Carol Gledhill

My experience with menopause has not been an easy one. I had my first hot flush in my early 40s which was a mild one but, by the time I reached menopause, I was having the whole raft of symptoms – night sweats, hot flushes, problems with my joints, memory loss and the most awful anxiety and low mood.  

I had always been a very focused person who was able to multi-task at work but my mind was suddenly distracted all the time. I couldn’t stand to be in noisy places as I found it disorientating and I developed what I thought was deep social anxiety.  I’ve never been a party animal, preferring quiet pastimes, but I’d always enjoyed socialising in groups where I could feel part of it without having to be the life and soul etc.  

I went to see my GP and asked for a blood test to see if I was menopausal and I was refused and told that I would know. I came out with a prescription for Sertraline and took that for about six months but it didn’t help with anything and just made me not care. It took me around three months of lowering the dosage to get that out of my system and was quite unpleasant.

At that point, I started to research menopause and gave up alcohol completely and also caffeine as there was a lot of literature recommending it to help with anxiety and hot flushes.

A friend recommended HRT, saying it had changed her life, so I went back to the GP after months of insomnia and started the HRT. I slept well on the first day and thought I’d found the answer but then the headaches started and it felt like there was gel leaking into my brain all the time. I was sleeping well but my quality of life went rapidly downhill. Added to that the GP had given me the wrong dosage of oestrogen and I started to bleed. What followed was an extremely stressful series of hospital visits and biopsies to determine whether I had uterine cancer.  

After I got the all clear I contacted my GP and asked to see the “menopause specialist” but I was told I didn’t need to. They gave me a prescription for another six months of HRT but I decided to stop taking it. It took months to get it completely out of my system. HRT affected me very severely mentally. I had racing thoughts, extreme anxiety and struggled to even function in my day-to-day life.

During this process I was seeing a client who was autistic. At the end of the session one evening she asked me if we’d been matched up because we were both autistic. It was a life-changing moment for me because everything started to make sense. Over the next few weeks I rewound the whole of my life, putting everything into place and realising that not everybody felt like I did. I had an assessment a couple of months later and they told me on the day that I was autistic. They also said I was showing strong signs of ADHD which was a huge shock. I did what I now know is the classic thing of writing the key points down which turned into a whole book. Then there was the anger as to why a gifted child had walked into a selective grammar school and never fitted in or thrived. After that there was the grief to work through of what might have been if someone had seen my struggles and understood. I went on a deep dive of learning and then a “trial and error” journey to try and alleviate the menopause symptoms.

One major breakthrough was caffeine. I’m waiting for my ADHD diagnosis so I can try the medication but I read an article about the use of caffeine to help with ADHD and decided to make myself a strong black coffee. After 18 months of being paranoid about avoiding it, it was like someone had switched the light back on in my brain. I felt present and calm and I could focus! I am very interested in mindfulness and meditation so I bought a CBT workbook for menopause which I found to be extremely helpful. I take herbal supplements and the caffeine and my menopause symptoms are still there but they are manageable and they no longer affect my quality of life.

As I expanded my knowledge on this subject I started to question why are so many women in their 40s and 50s being diagnosed with neurodivergence. There is growing opinion that there is a strong link with the periods of a woman’s life where hormones are not stable (i.e. puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause) and neurodivergent traits being exacerbated. Therefore, a woman who has masked all her life to fit in with a neurotypical world suddenly finds herself dealing with menopause symptoms and burnout from all the masking she’s done without necessarily being conscious that she’s doing it. All a recipe for disaster.

There are a lot of “experts” telling neurodivergent women that they should take HRT to deal with their menopause symptoms and help with their traits. I believe that, in order to do this safely, a woman would need to have constant blood tests to alter the dosage to match her body, however, that kind of care isn’t accessible to most women. We are all different and I know that my autism affects how my body reacts to medication, including HRT, and I ended up feeling suicidal at my lowest point. Once it’s in your system, it takes a long time to get all the traces of it out. I feel fortunate that I had access to lots of information and knew where to look and I’m looking forward as a qualified counsellor to helping other women find their way and what works for them in this very important stage in their lives.  

woman dressed in white looking to the side

Menopause and Neurodivergence: A Ticking Timebomb for Undiagnosed Women?

