IQ and Affect Dysregulation

In 6th grade, I recall a teacher having me stay after class because I couldn’t understand the math problem that the rest of the class had figured out how to solve. She showed me and showed me again, but I couldn’t repeat her process. At her wits end, she threw her hands up in frustration and said, “Well Derek, if you don’t understand it at this point I don’t know what to tell you.” 

She didn’t know that I was regularly visiting with Child Protective Services after school and was being abused at home while my parents went through a divorce.

A few years before, I was one of 2 other students from my grade that went to a separate room for gifted math and reading classes several times each week. I was in our advanced chess club and had finished in the top 100 out of 7,500 kids in our national tournament. The whiplash of going from that to where I was in 6th grade was disorienting. I had no understanding of why I was suddenly unable to learn or pay attention. 

How Our Emotions Affect Our IQ

This chart from Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey’s book What Happened To You illuminated so much of my life experience. The chart moves from regulated and calm on the left side, to more and more dysregulated as it moves to the right. We move from the top, more advanced parts of our brain on the left side of the chart, to the bottom, more primal parts of our brain on the right side.

When we’re calm and regulated, we have access to our creative, abstract brain. The brain that learns, adapts, reflects, and connects. But as Bruce Perry writes:

“The hypervigilance of a boy living with domestic violence scanning his home for any sign of threat is very adaptive; in a classroom, this can prevent the child from paying attention to the teacher and result in the child being labeled with attention deficit disorder (ADHD), which is maladaptive.”

It's More Complicated Than That

When I was in 3rd grade in advanced classes, I still had access to my cortical brain. I was calm, reflective, and able to process abstract material. When I was in 6th grade, I lived in a dysregulated state, moving between Fear and Alert throughout the day. I was hypervigilant, dissociated, and unable to access the higher part of my brain devoted to learning.

So am I stupid or smart? An understanding of trauma helps me get beyond that question. While yes, of course there is a true genetic component to IQ and the ceiling of each person’s capabilities, that question is largely irrelevant when you can’t even get halfway up the basement steps to the first floor because of trauma. 

So if you have a history of trauma, hopefully this chart helps you see that your difficulty learning, focusing, or comprehending material that others seem to have trouble with, has so much more to do with your environment than your IQ. And our brains can heal. So, what would it look like to be kind to the part of you that struggles with learning and feels stupid? Maybe to use the chart above to see symptoms of wounds that need care instead of defectiveness that needs judgement.

I went from gifted classes, to all adaptive classes, to barely graduating high school, to eventually healing enough to get my bachelor’s from a good state school when I was almost 26. I dropped out of college twice before that. Healing takes time. Your wounds need kindness from yourself and others.