STEPPING STONES TOWARD DISCOVERY OF CORE PROBLEM
UPDATE 9: 29/11/2016
This page presents the cases which acted as stepping stones leading to the discovery that a mis-match between the writing and the adept hand is a co-factor in many intractable problems. One difficulty in constructing this page is that the 'what' cannot easily be separated fom the 'how'. It will become clear that although initially considered to be one of assessment each case had a 'treatment' aspect. In short each session was conducted in a pedagogic meaning the form and content evolved in an organic manner. I have finally settled on a structure where I treat each case as both a stepping-stone and a fingerpost. A sample handbook for conducting the most difficult evaluations - in secure settings for legal purposes - is available from download. In the handbook I confront directly the contentious issue of introducing 'banned' objects into security dominated penal institutions. Updates and amendments will be displayed on the page menu; eg. Trail update-5
In the mists of time
Looking back I should have been able to diagnose latent / converted handedness years before I did, because I had already come across some pieces of what eventually turned out to be a puzzle:
- A six year old pupil wrote his name 'John' with his right hand as Arabic is written, right to left, or as we would say mirror-writing.
- I asked a pupil: "Can you do what I'm doing?" as I held my right arm straight out to my right (Berges & Lezine's Imitation of Gestures test). She raised her left hand across her body to point in the same direction I was pointing. I said she had her arm across her body but I didn't. I asked if she could do it without crossing her arm in front of her. Without hesitating she turned round to face in the same direction as I was facing, now with her left arm held straight out from and not crossing the body. We were now pointing in opposite directions.
- At the end of a lecture to a group of PGCE students in which I referred to both above incidents one female student came up to me and told me that when she wrote for others to read she wrote with her right hand, but when writing for herself, she wrote faster with her left. [ Chris Seed, a left handed pianist made an equally intriguing comment about playing a left - as opposed to right-handed piano.]
At the time I didn't question the implications of each incident.
Remedying this topsy-turvy, first-last presentation was prompted by:
- a conversation with my very good friend Seb. We agreed that although different cultures told different stories the one constant was that they all told stories.
- attendance at TEDxSalford 'Festival of the Mind' session. I belatedly realized that I hadn't written down the story of how I uncovered the phenomenon of latent / converted handedness
- without the story it is difficult to see why latent / converted handedness has such profound implications for the conduct of educational and psychological evaluations and such radical consequences for'treatment' .
Instances of the Fingerpost
While many might know what stepping stones are - rocks set across a river to allow one to cross from one bank to the other; fewer know what a fingerpost is. There is probably no better definition than that of Francis Bacon, in his 1622 Novum Organum Scientiarum Section XXXVI, Aphorism XXI)
"When in Search of any Nature the Understanding stands suspended, then Instances of the Fingerpost shew the true and inviolable Way in which the Question is to be decided. Those Instances afford great Light, so that the Course of the Investigation will sometimes be terminated by them. Sometimes, indeed, these Instances are found amongst that Evidence already set down."
Evaluations for educational purposes
Unless otherwise stated all of the following wrote with their right hand and considered themselves to be right handed. And in the case of children all were of primary school age, again unless otherwise stated.
Sit still
As I drove home I was searching for a simple descriptor: suddenly the phrase 'ants in his pants' jumped into my head; and that the ants had become less active as the session progressed. I quickly translated this as him being initially ill-at-ease with himself and less so as the session progressed. Instead of medicalizing his conduct with the label 'attention deficit hyperactivity disorder', I sought to explain how it was possible for him to be less agitated instead of more. The only explanation I could come up with was that some of the tasks he was asked to tackle were bi-manual, including as a distractor- drawing a 4-looped geometrical figure first with one, then the other hand. His other, left hand was better. I was reminded of all those who had been forced to write with their right hand and wondered if I had just encountered such a case.