Kelly Hearn

I have loved my work for more than two decades and was fortunate to work with the same tight-knit team for most of it. Six months ago, our company was acquired and several of my closest colleagues were either let go or opted to leave. I miss them dearly. My job description has also changed and my new boss is a complete nightmare. I am close enough to retirement (age 57) to dread the idea of starting at a new company this late in the game, but I don’t see how I can live in the current stressful situation for much longer either.

That’s a lot of change in one year, in an area of your life that had previously been a source of great fulfilment. To work among a group of trusted colleagues in meaningful work over such a long stretch is fortunate indeed – the changes you describe must feel like a great loss. The addition of a new boss you clash with is understandably tough. You are likely in somewhat of a grieving process and only six months into the transition; it may require longer to find your feet in the new organisational structure and direction. 

I think some big picture context – even if you already know it and it seems obvious – is warranted. Change is hard, particularly when we quite liked the old ways of doing things, thank you very much. A new boss has been parachuted into your division, likely with targets imposed on her to achieve. She will be under considerable pressure herself and navigating her own change. Differing work and communication styles can contribute to the stress.  Given this backdrop, some conflict is to be expected, even inevitable. Most of us are somewhat to very conflict averse, viewing it as potentially dangerous and destructive. But conflict can also be a force for good if we engage in it constructively.  

Often people only truly understand each other by having the difficult conversations in which we’re able to share more of our values and preferences, and learn about the other’s. We are able to clear up faulty assumptions, clarify intentions and make requests. Addressing any elephants in the room can also be quite grounding – often it is the unknown or unspoken that causes more anxiety than any difficult realities that become less so when we name them and start working to improve them.  

There is also often an ‘elegant intelligence’ that arises from conflict – we can come to better, more creative solutions by taking in different perspectives, exploring new angles and refining our thinking. You have been asked to change the way you work – can you remain open and flexible to what opportunities may arise while your business is in the flux of new ownership? What’s behind the requests you’re receiving from your boss, her ‘nightmare’ behaviours you’re observing? How might you take both of your needs into consideration? After these types of dialogues, you may still not like the changes, but maybe you understand them, and your boss, better.  

All of which is to say I encourage you to initiate a dialogue with your boss to first try and find a way forward with her, and in your organisation. It’s an important conversation, so warrants some pre-preparation. I like the questions introduced by Kerry Patterson in the book 

What do I want for me, for the other, for the relationship? And how would I behave if I really wanted these things? Spending time with these questions allows us to get really clear on what’s important to us while keeping the spirit collaborative. When approached this way, conflict can be cooperative rather than combative. 

Getting a bit more specific in terms of what the conversation might look like, I would suggest stating positive intentions up front just to calm everyone’s nervous systems, allow for a felt sense of ‘friends not foes.’ Then four stages (widely used in Non-Violent Communication or NVC):  

Assertive communication invites more of the same from the other. Hopefully your boss is able to meet you in this type of conversation, and you two are able to learn about each other in the process. Perhaps even arrive at an ‘elegant solution’ regarding what’s next for you in your organisation. Or not, but at least you will have explored the possibilities before taking the bigger step of looking for new work. And even if you ultimately decide to leave your current company, you will have practised the essential life skill of managing conflict in the process, and will take this skillset with you.   

dear therapist kelly hearn welldoing

Dear Therapist..."I'm Unhappy at Work – Is It Worth the Risk of Changing This Close to Retirement?"

Dear Therapist..."I'm Unhappy at Work – Is It Worth the Risk of Changing This Close to Retirement?"

Tanis Taylor

When JK Rowling’s Harry Potter arrives in the Weasley’s cluttered kitchen after his years at Privet Drive several things happen all at once. The smells and sounds of Mrs Weasley’s kitchen first confuse then delight Harry as we imagine some long-gone memory deep in his nervous system is reprised. Mrs Weasley ‘clattering around, cooking breakfast a little haphazardly’ may signal safety to his limbic system and his amygdala – automatic, incessantly firing – might dial ever-so-slightly down based on her cues and vocal tone. As he goes up to his room with Ron and dares to share, for the first time, something of his visions of Voldemort (crucially naming him) some of the airlessness and intimacy of his nightmares could begin to reorganise on exposure to the light.  

