because adults do the same thing. So, yeah. There are all kinds of risks.

Ellen: Is there something we can do to help children develop resilience?

Michael: Well, that’s an interesting question. The studies of helplessness would say that the way to develop resilience is because we deal both with success and failures. So that we understand that not everything we do is easy. We have the challenges, and we understand that having challenges is proper. We can be introduced to examples of great people—whether in science or in art—who have worked on something for a great many years and suffered a great deal of frustration, but they persisted and finally had the solution to a problem. Whether it’s a problem in art or a problem in science. But it was very difficult, and then they often despaired of finding a solution, and that’s normal.

And that’s what we know from the studies of helplessness. When we want to avert helplessness, we don’t give children only easy problems. We give them problems they can solve and problems they cannot solve and tell them, well, this one… this requires a little more effort. And that builds resilience and resistance to instant feelings of failure when the first obstacle is encountered.

Ellen: Do you think giftedness helps kids develop resilience? Do gifted kids have more capacity for resilience?

Michael: I think that we need to investigate that. I think it is a combination of the inborn capacity for resilience in some, and in others, it is the way we are raised. And we never know, no matter what people say about the influence of genetics on behavior and how much it plays a role, we cannot decide in individual cases which is more important. We only know that there are cases where the most benign environment, or supportive environment, still was not able to give the kind of self-confidence to a child and a person. So then we can suspect that there must be some epigenetic load of interfering, messing up genes, and things like that. Where people are more prone to depression.

In fact, there were data showing that there is more of genetic input toward negative emotions but that the positive ones depend more on the environment we grow up in. So, if we grow up in an environment that supports our efforts and builds our confidence, that’s where it comes from. I mean, besides, giftedness is such a spectrum and complex of all kinds of gifts and combinations that it’s impossible to decide for the gifted, whether by themselves…they have more capacity for resilience. I don’t think so. It depends on so many other things. [00:21:34]

Ellen: Talk a little bit about how you would define giftedness and how you would describe gifted children in general. Since we’re already talking about the many faces of giftedness, I would like to hear you discuss this a little bit.

Michael: Well, there is a stronger life force in them. There is more intensity, more vitality, greater depth of feeling, and the differences are not quantitative, they are qualitative. Because the combination of them makes for a difference, a qualitative difference. We don’t have a continuum from, you know, a little bit more, and a little bit more, and then we get into the gifted range. No, the differences are very distinct. And so it has to do with… Gosh, it has to do with so many things—with the interest level, curiosity about things.

Even in the many cases of ability to withstand pressure from the environment. Although many gifted kids are extremely vulnerable to the pressures of adolescence that Mary Pipher has described so well. Even the best prepared, it turns out, can succumb to those tremendous pressures and transitions to feel that we are worth something only if we are attractive to others in one way or another, whether it’s socially or aesthetically or in some other way. My goodness, there’s such a diversity.

I think that Annemarie Roeper said it best because she said there’s this greater awareness, which is being more strongly plugged into life on many levels. Understanding things, asking questions, feeling more deeply, and seeing possibilities. That’s greater awareness of all levels.

Ellen: How would you say your work has helped develop understanding or raise consciousness about these children?

Michael: I think the ways to recognize the different forms of energy, what Dąbrowski called overexcitabilities, that thanks to his model, it’s easier to see that higher energy level is not necessarily hyperactivity or attention deficit. Because how can it be attention deficit if the kid who never pays attention in class can score so high on a test? Where did he get it from? How did it come into his head? So that’s one of the things. The higher energy level is there, and that’s why it’s very hard for them to sit in one place for a long time.

Recognition of the value of imagination. That it’s essential to being creative. We know from the study of creative people that imagination is important, but do we value imagination in children? No. Up to a point. At a certain point, it becomes too weird, or we don’t believe it’s original—it’s their own production. And so knowing that this is possible could help someone understand gifted children better.

Understand also the need for daydreaming, also understand that maybe daydreaming shouldn’t always be interrupted, because it’s really jarring to the system. If it’s done too much, it’s injurious because it’s really like a trance state, being absorbed in some imagery. It doesn’t have to be escape, but it’s a basic need, a basic necessity for the child. And I know those who said that they get the best ideas at the most inconvenient times. One boy was telling me that he was getting the best ideas for his projects during exams. It was most inconvenient. But he couldn’t help it.

So that’s, again, it’s not uncommon. Then, the emotional intensity and sensitivity, which so often—almost always—is seen as immaturity. And seeing that, many people say, well, this child cannot go into the gifted program because he’s too immature, when in fact that’s exactly what the child needs, to be in a place where emotional sensitivity and intensity are recognized. But unfortunately, it is so often thought of as being immaturity, or even pathological sensitivity. That something is wrong with the child.

We have not yet been systematically looking at the match between the child and the environment. Or the setting, the context. We take it for granted that the context is okay and proper, which it often isn’t. And that comes so often with the students I had in teacher education that whenever we came up on a situation when it is to be decided that there is a conflict with a child and the teacher. Should we allow the child to move to another class, and of course, they already are so identified with the establishment they say, no, the child should learn to fit into this class. You know, instead of saying, well, it would be better for the child and the teacher to be in another classroom. We just refuse the rights that we take for granted for ourselves, for children. Why? I always wonder.