Fingerpost: This stepping stone pointed to the need to introduce more bi-manual tasks into evaluations and counselling sessions and to ask clients to try uni-manual tasks first with one hand then the other
Stop rocking
Fingerpost: The mother's spontaneous "I realize he needs to be left alone to do things his natural way" was a Damascene moment for me. The phrase "left alone" in this context was the entirely correct reposte to saying he should do everything right! It was clear that all future evaluations or counselling sessions should check for 'left handedness'. Acting scientifically, I needed to check to see if I could refute writing with the wrong hand as being a co-factor in their problem.
Robert as Robert
I realized that while the majority of people are either right or left handed there's an infinitesimally small proportion who are neither right nor left handed: they have two adept hands.
Craig with two 'g's
Craig was living with other children in a residential home for 'children with difficulties'. We came to the task of writing his name with a pen in each hand simultaneously. Craig did what Robert had done, writing 'C' with one hand and the 'r' with the other, simultaneously and at speed; he did the same with the 'a' and the 'i'. There was no time to ponder how he would complete his name before he had done so. But the question which will test your grasp of the body-mind mechanism at play is, "How did he write the final 'g'?" While the majority of people nominate one hand or the other, very few nominate "... with both hands!" which is in fact what Craig did!
Having two adept hands, poses no problem when each is given the opportunity to enact itself.
The reason why the task is impossible for right or left handers is that the hemispheres interfere with each other: but with the doubly adept each hemisphere can operate without interfering with each other. It should come as no surprise to learn that hitherto Craig resolved most 'emotional-social' problems with either both hands (fighting) and or both feet (kicking).
After this second 'single name' stepping stone, I recalled that some time before I had the session with Robert I had encountered another boy who had written the top-half of his name with one hand and the bottom-half of the other; and both simultaneously. It was so out of the ordinary that I hadn't appreciated its full significance at the time.
Postscript to Craig's case. While telling the director of the home how Craig had written his name and what I thought it was telling us about body-mind links, Craig was brought into the room by his carer. He was seeking the director's judgement on whether Craig should be allow to go into town since he had not been doing what he should have been doing. The director was about to 'lecture; him when I asked if I could interrupt briefly. The director agreed. I asked Craig to tell me if he knew what he should have been doing. He gave a thorough account. I then asked him to tell me if he also knew what he should not have been doing. He gave yet another thorough account. It was quite clear that knowing what he should and shouldn't be doing was not his problem. It was matching his conduct with his knowledge, or rather handling himself!
I used to be left handed?
About 20 minutes into the evaluation session H volunteered that she used to be left handed. I told her I found this interesting and also wondered how she knew she used to be, and how she now knew she was right handed.
H named both year and the name of her primary school teacher when she changed. She said she was sitting writing in the class one day when she looked around her and saw that she was writing with the wrong hand (since everyone else was writing with her right hand.) And she knew she was now right handed because she wrote with her right hand.
I told her that although she had changed the hand she was writing with that did not mean that her brain had changed and that it was - as the evaluation demonstrated- still more adept with her left hand.
FingerpostI had assumed that H was going to tell me that her teacher or someone else had coerced her into writing with her right hand. This fingerpost pointed in at least three directions.
- it demonstrates more than any thing else the power of self-imposed conformity.
- a link between difficulty in recovering from trauma induced by being involved in a road traffic accident as the innocent party
- explained her difficulty with spelling
- and explained her problems with left -right orientation.
Indeed so profound were her orientation problems that this stepping stone led me to extend the task of rolling the Chinese stress balls around the hand to include rotating the arm as well (as with the swimming breast-stroke - but with palm facing upwards, and walking in a circle: first with one hand-arm then the other and both clockwise and anti-clockwise)
I want to be ....
The parents had a daughter doing well at secondary school and a younger son who should have been at secondary school but was not. He had been kept down at primary school because his head teacher thought he was not capable of benefitting from the move up. However, not only had she kept him back a year but he had also been placed in the school's EBD unit(emotionally and behaviourally disturbed) or for what used to be called maladjusted children.
Over the course of many home-based family workshop sessions it was established beyond reasonable doubt that G was not writing with his adept left hand. He was articulate and 'bright'.
