What is dyspraxia? In this
article, we are not just going to describe dyspraxia to you but also try to get
you to imagine what it is like to be dyspraxic. We would just like to point out
that everyone with dyspraxia is, of course, unique so please don’t assume that
every single person will experience every single difficulty!
Firstly, we will start off
with the basics. For all of us to perform any task, our brain will send our body signals telling it what to do. For
most people, these signals are transmitted succesfully. However, for someone who is dyspraxic these signals get
muddled along the way – you could even picture them as tangled wires. This
can affect us in a variety of ways, from physical difficulties to social
difficulties.
Physical
difficulties are, in our opinion, the most understood aspect of dyspraxia (and even
then the understanding isn’t great!) Imagine you’re on a walk and you start
walking down a hill. For the majority of people, their brains will send their
body the signal so that their body can balance out and compensate for this. But
when you’re dyspraxic, due to the ‘tangled wires’ your body does not
successfully receive this message and you are more likely to lose balance –
we’re known for being prone to tripping over!
Coordination is another aspect affected by
dyspraxia. Whether it’s attempting to rub your belly and pat your head at the
same time, or coordinating your legs and arms while walking, coordination comes
into a wide range of things. Although we know the action we want to perform, actually getting our body to do it is a different matter! This is due
to the signal getting muddled, therefore getting our bodies to coordinate
themselves is difficult.
When someone throws you
something, you would usually be able to catch it without too much difficulty.
But imagine what this is like for someone whose signals from their brain to
their body get muddled…even when we do manage to catch an object, it will often
slip out of our hands – an example of our difficulty with gross motor skills.
Trying to catch an object can be made even more difficult due to the fact that
it requires good spatial awareness, whereas our spatial awareness is not so
good! This means that we have difficulty judging where the object is in
relation to ourselves, so we may attempt to catch the object too early or too
late.
Similarly to gross motor skills, fine motor skills, are
also something that can be a challenge for dyspraxics. This can involve using
cutlery and handwriting. You know when you hold a pen in your non-dominant hand
and just can’t seem to get the grip on it right? That’s what those of us with
dyspraxia experience when handwriting, and also getting the right strength of
grip is difficult. Imagine gripping onto a pen really tightly while writing,
your hand would soon tire wouldn’t it?
Dyspraxics also have difficulty in writing quickly too,
those muddled signals mean that they physically can’t perform the action
quickly. You can probably imagine that due to these difficulties the handwriting
isn’t usually very neat. Typing is a much better option, it still presents the
difficulties with fine motor skills but at least they don’t have to worry about
the grip.
Now we’ll talk about sensory issues. Some people strongly
dislike certain textures of food, or may be very sensitive to certain
temperatures. This is not just disliking foods, it is absolutely hating the
feel of them. With temperature, some
people find that they get cold easily. Again this isn’t just “Oh, I feel cold”,
it’s having your teeth chattering while other people aren’t even wearing their
coats. Other sensory issues people
with dyspraxia might have are being over
sensitive to loud noises, touch, etc.
As you may have noticed, sensory issues are something that overlap
with autism. There are a quite a lot of aspects where there is this
overlap, which it’s not sure that many people who aren’t particularly familiar
with dyspraxia are aware of. One of these aspects is routine. Now, you may be thinking “But most people like to be organised and have things
planned.” Yes, that may be true, but there is a lot more to it than that,
when it comes to dyspraxia. Imagine yourself when you
are extremely stressed out about something, or you are overthinking with a
million “What if?”‘s whizzing around your brain.
That’s the situation created when their routine changes. There are all sorts of
examples of what we are talking about by changes in routines. It can range from
the smallest things such as having to suddenly change what you’re wearing in
the morning because you’ve spilt something on your clothes
or to bigger things such as living away from home at university.
Other ways in which dyspraxia
relates to autism are social
difficulties. Imagine you are talking to someone, and despite trying to
make eye contact, you find it very
difficult to keep it and don’t really make eye contact very much. It may look
like the person is not interested or not really listening.
Another thing is taking things literally. People use
sarcasm quite a lot and for those of us who are very literal thinkers this can
be confusing. A lot of the time it can be amusing really, “I’m confused” is one of the most-used phrases. Then there’s being
in large groups of people. Lots of people can engage in conversations in quite
big groups fairly easily, but imagine there being a delay in processing what is
being said and then thinking of what to say in response to it. Often by the
time of thinking of something to say they’ve moved onto the next topic!
Smaller
groups are easier as there’s much less going on, it can be difficult for a dyspraxic brain
to process everything that’s going on in a large group. In addition to this, it
is made even more difficult when there is lots of background noise. This is not
to do with the actual hearing, but with dyspraxia it can be difficult to distinguish noises from each
other – the brain sort of merges them all into one. This means that they
have to really focus to work out what someone is saying when there is
background noise, and it may come across as though they can’t actually hear
them!
Meeting new
people and making new friends is also something that can be difficult and a dyspraxic may come across as
quiet and shy.
