What is Compensation?

Compensation is the mind’s ability to solve a problem in another way than is typical. The highly gifted excel at problem solving. The more abstract reasoning capability one has, the more one can use reasoning in place of modality strength to solve problems. Let me give you an example. A highly-gifted child turned his mother’s face toward him when she spoke and intently studied her face. In school, he sat in the front row and watched his teacher just as intently. He was in second grade before it was discovered that he had a 98 percent hearing loss (C. J. Maker, personal communication, July 8, 1998).

Compensation enables one part of the brain to take over a function when there is injury to another part of the brain. Both sensory equipment and the processing of sensory information can be more acute in the remaining senses when one or more of the senses are impaired. The most dramatic example is Helen Keller—blind, deaf, mute—whose sense of smell (as well as taste and touch) was so finally tuned that she could detect a storm hours before there was any visible sign.

I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws near my nostrils dilate, the better to receive the flood of earth odours which seem to multiply and extend, until I feel the splash of rain against my cheek. As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odours fade, become fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space (as quoted in Ackerman, 1990, p. 44).

Compensation is, indeed, one of the miracles of the mind.

But compensation is a two-edged sword. While it helps an individual to adapt, it also acts to prevent accurate diagnosis and recognition of disabilities by oneself and others. Many forms of compensation are unconscious. A child whose eyes do not team properly may see doors an inch to the right of where they really are. After bumping into several walls or doors, the mind automatically adjusts the child’s perception one inch to the left to enhance the survival of the organism. Instead of allowing the recognition of the problem, so that it can be re-mediated through exercises or lenses, the mind adjusts the perception—at least in some situations. This process occurs with all of the senses.

Some forms of compensation are conscious. Special educators attempt to teach children to compensate for weaknesses by consciously developing their strengths. And many determined individuals teach themselves to compensate for injuries or disabilities through years of practice and exercise. One gifted woman I know with cerebral palsy had to teach herself to walk three times. Even if the process of learning how to compensate is a conscious effort, the compensation itself eventually becomes automatic or unconscious, and the individual comes to rely on that capacity to compensate in order to function in the world.

The problem is that while modality strengths can be counted on consistently, compensation tends to be unstable. Under a variety of conditions, the mind stops compensating adequately. Fatigue, illness, and stress all have an impact on compensation mechanisms. When I am tired, my eyes cross. A person who has taught herself a set of organisational routines to help her deal with being organisationally impaired may not be able to rely on those strategies if she suffers a loss of a loved one.

Compensation requires extra physical, emotional, and cognitive energy. When the body is fatigued, when it does not receive proper nutrition, when illness occurs, there is often insufficient physical energy to compensate. Likewise, when a person is emotionally wounded, there is less emotional energy. After exerting a tremendous amount of mental energy concentrating all day when concentration is difficult, an individual may feel “brain-fried”- unable to take in any more cognitive information. At all these times, disabilities may be more evident or appear more severe. Sometimes a person can have a surplus of cognitive energy, but not have enough physical energy to do anything but watch TV. One cannot borrow from one energy source to replenish another. All three sources of energy must be present for functioning to be optimal.

Age is another variable that affects compensation. A highly-gifted child may be sort of spacey in elementary school and still maintain a B+ average. However, by high school, when hormones kick in, and the work becomes more difficult, the student’s grade point average may drop to C. The compensation strategies that the mind developed for coping in the first twelve years of life may not work as well during the preteen years.

Compensation can also be situation-specific. It works in some situations and not in others. New strategies may need to be consciously developed when the automatic mechanisms no longer do the job.

Unfortunately, since compensation occurs at an unconscious level, individuals are rarely appreciative of their own heroic achievements. Instead, they berate themselves for their weaknesses or inconsistency of performance. They expect the compensatory mechanisms to work all the time, and they blame themselves if they don’t. This undermining of self-esteem is often the by-product of the lack of understanding they received as children from the significant adults in their lives.

