The first week after Sam died I spent a lot of time in the kitchen whilst everyone else was in bed. I couldn’t sleep more than two or three hours at a time. So I would come down and drink herbal tea and smoke at the kitchen table. And weep.

The Aga was dark blue. When I had chosen the house a year before, it was the Aga that beckoned me — this dark blue enamelled heart of the place, something on moving in that felt like an arrival, and that I had soon learned to lean into at the end of a long and stressful day at work. Now I sat with my feet cooled by the quarry tiles, the stainless steel jug that served as a kettle on the hotplate, its lid standing open. I sat at the huge IKEA table that had seated twelve for Christmas dinner the December before. Through the pair of glazed doors was the new courtyard garden my brother had landscaped for me, with its railway sleepers and its huge empty terracotta pots — pots that had been expecting cypress trees that very day, and now stood disappointed.

On the end of the table, a pile of condolence cards. Every day, clusters fell onto the doormat, the postman’s steps on the gravel echoing that other crunch of gravel — the police, calling round at three in the morning.

I had my diary and in the pauses between crying uncontrollably I tried to catch fragments of thought into some kind of to-do list.

A coffin. A song. A scary thought. Someone else to notify. A sudden memory. His phone contract. The car tax.

And underneath the lists, something much harder. In those solitary nights by the Aga I found myself turning over all the choices I had ever made, and questioning the kindness of each one. That husband. This school. That job. This house. That baby. The new bike. This decision, that decision. The countless choices I made — for myself, for my children, for other people — and the impossibility of ever seeing where their impact would land. It was overwhelming.

Over and over I landed in self-blame and in shame. Which was not living with kindness. Not at all. And yet to let go of it, to say with any kind of conviction, I did my best, I am a good mother, did not feel either possible or helpful. I felt as if I had an intractable puzzle to solve, no matter how painful. So I stayed there for long periods of time, where the self-blame was brutal. New and shocking realisations would surface and others would repeat and repeat, without mercy.

It was so harsh that no-one was able to listen to it without needing me to stop. To reassure me, “This is not your fault.”

So I saved it for the nights. On my own.

Two things came to support me in that kitchen, and I have kept them both.

The first was a name. My ex-husband, Danny, had a joky but affectionate name for me — Weenie. And in the small hours by the Aga I found myself using it, addressing myself the way someone who loved me might. “Come on, Weenie, make a cup of tea.” Or, “Not now Weenie. That one can wait.” Or simply, “It’s OK, Weenie. It's all right.”

The second came from the title of a book.

Over the last year I had bought a small book of cartoons — pithy advice for someone going through something really hard — and put it on my shelf, vaguely thinking it might be useful for my job as a pastoral leader in a large secondary school.

One of the Year 11 students in my house lost her mother to suicide. She and I went out one lunchtime for a hot chocolate at a nearby café with a courtyard garden. The tables were enclosed by potted plants and tall palms — parlour palms, probably not, but something like them — so that we sat half hidden. Through the leaves I could see one of my maths colleagues, puffing away behind a plant of his own.

My student's hot chocolate came with whipped cream and a long spoon. I had a black coffee.

She looked around, and glanced at her bag, trying to gauge what to do. I knew what she needed. I said quietly, “You can smoke if you want to. It’s OK.” And so she got out her rolling tobacco.

I decided in that moment that if it helped her just a tiny bit, I would risk whatever criticism — trouble even — might come my way for allowing it.

And now, in my kitchen, I understood instinctively that I must afford myself every small kindness that occurred to me. I allowed myself to smoke, rolling one skinny cigarette after another.

I fetched the little white and blue book from my shelf. Cálmate, corazón. Be still, dear heart.

I don’t recall its content as being particularly helpful but I adopted the title phrase, uncertain even how to pronounce it. When my panicked thoughts raced with the harshest of self-criticisms and brought me to more floods of tears — Cálmate, corazón.

As the weeks and months went on, I was unable to return to work, and allowing myself that was part of it. I made it a practice to take the kindest route — to try to do what was kindest for myself. And for my children, and for everyone else. But it started with me. To do what was kind. To choose what was kindest — not what was expected, or sensible, or agreed with everyone else, but what was kind.

I tried not to plan for the future, and yet, of course, some of what was kind now was inevitably shaping it. I knew from the start that I would survive this. I did not know how. And it seemed to me that kindness was the best compass.

The vehicle for that kindness that I discovered in my kitchen is self-compassion.

The roots of the word tell you what it is. Compassion — from the Latin com, with, and pati, to suffer. To suffer with. To carry something alongside another.

And self-compassion is carrying something alongside yourself. The willingness to suffer with yourself. Not to fix the pain, not to explain it away, not to stand over yourself in judgement — but to stand beside your own suffering the way you would stand beside a dear friend in theirs.

Kristin Neff names three aspects to practising self-compassion. Here they are, as I understand them:

That middle one, being human, is the part that undoes the sense of isolation. When I remember I am part of humanity my suffering stops being mine, set against everyone else’s, and it becomes simply suffering, that can be met with kindness, wherever it happens to live. There is a temptation for us to imagine there is something wrong with us when we have a lot of suffering to deal with.

And when we see clearly we can see that, for example, I am having the thought that this is my fault and it is painful, without being tempted to numb it or ignore it.

This is what I have come to understand self-compassion to be: kindness turned towards my own suffering. The same kindness I would offer anyone.

I started to learn this it by the Aga, saying Cálmate, corazón to a heart in deep pain that I did not yet know how to comfort. And by holding myself with love through a name that was coined in love. Weenie.

We are sometimes encouraged to fill our own cup in order that we have enough to give to others — as though self-compassion only earns its place by making us better for other people. But I did not deserve kindness in that kitchen because of what it would let me do for anyone else. I deserved it because I mattered. And I deserve it now because I matter. As do you.

There was, at that time, all manner of kindness and compassionate action coming towards me from others. But kindness to myself as self-compassion was vital too.

That kitchen was where I began to live more actively with self-compassion. Well — maybe not the start, but where it became a daily vital practice. And part of the ground I aspired to stand on.

And I did not always get it right. Sometimes, I fell into being kind to everyone but myself. The first night in the Nottingham hotel, I shared a bed with a friend, and a room with her and my brother. They could sleep. I could not. So I left the room and sat on the floor in the stairwell so as not to wake them with my crying.

I should have booked another room. Maybe someone else should have booked it for me. I was still operating under an old illusion — that to get what I needed I must first look after everyone else’s needs, that I could not simply ask for what I needed.

But that is another story, and I will come to it another time.

I have come to believe that kindness — and the noticing of chances to practise it — is the only thing that truly matters in this world.

I do not manage it every moment. Far from it. But I have come to see it — often most clearly in other people’s lives — as a principle worth living by.

But when it goes unbalanced — when what seems like kindness to another leaves the self abandoned, disregarded — then perhaps it was never kindness at all.

Over the years since those kitchen nights I have increasingly come to realise that we are not separate. And as the line between self and other thins, the distinction between self and other begins to dissolve. I see that a kindness is simply a kindness. The same, whether it is turned towards me or towards someone else.

And perhaps that is what it means to belong to myself. Not to be apart, but to be my own — and, in the same breath, one of many. A wave and the ocean.

I saw this clearly once, in a small moment. My little grandson fell and cut his knee, and I felt the sudden sharp pain of it in my own knee, mirrored. I went to him, and I heard myself murmur it — Cálmate, corazón — to him, or to myself, I couldn't tell. Kindness to him, kindness to me — in that moment there was no difference between them.