I’m not suggesting a sleepover with a friend as a treatment-plan for trauma but to remember the people and places who have provided safe havens and landing pads 

 throughout our childhood can be crucial supports to our 

For me it was boyfriends' mums. Late night, after gigs and on the pretence of making a tea I would sit at their kitchen tables and have the kind of chats I wouldn’t have with my own mom. I imagine the parent was usually relieved we were both safe back home and I was probably a little drunk and I would sit at those tables and try out observations and confessions that were loose and clumsy with these older women who were long-suffering and probably really, really tired. They weren’t my parent so I had the space to fall, unformed, into conversations with the liveliness and looseness of the evening still about me. I remembered surprising myself by how much I talked. Where what Dr Tara Porter calls ‘outcome-parenting’ makes for pointed, invested questioning (and defensive replies) this brief was broader, a witnessing she likens to ‘wallpaper' – non-judgemental, peripheral listening egged on by the odd nod and chuckle of a bemused, benevolent other. Very occasionally they offered advice but those aren’t the bits I remember.  

Frequently today when I am working with a client whose story features neglect and abuse it’s important for me to ask, who else? Who else was there? Neighbour, teacher, babysitter, friend? A character in a book, a superhero, an avatar, an online world? A den, an allotment, a pet? These are the pinpoints of warmth – possibly boring, maybe fantastical, ordinary or everyday – that can be gainfully kindled in therapy as ‘evoked companions’ (Daniel Stern). With the support of a therapist and using whatever fragments are retrieved, creatively we can uncover wallpaper and lovingly repair dens.  

Traumatic memories are formidable opponents. Somatic, non-linear, implicit, buried, they embed four times as fast as a positive memory and frequently present as symptoms not memories (Janina Fisher). But just as the body remembers trauma, so too does safety have somatic anchor points – touchstones that we can find and retrieve if like good detectorists we scan for their sonars and echoes. 

Literature is peopled with them – not the main characters rather the solid outfielders, the background characters, furnishing the margins – in the pages of Mrs Phelps’ library in 

, heard through Pheoby’s generous ear in 

, on 28 Barbary Lane's ‘well-weathered, three-story, brown-shingled’ co-op in 

where the smell of marijuana was a sensory beacon for the loose, the defiant and the lost. It is important to remember these people and places as later when, if we’re really lucky, we get to become secondary characters and tea-brewers to someone else's loose or lost.

Thirty years on it's the kitchens I remember the most. The smell of burning toast, china mugs, the worn lip of a wooden table where the varnish had rubbed clean and, of course, the night – when intimacy is easier. These are my early somatic signals to relax – to dare to care less and yield more than in all those other places I was bound in and I held myself up to. I have watched clients of perfectionist parents, critical and self-monitoring, light up as they describe the jumble and clutter of a childhood friend’s house. For the daughter of a hoarder it was an aunt’s bungalow that was clean and orderly that allowed her to soften and land in our therapy room. Grandparents feature frequently. Teachers too. Scents can call us back. Fairtytales. Quilting, clay, crochet. 

I was at a party recently and a lady told me that after her mum’s funeral she received a card from an old East End school friend. They hadn’t spoken for 50 years and she barely remembered this once-was-friend; for a couple of months they had been pals and she, a frequent visitor to their house. But this lady’s mum and her fishfinger suppers had held great importance for this girl when all of her other bearings came suddenly unmoored. Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy posits we humans need a wide range of caregivers – a diversity of alloparents and alloplaces – to thrive, particularly when we hit obstacles. 

‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

I suspect most of us will never know the importance we might have held for another long after their names and faces have faded from our memory. Our names will be teeny tiny lines in the film's closing rolling credits. It is the therapist’s privilege to return to seemingly unimportant tombs, to take the time to stop, be curious, remember and revive these very ordinary, everyday treasures. 

still from the original Matilda movie

Background Character Syndrome: A Hymn to Life's Secondary Characters

Camilla Nicholls

One of the impressions given by the first 100 or so days of the Trump 2.0 presidency is that the generally accepted laws of US society do not always have to apply to those in possession of billions of dollars.

