Yesterday, Meredith had a bad day and came home crying saying that she was depressed. She even missed her soccer game because of it. The problem was that I couldn't pinpoint the source of her emotions. It's not as simple as asking her what is wrong, because often she can't find a way to express her emotions and asking her sometimes just makes her that more upset. Usually she will show that there is a problem by crying, refusing to do anything I ask her to do, getting upset with any little inquiry or suggestion I make trying to help her, and being very over reactive to any minor stress. In these situations, the only thing that I have learned to do is to give her lots of space, remove any stresses, and provide opportunities to refuel her right brain like drawing, watching TV, listening to music, or playing with her dolls.
So, she watched lots of TV, drew me a picture, sang and danced in her room, and had lots of good snacks. I didn't insist she go to her soccer game, do any chores, and made sure her little brother stayed far away. After dinner, she came into my room and we were able to talk rationally about what was bothering her. She had mentioned a few times last week that she was struggling with some math concepts--the relationships between fractions, decimals, and percents in particular--so I thought this could be it...especially since I knew these are generally difficult concepts for a visual thinker like Meredith to grasp. And sure enough, that was it. 
Meredith said that she just doesn't get the concepts and can't process what her teaching is saying. She has always struggled with these concepts in math. She says that all she hears is "Blah, blah, blah." Not in a disrespectful way at all--just that she literally can't process what she is hearing; it doesn't mean anything to her.Over the last few months, I have learned a really good way to judge how Meredith is feeling or what problem she is experiencing by asking one simple question: "What's Merebith doing?" Meredith told me that during math class last week, Merebith was in a coma being kept alive by a machine. And because Merebith is Meredith's "Control Center," (according to Meredith) no learning was happening...the factory was closed essentially. That gave me a pretty good idea about how math was going for her lately and what her emotional state was. Merebith always displays an exaggerated version of how Meredith is feeling--she's like a cartoon character in that way. This exaggeration is really helpful because it leaves me little doubt as to what Meredith is feeling!
I know that Meredith really enjoys geometry (hello again visual-spatial strength!) and so as a contrast, I asked her what Merebith does when she is doing geometry. Meredith told me excitedly that Merebith wears a T-Shirt that has a lot of colorful shapes all over it and the words, "Math Rocks!" She also wears a visor and has a pencil tucked behind her ear. Usually, Merebith is furiously doing math on her paper because she loves it.
Continuing with this topic, I asked her if Merebith acts in any peculiar ways if she is having trouble or having a lot of success in other subjects at school. The one thing she told me was that in Language Arts, a lot of the time Merebith has a frog stuck in her throat. Merebith gets a frog stuck in her throat when Meredith is trying to figure out what a particular figure of speech means (Meredith understood the irony that Merebith is acting out a figure of speech during these times). Until Meredith understands the figure of speech in question, Merebith continues to choke and Dogot uses the Heimlich Maneuver (in his robotic nature) to try to dislodge the frog. Once Meredith understands what the figure of speech means, Dogot successfully dislodges the frog from Meredith's throat and it goes flying across the room and hits a wall--splat!
At least I know that Meredith understands irony...
Reading your stories reminds me so much of how such metaphorical thinking really is an adaptation for those who think visually. It reminds me of how I dealt with working memory tasks and verbal type issues early in life. I had a "memory scroll" where I'd "write" things I needed to remember/learn, and refer to it when I needed to pull up the information. I became a great speller, because I stored pictures of the words that I could just pull up at will. Meredith's descriptions of filing cabinets reminds me of how I dealt with learning multiple languages at once. People used to ask me, "How do you separate them from one another? Don't you get confused?" I'd say no. The reason? They each had their own filing cabinets. :)
ReplyDeleteHi Lynne,
ReplyDeleteI'm so excited to read about how you adapted as a visual thinker--especially since your adaptations are so similar to my daughter. I just don't read very much out there describing this (do you?) and I'm glad we can put this information out there together.
Two questions for you:
1) You said you stored pictures of the words that you could pull up when you needed to know how to spell them. Did you have a picture that went with the word, or did you store just the word itself?
2) Wondering if you might clear up a little confusion I have. On the one hand, visual thinking is so fast and natural for visual thinkers, it is not necessarily hard to store and retrieve information in mental files, correct?
On the other hand, I see Meredith having only a limited amount of energy to recall information from her files. If I ask her too many questions which require her to go into her files, she says her head feels like it is going to explode.
In your experience or in your opinion, do you think that Meredith gets worn out just by the act of finding the information, or do you think it is more that she gets tired translating her mental, visual information into words to communicate with me? I think I'm starting to understand that really, it is the translating back and forth between pictures and words and words to pictures that is exhausting.
I would love your opinions on this.