Breaking the Connection: Dyslexia and Humiliation

Identifying Dyslexia

Dyslexia should be addressed as soon as it is discovered. The longer your child cannot read, the more he or she is “crippled” in our society — which depends on the written word for learning, employment, driving, shopping, reading menus and even worshipping.

Progression in many facets of life will halt when there is dyslexia. Your child will continue growing physically, but will face a mental and intellectual obstacle. Dyslexia, especially when unaddressed, often scars children for life.

According to Rick Lavoie, an Education Expert who has worked with dyslexia for many years, a learning disability such as dyslexia often leads to rejection and isolation. There is a direct link between a learning disability and social failure.

How does this happen?

Negative emotions are consistently and continually conjured up in children with dyslexia. Embarrassment and shame are two emotions that can cause a ripple effect in your child’s health, for the rest of his or her life, absent any dyslexia help.

The way a child is treated in school when he cannot read is often pretty primitive. She may be picked on by the teacher to read aloud more often. This is enough to send a shudder of fear down the child’s spine: “Me again? I’m going to mess it up again and everyone will laugh at me.” Begrudgingly, the child agrees and the prophecy becomes reality. The teacher doesn’t understand that if the brain cannot perceive the words on the page correctly, calling on him more is not going to help the situation.

The child ends up chalking up another failure and another embarrassment. Soon the idea of going to school starts to make him sick to his stomach or creates headaches. Because of dyslexia, he now associates school with embarrassment.

Isn’t childhood supposed to be filled with joy, wonder and accomplishment?

Dyslexia causes embarrassment, because they cannot do what other children can do. When a child hears other children snickering about her reading ability, her heart gets heavy. She thought the other students were her friends. Now she feels betrayal and shame.

How do social skills problems begin?

What’s it going to take to break the connection between dyslexia and humiliation? If your child continues to feel embarrassed, one of two things will happen:

1. He could end up withdrawing from relationships and feeling like a social misfit the rest of his life. This could easily develop into an anti-social personality that is unreachable from anyone who wants to offer love and support.
2. She could develop aggression to cope with embarrassment. This is a protective mechanism, as no human wants to feel humiliation.

The brain operates on patterns. If your child’s brain perceives the pattern of going to school causes humiliation, your child will do everything he can do to avoid the pain. He won’t know or understand he’s doing this; it happens automatically as a result of how the brain works.

With humiliation, there is no freedom. It is a taskmaster that demands greater and greater negative feelings to support it. It is a taskmaster that tells the child to look at every situation through the eyes of humiliation. Dyslexia can cause great unhappiness.

The only way to break the connection between dyslexia and humiliation is to address and overcome the dyslexia. And it can be done. Get more information about dyslexia treatment offered by Gemm Learning.