Mark's dream is an exceptionally apt metaphor for the compelling need to cover up this completely confounding inability to do seemingly simple things and the accompanying feeling that he was not like every one else. Even now he says, "If you want to be secure in your job, you have to create the illusion that you can make things happen, at least when you start up. Later on, you can tell the world. Everyone at work knows now that I'm dyslexic. But I didn't tell them until I was there six months, after I proved myself. Then I said, 'Hey, I've got this problem. It's no big deal. I can pound out reports and do stuff you probably can't even think about.' And I'm doing it. And then they forget about it. In a way it's challenging. I know that I can't be the Harvard graduate, the VIP, set the world on fire at 28, but I can be at the same time. I can be. It's like a double-edged sword. You can be and you can't be."
"You can be and you can't be." How can a person seem so normal — indeed, be so normal, or even, like Mark, be clearly above average in many respects — and not be able to do certain relatively simple and basic things? How can one be so smart but so stupid at the same time? This incoherence is part of the very nature of a learning disability. The learning disability itself creates this conflict, and it is this phenomenon that makes LD unique. Mark's story is important because it helps us understand the contradictions and conflicting emotions of living with LD. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these contradictions in depth and show how they contribute to incoherence in the self. We will also explore the crucial but often overlooked implications of living with the LD paradox for diagnosis and therapy.
Mark's story shows us that a learning disability is a contradiction not in the logical sense, but in the psychological or emotional sense that it contradicts very natural expectations on the part of society and the learning disabled individuals themselves. We normally expect that all of a person's basic competencies will be more or less equal — that someone who reads well will also write well, and so on. But learning disabilities involve very specific cognitive processing weaknesses and so defy such expectations. People with learning disabilities are competent in some ways but inexplicably incompetent in others. One person can do math but can't spell, another person can sing but can't learn to read the music, a third can fix anything but can't even begin to explain to someone else how to do so. The result of living continuously with these contradictions is that many LD individuals never develop a secure sense of who they are, what they are capable of. They constantly ask themselves, "Am I the competent person who can 'read' other people so well, or am I the dummy who can't read the newspaper?"
Continue to the psychotherapeutic commentary on Mark