As a play therapist I am intensely and deeply involved with children and teens with dyslexia. The first question these people have when they learn about dyslexia usually is: “What is this and what does this mean for me?”. So, I decided to write this article to address children and teens who have questions about dyslexia, either because they learned they are dyslexic or because they know a dyslexic person. The purpose of this article is to offer an accurate description of dyslexia through the experience of dyslexic people, to dispense the usual myths that revolve around the term and to underline both its gifts and its trade-offs.

When I hear the word dyslexia the following story comes to my mind: When I was in fifth grade, one ordinary day, the teacher told me to go and sit next to Angel. Back in my days, in my sunny country, Greece, students used to sit on a desk that had two seats. We usually chose to sit next to our best friends, so I guess that this change of seats was a punishment. As I was an invisible child, I can only guess that the punishment was for Angel. Nevertheless, I was happy to sit next to him.

Angel, to my eyes, was a mysterious child. In the classroom, he was always quiet and self-conscious. Outside class, he used to spend his time running around the school yard really fast. But the greatest mystery around Angel was the contrast between his running speed and his reading speed. Every time the teacher asked him to read aloud, Angel read really slowly and spelled each word. Usually the teacher became impatient with him and accused him that yet again he hadn’t studied enough. Angel didn’t reply to these accusations. But his face said everything, because his feelings traveled upon his features like trains travel through stations: embarrassment, anger, indifference, irony. My face, on the other hand, displayed only two emotions: surprise and sadness. I didn’t, doesn’t and won’t ever understand why none of our teachers could see that Angel really tried. It wasn’t so hard to see! It was all over his face and body as he struggled to read. Every time Angel read aloud, the classroom’s silence was so dense that it could be cut through with a knife. To me that was proof that all our classmates realized the simple truth of Angel’s effort and showed their respect and support by trying not to distract him with extra noise. Still, the teacher could not get it…

Sitting next to Angel enabled me to get to know him a little better. It turned out that he had tons of humor and made me laugh throughout the darkest and most anxious moments of class. But he could also become very critical and harsh both with himself and me. The best moments though were when, disheartened and/or bored, he grabbed his pencil and created drawings onto the white margins of his books. I admired his drawing skills. Imaginative shapes and forms jumped out on the white space as his hand moved with speed and precision. These were the times when his face was coloured with focus, aliveness and interest.

Angel was dyslexic and nobody knew it because back then there was no assessment and diagnosis of dyslexia in Greece. These days dyslexia seems to be a well-known concept among teachers, students and their families. But yet again, I am not quite sure that Angel would have been well-served if his teachers knew about his dyslexia. My doubts stem from the narrow view that people still maintain around dyslexia. This view is apparent in the way dyslexia is defined. More specifically, the most widely used definition defines dyslexia as a neurological specific learning disability which results from phonological deficits. It is characterized by various difficulties around decoding and recognizing words, which lead to secondary consequences in reading comprehension and further impediments in knowledge (International Dyslexia Association, n.d.). It seems that the theorists who created this definition used their brain’s left hemisphere to do so, meaning that they focused on a narrow, common and literal field of information to do so. They described just one tree of dyslexia’s rich forest.

It is not a surprise then that when a child is told that he or she is dyslexic does not know what this really means. It has been found that dyslexic people display a right-hemisphere processing and therefore have a tendency to see the whole picture, making connections and inferences, rather than focusing on fine details (Eide & Eide, 2023). It seems only fair to approach dyslexia in a right-hemisphere, whole picture way.

This is exactly what Brock and Fernette Eide (2023) do in their book: “The dyslexic advantage”. They explain that dyslexic brains work in a certain way that has significant advantages which come along with certain trade-offs. They use the acronym M.I.N.D. to describe four areas of strengths frequently found in dyslexic minds. These are:

• M-strengths or Material Reasoning: They are the 3D abilities that help people reason about the shape and position of an object and the ways it interacts with other objects. Some dyslexic individuals tend to create an interconnected 3D mental image of the world and perceive spatial imagery. In the classroom, they struggle with the trade-offs of symbol reversal and subtle language challenges but outside the classroom are very creative.
• I-strengths or Interconnected Reasoning: They are the ability to make connections between different points of view, make links between different fields of knowledge, understand systems and maintain a big-picture. This may lead to challenges with fine-detail processing.
• N-strengths or Narrative Reasoning: They are the ability to recall powerful personal memories that have a highly narrative format. These memories help individuals reconstruct their past but also make images of their future. That is why dyslexic people learn better using experiences rather than abstract concepts.
• D-strengths or Dynamic Reasoning: It is the ability to observe patterns that help dyslexic individuals make predictions or solve problems with ambiguous or incompletely known variables. Its trade-off is extra need for reflection and reduction in speed (Eide & Eide, 2023).