There is a tool here which is for all my readers:

A 26 question self-assessment quiz.

A review of your results that will tell you:

• How kind to yourself are you?

• How well do you understand yourself to be a member of humanity, rather than alone in your suffering?

• How clearly aware are you about your own painful feelings?

Then:

A pdf of your reflection along with tiny practices to support you to download and keep.

The self-compassion scale itself was designed by Kristin Neff, who generously allows its use. I have added some reflections of my own, and some small supportive practices, for anyone who wants to see where they are with this. Just to notice.

My tool is here, if you’d like to try it. You are so welcome.

Thank you for listening.

Davina 💙

Are you new here, or have you been here a while, and are wondering what this place actually is? My writing circles six things. Here they are, with the posts that will take you into each one.

1. Sam’s Story

My son, Sam. Neurodivergent, gifted, and nineteen when he died by suicide. I am writing a book about him — Sam’s Story: It Takes a Village not to Lose a Child — and it is close to being published.

• My book: Sam’s Story — What this book is, and why it has to be written.

• It Takes a Village not to Lose a Child — Every child needs to know that they belong, and that they belong exactly as they are. And much of this is beyond the reach of a mother.

2. My Story

Memoir posts about my life. These three will give you a feel for it — there are many more waiting for you in the My Story section.

• The Highest 11+ Result in the County — I pass my 11+ with flying colours, then spend the next four years trying to work out how to fit into a world where I feel as if I don’t belong.

• Two Lanterns — Two friends meet on the moors — trying to find a ritual, a gesture, anything that might help to hold the weight of profound loss, knowing before they even begin that nothing ever will.

• Make Sure I’m Buried With Grandma — How I went looking for a burial ground and found a place to belong.

3. The Worst Loss

The profound and traumatic loss of a child to suicide. I write about what it is actually like, what helps and what really doesn’t.

• Bring it on. This is what I’m here for. — A mother’s journey through profound loss, fury, and the recovery of meaning.

• A Bad Day to Stop Smoking — You were there when I needed you.

• “Hello? Is there anybody in there?” — Numbing the pain of profound and traumatic loss and why doing so doesn’t serve us.

• How Many Children do you Have? — The innocuous question that makes bereaved parents stop in their tracks.

• Somatic Symmetry — The body remembers the joy and the pain.

• Spiritual but Not Religious — Some of the practices that help me to feel connected to ‘what is’, beyond the everyday.

• All I Want for Christmas is You — What bereaved parents actually want you to know at Christmas.

4. The Five Roots of Belonging

The framework underneath everything I know about life — the five things we need in order to belong to ourselves.

The roots, and the twelve monthly themes outlined in the first post below, are what our membership Zoom meetings centre around each month.

• You Were Born Belonging - A Map For Your Return — The Five Roots of Belonging and coming home to ourselves.

Root 1: Being Sanctuary

• Being Sanctuary — How to embody safety, refuge and a regulatory resource for a child.

Root 2: Healing Shame with Self-Compassion

• From Shame to Self-Compassion — Recognising what’s yours and what really isn’t. And starting to witness and heal the shame in your body.

Root 3: Embracing Complexity

• Behaviour as Communication — What our children are trying to tell us.

• The Neurodiversity Lens — Moving from ‘What’s wrong with you?’ to ‘What is your particular way of being here and what do you need?’

• The Trauma of Giftedness - Part 1 of 2 — How gifted and twice-exceptional children learn to choose between authenticity and belonging — and why this choice itself creates trauma.

• The Trauma of Giftedness: Part 2 of 2 — What happens when gifted children can’t find belonging — and what needs to change.

Root 4: Trusting Your Intuition

• Dreaming Yourself Back to Belonging — The recovery of aspects of your self through the exploration of your dreams.

Root 5: Living with Kindness

• Rage Is Not Just More Anger. — Rage and anger are different things. And getting this wrong has consequences.

The Village — the ground the roots grow in

• Understanding Your Village — Children need other people in their lives beyond their immediate family members. We were never meant to do this alone.

5. Perspectives

My perspectives on AI, education, and other things that catch my attention.

• Why AI Can’t Be Our Psychotherapist — And why we think we want it to be.

• Mind the Empathy Gap — Claude’s child safeguarding processes leave a lot to be desired.

• Who are those SEND assessment reports really for? — What happened when Sam opened the blanket box.

6. Forest Stories

My life experience and my psychotherapeutic knowledge, with AI helping me weave the threads of these into stories.

• Small Oak & The Fire: Part 1 of 4 - What if I get lost? — The forest prepares for the coming fire.

• After The Storm — The five gifts of the forest after profound loss.

• A Story Of Belonging Through the Seasons — A forest story following the monthly themes of Belonging to Myself.

• Meeting AI With The Wisdom of The Forest — A story about the three kinds of power we can use to shape how AI technology develops.

And when you’re ready

• A Gift for You 🩵 & Tools for The Journey — Self-exploration and support tools for subscribers.

• Tools for the Journey: Links & Access Codes — For paid subscribers only.

There is also a monthly newsletter — a letter from me at the end of each month, with what’s been happening here and what’s coming next.

I post weekly on Sunday mornings just after 11:00 am (UK time), and some weeks I post on Wednesday morning as well.

Wherever you start, you are warmly welcome here.

Warmest wishes,

Davina 🩵

P.S. If you are interested in joining The Gathering, I’d love to hear from you and to answer any questions you might have — You are invited for a virtual coffee ☕ with me.

I am writing about the shame of not belonging. About the injustices of an education system that was never built for those of us whose neurobiology and trauma history leave us struggling inside its rigid structures. About how we are forced to change ourselves to fit what's on offer — sometimes at devastating personal cost.

My son was castigated, punished and excluded

My son Sam was first excluded from school aged 6. He was finally excluded from the student union bar at Nottingham university aged 19. He took his own life that night.

From a young age he was identified as ‘gifted’ but not recognised as having a unique neurobiology that required a different approach in order for him to be able to learn or to be OK. His struggles to conform in school were understood as behavioural problems, emotional damage or bad parenting on my part and he was castigated, punished and excluded.

I needed to find a sufficiently peaceful heart in order to be able to tell his story

Twenty years passed before I could find a sufficiently peaceful heart to be able to tell his story. Then I saw the pattern repeating with my grandson, and I realised it was repeating everywhere and that Sam’s story urgently needs to be heard.

So I dragged a cardboard box down from the attic, full of yellowing school reports and assessments, and heart breaking memorabilia and I sat down to write Sam’s story.

As I wrote, my shame and confusion started to clear

After a while I started to see the parallels between his experience at school in the 1990s and my own experience in the 1970s. As I wrote, my deeply held shame and confusion finally started to clear around my own experience in school and beyond. I wasn’t bad and I never had been bad. I was a good, not perfect, but good enough mother.

The problem wasn’t with us but with the schools, education systems and communities

My son wasn’t bad either and I saw that he and I, as well as many of the other children I was aware of, each has a unique neurobiology that requires the right conditions if we are to thrive. The problem wasn’t with us but with the schools, education systems and communities that we were trying to fit into.

“A child needs to know that they belong, exactly as they are, and much of this is beyond the reach of a mother.”

— Davina Robertson

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As a paid subscriber you will get early access to chapters of Sam’s Story, and the opportunity to give feedback that will influence the final manuscript. I am very, very close now.
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Be part of bringing this wake-up call into the world.

Davina 🙏

You might want to read this post first: The Trauma of Giftedness: Part 1 of 2

There’s a pattern I have witnessed both as a teacher and as a parent: what happens when a gifted child outsmarts an adult.