I recently worked with a highly-gifted teen who is dyslexic. Her well-meaning teacher set standards for her based on what she demonstrated she could do on one occasion. The teacher assumed that if she failed to live up to her previous performance, she must not be trying hard enough. So she was penalized for succeeding once when she was unable to repeat the performance.

Rose, my friend with cerebral palsy, provides another poignant example. Her high intelligence has enabled her to compensate well enough to pursue graduate studies in mathematics and live independently. However, there have been many ups and downs along the way, with accompanying self-deprecation during the down times. Last week, Rose visited a center for the disabled and came to the realization that she had been denying the impact of the cerebral palsy on her life, diminishing its importance since she could “pass as normal.” She also realized that in doing so she failed to give herself credit for what she had accomplished in coping with her disability. Rose had difficulty accepting herself as gifted, since she was unable to do so many things. When she finally understood how giftedness and disability interact, she was able to describe herself in her journal as gifted for the first time in her life, without putting gifted in quotation marks.

The Importance of Early Detection

It is essential to the well-being of the individual to have disabilities diagnosed as early as possible. Early diagnosis enables early intervention. Early intervention is particularly important in the case of motor delays, since the optimal time period for their correction is under the age of eight. Too many educators and paediatricians adopt a “wait and see” attitude, advising that children often “outgrow” these fine motor or gross motor problems. The window of opportunity for remediation of sensory-motor dysfunctions may be over before everyone takes the problem seriously. In my practice, I have found a startling number of highly-gifted children with sensory-motor delays. Many were the product of very long labour, emergency C-sections, a cord wrapped around part of the body, or the necessitation of oxygen at birth. A neuropsychiatrist in Denver hypothesized that in some of these cases perhaps one part of the brain is hyperoxygenated while another part has oxygen deprivation. A paediatric occupational therapist should be contacted to evaluate any signs of clumsiness, switching hands when engaging in activities, or difficulties with writing or drawing. Also, when highly-gifted children hate puzzles, that is another red flag. Although some children may exhibit these traits without having a disability, early diagnosis will enable early treatment for those children with those needs.

We have also found that chronic otitis media—more than nine ear infections in the first three years—can result in auditory processing impairment with concomitant problems in attention, listening skills, spelling, rote memorization, and handwriting. In highly-gifted children, otitis media is often difficult to detect, since the number one sign is irritability. Many highly-gifted children are just naturally irritable—with or without an ear infection!

Children who begin reading at two, three, four, or five years old may be bringing naturally farsighted eyes into near-point focus, leading to slight muscular imbalances. Don’t hide the books and the cereal boxes. A behavioural optometrist who specializes in vision training can retrain the eyes within six months. Some highly-gifted children have tracking problems (they lose their place when they are reading) or near-far/far-near focusing problem (they find it difficult to copy for the board). Some have poor binocular fusion, depth perception, visual discrimination, visual-motor coordination, or visual perception. High verbal IQ combined with performance IQ that is fifteen or twenty points lower should signal the need for an optometric evaluation. Regular eye exams can detect these difficulties.

In assessing highly-gifted children, whether intellectually or in terms of modality strengths (vision, audition, kinesthetic abilities), it is vital for the examiner to compare the child’s strengths to his or her weaknesses, rather than to the norm for average children. Highly- gifted children often have strengths at the top of the test and weaknesses within the average range. The strengths should be seen as the approximate level of the child’s actual abilities, and the low scores should be interpreted as significant weaknesses, possibly improvable through therapeutic intervention.

References

Ackerman, D. 1994. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage Books.
Kaufman, A. S. 1994. Intelligent Testing with the WISC-III. New York: John Wiley.
Silverman, L. K. 1995. The universal experience of being out-of-sync. In L. K. Silverman(ed.), Advanced Development: A Collection of Works on Giftedness in Adults. Denver: Institute for the Study of Advanced Development.
Wallach, M. 1995. The courage to network. In L. K. Silverman (ed.), Advanced Development: A Collection of Works on Giftedness in Adults. Denver: Institute for the Study of Advanced Development.

Originally printed in:

UNIQUELY GIFTED: IDENTIFYING AND MEETING THE NEEDS OF TWICE-EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN
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