by Lynette Louise, A.K.A. The Brain Broad
As I was saying at the end of Part 1, my own temporal lobe brain challenges make “traditional” record keeping a problem, and it leads me to wonder how I will pass on what I know and share responsibly with the field.
I have healed this issue markedly. I have healed to the point in fact where my difference is more of a gift than a challenge. This is especially true in regards to understanding and creating usable protocols for healing work with science based intuition. However, where report writing in a scientifically accepted style is concerned, I am still challenged.
This “difference” in my recording style came up for me recently when I was asked to contribute to an interdisciplinary magazine with pictures and graphs. You see, pictures and graphs make it harder for me, not easier.
Though I can take the stage and share what I know with flair and a photographic sense of recall for brain dysfunctions, though I can create movies, videos, podcasts and abstract visual art while orchestrating the edits in all motion mediums– graphs, still pictures and power point presentations still disorient me. When you include these in your work, I skip them. I am a word person.
I can write a book, straight from experience and memory, easier than research citations. I can use creative writing techniques to make learning feel like a plot driven novel, easier than stay awake while reading a research paper. In fact, I stay awake by doing all my reading research while walking on a treadmill. Unfortunately, writing a research paper is impossible to do while asleep or walking on a treadmill. For me, the redundancy inherent in the writing and/or reading of an APA style document, is absolutely exhausting. Fortunately these differences- between me and my colleagues- no longer mean I judge myself as broken.
If ever there was a field that helps a person to appreciate difference, it is the field of neurofeedback when viewed through the arousal model.
Previously held convictions—like that coffee and sugar are unhealthy and cause hyperactivity—shifted for me to the concept that they indicated the need to self-medicate, and assist the individual in their search for a state of balance. These habits became clues about the need to counteract under-aroused states and ensure survival. The fact that I would drink coffee in order to sleep was no longer crazy, just a bit of information on what I needed for homeostasis. Everything about me, my clients, my children and my friends, became evidence and led to ideas on how we could correct our imbalances rather than lean on our crutches.
Life became more accepting as my friends and I stopped arguing for each other’s preferences. The wine drinkers accepted the coffee drinkers, and the beef eaters accepted the vegetarians. Each of us assisted the other to adapt and find new ways to garner the same effects. We became helpers to each other rather than judgers of each person’s habits.
It’s a wonderful way to live and I would like to share this thinking everywhere.
At this point I am much farther along in my career and I want to share information about my experience and my learning, but my observations and solutions are still experience-based rather than research or education-based and this, I fear, means my ideas are sometimes met with a dubious attitude. However, hands-on is who I am and will always be where my knowledge primarily comes from. Even though I am close to finishing my PhD, my style of learning, discovering and sharing will always have that leaning. And that makes it harder to be heard. Or so I have told myself.
And then I remembered Dr. Burke.
He was proof reading my book MIRACLES ARE MADE: A Real Life Guide To Autism. He questioned something in it and I answered him from memory. He questioned even more, and each time my answers satisfied his need for clarity. He read the case study one more time and said, “We can’t deny your lived experience.”
And yet people do deny the lived experience of another, on a regular basis.
NEXT: Life is not one-size-fits-all (coming soon!)
PREVIOUS: Neurofeedback, From the Beginning and Back