Many teachers struggle when a student demonstrates superior knowledge or identifies errors in their teaching. The child who corrects a mathematical mistake, who asks a question the teacher can’t answer, who sees connections the adult missed—this can feel threatening to adult authority.

And when adults feel threatened, children pay the price.

I saw it happen repeatedly with Sam. A perceptive observation treated as disrespect. A genuine question met with hostility. His ability to see through inadequate explanations labelled as argumentative behaviour. The very intelligence that should have been celebrated became evidence of his defiance.

It was this that led to his permanent exclusion from school aged seventeen, just months before his final A level exams. A stand-in teacher on a snowboarding trip exacerbated an already challenging situation and tried to force Sam into submission with his power.

He did not know my son.

His capabilities could make others feel small

I experienced this dynamic myself whilst helping him revise for his A-level calculus exam after his exclusion. We’d work through exam papers together—me, an A -level mathematics teacher with a first-class degree in the subject, and my seventeen-year-old son. He’d work at more than twice my pace, waiting impatiently for me to catch up so we could compare answers.

“No, Mum! It’s 4x to the -3, not 16x squared to the -3.”

He was right. He was always right. And he had no patience for my slower processing.

As his mother, I could celebrate this. I could laugh at being outpaced by my own child. But in classroom after classroom, I’d watched teachers respond to this same dynamic with defensiveness, with punishment, with the reassertion of authority.

This isn’t about individual teachers being malicious. It’s about how hierarchical educational structures depend on adult authority remaining unquestioned. When a child’s natural intellectual capacity challenges that authority, the system protects itself—often by punishing the child.

The gifted child learns: being smarter than the teacher is dangerous. Seeing what others miss makes you a target. Your intelligence isn’t an asset—it’s a threat that must be concealed.

So they learn to hide. To play dumb. To protect adults from their own defensive reactions by making themselves smaller, dimmer, safer.

This is perhaps the cruellest aspect of educational trauma for gifted children: they must suppress the very capabilities their teachers claim to value.

It looked like success

By the time my son reached university, he’d achieved great A-levels, had friends in sixth form, had won prizes and played football for a local team and had brilliant times at Reading Festival with friends. On paper, he’d succeeded against many challenges.

But the trauma doesn’t disappear because you pass exams. The belief that you don’t really belong, that acceptance is conditional on considering others’ needs above your own, that your authentic self is too much—that stays in the body.

At university he struggled. Not academically—he could do the work easily when he engaged. But the accommodation office placed him so far from his lectures that attending became practically impossible. My pleas to have this changed were dismissed.

The long bus journey proved too much, and he stopped going to lectures entirely. Despite my enquiries, no-one told me what was going on. He didn’t have a mobile phone (not everyone chose to have one in 2003 and he was unmaterialistic) so I was reliant on sporadic phone calls and what he chose to tell me when he came home in the holidays.

On his village campus, away from the academic buildings of his faculty, he connected with the biologists. He partied. He had friends, a girlfriend, a social life that felt real. For a time, it looked like he’d found belonging.

Things fell apart

At the end of first year, he’d failed his exams. He’d need to start again. And then his girlfriend finished with him during the summer break. On his nineteenth birthday.

When his ex-girlfriend started seeing one of his best friends, the betrayal compounded every other message about not being wanted, not being enough, not belonging.

He was struggling hugely when he went back to university and no-one let me know. Because his behaviour looked like bad behaviour, not cause for concern. And if anyone was concerned they didn’t tell me.

A couple of weeks later, Sam called me late at night, drunk and injured. I drove to Nottingham immediately. I did what I could but had to return home.

Then he called me another night after being excluded from the student union bar. We talked. He agreed to come home by taxi and train the next morning.

He died by suicide that night. He was nineteen.

The spectrum of harm

I tell you this not to centre his death, nor to frighten you about your own children, but to name it as the extreme end of a spectrum. Most gifted children who experience educational trauma don’t die. But they carry wounds.

They carry shame about their intensities. They learn to hide their intelligence, to dumb down, to make themselves smaller and more palatable.

They develop anxiety, depression, perfectionism that becomes paralysis. They struggle with relationships because they never learned that being authentic could be safe.

They experience autistic or ADHD burnout from years of masking. They choose careers below their abilities because they never learned to trust their own exceptional thinking.

Many turn to alcohol and drugs to numb the pain of not belonging. When you carry the belief that your authentic self is fundamentally unacceptable, substances offer temporary relief from that unbearable knowledge.

I fell into this pattern myself after being expelled—alcohol and drugs became a way to quiet the shame and silence the relentless internal voice saying I was wrong and to find ways to feel connected with others.

Sam followed a similar path both before and at university, using substances to manage the disconnection and isolation he felt. It’s a common trajectory for those carrying unprocessed educational trauma: we medicate the pain we don’t yet have language to name.

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Research findings are alarming

The research on suicidality in gifted and twice-exceptional youth is stark. A 2023 University of Iowa study1 found that autistic children with IQ of 120 or higher are almost six times more likely to have thoughts of suicide compared to those with average IQ, with twice-exceptional children showing the highest rates of suicidal ideation.

These children are at significantly higher risk than their neurotypical peers, especially when undiagnosed, late-diagnosed, or multiply marginalised. The pattern is consistent enough that the researchers call it a public health crisis.

But behind every statistic is a child who learned that difference equals rejection. Behind many are families that tried everything within conventional systems and found those systems unable to properly accommodate neurodivergence.

What I learned too late

After my son died I struggled for many years to make sense of what had happened. There were many competing narratives. Eventually I had to face this truth: The problem was never with him. It wasn’t my faulty parenting either. It was systems designed for conformity that either ignored or treated his neurological difference as defect requiring correction rather than difference requiring understanding.

From that distinction—defect versus difference—much follows.

When you see a child’s intensity as a behavioural problem, you try to eliminate it. When you understand intensity as neurological difference, you accommodate it. You create environments where that child can be authentic and safe simultaneously.

My son needed:

• Permission to move whilst learning

• Curriculum that matched his intellectual capacity rather than his age

• Acceptance that his learning profile was uneven or ‘spiky’

• Understanding that his questions were engagement, not defiance

• Recognition that his refusal to “show working” wasn’t laziness but genuine cognitive difference

• Space for his sensory needs

• Opportunities for authentic connection with intellectual peers—not exclusively but as a part of his social life

• Acknowledgment that his emotional intensity was real and required a level of emotional intelligence in his teachers that wasn’t always there

He needed to be met where he was, not forced into a shape that denied his neurology.

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Some of that happened. A special residential school for a couple of years understood him sufficiently but not perfectly. He eventually learned to write cursively, thrived academically and socially to some extent. They were able to teach him, at nine years old, to write at the same time as supporting him to study GCSE level maths and science. But it required sending him away from home, from family, to access the understanding he needed.

And even there, some thought him arrogant because of his abilities and how these were seen to have given him a head start in comparison to others at the school. The painful cost of his finding some belonging at school was separation from belonging at home.

Later, back in mainstream, some teachers got it. They let him balance on his chair, appreciated his insights, didn’t punish his intensity. I have a special place in my heart for his food tech teacher who allowed him and his friends to make themselves a breakfast fry-up in her classroom. He flourished in parts.

But the foundational trauma was already laid. Years of being told he was wrong, dangerous, too much, impossible. That doesn’t disappear. The nervous system remembers. The body keeps the score.

The belonging crisis

What I’ve come to understand is that the trauma of giftedness is fundamentally a crisis of belonging.

