I heard you'll be doing interviews with various radio stations. Will any of them be available on the Internet?
AJL
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Hidden Handedness - Not a site for the left-handed, or the right-handed, or the ambidexterous although all handedness types are welcome. Submergees (those whose handedness was reversed) and Emergees (those who return from this state to regain their innate handedness) are the focus.
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About Me
- Samuel
- Having lived for fourty plus years as a "right-handed" individual, I found my experience of awakening to left-handedness to be a huge surprise. Submergees and emergees are real people with real needs and serious issues and questions. My hope is that the answers to questions that submergees and emergees need will now begin to grow in number and relevance. I want to provide sources of help for those who are looking for it, and new meaning for those whose lives were forever changed by the simple childhood experience of becoming a submergee.
6 comments:
AJL - Interviews are a great forum and even better when they are archived and available as you have suggested. Thanks for the question.
Yes, I intend to set this feature up in the weeks ahead.
I have a rather vexing problem. My handedness has been changed in my life at least twice. And I don't know what my original handedness is.
From preschool age to 12 or so I was considered "left handed'. I was a clumsy and very emotionally distraught kid.
At 12, I decided to become a right hander on my own choice. My parents and teachers really discouraged it, but I INSISTED that I was going to be right handed. And when I suceeded, I was DELIGHTED with the results. And the adults tried both punishment and pro-left handed propaganda. Since, I wanted to be an Astronaut my father compiled a list of left-handed Astronauts-including Sally Ride. I was having none of it, and still insisted on the conversion (or was it reconversion? I'm honestly not sure.) And it was in these years that my self esteem and "on the up" factor in life were the strongest. I was even good at a few sports.
In my late 20's I heard the idea that switching handedness was a bad idea and sort of went back to my left hand over time. However, I had a great deal of troubling coping with graduate school and the workplace. Most of the "cohorence" I had developed as a teen and in my early 20's seemed to be slipping away.
I'm now 32 and nearly a year ago, I was recently out of Americorps, livng with Mom and Dad, and not sure what the hell I was going to do with my life. I saw in a British book on dyspraxia (a disorder my mother thought was to blame for much of my problems) a unique form of neurodevelopmental therapy that operates on the premise that some people don't develop their normal mature reflexes in early childhood, and go through life with infant ones, and that a lot of problems such as dyspraxia, ADD, dyslexia, and anxiety disorder can be treated by excercises that correct this.
To make a long story short, it was one of those experiences where you read a description for something and it just hits you like a ton of bricks, so I got evaluated and have been doing the therapy since September of 2006. At the initial evaluation the laterality tests showed I was right eyed, righted footed, left eared, and RIGHT HANDED (even though I had been writing with my left hand for years and started out that way as a child). The handedness tests involved the therapist asking me to catch and toss beanbags and to mime things like writing, and to point at certain objects (without telling me that she was looking for handednes until after the fact).
Now I've done some research, and wonder if I was a natural right hander, who was somehow converted by mistake VERY early. Or if I"m a left hander, who has been confused by her rightie days. Or if some people genuinely are mixed handed.
And above all, what should I DO about all this?
Amy,
I would say that you not only have a vexing problem, but a unique one. Using the terms that are developed in Hidden Handedness, and based on the history you have given, it would seem that you were:
A submergee from age ? to 12 (you were born right-handed and converted to left-handedness)
An emergee from age 12 to 20 (you became what you are, right-handed)
and you are now a submergee again
The terms submergee and emergee were chosen precisely because they avoid a direct link to the left or right hand and that's important since handedness reversals happen in both directions. It is less common for right-handers to be converted to left-handedness as you were, but it does happen and the loss of function that follows is just as real. So your case is unique but you are not one of a kind. Finally, these terms evoke what it's like to be submerged, with loss of function and life skills in consequence, and later, to be filled with new life and recovery of skills.
If it were me in your situation, I know that I would chose to live life as an emergee. The book Hidden Handedness was written to make that decision easier to consider.
There are three other books you would probably really benefit from reading.
1. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge '07
2. The Mind & The Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz & Sharon Begley '07
3. Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley '04
What you will learn in the three books cited is that your prognosis should be really good if you decide to emerge.
