Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Feelings of not belonging at HOME

Since last year, DD8 has occasionally told us she gets a funny stomach feeling at night from a strong feeling that she does not belong at home, in our family. My DW says she remembers having this same feeling as a child and I think I have a faint memory of this same feeling around age 10 or so. It troubles DD enough to keep her up and give her a stomach ache and actually tell us about it.

Regardless, it's a bit alarming to hear one's child say this, and I wonder whether others have similar experiences with their children? In discussing it with her, we've not pinpointed any particular circumstances responsible for this feeling. Gifted issues aside, we have a peaceful and safe household.

The only gifted angle I could put on it was the fact that DD also says she wants to have her own apartment and live with a friend, so maybe the two feelings are related.

Only child?

My 13 year old has only said that he doesn't feel like he belongs in the small town we live in. He talks every day about how he is going to move away as soon as he gets the chance. He feels very uncomfortable with our extended family that also live in this town. He tries to talk me into promising that we will move somewhere else after his dad retires so that he can at least have a few good childhood memories. It makes me sad to hear this.

I went through the same things--still do to a certain extent--and I was a middle child. I also felt restless living in a larger city with my college friends after graduation. Since then, I've lived in Taiwan; Honolulu; Washington, DC; and two of the smaller Hawaiian islands.

There are two gifted angles here that I can see. One of them is the difficulty gifted children have in finding friends that are their intellectual peers. That can be magnified and much more difficult in small towns and rural areas. However, I went to a selective college in a small town and absolutely loved it. I now live in a town that has less than 10,000 people, but there's much more to do here.

The other gifted angle is what Dabrowski called over-excitabilities. There are a few of those that can make small town life unbearable for gifted children.

DD was the first child, and she took the 2nd's arrival pretty hard. But things have smoothed out and she really does not have any other particular complaints, other than just feeling like she doesn't fit in our family once and a while. She did struggle a lot in 2nd grade with not fitting in with peers, but now is thriving in a gifted magnet school class for 3rd.

I think she never quite feels comfortable in her own skin. She's a chameleon people pleaser. We used to joke when she was a baby, before we knew about giftedness, that she was born grown up. So it could be wrapped up in all that.

This is a little off the wall, but on the offchance it sounds appealing to you, I'll throw it out there. And disclaimer, we haven't experienced what your DD is experiencing.

We talked quite a bit with DS6 several years ago about different theories of what happens when you die, related to some deaths among family/friends at the time, and reincarnation was one of the things we talked about. Maybe in the course of brainstorming with your DD why she's feeling like she doesn't belong, you could bring up reincarnation and see if it helps ease her anxiety over her feelings. Perhaps her spirit is connecting to a past life right now. I don't believe (or not, really) in reincarnation, but it came to mind as an off-the-wall possibility that, depending on your DD's personality, could provide some comfort. My DS, who is more spiritual than I am, would be quite comforted by that thought if we were in your shoes.

Sounds like a J.D. Salinger story--"Teddy", the last one in _Nine Stories_.

DS9 has the occasional meltdown (generally at bedtime) about not belonging anywhere, including school, home, town, family, etc.

It's heartbreaking, not knowing what on earth to tell the kid to make him feel better. All I can do is hold him and tell him that I love him and I understand, and that it will get better, but he doesn't believe it.

Around that age I had deep feelings of.. maybe emptiness?

And I expressed it by saying I was afraid to grow up. I think it maybe had to do with fears of death in some way or about being forced to deal with some of the darker aspects of the world that I was keeping at bay by just being a child and reading my fiction books, but honestly I barely remember. I do remember crying about it on either my 10th or 11th birthday though.

Edit: Oops. Kind of an old thread!

Yes. Right after my own crying spells I launched into my "search for truth" and started reading everything I could on religion and spirituality and I'd write down interesting ideas I had about past lives or how the essence of someone might be able to stick around.

(like ghosts or in one crazy idea... the idea that the molecules that made up a person maybe changed constantly and the only thing keeping them in one shape was some sort of force (cookie-cutter esque) of that person. Which would explain the feeling of phantom limbs and such... and which would mean that perhaps the molecules making up my body at any given time were the very same ones that once made up someone elses. And that maybe those molecules "remembered" what they used to be.
Not totally a crazy idea once I learned more about chemistry...)