We are free to choose our job, we are free to choose our friends, but we feel that children should play with the people we have stuck them with. And as Csikszentmihalyi showed, with his study of adolescents, when we have a job, it has a certain continuity, it has certain cohesion, and coherence in what we do, and yet we expect young people to shift their attention between different topics all the time. Whatever they are interested in, they have to drop and do something else, and they have to shift their attention dozens of times during the day.

Eventually, it’s disequilibrating. So they cannot work at something and get fully engaged in something, at their own pace, and so on. It’s just disrupting the whole balance, psychophysical balance, of children and young people. We’re not only talking about the classroom, we’re talking about the pressures of the peer groups and all that’s going on there, which is even stronger. That we, as adults, are not exposed to as much.

Ellen: Talk a little bit about the overexcitabilities and how that impacts all of these issues.

Michael: Well, the overexcitabilities make anyone who has them take in more stimulation and information and experience at any time, in many different ways and channels, and it doesn’t always agree with each other. I mean, one can be emotionally ecstatic and euphoric at the same time and disturbed by some smell. Or, as in many of the highly gifted children—it comes up repeatedly—that they have to have very soft, loose clothing because their body reacts so strongly. Some of them don’t tolerate coats, because it’s just too much pressure on the body or something like that.

These heightened sensitivities can create problems in an environment where they are not recognized, or they are laughed at, which often happens. You know, the message to them goes always back—you are too much. So they say, cool it. But if you have these intensities and sensitivities, there’s no way you can do it because that’s the way you are made up. So there is a lack of fit.

We are not tolerant of it. The society is not very tolerant of it, and that’s a problem. So if, you know, people around enjoy the imagination and the tall tales and inventions of someone, it’s very good. And that’s the easier part. The curiosity, well, children who ask questions unrelentingly, can wear out their parents and everyone around them because they have to know. They have to understand. Some of them express their opinions on everything and demand to be heard and recognized. That can be taxing, too.

The energy level has to be engaged. I think the hardest to deal with is probably the emotional sensitivity because it goes so deep, and it can be so—the upsets—can be so deep and so long-lasting. So people have to be well informed on how to approach a child about an impending change in life, whether they are moving and leaving one house and moving somewhere else. It can be very hard.

If you have emotional boys, the way they are criticized is the most damaging. Because they are called sissies and girls, and that is considered, and received, as the worst shaming criticism. And yet, it’s used so widely and so commonly. So that drives a child into hiding, and really, when we were talking about spiritual experiences, it takes only one critical remark or lack of recognition or acceptance of the experience of the child as related. That child will learn that that’s something I shouldn’t be talking about. Goes into hiding, and then it has no recourse because the lesson is no one is going to believe you, no one is going to listen, and you have no one to talk to.

That creates a condition of loneliness that no one knows about. That, again, happens very often. Many people reported in Hoffman’s study on their early experiences, that’s what they said. That they were clearly told, and they knew they had to keep it to themselves. And some of them didn’t know whether they were normal or not because of these criticisms. Then looking back, they felt sadness that they were told something they shouldn’t have been told. That they were made to doubt themselves.

Ellen: How did you get interested in gifted children in general and in particular in these free spirits, and the highly gifted, spiritually gifted, the gifted kids who don’t fit in?

Michael: Well, I was first a scientist. And I was first studying plant science, in which I got a master’s degree, in Poland. Then I started molecular biology and, when I got the degree in it, spent several years doing research in molecular biology. When I realized that was not where my future was, I went and studied counseling psychology. It so happened that at the University of Wisconsin, when I went for my counseling graduate program, there was the Laboratory for Superior Students.

This was to serve the gifted kids as designated by schools, and so we did school visits. They came to the laboratory in Madison, and they were tested, and they had visits on campus, and so that’s how we got into contact with some gifted children. Some of whom were very exciting, interesting people. And that’s when I started the study. I just was naturally drawn to them. They were interesting to me.

Since I was, at that time, already doing research with Dąbrowski, I devised a questionnaire to ask a number of these students who were coming to this laboratory to answer these questions. There were 46 questions. It was a 10-page questionnaire. I don’t know whether kids today would answer them, but this was the 70s, so they still did. And I had them nominated by the people who worked with them because there were several research assistants in the lab. So, by nomination, I got a better response. I then had a pool of 30-some—I think it was 30-some—questionnaires with very interesting material that I have used, and then that was the first report on it was in the 1979 New Voices in Counseling the Gifted that Nick Colangelo and Ron Zaffrann put together. So that’s how I entered the scene. With overexcitabilities.

Ellen: What would you say are your most pressing concerns about these kids?

Michael: I cannot say they are the most pressing because they have been pressing forever. They have been always there. Give them the room to breathe. That’s what I would say. Many of them adapt by becoming good achievers. And that’s how they often fool us because we don’t see what’s going on inside. They may be achieving, but they know they are doing that to be accepted, to please others, and inside, it feels hollow. And no one knows that, and they are depressed, but they always say everything is okay. Or no one asks. Because everything looks okay. There’s quite a lot of that. We don’t know it because either we don’t ask or they would tell us that everything is okay. Because they are not able to tell us what’s going on.

1. When I worked at the Gifted Development Center, it was a long drive from my house to the office, and I used to listen to this interview in the car. Click here for an audio-only version that can be downloaded.

2. Ellen is the author of Bright Adults: Uniqueness and Belonging Across the Lifespan.

3. I think he was referring to a book published in 1996 called Resilient Adults: Overcoming a Cruel Past by Gina O. Higgins.