Diagnostic Impressions

(From Chapter 2)

Imagine being the therapist with whom Mary consults in a crisis. She walks in your office door, an energetic and forthright woman in middle age who makes a strong impression. Despite her record of achievement as an author and speaker in the field of learning disabilities, she describes a history of always trying to be like others, or to be herself as she really could be, which she achieves only sporadically and temporarily. As she describes her history of trying, failing, achieving, failing, sometimes with ironic wit, sometimes in tears, sometimes sad, and sometimes upset, diagnostic impressions begin to form in your mind. "The focus on one theme seems to dominate her consciousness, she seems fixated on it; perhaps she is compulsive." "Her sense of herself is centered around an emotional injury; perhaps she has a narcissistic disorder." "Her affect changes rapidly from laughter to tears; perhaps she is bipolar, maybe a rapid cycler."

Compulsivity of thematic focus, narcissistic injury, rapid emotional cycling there may be, but they all emerge front a definite, specific set of causes — the combination of her giftedness and her learning disability, how she has been treated because of that in the various environments in which she has developed, and what those experiences have meant and continue to mean to her. Failure to recognize this will result in failure in psychotherapy. It will also mean failure with Mary, because she is too aware of this herself to remain with a therapist who attempts to treat her without acknowledging her learning disability as a central fact of her life.

Mary is not just learning disabled; she is gifted and learning disabled. This combination brings special problems of its own. In a very practical and cognitive manner, it is as if the person were split into two parts — one bright, quick, and capable, and the other dull, slow, and impaired." The polarities of Mary's life are not just normal versus slow; she is also fast, often the quickest person in the room to grasp something important about a situation that's unfolding. Gifted learning disabled people often have the understandable wish to be gifted only, to be able to operate at their highest and best all the time. Instead, they are gifted sometimes, average sometimes, impaired sometimes, and they have little control over when and where, because it all depends on what kinds of thought and perception events require of them. Inexplicably and uncontrollably, they find themselves ahead of others in some situations and lagging far behind in others.

This polarization within the personality between cognitive superiority (and the feelings associated with ease of comprehension) and cognitive deficit (and the feelings associated with failure to grasp what others can learn fairly easily) can lead to terrible frustration with oneself, and often to self-hatred. Alternately, it can produce grandiose overvaluation of one's strengths, and the attitude that nothing is worth doing that can't be done with one's best attributes — which, for an LD person, can include a lot of territory to turn one's back on.

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