It is in this milieu of the make-your-own-rules super wealthy that the new Netflix series 

, starring Meghann Fahy, Milly Alcock, Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon, is played out.

 is set on a private island using the heavy symbolism of a world cut off from reality. Or perhaps depicting one of the circles of hell reached only by boat?

 opens in the real world and we meet foul-mouthed Devon de Witt (Fahy) fresh off a night in jail for her second DUI (Drunk Under the Influence) offence and in a fury. She’s enraged by her sister, Simone (Alcock), sending her an ‘edible arrangement’ (fruit basket) in response to her cry for help. She is clearly at her wits end and is desperate for Simone’s help in caring for their father whose decline into dementia has recently accelerated. Devon goes in search of Simone to tell her where to shove her strawberries and to bring her home to help shoulder the responsibility for their father’s wellbeing.

What Devon finds is a totally reinvented Simone who has fallen under the spell of controlling socialite, Michaela Kell (Moore). Simone has expunged all mention of her awkward and distressing ‘wrong side of the tracks’ upbringing when applying for a job as Michaela’s assistant. So Devon’s arrival, dressed all in black, throws a shadow across what is, on the surface, a pastel-coloured, sugary world of conscious-easing philanthropy, and gargantuan excess. We start to see reality bite into fantasy.

, written by Molly Smith Metzler, works cleverly on more than one level, just like its title. For sirens – the sound of the emergency services which were never far from Devon and Simone’s childhood experience – is their private code word for ‘help needed’.  It also references the hybrid half-bird half-women sirens of Greek mythology epitomised by Michaela Kell who has lured Simone into being her amanuensis, mini-me and ‘sister’ and who also airily believes she can talk to the raptors she keeps caged in a sanctuary on the island.

The series is a glossy, well-acted drama that twists and turns. Despite the humour a sense of tragedy gently presses in on almost every scene. All the key characters seem hellbent on avoiding unpleasant realities, and, at first, the wealthiest seem most likely to get away with it.

 has many strong themes in play. What it means to be a sister – in the familial and feminist sense – is well-tackled, as is the effectively explored issue of how childhood trauma, if left unprocessed, can manifest itself in painful ways. For Devon it’s self-harming levels of alcoholism and meaningless sex; for Simone it’s all about denial and self-isolation.

In order for Simone to try to fit into her adopted lifestyle of charity galas and free-flowing champagne and to protect herself from negative feelings such as shame and anxiety, she inhabits a ‘false self’ and acts this out by expunging all reference to abuse from her life story, disowning (through omission) her sister, prettifying her mother’s suicide into a more socially acceptable tragic death, and a disliked nose is cosmetically altered, her downmarket childhood tattoos removed. Devon’s arrival on the island threatens Simone’s protective false self and historic cracks begin to re-open.

The grim reality of the sisters’ upbringing is woven seamlessly into the drama as is the dementia of their father, Bruce, poignantly depicted by actor Bill Camp. In scenes of pathos and humour Bruce’s realisation of being ‘in hell’ in his moments of clarity are as saddening to watch as his own, unlooked for, departures from reality as the dementia tightens its grip.

 the majority of the main characters’ actions are completely at odds with Socrates’ dictum ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Most appear content to use myriad defences (alcohol, drugs, sex, sycophants) against emotional reality in the hope that if they ignore the darker feelings we all experience and leave them unexposed to the light of self-awareness there’s a stronger chance of that elusive fairytale ending.

What a Psychotherapist Thinks of Netflix's Sirens

Alice McGurran

Tiffany Jenkins

Taking us from Reformation England to the modern day, through the development of concepts like religious tolerance, consciousness, freedom of speech and thought, institutions like the post office, to technological advances like the camera, printing press and wire tapping – Tiffany Jenkins' 

 is a sweeping and thought-provoking exploration of our changing attitudes to public and private life across the centuries.

Today, with social media, OnlyFans, Substack, journalism focused heavily on personal experiences, and politics defined as much by personality as policy – what do we gain, and what do we lose, when the boundaries between public and private life are blurred?