Begley has an excellent section in Train Your Mind on Constraint Induced Therapy (CIT) that documents the findings of Dr. Edward Taub in which he has found that approximately 3 consecutive hours of intense focused work performed daily over a period of 10 plus days by patients who have suffered a stroke has a massive effect on brain plasticity relative to stroke damaged neurons. Based on what I have learned, the emergee process has many parallels to CIT.
It is very encouraging to note that Dr. Taub has worked on patients who have been disabled by strokes for decades, so his work shows that the ability of the nervous system to adapt and recover from trauma is a lifelong capability. Many of the insights into brain plasticity are new, so don't be surprised to find after you have read up on what is currently taking place, that you are way ahead of the professionals who need to get up to speed with current research findings relative to neuroplasticity.
An excellent add-on to the above is the FastForWord program which you can learn about at PositScience.com
Lastly, your case may be of interest to researchers. I am currently working on a research project where the details of your experience might provide valuable insights, especially if you make the decision to become an emergee once again. If you could journal your history and then track your experiences in the months and years ahead, that history might provide valuable insights given that your dual visits to submergee status make your experience a first based on what I know about the subject. As you can see from the tenor of my response, I see the years ahead as a very exciting time.
Best wishes,
Samuel Randolph
Samuel,
How do I tell which is the emergee state. I can write with either hand so the "decision" isn't the problem. It's knowing which is correct.
My life has generally been better as a right hander (I've been using my right hand for a few months and even use at work now.), but other factors could have been involved.
Emotionally, I'm leaning to right handed and am surprised by the passion of this feeling. Even though I"m not big on conformity and have at times in my life felt proud of being left handed because it seemed unique. I also felt that way at 12.
But some of the doubt comes from the fact that I was considered a left handed child. How does it happen that a right handed kid becomes a submergee? I have a few thoughts on why it might have happened to me. But what are yours on how it can happen?
The big vote for right handed beyond simply how I've felt at different times in my life, is the test for laterality done by a neurodevelopmental therapist said I was right handed, even though I had written with my left for some years. Basically she asked me to catch a ball, clap with one hand, look though a telescope and mime that I was writing. I had no idea these were laterality tests, and assumed they were motor skill tests. Is this good evidence in your mind?
Amy
Amy,
It's a pleasure hearing from you.
Here are my thoughts in response to your questions.
1. Given the limits of what is currently available for diagnostic purposes, I would say that the laterality diagnosis you were given was excellent. Also, based on the history you have shared, you have a very strong evidence that you are right-handed from that perspective too. The fact that even have to ask this question points to our need for a simple, inexpensive diagnostic test for handedness that is based upon more direct and accurate methods. Wouldn't that be great?
2. I would guess that the source of your conversion would have been your parents or other early caregivers, but most likely parents. In Hidden Handedness, I describe those who like me had this experience of early conversion by parents as "Deep" Submergees, those who have no memory of their submergee training. In those cases I am aware of in which right-handed children were submerged, it was the parents that wished to have a left-handed child who did the training.
3. Reasons to submerge children? Wish there was a simple answer to that as I had this conversation yesterday with someone who was subjected to submergee training pressures by the nuns in his school but in spite of the, he remained left-handed. It was frustrating not to have a single simple answer to the question "Why do they do it to kids?"
Here are some of the factors that are are at work:
A. Cultural pressures (and this could be family, peer group or any other cultural grouping).
B. Religious pressures and beliefs about one's handedness being good or evil.
C. Parental ambitions - "I want my kid to be XYZ and thus they must be X - handed".
D. Minority status - This would be true for left-handed children. The majority rules.
E. The "Blindness factor".
Someone who did a great job of discussing these points with a nice emphasis on the "blindness factor" is Stanley Coren. See his book The Left-Hander Syndrome to get more on this topic.
Sounds like you are making great progress in your move to right-handedness.
Hope this helps.
Samuel Randolph
Samuel,
Well, I just talked to my auditory therapist, and she had a very different take on what might be going on in a case like mine. Basically the desire to be right handed came up once partially when I was 12 and in physical therapy, and later as an adult when I was in Neurodevelopmental and Auditory therapy.