Not all dyslexics display all of the above strengths but they all display a unique mixture of them, just like a unique DNA-strand of dyslexic strengths. These strengths are inherent in the dyslexic mind but they frequently remain dormant and in the shadows because of the emphasis that is given in their trade-offs. Eventually though, a dyslexic person will discover and understand his/her mind enough to start utilizing its abilities. Eides’ book is full of stories of eminent dyslexic adults who had a really hard time as children at school but, as they were growing up, they were able to unlock their potential and put it into good use. The dyslexic experience is paralleled with the caterpillar which grows up to become a butterfly (Eide & Eide, 2023).

But how does this powerful transformation actually happen? A group of researchers, namely Dr Fumiko Hoeft and her colleagues, Dr Haft and Dr Myers, wished to answer this question and so they searched for the factors that promote cognitive and socio-emotional resilience. They came up with the following:

• Strong language and general knowledge skills
• Strong executive functioning
• Strong fine motor skills
• Strong attention skills
• Self-awareness and self-determination
• Realistic planning and goal setting
• Strong sense of control over their choices
• A growth mindset combined with hope and positive belief that obstacles can be overcome and talents can be developed
• Strong relationships with supporting adults, especially parents and teachers, and one or more peers (Haft et al., 2016; Eide & Eide, 2023).

Well, speaking of butterflies and metamorphosis brought to my mind my great teacher and supervisor Dr Joyce C. Mills. Dr Mills is an award-winning Play Therapist and author of eight books (“Butterfly Wisdom” is one of them!). She has created StoryPlay®, a resiliencebased, play therapy model, which utilizes indigenous teachings, metaphors, symbols, stories and crafts to tap into children’s (and also adults’) inner resources and promote their self actualization (Mills, 1999). Dr Joyce Mills is also dyslexic.

I decided to ask Joyce to share with me her own experience with dyslexia, in order to compare it with Eides’ findings. Joyce started her story by telling me that when she was a child she didn’t like reading. She didn’t know why because back then there were no terms like dyslexia yet. She described how she observed her cousin reading voraciously and she just figured out that her cousin was smarter than she was. She shared with me how, despite the difficulties, she did good grades:

“I couldn’t read a whole book at a time, I couldn’t read all that was given to me, the page was too much. So I started to develop my own way which was: I would have the book but I would draw pictures. I would draw pictures next to what I was reading, like little symbols. I loved to paint, I loved to draw. So I did a lot of that and I think that enabled my brain, I am just guessing, to grasp what it was, the words.” (J. C. Mills, personal communication, May 18, 2023).

Dr Mills was able to finish school but she wasn’t considering higher education until she gave birth to her first child and she found herself in a parents’ support group. The counselor insisted that she continued her studies and soon, she found herself enrolled in Antioch, a work experience school. Her description of her experience there is a perfect example of the significant effect a strength-based environment has on both the person’s learning process and the discovery of her potential:

“So what it did was it utilized my natural way of learning and it activated a desire to read more because I was experiencing what I was learning. So, for example, I had to take art history as an undergraduate... So, I went to the big museum in Los Angeles and I spent like a whole day there. And I got the big art history book. I couldn’t read it word for word but I went to the different rooms where you could experience what they were writing about and then I had to write my own paper. And it had to be, you know, a good paper, I mean it’s college, but you can write it … like a story. So I could do that, and I didn’t have good English, my grammar isn’t terrific, and the professor said at the time “Don’t worry, that’s why we have editors”. Remember, we didn’t have computers then. So, I hand wrote everything and I typed it. And I learned that way, I learned to correct my grammar that way, I learned to enjoy and could taste what I was learning as opposed to only memorizing with no relation. So the learning became much more organic…And it was just a small school … it was in a small building, you know, so we had small classes and we interacted with each other and we learned, it was organic and I loved it… But what I read, it so excited me because I could feel it. So, I think this is so important, to recognise the gifts.” (J. C. Mills, personal communication, May 18, 2023).