Every human being needs to know they belong—that their authentic self is acceptable, wanted, valued. For many gifted children, this belonging c repeatedly denied. They learn that acceptance is conditional on suppressing their natural intensity, their questions, their different learning pace, their sensory needs, their emotional depth.

They learn to choose between authenticity and safety. Between being themselves and being accepted.

That’s not a choice any child should have to make.

The research on belonging and mental health is unequivocal. Children who experience chronic rejection, who cannot find stable social connection, who live in environments that punish their natural responses, develop trauma symptoms indistinguishable from those grounded in abuse.

Because it is abuse. Not intentional, not malicious, but structural. Systemic. The abuse of forcing neurodivergent children into systems designed for neurotypical development and then blaming them when they can’t conform.

What needs to change

I write this now, because the pattern must be interrupted.

We need radical inclusion. Not inclusion that means “you can be here if you try hard enough to be normal.” But inclusion that redesigns environments to accommodate neurological diversity as expected and valued.

That means:

• Classrooms where movement is permitted, even encouraged

• Curriculum that flexes to individual learning pace rather than age-based lockstep

• Understanding that “showing your working” might look different for different brains

• Recognition that sensory needs are real, not preference

• Training teachers to see questions as engagement, intensity as investment, resistance as communication about unmet needs

• Elimination of exclusion as primary behaviour management tool

• Proper assessment and support for twice-exceptional children

• Accountability for educational trauma as real and measurable harm

It means understanding that the goal is not to make gifted children normal. The goal is to create schools where different ways of being are safe.

The transformation available

I carry both grief and hope.

I carry grief for my son, for the years he spent trying to be acceptable, for the belonging he never fully found. The reason it has taken me over twenty years to write Sam’s story is that I have had to create sufficient internal space to hold all my grief alongside all my love.

I have grief for my son, for my younger self, and for every gifted child currently learning that their authentic self is wrong.

And I also have hope.

Because I’ve seen what’s possible when environments change. I saw my son temporarily transform when removed from hostile systems—calm, happy, engaged. I’ve seen schools that accept, love and provide for all the children. And I have seen parents courageously allowing their children to learn in their own ways at home. And their children flourish.

The trauma of giftedness is preventable. It’s not inevitable. It’s the result of specific systemic failures that we have the knowledge and capacity to address.

Every gifted child who doesn’t have to hide to feel safe, every twice-exceptional teen who can speak honestly about their uneven abilities without shame, every young adult who trusts their own exceptional thinking—these are proof that radical inclusion is possible.

If you’re working in education—consider how many children you’re asking to walk backwards to prove they know how to walk. Consider whether your behaviour management is actually managing behaviour or punishing neurology. Consider what radical inclusion might look like in your classroom, your school, your system.

The intensities of gifted children aren’t flaws to fix. They’re differences to understand and nurture. The trauma of giftedness isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice we make collectively every time we demand conformity over accommodation, every time we choose institutional efficiency over individual neurology, every time we tell a child their authentic self is unacceptable.

We can make different choices.

My son deserved a world that valued his exceptional mind without demanding he deny his body’s needs and his social needs. He deserved to belong as he was. Every gifted child deserves that. Every child deserves that.

It’s not too late to build it. Future generations depend upon it.

If you were that gifted child who learned to hide—what do you wish one adult had understood?

“It’s just a simple sum like six times four and I have to draw twenty-four houses.”

My five-year-old son said this with extreme frustration. He could see the answer instantly. The requirement to prove his thinking through drawing felt absurd to him, like being asked to walk backwards to demonstrate he knew how to walk forwards. He complied for a while. Until the daily accumulation of being forced to think more slowly, to show his working when the working happened in a flash of pattern recognition, to conform to a pace that felt like moving through treacle, became unbearable.

He developed almost a phobia of writing and drawing. When Sam said “No” he meant it.

Just one year later, he kicked a supply teacher who had insisted he must write like every other child in the class. An exclusion letter arrived calling him “a danger to the other children and to the staff.”

A small child who saw straight to the heart of new mathematical concepts, whose mind worked so swiftly. A child who had taught himself to ride a bike without any adult help, through sheer determination. A little boy who had climbed out of cots and up trees and disappeared in shops because staying still felt impossible, was now officially labelled dangerous.

This is where the trauma of giftedness begins: with a neurological difference that creates complexities and intensities that the world too often mistakes for defects requiring correction.

What giftedness actually is

I've come to understand that giftedness isn't about scoring highly on IQ tests. This is a strong indicator for giftedness, but not a requirement. Giftedness is a complex neurological difference that creates experiences most people don't have words for.

Jennifer Sallin of Intergifted has identified six areas of giftedness: intellectual, emotional, creative, sensual, physical, and existential. These manifest as complexities—different domains where depth, nuance, and multidimensional thinking and experiencing emerge. You might see connections others miss, feel moral questions viscerally, create rich inner narratives, or experience physical movement as a way of thinking.

For example, Daniel Tammet is an autistic man who experiences numbers as shapes, colours, and textures—a form of synaesthesia that allows him to perform extraordinary mathematical calculations and learn languages with remarkable speed. His books, including Born on a Blue Day and Thinking in Numbers, offer rare insight into a mind that processes the world through patterns most people cannot perceive.

Olympic athlete Simone Biles possesses a combination of spatial awareness, proprioception, strength, and neuromuscular control that allows her to perform gymnastics skills no one else in the world has achieved—some moves are literally named after her. Her body processes movement and space with a precision and speed that represents the outer edge of what human physicality can accomplish.

These are extreme examples in terms of what these two individuals express outwardly. There are different levels of giftedness as well as different domains and each gifted person is, of course, a unique individual and not defined by what they achieve. There is much that stands in the way of an individual expressing their particular constellation of giftedness in the world.

Two of Sam's particular flavours of giftedness showed up in his intellectual meta cognition—and in his deep sense of morality and ethical behaviour that was entirely his own and which he upheld with unswerving voracity.

Alongside the six ‘flavours' of giftedness, Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski identified five ‘overexcitabilities’—not as pathology, but as a description of different ways that people can experience the world with heightened intensity. And for gifted people, more intense ways of experiencing their complexities. His research showed that many gifted people have an individual profile that includes one or more of these.

Psychomotor overexcitability: High energy, constant need for movement, rapid speech, intense physical responses to emotion. My son could never sit still. From the womb he was restless. As a toddler he climbed everything, disappeared in seconds, moved through space like water finding cracks. At school this was called a lack of self-control and deliberate disruption.

Sensory overexcitability: Heightened responses to sound, light, texture, smell. The chaos of school assemblies, crowded playgrounds, unexpected changes in routine could send Sam into a hyperactive and defensive mode. The world was too loud, too bright, too much. But schools don’t accommodate nervous systems that process sensory input differently. They demand that you cope.

Intellectual overexcitability: Relentless questioning, a need to understand deeply, capacity for complex abstract thought. He grasped new situations so swiftly and he solved puzzles at great speed. And when he asked questions, the answers had to make sense. “Because I said so” or “that’s just how we do it” weren’t answers. They were dismissals. His physics teacher later wrote that his “talent and insight were extraordinary.” But for years before that, his questions were treated as challenge to authority.

Imaginational overexcitability: Rich inner worlds, vivid imagination, capacity to see possibilities others miss. This can look like daydreaming, like being disconnected from reality, like not paying attention. It’s actually a different quality of attention, one that sees patterns and connections others don’t notice.

