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Dyslexia Case Histories
More about the Freer Mind 60-minute dyslexia cure
John - poor spelling, unable to copy from the board
Sarah - poor spelling, letters moving around
Sarah - Session 2 [New]
Georgina - unable to retain spellings
Paul - words move around, misses out words
David - mixes up central letters
John - an 11 yr-old boy
John is a very bright 11 yr-old, full of smiles and curiosity. When we started the session, however, he was being heavily marked down at school for poor spelling and was thoroughly demoralised. He had been having special-needs support for his dyslexia, but it had made little difference.
He was unable to do more than take a stab at spellings, unable to copy more than 3 letters at a time from the board, and could remember numbers only very briefly. He had, however, no problem with the visualisation tests.
We started, as always, with checking his ability to visualise the word 'cat', and played with character size, location and distance. He was easily able to spell it forwards and backwards. We moved up the vocabulary chart, increasing the length of words. At one point he struggled a little and immediately lost confidence, so I took him quickly back to shorter words, reminding him that he had the technique down pat, and it was just a case of getting used to it, strengthening his ability.
After that hiccup, progress was swift. I took him through problems like 'their, there, they're'; long words like 'accommodation', 'mediterranean' and 'caribbean' (he could spell them all forwards and backwards); and then he taught his accompanying mother how to visualise the spelling for 'ecological.'
What was especially interesting was seeing that he was beginning to load visual spellings into his mind automatically - after a brief glimpse of shortish new words he had them stored, without needing to code them specifically. This gives me great hope that he will catch up on his vocabulary extremely quickly.
That all done and needing to settle in his mind and have practice, we turned to numbers. I showed him how to look at numbers on the board, then how to put them onto his mental whiteboard before turning to his pen and writing them down on his pad. He stumbled a couple of times but then understood it. I was able to dictate a mobile phone number, and he wrote it down without error.
We turned to copying instructions down from the board. His mother said that he was always very slow, because he could only remember a couple of letters or numbers at a time. I showed him how to visualise several words at a time before attempting to write them down. He did this and copied 3 lines of instructions from the board without a single error and without looking back up for a line.
We decided that this was enough progress for one day - this all took just over one hour. John was beaming with pleasure at his success, and at the chance to amaze his friends with his backward-spelling ability. He has instructions for practice, and will come back in a few weeks time for the next stage of learning development (mental organisation and learning skills).
Sarah - an 18 yr-old girl
Sarah had missed out on most of her education because she struggled so much with reading, and was now getting more and more depressed as she saw her friends take their A-levels and head for university. Her mother was desperate to find a way to help her daughter.
Pessimistic psychologist's report
Sarah's psychological report for dyslexia was full of doom and gloom, and also mentioned that Sarah was unable to retain visual information for more than the briefest periods. This didn't tally with the results Sarah had had with our visualisation tests, so I was curious as to what I would see.
Learning to focus
We started by going through various Key Stage 1 and 2 words. Sarah had little problem with learning to spell these verbally per se, but had a tendency to rush into trying to spell them without accessing the visual image (and, noticeably, looking down instead of up when she encountered difficulty). We concentrated on the process of "stop, look up, remember the image", and she made perfect progress.
Letters moving around
When it came to writing words down, she immediately ran into a confusion between the letters 'b' and 'd' (and there had been hints of confusion in other letters), so we addressed that head-on. When I filled an A4 sheet with large bs and ds randomly placed, and showed it to her, she immediately reported feeling ill, because they were all moving around. This told me that she was experiencing the same problem as did 3-D thinkers - which, happily, told me what I would need to do about it.
Using NLP techniques, I was able to help her sort out in her unconscious which activities were appropriate for 3-D thinking (in her case, dancing) and which were appropriate for 2-D thinking, i.e. reading and writing. This mental sorting had an immediate effect: when she looked at the page of random bs and ds, she found that they stayed perfectly still.
Confidence and self-belief
We finished the session by running some metaphor visualisations to improve Sarah's confidence in her ability to learn and grow. The metaphors we constructed showed that Sarah was tending simultaneously to expect too much of herself and to doubt herself; so we worked on relaxing the message to one of 'commitment to learning how to improve her literacy.' This she was able to do quite happily, producing a fun and inspiring metaphor visualisation; and she reported feeling a great deal more certain about her future.