A turning point occurred during one session when I asked G what he wanted to be when he grew up, what he wanted to do after school. He said he wanted to be a lawyer, with the implication that he could right the injustices being done to others. The ensuing dialogue went like this:
P: What do you need to do to be a lawyer?
G: Have a law degree.
P: What do you need to do to get a law degree?
G: I need to get good A levels
P: And what do you need to do to get good A levels?
G: I need to get good GCSEs.
P: And what do you need to do to get those?
G: I need to work hard
P: I think you've missed something, luck!
G: [Paused, looked puzzled and was speechless].
P: You also need luck because when I look back through your time at school, there have been periods when you have done well and worked hard and there are times that you haven't. There were times when you had good teachers and there were times when you didn't. Over the recent pass you've been unlucky in not having good teachers.
FingerpostThis stepping stone more than any other illustrates:
- the life and career changing consequences of not identifying latent handedness when it is present.
- The EBD label was entirely unjustified. On the contrary, if anything it was the 'system' that was mal-adjusted in not being able to properly 'handle' the family and its problem with their son's handedness.
- like many other cases, the authorities - in this case the school - are reluctantly prepared to admit that the child is not writing with the adept hand but they are not able to accept that this constitutes a core 'information processing problem'. And because of this they are then not able to enact a recommended 'treatment programme'.
PostscriptMany years later, when I was out, Andrea my late wife answered a phone call from G's father. He was clearing through some old files and had come across the material he had kept from our sessions. He wished to thank me for my time with the family in helping them resolve their problems. His son had now gone on to establish a very successful career. Andrea wasn't able to say which profession, since he didn't tell her.
Several years after this I received an answerphone message His father had wanted to speak to me directly thanking me for my time and effort with the family.
C...c...c...communication is ...
It was clear that he was not writing with his adept hand
Fingerpost
His hand action clearly embodied his thinking. This well illustrates the fact that thought and action are as one. However, we generally only take as evidence of what we're thinking, the words we utter. At best we fail to notice or at worse ignore what the body (in this case the hands) are telling us.
That stuttering and handedness are related should come as no surprise to those aware of King George V's stuttering.
Many years later a client in his 70's came for counselling. His accumulated problems showed what happens when latent handedness had not been made early in childhood. Not only was he still stuttering, but his right hand shook when he wrote.
This fingerpost pointed to the need to describe difficulties in rotating the Chinese stress spheres as (a) tongue-tied (b) hesitant or (c) fluent.
It is my left hand!!!
This boy's parents were paying for a private primary school education but were concerned that he wasn't making sufficient progress to enable him to be admitted to the senior school. A participant school observation took place before the home-based session. By now I was deliberately looking for pupils who appeared to be using their non-adept hand to write with. Prior to the classroom observation the Headteacher suggested that his parents held unrealistic expectations of their son "... because to be truthful, he didn't have much up there!" (gesturing to her head).
In the classroom Seated at the front, I could see the whole class. I saw three pupils who, from their posture and gestures, looked as though they might be more adept with their left. Although I had not yet watched them writing, I saw a boy sitting in the middle of the front row desks fiddling with his biro in such a manner that he eventually 'broke' it. It was clear from the way he was handling it that his right was his holding and his left his manipulating hand.
The pupils started writing. I watched and waited a little then went first to the other two pupils. The first boy had nearly completed a page of writing and was doing so with his right hand: he clearly wasn't the pupil having difficulties! I next went over to the girl and saw that she too had written several lines. She didn't appear to be a pupil having any difficulty.
As I approached the boy sitting on the front row, I could see he had written not a word. As I approached him I crouched down to his level as I reached him, but instead of asking why he hadn't started to write anything, I said: "I think I know what your problem is!". He looked at me in a slightly puzzled way and asked how I could possibly know. I told him I'd seen many children like him before and he seemed to have the same problem that they had. He was clearly intrigued. I told him we could confirm my guess later at home during the home-based session.