Emotional overexcitability: Feeling everything intensely. Joy, fury, injustice, others’ pain. My son felt injustice like a physical wound. He couldn’t bear seeing other children treated unfairly. He couldn’t tolerate hypocrisy. His anger at his own exclusions wasn’t just about himself—it was about the fundamental unfairness of systems that punished difference.

These aren’t behavioural problems. They’re neurological differences. But when you’re five, and six, and seven, and you keep being told to calm down, sit still, do it this way, show your working, stop asking questions, stop moving, stop doing it your way, stop, stop, stop—you learn that who you are is wrong.

And that learning becomes trauma.

Twice -exceptionality - when giftedness meets neurodivergence

Twice-exceptional—or 2E—describes children who are both gifted and neurodivergent. They might be gifted and autistic, gifted and have ADHD, gifted and dyslexic, or any combination. The giftedness and the neurodivergence interact in complex ways that schools are often spectacularly ill-equipped to understand.

The giftedness often masks the neurodivergence. A brilliant mind can develop sophisticated compensatory strategies that hide struggles with executive function, sensory processing, or social communication. Teachers see a child who can discuss advanced concepts but won’t follow simple instructions, who understands complex systems but can’t organise their pencil case, who asks profound questions but melts down over unexpected changes to routine.

Sam was known to be dyslexic, but since he taught himself to read and was not significantly lagging behind his cohort in this, or in spelling, it was not taken seriously despite causing him massive frustration.

Without understanding twice-exceptionality, adults default to behavioural explanations. The child must be lazy, defiant, manipulative, attention-seeking. “He can do it when he wants to” becomes evidence of wilful non-compliance rather than the reality of inconsistent executive function or sensory overload.

I suspected something beyond giftedness was at play with Sam. The intensity of his responses, the rigidity around certain expectations, the way sensory overwhelm could tip him into fight-or-flight, the genuine distress when routines changed unexpectedly—these weren’t simply about being intellectually advanced or emotionally intense. But I didn’t have the language. Autism and ADHD weren’t widely understood in the 1990s, especially not in obviously bright children who could hold complex conversations.

So Sam continued to be treated as if he was simply badly behaved or emotionally disturbed. Each exclusion letter focused on his “refusal to comply,” his “disruption,” his “anger management issues.” No one saw a neurodivergent child trying desperately to navigate systems that weren’t designed for how his brain worked whilst also being intellectually under-stimulated and socially isolated.

Now, I understand Sam to have been twice-exceptional. Highly gifted intellectually, but also navigating sensory processing differences, likely ADHD, possibly autism. The combination meant he needed both intellectual challenge and sensory accommodation, both advanced curriculum and executive function support, both recognition of his exceptional thinking and understanding of his neurological differences.

He got neither consistently. And that failure—to see the whole child, to understand that giftedness and neurodivergence can and do coexist—was catastrophic.

The spiky profile

Many gifted children also have what’s called a “spiky” learning profile. Their abilities across different areas are dramatically uneven. As a child my son could grasp mathematical and physics concepts that university students struggled with, but he couldn’t write well at all. Dyslexia and immature fine motor skills meant that getting thoughts from his brilliant mind onto paper was excruciating for him. So he refused to do it. Point blank.

Schools see this and think: lazy. Defiant. Not trying hard enough. They don’t see a child whose brain processes spatial patterns and abstract concepts at exceptional speed but whose hand-eye coordination develops at a different pace. They don’t accommodate the unevenness. They demand uniform development.

“He’s not working to his potential,” they said, again and again. What they meant was: he won’t conform to our delivery method. What he heard was: there’s something wrong with you.

This is spiky profile trauma—being exceptional in ways that don’t count while struggling in ways that define you as broken. The message is clear: your gifts don’t matter if you can’t perform in the prescribed way.

Resonating? Leave a comment

How the trauma accumulates

Educational trauma doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment. It accumulates through daily, hourly messages that your authentic self is unacceptable.

Pre-school: You refuse to do things our way.

First school: You’re dangerous.

Gifted school that should understand: You need to do as you’re told.

Progressive school: You’re too much, even for us.

Special school: You’re OK as you are, but you are rather arrogant.

Secondary school: You need to do what everyone else does. You need not to get upset.

Each exclusion compounds the message. Each time a teacher sighs with exasperation. Each time you’re sent out of assembly for fidgeting. Each time you’re punished for asking why. Each time you’re told to just try harder, be normal, fit in.

The body keeps the score, as trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk1 describes. The nervous system learns: I am not safe being myself. Hypervigilance develops. You learn to scan rooms for danger. You learn where exits are. You learn to mask, to perform neurotypicality, to hide the intensities that mark you as different.

Physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté2 describes this impossible bind: children need both authenticity and attachment, but when these needs conflict, attachment wins. The child suppresses who they are to maintain belonging—and this suppression becomes trauma.

I know this because I lived it too. I was expelled from school at fifteen for not conforming. I was told I was too intense, too questioning, too much. I fell into destructive patterns—alcohol, drugs, relationships with people who confirmed my unworthiness. It took decades to understand that the problem wasn’t me. It was systems that cannot make the space for difference and then punish us for reacting against them.

I didn’t have language for it when my son was small. I had shame. When his first school called me in to collect him after he’d kicked a teacher, I felt the familiar heat of being marked as wrong. My child, my parenting, my family—all being judged and found wanting.

The loneliness of being different

There’s another layer to this trauma that’s rarely discussed: gifted children often cannot find belonging with their age peers either.

The intellectual intensity that allows a five-year-old to grasp complex mathematical concepts means their interests, their conversation, their way of engaging with ideas often aligns more naturally with adults or much older children. But their emotional development, their social skills, their physical coordination typically develop at age-appropriate rates.

This creates a profound mismatch. My son could discuss mathematical concepts with university students but struggled to navigate playground politics with eight-year-olds. He was intellectually lonely among his peers—their games bored him, their conversations felt superficial, their interests didn’t match his—but emotionally he wasn’t ready for the complexity of older friendships.

So he existed in between. Too intellectually advanced for his age group, too emotionally young for those who matched his cognitive level. Never quite fitting anywhere.

Other children sense this difference instinctively. The child who asks too many questions, who doesn’t care about the same things, who speaks in a way that feels oddly adult, who gets excited about subjects no one else finds interesting—that child becomes a target.

Not always through overt bullying, though that happens too. Often it’s subtler: being left out, not invited, talked about rather than talked to. The steady social exclusion that teaches you that difference means isolation.

My son learned early that showing his intellectual intensity made him vulnerable. If he demonstrated what he actually knew, if he answered questions in class with the depth of understanding he possessed, other children mocked him. Teachers sometimes felt threatened. So he learned to hide. To dumb down. To pretend the work was harder than it was. To laugh when he was confused about social situations and to act confused when he was actually fully engaged.

Being asked to make yourself smaller

But it wasn’t just about hiding to avoid mockery. He was actively asked to diminish himself for the comfort of others. “Let someone else answer.” “Be patient whilst we explain this to the other children.” “Don’t work ahead—wait for everyone to catch up.” The implicit message was clear: your ability is an inconvenience. Your understanding makes others uncomfortable. Your role is to stand aside, to slow down, to make yourself smaller so that less able children don’t feel bad about themselves.

This is a particular cruelty of how giftedness is managed in schools. Rather than providing appropriate challenge and allowing gifted children to work at their natural pace, we ask them to be perpetually patient, perpetually waiting, perpetually pretending they don’t already know.

We frame their capability as a social problem—something that creates inequality in the classroom that must be managed by suppressing the gifted child rather than stretching to meet their needs.

