I am going out on a limb here and posit that having to overcame abuse and dealing with disassociation is much more to blame than not learning how to feel part of a group in childhood. I mean, how much of a childhood group have you, with your level of giftedness, ever had a chance to have? My own experience is that catch up in social skills does get harder with age and the more you have missed, but it does absolutely still happen in adulthood, too. I have played the catch up game all my life and am still changing and learning with life experiences (and i know it is noticeable because people i haven’t seen for a long time comment on ir). As you suspect, there is probably more to the disconnect you feel.
Do you have a good therapist? It is super hard to find one who can deal with both trauma and giftedness, I know, but the search is worth it.
I started seeing a new therapist recently (after getting rid of the last disastrous one, who saw me as a threat and was constantly trying to prove he was smarter than me, when I never wanted it to be a competition). The new one seems not to quite know what to make of me or how to help me, but at least he doesn't invest his ego in being smarter/more knowledgeable than his clients. I told him that I have significant weaknesses on the emotional/experiential side of things and that's what I need help with, and he seemed to understand that.
We'll see how it goes.
I'm not sure the points I was trying to make actually came through in my post (probably shouldn't have posted while having the flu and being cognitively not all there). I also need to do more thinking about this.
Basically... there are HG+ people I've met, online and IRL, who don't seem to feel all that different or "special" in either a good or a bad way. They seem to have a basic assumption that whatever talents they may have, they're essentially just human. And then there are others who seem to have a basic, gut-level assumption that they're a fundamentally different kind of person than just about anyone they'll ever meet, and that their intelligence has something to do with this. And despite wanting to be in the first category, and trying very hard for decades to reshape my emotional responses so that I cross over into the first category, on a gut level I remain in the second category even though I consciously reject that set of beliefs/values.
I've never seen anyone cross over between the categories (although I certainly hope that it is possible), and I'd guess that which category someone ends up in probably has something to do with childhood experiences, among other things; at least, it pretty clearly does in my case, because I was raised to believe the things that I now reject but am still stuck in on an emotional level.