In Joyce’s memories, one can clearly spot the resilience-based mindset that enabled her flourishing. It is there in her idea to draw pictures in order to learn her words during elementary school and in her boldness to return to college in adulthood. You can also see it in her organic approach to learning, through feeling. Moreover, Joyce highlights the ingredients of a strengthbased environment that intends to cultivate students’ talents and inspire a love for learning. These are: positive relationships with both teachers and peers, small classes, utilizing each student’s talents (in Joyce’s case her narrative reasoning strengths) and a creative and experiential approach. It seems that Dr Mills’ personal story validates Eides' observations.

After being trained as a psychotherapist, following Dr Milton Erickson’s strength-based approach, she created StoryPlay® in which her unique dyslexia strengths are embedded. You see, when entering a therapeutic relationship with her client, Joyce allows both real life stories and myth stories to come to her mind (utilizing her N-strengths, thus recalling powerful memories and creating strong narratives). Then she braids sensory descriptive words and interspersed suggestions into the story to tailor-make it for her client’s unique needs and sensory systems (utilizing her D-strengths and I-strengths, thus observing patterns in the way the client uses his sensory system, maintaining the big picture and connecting different areas of knowledge, such as indigenous teachings and psychological knowledge). Lastly, she creates StoryCrafts, which are literal 3D crafts inspired by a certain story, thus enabling her clients to give a 3D form to their inner processes, their hopes and dreams (utilizing her M-strengths and spatial imagery). But above all, StoryPlay® is the manifestation of the strength-based mindset Joyce maintains throughout her life, the mindset which helped her unfold her full potential.

I suspect that at this point you might wonder what happened to Angel. He dropped out of middle school and spent a couple of months with his favorite uncle on his island of origin, Kefalonia. In this beautiful place, which is full of the greenest trees and the bluest waters, helping his uncle repair motorbikes in his garage and talking to him about his difficulties at school, he was able to reconnect with his inner voice. He realized that he would never be able to finish school. He never thought that he was not smart but he always knew that he was not good at reading and writing. He returned to Athens and he found a job at a bakery, where a professional baker taught him his art. These days, Angel creates unique birthday cakes on which he draws by hand the most complex drawings.

His most demanding customer is our oldest son. He orders 3D drawings for his cakes, just like how he sees his own drawings and the school’s leaflets. You see, he is also dyslexic with great M-strengths. When he learned I was going to write this article he told me to share this message: “Don’t be afraid, dyslexia is not something terrible. It has its advantages and disadvantages. It makes you see drawings and school leaflets in a 3D way but it also makes it difficult for you to read and write.” (E. Mourelatos, personal communication, June 2, 2023).

Joyce also has a metaphor that wanted to share: “You see things differently, you see things past the words. The words are blocking your experience. The words can be intimidating. So, what would you do if you had a challenger, a friend of you, and you were playing soccer? You’d find a way to get that ball past the challenger. You’d find your way because within you is that resource. (J. C. Mills, personal communication, May 18, 2023).

So next time you think about dyslexia, you might want to keep these messages in mind. You might want to try to get that ball past the challengers and into the goal! And you might want to show to other dyslexic children and teens how to play and relate both with their balls and their challengers.

References:

Eide, B. L., & Eide, F. F. (2023). The dyslexic advantage: Unlocking the hidden potential of the dyslexic brain (2nd ed.). Plume.

Haft, S. L., Myers, C. A., & Hoeft, F. (2016). Socio-emotional and cognitive resilience in children with reading disabilities. Current Opinions in Behavioral Science, 10, 133-141.

International Dyslexia Association. (n.d.). Definition of dyslexia. https://dyslexiaida.org/definition-of-dyslexia/

Mills, J. C. (1999). Reconnecting to the magic of life. Imaginal Press.