On the journey home? We had to wait a short while to meet up with his mother who was collecting his older sister, before driving to his home. We agreed that since I didn't know the route, he would sit beside me as a front seat passenger and we would follow his mother's car. Very quickly we lost sight of her. But the boy directed me faultlessly home, signalling with his hands which direction to turn at every junction. At the end of the drive, he asked me if I knew why he hadn't told me to turn left or turn right. I said I thought so and that it might be related to why he had difficulties with his school work, but could he tell me why? Rather obviously he said that he didn't know his left from his right (hand).
Home-based session??As the session unfolded it became increasingly clear that his left hand was indeed his more adept hand. One of the final set of tasks involved juggling with up to 3 balls. We had reached the phase of asking him to stand side-by-side with his father, holding hands together and juggling one ball back-and-forth between the outer hands: in effect, juggling 'as one'. The boy was holding his father's left hand with his right hand. This meant the father was throwing-catching with his right hand and the boy with his left. At one point the boy failed to catch the ball his father had thrown and reached down to pick it up while still holding his father's hand with his right. Just as he grasped the ball and while still stooped down the following dialogue then took place:
P: "Freeze!!! Statues!!!"
B: [He froze.]
P: "Which hand is the ball in?"
B: [Without any hesitation] "My left hand".
P: [Invoking the principle of being able to resist a counter-suggestion] "I'm not sure. I don't think you're correct. And anyway, how can you be so certain when you said earlier that you couldn't tell your right from your left?"
B: "It is my left hand."
P: [By now he had let go of his father's hand and was standing upright.] "I'm still not convinced. Look, I'm sitting here opposite you and this is my right hand (indicating) and since that hand is on the same side it must be your right hand too!"
B: "No it isn't, it's my left hand!"
P: "OK, I might be prepared to admit that you're correct and I'm wrong; but tell me how you know it's your left?"
B: "I know it's my left hand, and because this is my left hand that is my right {hand)!" [Gesturing]
How wrong was the Headteacher?
How, during the course of one afternoon and evening could he be transformed from not knowing how to tell his right from his left, through being able to do so, to being able to resist someone telling him that he was wrong?
Of even greater significance was his justification: He did not say "This is my right hand and therefore the other is my left" Clearly his essence had now been rooted in his leftness!
Which way does it go?
One of the questions I'd learned to put to all clients, children included, is the unusual one of asking them what they think with, not what are they thinking about. I then ask them to write down their answer. The dialogue ran as follows:
P: What would you say you think with, not what you're thinking about?
B: Mind
P: That's a good answer. It's not what most children say, it's more typical of what some adults might say. Can you now write that word 'mind' down!
B: 'n' F: That's an 'n' not an 'm'. B: [Changed the 'n' into an 'm' then continued until the letter 'd'] Which way does it go? P: I'm going to answer that question in a seemingly unhelpful way. I want you to put the pen in your other hand and write the word 'mind' down again. B: 'm' 'i' 'n' [and without any hesitation] 'd' P: Excellent. There's only one problem with the word 'mind'. It's often used when we want people to 'mind what they're doing', or 'mind their own business'. And Descartes said that the mind and the body were different, whereas I think they're different aspects of the same thing!
Not many young children offer 'mind' in answer to the question, "What do you think with?" The father's sitting-on-the-shoulder correction was not required since the letter 'n' was going to occur latter in the spelling of the word. It would have been pedagogically important to note whether the boy would himself have seen that he'd written the same letter 'n' for the two different sounds "m" and "n".
That the boy had done the down-stroke of the letter 'd' then asked "Which way does it go?" tells us that he (or perhaps better still, his brain) had an orientation problem. And because we know that the two cerebral hemispheres 'mirror' each other, at least as far as motor control is concerned, it was highly likely that he was using the wrong hand to read his mind's eye image. And so it proved to be the case!
I think with my feet: Get out of the room ... would you please mind leaving
When he was asked "What would you say you think with, not think about?" he said "My feet". At that moment he was indeed kicking an indoor football round the room.
I told him that sounded and looked like a good sensible answer since he was indeed kicking the ball around: (that's probably how professional footballers might answer the question too).
