Dyslexia: A Psychotherapist's Guide
A client reports the following: low self-esteem, lack of confidence, feelings of shame and embarrassment, inability to work efficiently, panic at the thought of going to the office, poor concentration, memory lapses, periods of blanking out in conversations, difficulty in relating to people. Is he depressed? Dementing? Agoraphobic? Perhaps - but perhaps part of his problem is that he is experiencing 'dyslexic' difficulties. (For convenience I have used the masculine pronoun throughout this article.)Dyslexic difficulties, more usefully known as specific learning difficulties, encompass a variety of impairments in short-term memory, phonological ability, sequencing skills, perceptual, spatial and motor ability. (Difficulties in the last three of these areas are sometimes termed 'dyspraxia'.) These impairments result most noticeably in poor literacy skills, but they also affect information processing generally.
For example, a dyslexic person may have difficulty in following a discussion or a debate, in remembering spoken instructions, or in formulating his own ideas when conversing or giving a talk. There are difficulties, too, in dealing with complex visual displays, such as maps or the pages of a dictionary or directory; and difficulties with orientation in space: a dyslexic person may have trouble in telling left from right, and may easily lose his bearings in strange – or even familiar - surroundings. He may tend to operate in a generally muddled and untidy way: he may be late for meetings, forget appointments, and miss deadlines.
Many dyslexic people are highly intelligent and, consequently, the wide range of difficulties they experience when trying to impart or absorb information causes them great frustration - and in many cases shame and embarrassment.
Many adult dyslexics are not in fact aware of the nature of their problems. Dyslexia is often assumed to be essentially a reading problem, and, since many adult dyslexics have acquired some reading competence over the years, it may not occur to them that their difficulties are dyslexic in nature. All too often they regard themselves as being 'thick' or fundamentally flawed in some puzzling way.
Dyslexic difficulties then become a guilty secret - a source of humiliation. There is also a fear that, if the difficulties become evident to an employer or to colleagues, then promotion may be blocked or, even worse, dismissal may ensue.
In some cases, the level of anxiety generated by these feelings is so great that sufferers have been unable to face going to the office at all; they have perhaps developed sickness or other minor complaints on workday mornings. When they are at the office, they are often felt by their colleagues to be disagreeable: they may be morose and withdrawn, or touchy and aggressive. They are also the despair of their employers since they work in an inefficient manner - and appear to be unwilling or unable to improve their performance. Clearly the general chaos of a dyslexic person's life, and the confusion of emotions which accompanies it, not only present a problem in themselves but also compound any feelings of dejection, bewilderment or despair that have their origin in childhood experiences. Fortunately, dyslexic difficulties can be identified and dealt with more quickly than 'neurotic' ones: what is required is assessment by a psychologist who specialises in assessing adults with developmental dyslexia, and individual tuition from a suitably qualified teacher.
For the therapist, it is obviously useful to bear in mind that some of the problems reported by a client, especially if they are related to work performance, may be due in part at least to dyslexic difficulties. Feelings about these difficulties and how they relate to the general emotional picture presented by the client can then be explored.
© Author of this article: Dr Sylvia Moody, Dyslexia Assessment Service, London. This article can be freely reproduced with due attribution of authorship.