The trauma of this is profound. You learn that your gifts are not something to celebrate but something to apologise for.

That taking up space with your actual abilities is selfish.

That the appropriate response to being capable is to hide it, dampen it, parcel it out carefully so as not to make others feel inadequate.

You learn that your job is to make other people comfortable with their limitations by pretending you share them.

This social isolation isn’t separate from educational trauma—it’s integral to it. School isn’t just where you learn academics. It’s where you learn whether you belong in the human community.

When you cannot find connection with your peers, when your authentic self creates distance rather than closeness, when you’re lonely even in crowded playgrounds, the message becomes cellular: there is something fundamentally wrong with being me.

The research on gifted children and social relationships is clear about this pattern. Many gifted children report feeling profoundly lonely throughout their school years, even when surrounded by other children. They describe feeling like outsiders, like they’re watching social interactions from behind glass, understanding intellectually but unable to participate authentically.

Some find refuge in books, in solitary pursuits, in rich imaginary worlds. Some find one or two friends who share their intensities—often these friendships become lifelines. Some mask so successfully that they appear socially adept while feeling utterly disconnected inside. And some, like my son, oscillate between all of these strategies, never quite finding stable belonging anywhere.

The cruelty is that schools, by grouping children rigidly by age rather than interest or intellectual level, create this isolation structurally. Then they blame the child for struggling to connect. “He needs to work on his social skills.” “She should try harder to make friends.” “He’s too intense—he needs to learn to tone it down.”

But the problem isn’t the child’s social skills. The problem is being forced into social groups based solely on birth year when your actual peer group—intellectually, conversationally, in terms of shared interests—might be years older. Or being isolated from adults who could engage with your thinking because “children should play with children.”

My son thrived when he could spend time with the university students in my mathematics lectures. He belonged in those conversations in a way he never quite belonged in the infant school playground. But that wasn’t available to him. School insisted he stay with his age peers, regardless of whether those were actually his peers in any meaningful sense.

Share your experience in the comments

The physiology of being “too much”

The research on chronic stress in children is clear. When you experience repeated social rejection, when you’re consistently punished for your natural responses, when you cannot predict when you’ll be safe and when you’ll be shamed, the nervous system changes.

Cortisol floods the system. The amygdala becomes hypervigilant. The prefrontal cortex—responsible for planning, impulse control, sense of future—goes offline. The result is a body that never returns to baseline. You live in a state of perpetual threat.

For gifted children with overexcitabilities, this is compounded. They’re already experiencing the world at higher intensity. Already processing more sensory input, more emotional complexity, more intellectual stimulation than their nervous systems can easily regulate. Add systemic rejection on top of that and you create conditions for profound suffering.

At sixteen, my son would tip his chair back to the point of perfect equilibrium and then banter his way through lessons while somehow absorbing everything. This looked like not caring. It may have actually been sophisticated self-regulation—finding the precise balance point where his body could be still enough not to be punished while his mind stayed engaged.

But at home, the mask came off. The anger, the frustration, the accumulated shame of being told he was wrong erupted. And it was scary.

When giftedness meets inflexibility

The trauma of giftedness isn’t about the giftedness itself. It’s about the collision between neurological difference and systems designed for a narrow definition of normal.

Schools are organised around conformity. Same age, same curriculum, same pace, same methods, same behavioural expectations. This works reasonably well for children whose neurology fits within a certain range. For everyone else, it’s daily violence.

Not physical violence—though sometimes that too, through restraint or isolation. But the violence of being corrected, punished, excluded, and shamed for the way your brain works.

The violence of being told your natural learning pace is wrong. The violence of being forced to prove you know something in a way that makes no sense to you. The violence of having your questions treated as disruption rather than engagement.

I watched my son transform when I took him out of school completely for a while at age seven. At home, learning football skills from a friend, exploring mathematics at his own speed, he was calm. Cooperative. The “impossible” child became easy.

The problem was never him. The problem was the environment’s inability to flex.

You might want to read this post next: The Trauma of Giftedness Part 2 of 2

An Invitation:

If this resonates with your experience, I’d value hearing your perspective in the comments.

These conversations matter.

References

That night I’d been reading a novel: “Something Might Happen” by Julie Myerson. She told of a woman with three children whose world is upended by her friend’s death—her ordinary everyday friend who was murdered. Her world starts to fray and change and become more and more unsafe.

Everything is changed.

Just after I closed my eyes to sleep Sam rang me. He was deeply upset because he had been thrown out of the student union bar where his ex-girlfriend was with his ex-friend. He told me that he was going to come home in the morning. I checked that he had the train fare and I went to sleep.

The police crunched across my gravel driveway a few hours later and they knocked me out of my dreamworld. My day-world was dropped from a great height and shattered into countless tiny pieces.

Sam died because, under immense pressure that caused him to momentarily lose sight of our love for him, he chose a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Sam carried trauma from repeated experiences of being told that he didn’t belong as the uniquely gifted and neurodivergent child he was. This meant that an experience of heartbreak and betrayal caused unbearable pain for him.

In the early weeks after he died I tried to summon him behind my closed eyes every night. I said his name in my mind, like a mantra, over and over again. He didn’t appear. Once he called out, “Mum!” and woke me. Once, I saw the kindest eye. It felt as if I was immersed in its benevolence and wisdom. I wondered, “Is this Sam? And if not, who is this?”

In the evenings I drank red wine until I thought I might pass out. And still I couldn’t sleep. And when I finally did I woke up crying.

Despite the sometimes overwhelming grief there was a part of me that knew I would survive, even this. I didn’t know how but I believed I could. I had already survived a lot in my life.

Taking a book from my mother’s shelf, I started reading A Course in Miracles. I got as far as Day 7. “The past is not here. To think about the past is to think about illusions. ” It made little sense to me.

One cold morning I woke and, in the seconds, just before the familiar brutal reality re-entered my consciousness, the words “I am what I am” were loudly resonating in my mind. I didn’t know what to make of that.

I read a book afterwards by a woman whose son had died in their house. “Is that worse?” I wondered. Perhaps. She was the one who told me about the gold. The gold in this experience that you cannot see, until you can.

I thought when I read this that it was pure bullshit. Told to her by a visiting minister to offer comfort. He told her she wouldn’t be able to see the gold until later. She claimed to have seen it. I didn’t believe it.

Surely the minister couldn’t have said that, if he had actually known how this felt. How it felt to be opening card after card after card and creating a pile of kind words and weird pictures of flowers and views. Everyone saying that they couldnt find words and they couldn’t ’t imagine how I felt. How it felt to be opening a letter containing a death certificate that outlined in stark words exactly how my boy had died.

The head of my department at work sent a box of sterile carnations with a computer printed message of condolence. I threw them both away.

My closer colleagues would have been shocked at this dutiful offering. They would have wanted me to have a huge bouquet of wild Devon flowers. A whole field full.

We had a two-vicared funeral, where Sam’s father and I closed his coffin together at the end of the service. It was surreal. My old friend Mandy took me to the pub at Dartington afterwards to drink gin & tonic and to breathe for a moment. The two vicars were there at the next table having lunch together. “I don’t fancy yours much,” I said to Mandy and she laughed.

Mandy drove us to another pub in town for the wake and my fragile and beautiful mum, who had lent me the Course in Miracles book was there in the middle of the crowd eating a bag of plain crisps. I hadn’t thought about the need for food. I got drunk. We all got drunk.

Mandy took me home and she drove her car into the wall in the village car park. I didn’t care. My knees were buckling anyway.

