Not everyone operates on the same wavelength. For example, people with high IQs do things differently than others. It doesn’t mean they’re better in some way; it just means they have different needs and a unique perspective.

There’s one thing that all of us experience from time to time that is frustrating for everyone, but drives people with high IQs absolutely crazy. It has to do with the way people respond to them and their emotions, and it’s pretty easy to see why it would be upsetting. The average thinker might be able to just move on, but someone with a high IQ will pretty much feel like they’re being tortured.

People with high IQs can’t stand being misunderstood.

Content creator Ethan Moore said in his TikTok bio that he is “helping you navigate life with giftedness.” According to Moore, there’s pretty much nothing worse that a highly intelligent person can experience than being misunderstood. He said it’s all to people feeling like they’re not attuned to somebody else.

“The idea of attunement is if there’s two people talking, one of them is expressing an emotion, and the other person kind of, like, catches that emotion and mirrors it back,” he explained. Moore offered a simple example of someone’s flight being delayed. The other person would respond in a way that acknowledged their frustration, showing that they are attuned.

On the other hand, it’s not uncommon to experience a lack of attunement, which Moore illustrated in a similar way. He stuck to the idea of someone’s flight being delayed, but this time added in a second person who started talking about something else entirely. 

“The first person expressed frustration, the second person ignored it, dismissed it, and then threw out some other emotion,” he said, noting that the second person was “changing the subject,” leaving the first “alone in the frustration.”

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Everyone wants to experience this attunement, but it’s especially important for those with high IQs.

Everyone loves experiencing the feeling of knowing someone gets them, especially when they’re going through something hard. Unfortunately, it’s a rare thing for a person with high intelligence to feel that way.

“That’s what we want as people with giftedness when we are expressing ourselves, and that’s what all humans want, right?” he said. “However, it seems especially common in our community that we express ourselves to someone and say, kind of, here’s what I’m feeling, and the other person misunderstands us.”

Moore said it’s entirely possible that the other person isn’t truly misunderstanding the person with a high IQ. “We perceive it as we are being misunderstood, when in reality, this person is just not attuning to us,” he added. “They’re not catching our drift.”

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Being misunderstood is terribly uncomfortable, but no one can really avoid it.

Licensed marriage and family therapist Cami Ostman, MS, declared, “One of the hardest burdens to bear is being misunderstood by other people.” Consultant and author Imi Lo, MA, added that “people with high IQ often run into difficulties such as … feeling misunderstood” because they “often feel out of sync with the world.”

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It’s hard for anyone to feel misunderstood, as it can cause a lot of pain and confusion. However, people with high IQs feel this even more deeply because they already feel like they’re a little different from others. It’s like feeling misunderstood is an inevitability for them, not just a possibility.

This means it’s important for everyone to communicate their emotions clearly, but that still doesn’t guarantee that others will be attuned to what they’re feeling. The unfortunate truth is that some people are just going to feel misunderstood sometimes, and there’s no way to prevent that. This will be especially hard for people with high IQs, who will feel like it’s akin to psychological torture.

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Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.