Sarah - Session 2
Sarah's mother wanted us to continue working with Sarah on her study skills, so we continued - partly on spelling, but mostly on issues of confidence.
Sarah's 'b' and 'd' confusion had almost completely disappeared: she had been practising at home and was now able to write them correctly, whereas before the NLP exercises she had been unable to do so, no matter how much she practised. She stumbled over a couple of words, but only once: at the second attempt she had it corrected, permanently. The page of printed 'b's and 'd's no longer made her feel ill.
For confidence, I had her take dictation. As expected, she struggled with words she didn't know, but when we added these words to her mental store, she could see and feel how easily she was able to write them in subsequent attempts. She could now physically sense the difference between those words she had stored, and those she didn't, and we ran some NLP exercises to embed that feeling of certainty. Her belief in her ability to recall stored words, and her ability to store new words is improving each time, leading to a virtuous circle of success.
We finished with some coaching exercises on her future plans and what she needed from her training with me to achieve them. I am helping her to take charge of her own training, to be able to tell me what she needs to learn, rather than the other way round. Next week she wants to learn how to get a story from a vague concept in her head through to a structured and well-sequenced piece on paper.
Georgina - a 14 yr-old girl
Georgina was a quiet girl, reserved and unsure. She and her father had prepared a list of spellings, which they had tried over and over to help Georgina to learn, without success.
I took Georgina through much the same process as above, and she quickly learned the words we picked from the list, such as 'vehicle' and 'argument'- forwards and backwards.
When I put all the words together into a spelling test, however, she was running straight into problems and immediately losing confidence. We quickly realised this was because she was forgetting to access the visual image, so she was put under a (humorously) strict regime of "stop, breathe, recall the image."
Her instructions were not to recall the spelling itself at first, but to recall what she had done to the word as part of the visualisation. This relaxed her immediately, and her spelling test was fault-free.
We moved on to reading comprehension, where I got her to create a film sequence of what she was reading. She soon found that she could remember the minutest detail if she did this. This was mostly useful for fairly concrete information - abstract concepts would come later.
This took approximately one hour, and it was noticeable that, when Georgina was copying the various words scribbled on our bits of paper into her notebook, she wasn't consulting the papers for the spellings but spelling them herself.
Paul - a 13 yr-old boy
Paul is a pleasant child, but somewhat disorganised and vague. His reading problems were reported as being words moving around, and a tendency to miss out words (or whole phrases) when reading, making reading-comprehension impossible. Although at a private school with plenty of good-natured learning support, he was always at the bottom of the class.
The first thing we worked on was the words moving around. I showed him how to control his vision using a simple NLP technique. After two applications (within one minute), he found (slightly to his surprise) that the words stayed still.
The next issue was to ground Paul, to get him to focus. I carried out some grounding/relaxation exercises, which brought him visibly back into the present.
We studied how it was that he was missing out words and phrases when reading. When he read something correctly, his visualisation and recall was faultless; however, he was inclined to get rather lost in complex sentences, assigning an entirely different meaning than that intended (but answering correctly on that basis!).
What became clear was that he was missing out abstract words, not concrete ones, and this was because he found them difficult to visualise. Under the stress of reading, it was far easier just to ignore the difficult words and deal with the ones he could process. He wasn't, obviously, conscious of doing this, which meant that he wasn't able to counter it.
We found, over a couple of sessions, that his comprehension improved when he had achieved good visual representations of the problematic abstract words: in the click-click-click of word recognition during reading, these words now had a home, and were not missed out.
David - a 45 yr-old man
David had been mildly dyslexic all of his life, and found it a severe irritant rather than an obstacle.
We carried out the usual sequence of exploratory exercises, and found that David tended to mix up letters in the middle of words. This was more evident when he tried to spell words backwards. He wouldn't normally be required to know a word backwards, but this approach tells us how strong the visual representation is.
The solution was simple: we examined various different visual ways David could strengthen the image of the central letters, and he chose the ones that suited each particular word.
This took only 30 minutes (most of which was the exploration). A few weeks later, when I saw David again for a brief follow-up, he was able to show me how quickly he was able to grasp new spellings, because the process had become so automatic that it was almost photographic.