Are We Born With Dyslexia?

The answers I’ll give you here will give you a perspective you may or may never have thought of.  In any case, I hope they’ll be of value to you. 

The belief that we are born with dyslexia [or dyscalculia, which is the numerical version of dyslexia] has been drummed into us for decades, so there’s absolutely no wonder it’s so prevalent amongst members of all generations.  But countless experience has proven that the answer to this question is a resounding no.

History helps us understand the presence.  If we go by the principle that everything that is said or experienced is said or experienced by somebody, we’ll be able to relate to what comes next more easily.  In exactly the same way as the number 65 was arbitrarily picked by the German government officials back in 1948 as the minimum retirement age – which was followed by a number of other countries adopting it, back in history whenever the first person discovered that another person in his/her life had some difficulty with language, this person didn’t know how to deal with the other person’s difficulty.  All s/he could do at that time is label the other person’s difficult experience.  So the label that was born was ‘dyslexia’ which is a Latinate word meaning ‘difficulty with language’.

What happened thereafter was that the news spread around the neighborhood, town, region, country, and then another country… to the rest of the world.  Since bad news spreads [and sells] faster than does good news, it kept spreading and people were so preoccupied with its content that nobody ever questioned its process.  All this happened in time = years ticked by until time passed on to very recently when a few individuals started thinking outside the contentual box and questioning the process.

So that’s the history. But what consequences did the history leave on many future generations since that first person?  Such that most people, especially representatives of now more senior tier of population, still firmly believe that people who have dyslexia are born with it.  Well, here’re two facts that mitigate against this wide-spread belief:

• Dyslexia is a learnt behavior, not a disease or condition.

At birth there’s nothing different about the person who will later become dyslexic from the person who won’t.  The difference will come later in the affected person’s life.   Once a person reaches the age of 3 to 4 years, a few factors will come into play.  Firstly, 3 to 4 years is the age when a child first comes across written words and numbers.  Up to this age everything in the child’s environment, alive or inanimate, is 3-dimensional.  People, furniture, toys, food… etc.  But a word and a number are the first things in 2 dimensions.  And this can confuse the brain.  As a result of this confusion, the brain will attempt to recreate the third dimension.  So it will start to turn the word or number around and upside down and in all directions simultaneously.   Or it will start moving the word or number around the page.  And this is exactly how the child gets into being dyslexic.

• Dyslexia is certainly not genetic.

A child, especially at the age of 3 to 4 years, has not yet developed reasoning.  So all the child can do is simply copy the behaviors of parents and siblings.  And if a parent, the pair of parents, or a sibling display(s) dyslexic behaviors, the child will copy those behaviors and internalize them as the norm.   This is also the reason why there’re entire families with dyslexia.  They’ve all unconsciously learned the dyslexic behaviors from one another and it is exactly the unconscious nature of the learning that gives them the explanation to believing that dyslexia is genetic.

Contact me for more information on NLP and dyslexia.