"WARNING, this post talks about recovery and may be offensive to some for various reasons including a belief that recovery is beyond their capacity". quoted above

If you are a person that truely feels that you cannot "recover" your oppinion may not be a terrible oppinion. If someone has dislexia, ADHD or other conditions that present a challenge where conventional learning is not effective, there are proven ways to "adapt" in spite of these limitations.

The word truely needed is not that of "recovery" but that of "ability to adapt" and as I mentioned above, that is something we are all designed to do.

I raised a child that has dislexia and she did not respond to conventional ways of learning. My daughter could be given a list of five things to do and her brain could only remember three things and not retain or process the ability to do five or more consecutive functions. My daughter was also not able to listen to a word that had multiple syllables and process these syllables in her brain in proper order to sound out a possible spelling of a word. My daughter also learned not just by seeing or observing but by doing and doing.

My daughter was lucky because I knew enough as her mother that her father was diagnosed with dislexia so while raising her I really paid attention to her ability to learn. My daughter was very capable of repeating and memorizing at an extremely early age. At the age of only 1 my daughter memorized the alphabet by listening to me sing it to her repeatedly. I also thought that she was reading at an early age, however she wasn't really reading, she had just memorized the stories I had read to her. As with most children my daughter had her favorite story that she wanted me to read every single night. My daughter remembered every word spoken on every page that went along with a picture. But, my daughter was not actually reading.

My daughter did struggle in school when it came to looking at words and sounding them out towards learning how to read. Had there been no offer of adapting around that inability my daughter would have truely struggled to learn and flourish in school.

I was very lucky that there was a study being done at Yale on dislexia so that her specific difficult areas could be identified to me. However there was not a real course on how to compensate for the lack. I had developed my own way of helping my daughter learn by accessing her ability to memorize and I read to her every night and that resulted in her increasing her cognitive ability above her age level for the rest of her life.

As time went on and my daughter had to learn words the only way she could learn them was by memorizing them. I helped her do that by surrounding the words with stories that aided in her capacity to memorize words and how they were spelled. And I also had to help her overcome the limits of a list that meant thinking about remembering five or more things. I also used stories there too so that it was no longer a list to be remembered but a story and often funny stories using our everyday pets, people friends etc.

I supported my daughter in also taking riding lessons and that also required her to remember more than just a few things. And there was also presented to her a procedure of jumping a course of fences in different orders and their were eight fences in every course that she jumped and the order would be changed each time she took her horse or pony in a competition of jumping. My daughter was able to memorize every course, rarely did she forget an order. I was amazed that she could do that as many children would have difficulty remembering the order of fences to be jumped. One day I asked her how it was that she could remember the different courses so well. She replied to me that she learned that she could do everything in threes. So how she worked it out in her brain was, 1,2,3 and 4,5,6,and 7,8, and off which means riding away from the course.

My daughter has a high IQ and she does remarkably well and has a good job. That was all possible because in her early years she was guided beyond her disabilty to ADAPTATION in other ways of learning and progressing.

Often we are told that it is not always about how we fall in our attempts in life, but how we rise again. What this really means is how we learn how to "adapt" in spite of whatever happens in our lives.

I am spending time here with this thread because in my time here at PC I have come to know many who feel that they are never going to RECOVER, or HEAL and feel STUCK or feel DAMAGED. And while we cannot change our past and the memories of our past, the path is not about RECOVERY. The real path has to be more about how to Adapt and Readapt with every challenge we are presented with.

I have to say, I am struggling myself with my own issues. As I look back at my own life I can see many struggles. I can see one life that was presented with many challenges, some of which were extremely disruptive. I can see things I didn't understand and situations that troubled me and I didn't really have answers to many questions and I didn't always know how to react appropriately because there really wasn't an example that showed me how. But I did survive and I did adapt in many ways.

I DO have a disorder/damage with a name and I don't exactly know what it means entirely. I am trying to learn what it means and find a way to understand it. Once I find a way to understand it, I have come to recognize that all I can really do is learn new ways to adapt and progress and give myself permission to do just that.

So for anyone that has any kind of disorder, it is not really about recovering per say, life is about change, constant change and constantly learning and adapting which takes place all of our lives. Even if someone adapted poorly in their past, that doesn't mean they cannot learn better ways to adapt now. Yes, it is still very challenging but we at least have to give ourselves permission to do what we are designed to do, learn new ways to adapt to our environments. Adapting is also about being willing to learn and actually do, even if doing is only a little at a time.

My daughter is always going to have dislexia and all her life she will be challenged to continue to learn new things in order to survive. The one thing that she will have is a learned ability to adapt, she will make mistakes as we all do, but her own ability to suvive will come from knowing that she has adapted in her past and therefore should be able to do so all her life.

Open Eyes