Living with learning disabilities as a psychotherapist, writer and mental health consumer

Living with learning disabilities as a psychotherapist, writer and mental health consumer

I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long

I never heard the melody until I needed the song...

… I never said “I love you” until I cursed you in vain

I never felt my heart beating until I almost went crazy

– Tom Waites, Serenade of San Diego

It's funny how sometimes you can't really see yourself until you get a glimpse of a harsh paradoxical reality. Perhaps this will give one the alternative perspective that is so necessary to truly see oneself and gain wisdom. I think that's what Tom Waites is getting at in the excerpts from his song that I posted above. This is why the ability to relate to others is such a powerful teacher and healer, so necessary to a therapeutic endeavor. Other people's struggles help us stop and see ourselves better. Although painful, growth is likely.

And just like the song says, I never really saw myself as a learning disabled person until I recently had the opportunity to sit with a person while they received a mid-life diagnosis. It was a diagnosis that I thought was helpful. Little did I know that before this session, I had rarely considered the full impact of a learning disorder affecting me as a writer, therapist, and mental health consumer.

***.

Learning disorders, which I often train as a psychotherapist, are an aspect of neurodiversity that is most strongly characterized by an imbalance in areas of brain abilities. Some areas may be significantly lower, while other areas may be particularly high. As my explanation goes, certain areas of learning become very difficult without a high level of support, time and determination. A person who struggles in this way may experience difficulty paying attention, need extra time to get things done, and, like Albert Einstein, develop a particularly strong urge to exercise their strengths because they are always struggling and struggling to keep up. Of course, if learning disabilities are not properly supported and cared for safely, they can lead to people being unable to exercise their abilities and accepting oppression.

I'll probably also talk about how learning disabilities are generally considered neurodevelopmental disorders. This means they are severely affected by a mix of biological and environmental stressors. There are a few points that I will highlight accordingly.

First, I would like to suggest that we learn that trauma can be inherited between generations and this could contribute to the brain's reduced capabilities. Second, I will argue that learning struggles can lead to a life of ongoing trauma and abuse that can expand and exacerbate the lower ranges, especially if support is not provided. Thirdly, I would like to point out that it is known and shown that trauma leads to brain damage and that learning disabilities give us the opportunity to address these trauma problems. And certainly I would add that compensating for a relative deficit can lead to unusually high abilities in some other areas and exercise making them increasingly stronger.

Having addressed these points, I'll be sure to point to studies on resilience that show that healing from trauma and neuroplasticity can cause people to become stronger than they would have been otherwise. In fact, damage can cause the brain to strengthen in ways that would not otherwise be possible. When they create a sense of safety and give people the opportunity to heal from trauma, they can become so strong that they become grateful that the trauma happened. Many who achieve this sense of security become highly skilled at being strong, spiritual, and high-functioning individuals.

***.

Unfortunately, the African American woman I referred for testing was informed that she had learning difficulties without reinforcing any of my suggestions. I thought about the fact that my ideas might be simple and not scientific. Instead, from my perspective, the focus was on what she couldn't do and what modern technology could help her overcome these deficits.

I went home after the session, edited a chapter of my current book, and suddenly found myself so overcritical that I froze. I noticed that I don't read like other people. In fact, I hate reading so badly that I rarely engage with other people's work in depth. Everyone says that to be a good writer you have to be a prolific reader. I usually tell myself that I learn by writing, not reading. I usually say that I train my talents, make myself happy and learn instead of wasting my time.

But in a frozen state, the thought occurred to me that I am not being realistic, as so many negative people in my life have told me. Maybe these fears I constantly work against are really true.

All the rejections I received from magazines and blog sites, as well as the people who used the vulnerability in my work to politically marginalize me, gained traction in my mind. Frozen, my sense of empowerment felt like it had been swallowed and was wallowing in stomach acid. The fact that I won five literary awards for my memoirs didn't matter. Instead, I returned to insistences on how my memories only reinforced my sense of alienation. All that mattered was that it didn't sell, attract reviews, or achieve what I hoped it would in order to reduce my feeling of invisibility. Instead of being relentless and meticulous during my seven-year struggle to write the thing, I suddenly told myself that I couldn't read like other people do and that my writing had to show it. I told myself that I had to work twice as hard as others in vain. Old tapes dominated the day.

“You wouldn't believe it,” a writing professor had complained in a college class, “but it took me ten rewrites to get my crime novel published!”

"Ten rewrites," I was once proud to tell myself, "that's nothing! And I'm having fun."

Suddenly, the confidence that had once helped me thrive was taken away.