Relating back to what said
about concentration and background noise in large groups, concentration in
other situations can be affected by dyspraxia. People often daydream, but for people with dyspraxia
it is even easier to accidentally start daydreaming, despite how hard you try
to concentrate. This can be annoying when concentrating in lessons. As strange
as it sounds, It can take absolutely
ages in the bath mainly due to the fact that the person loses concentration and
keep daydreaming, or just completely loses track of time (even with a clock in
there!)
Another aspect of
concentration is background noise. People with dyspraxia genuinely can’t understand how people are able to
concentrate on work while listening to music – that genuinely seems impossible
to them! They literally have to work in complete silence, the slightest noise
and they just cannot concentrate!
When you overthink something, it’s like you have a never-ending stream of
thoughts. This experience is normal for those with dyspraxia, it’s like they are
constantly thinking of something a million things at once. A
good way of describing it “My brain has
too many tabs open”. This has an affect when they are trying to sleep. Of
course lots of people have difficulty sleeping due to thinking, but it’s even
more so for dyspraxics and is described as “the
inability to ‘shut down’ the brain”.
All these jumbled thoughts can make organisation difficult. Memory also plays a part in this. Many
people will walk into a room and forget what they walked in there for, and this
is very common for dyspraxics! Short term memory can be a struggle for them. An
example of this is when a dyspraxic was making lunch and managed to completely
forget to put butter in the roll. It didn’t even occur to her until she was
putting the knife in the sink and realised that it looked exactly the same as
when she got it out of the drawer. On the other hand, for some reason those of
us with dyspraxia often have a very good
long term memory. They can remember conversations from years ago clearly,
so often they’ll say to friends “Do you
remember *insert conversation here*?” and they’re just like “No…” They can often remember not only
the conversation itself, but the situation it was in etc.
Do you ever experience when
you know what you want to say but you
just can’t word it right when you say it? That’s something else that’s
quite common for dyspraxics. Often they’ll pause, stutter, and get their words
muddled up when speaking. You could imagine it as the words you want to say
travelling down the wires from the brain to the body, and because these wires
are tangled for those of us with dyspraxia, the sentences they say are often
muddled. Another aspect to speech is controlling the tone and volume of speech,
which for most people is something that comes naturally. But for a dispraxic
it’s as though there’s a fault in the ‘volume control button’ and they often
speak really loudly without even realising until someone points it out. This
can be embarrassing when it’s somewhere really quiet, but again it can be
rather funny!
The sense of
direction can also be affected. “If I’m with
someone else I rely on them so much for directions, basically just going
whatever way they’re going. I notice this when I’m going to the same place on
my own when I end up making a wrong turning”!
Telling left
and right apart is something else that links into directions, and is something else that dispraxics
can have difficulty with. They know which side is left and which side is right,
but it just takes longer to think of it, due to the ‘tangled wires’. Also, if
someone says something like “Look at that
to your left!” they’ll often look to the right due to the fact that they
know they need to look quickly to see what it is, but the brain can’t process
quickly enough which way to look.
Another aspect of dyspraxia is
getting stressed and frustrated easily.
To other people, some of the things a dyspraxic gets stressed/frustrated over
might seem so little, but to his brain it’s a big thing! People may say for a
dyspraxic that he is a perfectionist.
Although the things he does certainly don’t end up looking ‘perfect’ his brain may
tends to notice more when little things are different, therefore if it’s
different to his normal ‘routine’ this can cause a lot of stress and
frustration. “Another thing I find is
that due to the difficulties in social situations, I’ll often spend a lot of
time worrying how I’m going to say something to someone, how I’ll word it,
whether it might sound rude, what their response might be, how I’ll react to
that, etc. So often if I know I need to ask something about someone, I’ll plan
exactly how I’m going to say it beforehand. Even after a conversation I’ll
often overthink it, especially if my sentences came out a bit jumbled. I’ll be
thinking “Did they know what I meant?” “I hope they didn’t think that…” etc”.
So as you can probably guess, this is something else that can cause dyspraxics
to become stressed or frustrated.
As already mentioned,
processing is slower for dyspraxics. This comes into the things we have talked
about, but also relates to other situations as well. For example, with school
work it will take them longer to read a question, understand what it is asking
me, form an answer, and then put that answer into words. The end result may be
the same as everyone else. It’s just like the process is put into slow motion
added with a few differences along the way.
Due to all of these aspects
that are affected by dyspraxia, you can imagine it takes their brain much more effort to perform everyday
tasks. This can result in getting very tired despite getting extremely
early nights.
It’s not all bad though!
There’s certainly lots of amusing moments to laugh about when you’re dyspraxic,
such as the fact that you’ve just walked into a door. Plus thinking differently
can be a good thing, it would be boring if everyone thought from the same
perspective!
We hope this post has helped
you to gain a better understanding of dyspraxia if you didn’t know already. And
if you have dyspraxia, we hope that you’ve found it relatable!
Raising awareness of dyspraxia
is something that is important. Dyspraxia doesn’t have nearly the amount of
recognition as some other conditions do and we really hope that one day it will
have more recognition and understanding!
Source
Posted by Kids Are Special
in DYSPRAXIA
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