More tellingly at one stage he clearly became distressed / angered. He was sitting on the right hand side of a settee, with his mother sitting between us. He'd raised his voice and shook his right hand at me saying, "Get out of the room now!". If his mother hadn't been sitting between us I'm not quite sure what would have happened. However, without commenting on his 'outburst' we paused without commenting, then continued. Within a few moments he asked me, "Please leave the room" but this time gesturing in a calm manner with his left hand.
Not contradicting, correcting or ridiculing his seemingly nonsensical answer to the question of what he thought with, validated his 'top of the head' answer.
More importantly by accepting and commending his answer we established a common ground allowing us to go forward together.
I concluded that his left hand expressed his cool, calm, rational self while his right hand expressed his hot, raging, irrational self.
Since we think with our head and feel with our heart this stepping stone more than any other points to the fact that one hand works both literally and metaphorically as the head hand and the other as the heart hand. We can therefore predict that when a right handed person says "With my hand on my head and the other on my heart..." the right hand would go to the head and the left to the heart. The hand gesture would be mirrored by left handers.
I'm prepared to admit ...
that I might be ambidextrous.
P was the eldest of three children: a sister of primary school age and the other of secondary school age. ?
I had been conducting regular weekly sessions with the youngest child because her school had failed to cater for her high ability with the result that she was presenting with conduct problems.
The sessions sometimes included her older sister and brother and sometimes her mother and father. ?
A notable fact about the youngest child was her incredible ability to 'wind up' her older siblings so that they would start fighting, both verbally and physically with each other. [This is yet another story].
All the evidence pointed to the two younger siblings writing with their adept right hand. This was not true of P.
I wanted to satisfy my curiosity over why he was so susceptible to his youngest sister's goadings. We, therefore, agreed on one occasion that instead of working with the youngest child for the whole of the session, I wondered if P and I could work together to check out his handedness. He was adamant that he was right handed. Indeed at one stage he thumped his right fist on the table, saying with righteous indignation "I am right handed, look!"
It became evident that his mother and two sisters would need to join this exploratory session.
Everyone apart from P could see that his left hand was his adept hand. But he still protested his rightness.
At this stage I became like a dog with a bone, desperate to think of a task that would oblige him see what others could see. I'd already been using juggling balls in the traditional way but this too had failed to alter his mind.
Finally I thought, "Let's see if I can throw one ball over one shoulder with one hand and catch it behind my back with the other. I failed with either hand: but at least I'd found an impossibly difficult task!
To my surprise but sheer delight P succeeded every time when he threw the ball with his left hand but never when he threw with his right. In fact when he threw with his right hand the ball landed nowhere near where he was standing: it hit the far wall or fell well away to his left.
Having caught the ball in his right hand, I asked him to tell me which was his adept hand. Without hesitating he raised his right hand to show where the ball was and said "My right, look I caught it with my right!"
I suggested that he might be focussing on the wrong aspect of the task. I asked him, "Which hand knew both where it was and also knew where the other hand was?"
Thinking it through he agreed it was his left hand, but this still didn't make him left handed.
The session with P finished and resumed with only his youngest sister.
About 30 minutes later, there was a knock on the door, P entered and asked if he could come in and tell me something.
Not quite knowing what to expect, I welcomed him. I was keen to hear what he had to say.
With his youngest sister on my left he duly sat on my right. Then rather solemnly and seriously he said "I'm prepared to admit that I may be ambidextrous!"
Fingerpost
For someone who was so adamant that he was right handed and who had resisted all the evidence that had convinced his mother and two sisters that his left was his adept hand his admission was indeed a seismic shift.
As with all other clients his shift in 'thinking' could not have been achieved without his emotions being raised. (Anyone who has watched Gordon Ramsay or Alex Polizzi in their trouble shooting roles will have seen this on a larger scale)
Why he was unable to make the complete shift as had the boy who'd said "It is my left hand" was a puzzle I was left with>
Self referred, adult, evaluations
Oh my god... I see my mother
This more than any other aspect ensured the sessions were not just fulfilling a meaningless ritual.
Fingerpost
This mirror 'task' was inspired both by the mythological tale of Narcissus and the folk tale 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'. Narcissus looked into a pool of water and fell in love with the image he saw, not knowing it was his own. The love Echo held for Narcissus was not reciprocated: she was the voice obliged to repeat the last few words spoken to her.