The craziness, the chaos, the crisps. The car crash. And this was just the beginning. Most of my feelings were still in suspense and yet the pain in my body was already immense.

I knew I had to do this my way. I chose in each moment what to do. I bought Angel Cards and piles of books. I stepped inexorably through the days, unable to work, barely able to function, and each day I heard Sam saying, “If that’s what you need to do today, Mother, just do it. It’s OK.”

I saw a therapist twice a week. Driving across the moors through the necessary rain and the festoons of rainbows as the grief poured out of me. I read The Power of Now at my therapist's suggestion. He told me much later he had never had a client who said “Fuck” as much as me. I was fucking angry. Never, ever at Sam. Not at my boy. No, never with Sam.

My old friend, Madeline, encouraged me to get back into my 5 series and I set off to see her, two-hundred miles away. I was very anxious about leaving Devon on my own.

The single-track lane from our village had passing places and I knew their locations well. As I drove through the next village towards the motorway a car was travelling towards me. I stopped and waited for the driver to back up to the lay-by just behind her but she didn’t move.

Assuming she had a tail of traffic behind her I backed up the few hundred of yards to another passing place. Then I watched a woman with a small boy in the back of her little red VW Polo casually approach me and there was no other vehicle behind her.

My sympathetic nervous system fired, pumping adrenaline through my body. I wound down my window and she stopped to see what I wanted. She rolled her window down with a puzzled look on her face.

I let her have both barrels. “Oh, don’t you worry about backing up, I'll just get out of your way by backing up half a mile. No problem.” I took a breath but the words wouldn’t stop and my voice started both to break and to rise in volume. “Never mind that you had a passing place just twenty yards behind you. Just let me do it. I've just buried my son but don’t you worry about that, just let me get out of your precious way so that you can take your precious son to school.”

I heard this road-rage tirade come out of my mouth and another part of me watched in horror.

The other driver closed her window, revved her engine, and carried on driving towards the village school behind me.

I was shaking and crying in my car. I couldn’t see how I could continue. I clearly wasn’t safe to be on the road.

After some minutes I saw her returning from the school in my rear-view mirror. I leapt out of my car and waved to flag her down. To her credit she stopped and got out of her car too. I was a good six inches taller than her.

“I am so sorry,” I said, the tears in my eyes starting to flow. “Really, I am so, so sorry. Of course it’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have had a go at you.”

She was crying too, “I was late for school and I know I should have backed up, but I didn’t want to be late.” She looked at me and her eyes were a warm brown - a bit like Sam's.

“I am so sorry about your son,” she said. “I can’t imagine how it must be for you.”

I don’t know who moved first, but then we were holding on to each other and I allowed the warmth of her embrace to calm me for a few long moments. Then we got back into our cars and I waved her forward and we both continued our journeys.

There were huge rainbows all the way along the M5. Not God's promise but Sam's. “I am OK Mother.”

He was a brilliant physicist so, as I pointed out at his funeral, he would have no trouble calculating the necessary positioning for the raindrops to refract the light to the required effect.

In recent years I have returned to A Course in Miracles. I see now with clarity that we create the world we live in and that we can choose fear, or we can choose love. I choose love.

And I hear Sam calling me. “People need to hear my story.”

Every child needs to know that they belong, exactly as they are, and this is everyone’s responsibility. No exceptions.

I am using my hard-won understanding of the shame of not-belonging to become a bridge for the children of the future. In order to step towards being that bridge I have needed to do more than just survive this. I have needed to allow myself to be forged by it.

When a storm comes the lighthouse stands firm on the rock. As the waves crash all around it and the lightning strikes, the lighthouse doesn’t say “Go away, storm.” Instead, it shines its light more brightly and says, “Bring it on. This is what I am here for.”

I am writing about the shame of not belonging. Twenty years ago, I lost my son Sam to the failures of an education system that couldn’t see him, and didn’t value him, for who he was. He was excluded from school for the first time aged just six. He was finally excluded, this time from the student union bar at his university, aged nineteen. He took his own life that night.

I couldn’t tell Sam’s story for a long time, because it was too painful and I was too angry. As the years passed, it started to seem that it was becoming less relevant to other people. Then, I saw what had happened to Sam repeating itself with my grandson. And then, everywhere I looked, I saw other Sams—brilliant, struggling, misunderstood children being failed by inadequate systems.

In 2018/19, children with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) accounted for 82% of permanent exclusions in primary schools (Day, 2025). Autistic students are twice as likely to be excluded, with exclusion rates increasing by 59% from 2011 to 2016 (Day, 2025). Meanwhile, more than a quarter of a million children wait over a year for assessment and support, with average wait times of 26-29 months for autism and ADHD diagnoses (Day, 2025)

Sam’s story needed urgently to be heard and his story can now be fully told without fear of harming him through its telling.

My concern is for children whose neurobiology and trauma history mean that they struggle most within the education system’s rigid structures. The pressures on children to change themselves to fit what is on offer are harming them. Rejections and exclusions are traumatising our children and leading to isolation, mental health issues, alcohol and drug misuse, self-harm and even suicide.

It takes a village not to lose a child

Every child needs to know that they belong, and that they belong exactly as they are. And much of this is beyond the reach and remit of a mother or a father. It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a village not to lose a child.

Giftedness understood only as high ability is a narrow view

From a young age Sam was identified as ‘gifted’ but only in the narrow sense of having a high IQ and being very able at maths and science. He was not recognised as having a unique neurobiology that required a different approach in order for him to be able to learn and to be OK socially and emotionally. His struggles to conform in school were interpreted as behavioural problems and emotional damage that needed fixing somehow, or seen as the consequence of bad parenting and he was repeatedly castigated, pressured, punished and excluded.

At sixteen all support fell away

He did have some significant support and he did have some years of being OK in school but, the damage from the early years ran deep and once he reached the end of compulsory schooling aged sixteen almost all support fell away. Neither he nor I ever had any help to understand his neurobiology or how to support him with emotional regulation and so on. And this was despite my having trained as a teacher, worked as a teacher and completed both a degree in Psychology and a diploma in counselling during his teenage years.

Sam is standing in the middle of this snowboarding group.

I had to open Pandora’s Box to write my book

Before I began I dragged a cardboard box down from the attic. It was overflowing with yellowing school reports, letters to and from education authorities, psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ assessments, and heartbreaking memorabilia. It was like opening Pandora’s Box.

As I wrote our story, deeply held shame and confusion overwhelmed me, both around how I had parented my children, and about my own schooling and teenage years. I started to see the parallels between his, in the 1990s, and my own experience at school in the 1970s and its aftermath.

I explored and researched the question of what it really means for a child to be gifted and the clouds began to clear. Giftedness, I learned, was not about having a high IQ or being a high achiever but an aspect of neurodivergence that comes along with an individual configuration of sensitivities and intensities that need to be understood and given space.

I held shame about some of the things I did

I had always understood myself as a difficult, rebellious and badly behaved teenager and held shame about some of the things that I did, and the choices I made, all those years ago. This new knowledge about giftedness meant I could accept that I wasn’t bad, and never had been bad. It also meant that I could finally properly see that my son wasn’t bad either, even though he certainly did things that caused problems for him and that I found difficult to handle and at a loss to help him with.

The shame wasn’t mine

I began to accept more deeply that I was a humanly imperfect, but good enough mother. I also now had a lens through which to understand my son and what he had needed to be OK. The problem wasn’t with him or me, but the schools, education systems and communities that we were trying to fit into. The shame wasn’t mine but belonged to the broken system.

