Professional Help versus Personal Cussedness.

[rabbitsin]

Just a quick introduction. I am a seventy-two year old woman from a high achieving family. Inevitably there were high expectations. I talked very early, but took a long time to stand up and walk. I more or less taught myself to read when I was four….but I simply could not write. My problems were always physical. I could no more catch a ball than fly to the moon and as for learning to ride a bike…… I have never been able to swim, again not for lack of trying, and I did not pass my driving test (and then on the fourth attempt) until I was thirty-eight. I expect all this sounds familiar to many of you.

Of course there was no help. No one had heard of dispraxia in those days. There was no thought that I had a handicap. Instead my elder siblings teased me mercilessly and called me ‘Fumbles’. However I did notice that my father, quite a distinguished man, had similar problems. He never did manage to drive. He had the greatest difficulty opening a letter tidily and was always dropping things. Then, when I was an adult with a home of my own, my much older half-brother (my father’s son) came to stay. I have never seen anyone reverse out of our drive so incompetently. And suddenly it all clicked into place. Dispraxia is inherited…and that is what I had.

However, even as a child, long before my self-diagnosis, I knew I had to compensate for my incompetence. I was ambitious. I needed to pass exams. But exams are time-limited and I wrote incredibly slowly. So I learnt how to express my ideas as tightly as possible. My exam scripts were always the shortest in the group….but increasingly I got the highest marks. In fact, by the time I left my fairly brutal boarding school, (no concessions there!), I had won a scholarship to Cambridge.

It was the same with craft. I love complex knitted jumpers, but of course, despite my mother’s efforts, I could not knit. Then, in my twenties, I realised that if I ignored the English method, pretended to be left-handed, and knitted in a self-modified version of the continental way, I could do it. And since then I have produced literally hundreds of complex sweaters for friends and family!

I go through this catalogue (and it is only two examples among several) in the hope it will be encouraging to someone who is struggling out there. One can, to some extent, help oneself. And, I must add one more thing. Inevitably I am ambivalent. If I had had the kind of professional help which is available nowadays, I am sure I would have had a happier childhood, but I suspect that I would not have been able to achieve quite so much.

[Tom fod]

Hi and welcome to the tribe

I had some CBT before learning about my Dyspraxicness and it definitely helped. My go to strategy tended to be (unsustainable) perfectionism and attempting to control the uncontrollable.

It's not that we're incompetent, more a case that established/traditional approaches to given tasks don't work for us.

I had help at school in the 80s/90s but it seemed to be all about my visual impairment and I don't think they ever mentioned dyspraxia. I just wanted to be treated 'normally' as special treatment made me a target.