I had previously used the mirror in a non-counselling or evaluation setting, working with Helen an adult suffering classic autistic behaviour. She was echolalic, avoided eye-contact with others and herself and engaged in repetitive ritualised hand gestures.
It was this combination of stories and the clients 'emotional' reaction to her mirror image which pointed to the need to include the 'mirror' task with all subsequent clients, irrespective of their presenting problem.
I don't think I can have cancer in the brain ..
... if I can do this, can I?. This was an early adult case which prompted the use of what have appropriately been called Chinese stress balls.
The critical features of this stepping stone were:
- I received a phone call from a female (W) desperate to book a counselling appointment for relaxation.
- On the phone W said she had tried everything else but nothing had worked.
- I told her I could probably help her but not specifically for relaxation
- W said she felt it was her last chance, as she had tried everything else. We arranged a session.
- A major puzzle arose when W said she had a perfect job, a perfect husband and a perfect daughter!
- The obvious puzzle is why is W suffering from apparently debilitating stress?
- It emerged that she thought she had brain cancer, but none of the specialists she had seen were prepared to acknowledge this.
- She had earlier thought she'd had cancer of the stomach. But then she had eventually been convinced by the results of specialist investigations, that she didn't.
- Because her underlying problem had not been identified the cancer had to go somewhere else; and where better than to the thinking brain?
- When I asked W what her evidence was, she gestured with her hand and said "Look I can't control the shaking".
- It was at this point that I told her that years ago I had bought myself a set of Chinese stress balls but never used them. I bought them because I'd read they would help defer possible rheumatism if rolled over the Chi points in the palm of the hand. I also said that I knew some people recommended them as stress-reducers. I would try to find them.
- I located a pair and turned them in my right hand. I asked her if she could do what I had done.
- W became completely focussed, indeed immersed; becoming 'at one' with the hand task.
- I asked her to try turning the balls in the other hand. She succeeded in doing so but hesitantly / cautiously. It was while she was doing this that she suddenly looked at me and said,"I don't think I can have cancer in the brain, if I can do this, can I?"
- I said that I wasn't medically qualified, but it was obvious that those parts of the brain responsible for hand control could not be damaged otherwise she wouldn't be able to do the task.
- Because of her highly emotional state the session concluded with a discussion over how she was to get home. I was concerned that she might be about to experience postural collapse. We considered possible alternatives: her husband fetching her, or me driving her home then her husband returning me back to the office. W said she thought she would be OK to drive. I wasn't so sure so I walked back to her car with her. I was immediately reassured as soon as I saw her seated with her hands on the steering wheel. She looked visibly confident with an 'I'm in control' posture and her hands weren't shaking
Fingerpost
We unravelled the key to W's problem when I noticed that during the course of the session she was rarely able to tackle the final part of any task / question. It emerged that she'd never got to say the final goodbye to her father who died of cancer while she was at university taking her finals' examinations. She was approaching the age her father died. Neither parent told her how terminally ill her father was nor how close he was to dying. They didn't want to jeopardise her future by interrupting her Finals.
The trigger to her belief that she cancer in the brain was her uncontrollable hand shaking. She first noticed this while running a week-end team building course. A team member had to leave the room to take a phone call. She returned to tell W she couldn't stay because the message was about a relative dying of cancer.
I did touch the floor
This client was responsible for me devising a "Count my 6-fingers" common-sense test. I'll report the critical features in four phases as follows:
Phone call:I received a phone call from a young adult female - with a very high pitched voiced - requesting an appointment and asking if it could take place at her home, where she was living with her mother.
?
Home based session - no show:
P: I arrived at her home to be met by her mother, answering my door knock.Her mother said the daughter was in bed and unable to get up. This was confirmed by her mother taking me to her bedroom door and me seeing her head covered in her bed; unable to talk.
I took the opportunity to take the mother through some of the tasks I proposed taking her daughter through.