***.

Sure, in school I was always the last person to take the test, but my grades were always good. It's true that some teachers tended to harass me about spellings that I couldn't do anything about, but I tested well in meaningless math. It's true that when homework got heavy in high school, I could only get four hours of sleep a night, but that was also because I was playing sports, working out, and not eating much. When I became addicted to hunger, I just thought I was a hard-working perfectionist who didn't want to be stopped.

When anorexia led to incarceration, I was forced to stop all behavior and food indulgence. Once the tears and struggle subsided, I learned to write when I couldn't exercise.

It's true, I had poured my heart out into my poetry notebook the year before, only to receive a B+. The teacher's comment to my mother - the school reading teacher - was that my work was just too depressing. She didn't like it.

I came straight from the hospital and was still angry about the B+. I took writing assignments and delivered long stories or songs instead. I wrote twenty-five pages of long bibliographies. The result: lower grades and a college essay that almost got me kicked out of school because the school psychologist—my teacher's wife and my mother's boyfriend—thought I was suicidal. I still wasn't sufficiently informed about the social psychology of the situation: I was exposed as a mentally ill patient, my grades suffered regardless of how well I did. I had a different experience and message than others. My successes, leadership, and hard work in the eleventh grade became a subverted, living lie. When I chose my only available form of rebellion against it to go to a local commuter college, the school decided to lie in the yearbook and say I would attend the overpriced Antioch College in Ohio.

I ran as far away as I could without using the college money that I suspected had been hospitalized. In a ghetto with a girlfriend seven years older than me, it was the easy courses with crappy textbooks that got my GPA off to a bad B+ start. Suddenly immersed in large, crowded auditoriums, my anxiety rose and my attention fell. I would be affected by the worst kind of writer's block. I started sketching out and memorizing everything I read. I ended up with a 3.9 average, but I never went to a single party or took any time off.

My college poetry teacher, who repeatedly selected my poems to share with the class, had once said, at the end of an intensive semester in which we spent a week writing a poem, "Then some of you will have to keep writing. not because you want to, but because you have to."

I don't know if I listened to him or if I found myself one of those who had to write. I took fiction and personal essay classes and obsessed over my take-home exams to get the wording right.

I was diagnosed with a learning disability and worked my way through graduate school. Because I was working with a psychologist who, unbeknownst to me, didn't believe I was college material, I became very aware of all of my shortcomings and tended to communicate about them with my colleagues. I took a heavy dose of medication that I later found out I didn't need as much. Interactive courses where the information came from multiple sources and was required in the moment of listening often overwhelmed me. I put away my writing during those seventy-hour weeks and did my best to engage with my colleagues and be social. I learned that I worked so much harder than them to prepare for tests. I was often mocked for asking so many questions to keep myself alert and tracked, but I was used to it. Once I got through those three years without hospitalization, I happily returned to an intense poetry habit.

***.

I have to admit, it was my suggestion that the African American woman be tested for learning disabilities. At least I made them aware of my views on learning disabilities before setting up the tests. However, the result still amazed me. I later learned that the specific tests used are known to be culturally biased against African Americans. Looking closer at the material, there were actually areas of superior performance that we didn't check. I'm using this essay to thaw out the writer's block that's been hitting me in the gut for the last few days.

I think I'll go back to being a happy, obsessive, unread writer for my own lonely needs.

A year after graduating, I moved to the West Coast to start over. I think about the times since: when things were difficult; when I escaped incarceration and faced homelessness, underemployment and long work hours just to escape the mental health system and get back on track. When I think about these experiences, I get angry that people are reduced to various types of pathological disorders such as learning disorders. At the same time, learning disorders no longer played a role once I developed the diagnosis of schizophrenia. I became a stored genetic cash cow. In the mainstream treatment mentality, schizophrenia trumps neurodevelopmental disorders, yet so many of the institutionalized individuals I work with struggle with unsupported learning disorders.

They are brilliant, complex, completely alone, living in misery and extremely righteous and good people. I just don't understand why psychological testing and treatment and the demands of society make it so difficult for good people to earn a living wage.

***.

Perhaps the reader can say that I have decided to come to terms with my story and experiences as a mental health professional, writer and consumer. I still find that there are a lot of people who pick up on the fact that I'm a little different and try to scapegoat me and marginalize me. It happens again and again like the rising tide of the San Diego sea on the shore that Tom Waits once pondered.

I never saw morning until I stayed up all night

I never say sunshine until you turn off the lights...

...I never saw the white line until I left you behind

I never knew I needed you until I fell into a trap

Really, it still hurts because criticism comes from all directions. However, eventually the pain will go away. I will still write. And I hope and pray that this brilliant person diagnosed with a learning disability will be with me and make the most of their meaningful life, no matter what “they” say.

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