Watch our interview with Tiffany Jenkins here, where she explains why the question of our fundamental need for a private life captured her so strongly: 

Welldoing Book of the Month: Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins

Book of the Month: Strangers and Intimates by Tiffany Jenkins

Anna Whitwham

Healing didn’t come easily to me. I had carried my mum’s coffin after a savagely difficult year watching her die – compounded by a Covid that meant any act of care and love was held to account and stripped to bare necessity. We were guided by room capacity and hand gel. Touching became luxury. Flesh, body – a thing to always fear. Nursing mum was a nervous job – not just because we had to monitor the way she was fed and the spike in sugar levels – but our touch alone could be the thing that would make her the sickest. 

Perhaps because it never felt there was a real space to help her leave the world, I found it hard to section a space to heal in. Grief took over. It was everywhere and, in every place, so fierce and stinging it would make me catch breath. It felt, truly, as if my heart had stopped being a muscle and become knotted, matted. I didn’t know how to smooth out the knots, how to repair. Nothing could get to it. 

I had tried ways to get better, even though I didn’t know what getting better meant or looked like. Grief wasn’t an illness. It is only now, much later, that I realise it was about working out a way to build and bridge the chasmic aloneness – the separateness from mum. To accept I could find her in a different, new way.  

But I needed a way to get to this point. Boxing came when I had tried to drink, to use sex, to rely on sleeping pills to quieten my mind to ‘get better'.  When I reflect on these approaches, I can see they are the opposite of healing – all were ways to remind my body of something else, something outside of the pain. 

Boxing was only pain – actual, physical, awful pain. I trained for fitness, then quickly moved to fighting. It felt, after initial panic about doing it with a real seriousness, very natural. The first few spars were hard for my body to understand – it had to not only work out how to feel after being hit in the face, but it also had to respond and hit back. Adrenalin and cortisol always swimming though the blood stream. Managing this kind of anger and moving it to composure, to a game of chess-like calm, was an art. But there was a level of aggression that was vital. 

The boxing ring provided a space to negotiate hurt in a thorough, finite way. Each encounter divided into three, two-minute rounds of jabbing, tapping – walking away with bruises, scrapes, blood. I was always feeling something. It made marks on my skin, my face. I was wearing pain so I could see it. And, because I could see the wounds, I could see the way they fade and got forgotten. Each spar, each fight came with its own little grief-narrative – a mourning, a loss – and then back again in a cycle that let me begin again. The ring became a place of definition.

When I had a real fight with a real opponent, I lost control of my anger. Perhaps I was getting rid of a final burst of rage and temper after seeing the way mum’s body was so sore, so broken, by her terrible cancer – I tried to knock my opponent out. It worked, but she came back harder in the next round and we began punching each other relentlessly until one of us was knocked out. 

I found the loss difficult, but part of me knew I had wanted to walk into the ring and be destructive – to her but also to me too. I had not used the tools I’d learned in training and in camp. It baffled me, and others, in the immediate aftermath, that I had I behaved so differently from the person everyone had seen in the gym. In spars I had always used my jab and stuck to what I was good at. 

When I wrote my book, I added that I might have another fight, despite all the injury. I was asked why – why would I want to do this to myself, all over again. Now I know I needed to punch out those knots and return my heart to muscle. I had to find a space to do this. Boxing let me do this. It allowed me to get to the bit of grief that doesn’t feel like I must ‘get better’ only to know my body can do the things my mum's couldn’t – and that brings me close to her again. Watching my body recover and return made me feel closer to mum. I was able to get well for us both. Healing came easily to me. 

photo of author anna whitwham in the boxing ring

After Watching Mum Die, Boxing Helped Me Overcome All-Consuming Grief

Adam Farrer

It took my elder brother Robert’s death for me to finally begin taking my mental health seriously. 