The most telling act on the part of the mother was to the "Mirror in my hands" task. She got visibly agitated and angry saying she was not prepared to take part in such silly games!!!
She also revealed that she had been so concerned about her daughter's mental health that she had taken her abroad for brain treatment (details to be added)
We arranged for me to make a return visit if and when her daughter contacted me.
?
Home-based session - show
This time K answered the door herself and invited me in to conduct the session.Describing some of her problems she said she would wash her hands repeatedly, brush her hair repeatedly but most importantly that when she touched the floor she would also touch and re-tocuh it repeatedly. When asked about this latter, rather unusual action she said she did a lot of things compulsively: she wasn't sure when she touched the floow the first time whether she had already touched it and picked up germs or was putting them back
I asked her to show me what she meant about touching the floor.
K leaned down, lowered her hand to within an inch or two of the floor then sat up. But without touching the floor. I asked her if she had touched the floor
K said she had
I told her I thought I must have blinked at the moment she touched the floor because I didn't see her touch it. I asked her if she could do it again, for my sake rather than hers.
K unhesitatingly repeated what she had done before.
Working on the principle of validating clients' experiences rather than questionning, contradicting or ridiculing them I switched tasks.
Later I asked her to hold a mirror between her hands and repeat and fill in the missing word in the question "Mirror, mirror in my hands who is the most ...... in all the land?"
K was unable to hold the mirror, and when I held it in front of her she gave it the briefest of glances and turned her head away.
I asked her on why she couldn't or wouldn't look at herself in the mirror
K said she wouldn't like what she could see.
I suggested, in that case why don't we break the mirror?
K said this would make matters worse because worse might lie beyond the mirror! Breaking the mirror wouldn't help.
Like the earlier 'ants in the pants' case, while driving home I wondered how someone could show me one thing while saying something different. I formulated the problem as one of common-sense, not when we're all agreed but when what we see agrees with what we hear and feel. Because she was apparently at ease with her actions it would serve no purpose to say she was acting nonsensically.
I needed to devise a simple check on 'common-sense' with future clients. I could hardly ask them to touch the floor, but not touch it, then for them to say they had! Or at least, if I were to ask them to do this, they would question my rationale / sanity. The essence of the task had to be to show them one thing while describing it as something else.
And then it hit me. A pedagogic activity with young children is to ask them to count the number of fingers we or they are holding up. But what if we tell them to "Count my six fingers please?" while holding up only four fingers on one hand and placing the other one's lap, in sight of the child? This would fit the criterion of inducing a mis-match between what one heard and what one saw, leaving open the question of how one resolves the seemingly 'nonsensical' instruction.
?
Final Home-based session.
Touch the floor: Several years later I received another phone call requesting a follow-up appointment. In the meantime she had given birth to child and there was concern over her ability to care for the child.
On this occasion her partner, but not child was present.
During the session I reminded her that I had asked her to show me what she did when she told me she would repeatedly touch the floor.
I asked her if she could show me again what she had done.
Without hesitating K touched the floor!
When I told her that was not what she had done before she was surprised and said she had touched the floor
Chinese stress balls
I demonstrated rotating the Chinese stress balls and asked her to do the same. She would / could not hold them.
I asked her to pass them across to her partner so that he could try
K Ssaid she knew what I was trying to do: get her to hold them, but she wasn't going to.
I admitted that that was my intention.
I passed them directly to her partner instead.
She was able to take them from him in passing them back to me
Fingerpost
It became clear that she did not write with her adept hand
Her mother said of course she was left handed. I told her that her daughter had claimed to be right handed (details need checking)
K's schizophrenia explicable in terms of mother's world-view and interactions.
I agreed with the mother that her daughter did indeed have a brain problem, but it was not the brain problem she or the previous experts had claimed. As a naturally adept left hander her brain 'mirrored' that of adept right handers. She was incredulous!
In the pipe-line
Is there something wrong with my brain (adult: County Court Judge request)
This (gesturing string - spinner) was the most interesting thing we did (Young Offenders Institute)
The 'voice' on my right shoulder tells me to do bad things, on the left good things (Primary School pupil)