My therapist says that a certain subset of people switch handedness in auditory therapy, and most of them are left handed people who experience a desire to become right handed. Often these people find that they do better right handed, or in a minority of cases left handed. (This woman is a very well trained professional and has a lot of experience.)
Basically there are two schools of thought as to why it happens:
1) That the person's processing disorders were what scrambled their handedness and laterality. Nobody ever *did* anything to make them use the wrong hand, or forced them to write with the wrong hand. And as the processing problem becomes rectified, the person's handedness simply changes.
2) That the "submergee training" was entirely unintentional. Much as the popular image involves nuns or Victorian schoolteachers rapping kids on the knuckles for using their left hands, this isn't always the case. In fact among those born after 1960, like myself it isn't even the norm.
I could be something like a parent habitually putting the spoon a the baby's hand without any thought as to which hand it's going into.
Secondly many children don't establish a clear handedness until they are 8. Children with processing problems, tend to be particularly slow. Of course, I have been and am being treated for many rather severe processing problems. And most people who take this auditory therapter have processing issues, because that is what auditory therapy is for after all!!
So you have a lot of kids, particularly those with processing issues, who are in second grade or older before their handedness shows. But by the time a child enters kindergarten enquiring parents and teachers want to know. Often people want the question firmly settled when the child is only four, three, or younger.
In fact, if the upper normal limit for a child to have a clearly established handedness is 8, the youngest is about 2.5. But it is amazing how many parent will jump to a conclusion about their child's handedness because they see it reach for a particular toy once at the age of six months.
In short, there are probably cases where the teachers and parents made a premature and false conclusion about a child's handedness, and taught them accordingly before the child was developed enough to really know. In this situation it seems that not only are the majority of children naturally right handed, but that nobody did this intentionally. There was no motive at all, to change the child's handedness, and the adults honestly believed that they were sticking with the child natural handedness.
In fact, when I was a child in the 80's in both public and especially Catholic school, I was really strongly discouraged from using my right hand on some occasions before I got to be 12 and began to feel more strongly about it. Why?
The sensitivity about not wanting to force a child to switch as happened in the "bad old days" was just so strong at that time. When I would try to throw balls or bat right handed (often not consciously), or use right handed scissors I was reminded that I was left handed and should do it the left handed way. Later on when I insisted on going right handed, they were really worried that I was simply motivated by peer pressure or desire to fit it.
Of course, that assumption didn't hold water, because almost nobody commented on my handedness. But I was often teased for not being more feminine, and voicing strong pro-nuclear freeze sentiments amidst a sea of "Reaganite pups" for peers.
But accurate or not, everyone was so set in the view that peer pressure was the only possible reason I would try to do anything with my right handed.
Another hypothesis I have with myself is that when I was tested for neurodevelopmental delay, I was found to have very, very severe problems in my right hand but not the left. So I'm wondering if I ended up using my left hand because the right hand simply didn't work that well.
Also most of the things that I initially wanted to do right handed didn't involve a lot of fine motor use of the hand.
In short, I can see a number of possibilities here, and I don't think anyone intentionally switched me. I think the processing disorders I am in the process of treating were either directly or indirectly the culprit-not my parents or any other adults.
Furthermore, although I do better right handed or even a bit ambidextrous than left handed, I don't think it will ever be possible to neatly seperate the handedness issue from the processing disorders that were treated to some extent with "old fashioned" physical and speech therapy when I was 10-12 (which worked for many years but eroded with time), and the much more powerful neuroplasticity based treatments I am getting now.
Also I just met a woman who thought she was left handed until she broke her arm at 23. After two weeks she found that her right hand had better writing. Was she a submergee? She learned to be ambidextrous in her 30's as a result of badly dislocated right shoulder.
She is a beautiful and very, very capable woman. She is a vet tech who can treat all kinds of animals domestic and wild. she trains wild birds and practices Chinese medicine on critically injured birds. Although I don't know her well she has loads of confidence, and I can't imagine her having grown up as a suffering submergee with no life skills.
I don't doubt that submergee/emergee stories like yours are quite real. But I do think that they aren't the only thing that ever happens in this arena.
The real bottom line is how much about the brain we really don't know!!! And how little we know about how humans can vary.
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