All children need to feel safe and valued

It isn’t that different children need different conditions or special treatment. All children need to feel safe if they are to be able to learn and grow. All children need to learn in ways that work for them at their own pace. And all children need to feel valued and prized just for being exactly who they are. When we get it right, children don’t just survive school—they are able to thrive both within and beyond it.

Reference
Day, Anne-Marie (2025) Kids ‘at risk’ of school exclusion and youth justice involvement? Or neurodivergent children and families in need of trauma-informed support? Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. pp. 1-16. ISSN 1363-2752

Madeline and I are stumbling in the velvet darkness, trying not to trip on the rocks or to tread in the sheep shit as the wind gusts around us and douses us with Dartmoor drizzle. A ewe bleats dismally, calling for her lamb. I pull my coat’s zip up a little higher, light the first sky-lantern and launch it confidently. It flaps wildly then is brutally torn apart. This wasn’t part of the plan.

We turn to the second lantern. As Madeline holds the paper part ever so gently with both of her hands, I crouch in the shelter of her grey Mercedes holding a flame against the block of fuel in the base of the lantern and will it to light. My fingers are starting to burn against the metal of the lighter and I hold my breath, determined to bear this inconsequential pain until it catches, and then I breathe out as the fire takes hold. The flame grows steadily in confidence and the paper starts to inflate.

Madeline tenderly and slowly lifts the whole thing skyward. Gradually, as the hot air rises into the body of the lantern, it begins to tug upwards and she lets it go. For a few moments it moves upwards, even swoops a little, and we watch, hearts in mouths, as the wind catches it and then throws it violently into a small thorny bush with fragile yellow blossoms.

It becomes a distant, tiny beacon under the starless sky for a minute or two, then disappears without ceremony. We stand and watch, understanding ourselves to be powerless, and we allow silence to echo between us for a short while. Then we climb into the car and light our cigarettes, hers a Marlboro Light and mine a roll-up.

We smoked together for the first time thirty-five years earlier, in the school toilets while we were supposed to be in our A-level Physics lesson.

“Who’s in there smoking?,” I had asked from the privacy of my cubicle, a toilet pan for a seat.

“Who’s in there smoking?”, she retorted. Hers a Winston and mine a No 6.

Her mother drove a Buick that she later shipped over from the States, while my mother drove a Ford Cortina and we recognised the rebel in each other that afternoon.

Madeline’s son Benjamin was born when we were twenty-three and mine, Samuel, when we were twenty-five. They were followed by her daughter, Bethany, then my Jessica and, lastly, my second son, Joshua.

Between Sam’s and Ben’s birthdays, if someone commented, as they frequently had cause to do, “Whoa! They’re a bit of a handful aren’t they? How old are they?” we liked to say, full of pride, “They are 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 years old!”

We had both married and then divorced as our husbands continued to play out the lawless wildness that had once attracted us. We leaned into serious motherhood. We spent our days loading bikes and scooters into the backs of cars, striding about in woods, pushing park swings, counting heads in swimming pools, watching football matches, making birthday cakes, reading stories and putting plasters on knees and sometimes counting the minutes to six o’clock bath-time.

Neither Madeline nor I went to university when we were young, nor even managed to survive our A’ levels at school, so we were inordinately proud of our boys when they did both these things. Ben, a gorgeously strapping and popular young footballer, went to study History at Lincoln and then the following year, Sam, six foot two, with long dark curls and olive skin, his dazzling smile decorated with a gold lip ring, went to Nottingham to study Maths.

Then, a year after Sam started university, Madeline and I were smoking together again in a bland Nottingham hotel. There was an untouched plate of Nachos on the table with cheese congealing over them and a collection of empty red wine bottles and an overflowing ashtray. Josh, was with us as well as my brother, who had driven the Mercedes like the wind to get us here. Ben arrived from Lincoln and he and Josh went out for sandwiches in the early hours of the morning.

As we drove into the city that morning there was a huge rainbow stretched across the university campus and I had known, immediately, that the rainbow was put there for me. Once the bar closed and the boys were safely back and asleep in the next room, I lay on the bed hearing my brother snoring across the room, and Madeline’s quiet breathing next to me.

Earlier, my body had begun to grieve loudly, gutturally, and Madeline said, “Davina, you need to stop that, you’re scaring Josh.”

I didn’t feel safe to allow my body to take charge so I brought the rainbow into my mind. I immersed myself in each colour in turn as if the strength of the hue could hold me in safety or connect me with my boy, or at least keep me away from reality somehow.

Eventually I slept for an hour or so and then as I woke there was the tiniest of pauses before I remembered again and the powerful sobs convulsed my body once more. I used my sleeve like a three-year-old child - Sam’s long-sleeved t-shirt that I’d been wearing for two days - and pressed it against my face. I held it there and let the tears and the snot run into the cotton fabric.

After some time, I don’t know how long, I started to think about coffee and without doing anything about my snot covered shirt I stood up, opened the door with its Do Not Disturb sign suspended from the knob and walked along the carpeted corridor past the numbered doors to the stairs.

I walked downstairs and next to the foyer was a cafe where a quiet queue of people in suits waited to be served. I could smell bacon cooking and I was aware that there was a distant parallel universe where I might have felt enticed by that. I walked to the front of the queue and stated my immediate need,

“I can’t queue, can I just have some coffee now?”

The assistant looked at me in surprise then uncertainly at the others who were dutifully waiting and then back to my dishevelled hair and exhausted face and said,

“Ok. I’ll bring it.”

I was vaguely aware of many eyes following me as I walked to a table and sat rolling one cigarette after another and laying them on the table in a row. I rolled them very thin. When I smoked one I lit it, took a few drags, extinguished it then rolled another.

I was aware of the buzz of conversation around me, perhaps some of it was about me, it wasn’t important. I just needed to get to the time when I could see my boy again. We had seen him the day before.

We had followed a police officer, walked and walked down corridors past door after door and occasionally passing incongruently chatting people and then into a waiting area. Finally, we were invited into another room and there was my boy lying there with his beautiful curls combed into a parting and his face calm.

He was covered with a white sheet up to his neck. I watched his father wailing and roughing up Sam’s hair into its familiar tumble. I held Josh as he wept, shattered and afraid. I was afraid too, especially about what injuries lay beneath the sheet, and as I stroked his beautiful face I could see his chest rising and falling with his breath and I knew this was an illusion but still couldn’t stop seeing it.

Exactly four months later, on a freezing winter’s night, the call came from Madeline’s daughter, Bethany, “It’s Ben, he’s dead.” I couldn’t take in her words. How could this be? How could our children be 16, 17 and 18 without the 19 and 20? Yet, I could hear Madeline screaming, just screaming, in the background. I drove the motorways and went to her, holding my dear friend in my arms and whispering to her,

“Just breathe, all you need to do right now is breathe. This is the worst day. I promise you, this is the worst one.” I knew her pain tangibly and hopelessly.

Then, I made the parallel journey with Madeline that she had made with me those few months earlier and as I stood with her, in another mortuary, in another city I silently promised Ben’s broken body that I would do all I could to help his mother to bear the unbearable as she had tried to help me.

Each year, as the season changes and the chill of autumn enters the air my body remembers the night when I lost my firstborn son. The coldness tightens around my heart and I sense the familiar hollow ache in my chest and the echo of the sharp pain beneath my heart more keenly. I want to mark the day, yet I find that nothing I do can hold the size or the texture of all of this.

When Madeline and I stepped out tonight we knew from the start that we were going through the motions of something that could not and would not bring true comfort. Our two lanterns lay broken and motionless in the mud.

Thank you for reading.