Ever since my teens, I have lived under a cloud that seemed to follow me everywhere. It would arrive, darkening my world, then eventually disperse and I would feel positive about my future until it returned, and I’d have to wait for it to clear all over again. Sometimes this would take days, other times weeks. But it has meant that, for my entire adult life, I’ve walked a perilous line with depression and suicidal ideation. When I was younger, this was interpreted as natural teenage moodiness and a phase that would pass. And it did, revealing the otherwise buoyant nature of my personality and reassuring those around me that I was okay. Nothing to worry about. Until the phase, that cloud, returned. Over time this cycle of light and shade grew so familiar to me that, in my more flippant, darkly comic moments, I began to refer to taking my own life as a backup solution should my cloud fully descend and obscure me completely. 

“I’m not sure I’ll ever actually do it,” I’d say, with a humourless laugh. “But it’s nice to know I have the option.”

My family has always been very open with one another. We talk a lot, joke constantly and no subject is ever considered to be off the table. But the one thing we never really talked about, was our mental health. When family members were in crisis, we didn’t speak of the cause of those crises so much as the hope of recovery. “It’ll be fine,” we’d say, “They’re getting better now.” This sort of talk seems so dangerous now, but at the time it defused the issues at the heart of our varying problems and made us feel better about them. They were too dreadful and complex for us to fully reckon with, so we smeared them with toxic positivity and hoped for the best. And when it came to my own mental health, I did the same, regularly thinking about my own death but trying to focus on those periods when my obsession with it passed. Sticking to the unofficial family credo, I’d think “I’ll be fine,” all the while quietly suspecting that I would not be. Then, in 2008, Robert took his own life, and everything changed. Death was no longer an abstract concept for me and my family, because it was in our homes and causing fires everywhere.

Robert’s death presented my family with a terrible, permanently altering example, and it taught us all something valuable. We now know the full impact of suicide, of a young death. It left a huge crater in the middle of our world, and we can never allow it to happen again, to any of us. History cannot be allowed to repeat itself. So now, when we need it, we get help. We talk to one another about how we feel. If things are difficult, we don’t sugar coat our responses for one another, we tell it straight. And if we’re really struggling, we get professional help. Counselling, therapy, informed guidance, these are all things we talk of in my family these days. Nothing is allowed to fester.

When, during the Christmas of 2019, I experienced my most profound suicidal impulse in years and found myself standing on the edge of a cliff, it was thoughts of Robert that stopped me from taking that unalterable step forward. In this sense, my brother saved my life. When faced with a terrible and final decision, it was his example that caused me to step back from the edge and seek out the help that we should all feel confident in asking and reaching out for.

It Was My Brother's Suicide that Forced Me to Take My Mental Health Seriously

Jody Lyons

Dr Lisa Rappaport

As a very verbal and social little girl, my parents loved to foster my curiosity and encouraged my joy of learning. They read to me often, took me to museums, and arranged for social outings with peers. As I grew, my mother began to notic

e that I seemed to tune out when she introduced games that related to learning the sounds of the alphabet, 

games that my peers seemed happy to engage in. She  hoped that it would be a passing phase, but when primary school began, an astute teacher realised immediately that something was wrong. 

While every dyslexic learner develops and presents differently, this was where my own education into my learning differences began. Back then my school was not set up to accommodate my different needs so it took me years to realise that my time spent hiding out in plain sight in the classroom had left real scars;  the secret that I had locked away while I was desperately trying to compensate for my deficits, was that I was “dumber” than the rest of my class. The emotional impact was far more subtle and fell under the radar for my parents, who were more attuned to my academic challenges.

As a psychologist, specialising in learning differences, the erroneous conclusion of being “less than” and the deeply held shame are what I have spent my adult life trying to help children avoid. Truth be told, there are still days that I need to remind myself, too. 

1. Cultivate your patience and your belief in your child

Addressing this self-attack, for those of us whose alternative brain wiring requires that we learn differently than the majority of our peers, is an ongoing battle. Knowing as we do today,  that as many as 20% of the population is dyslexic, can give children the important understanding that they are far from alone. Yet, being reassured that they can succeed and even excel at the highest levels is the message they are likely to need to hear over and over throughout their education. 

Equally, a dyslexic child will have to understand that they must develop real persistence and a deep patience for themself; as their parent, you’ll need to do the same.

Being taught to read using a phonetic approach will likely address the initial academic hurdle of reading, but the emotional impact on a child trying their hardest, while possibly being told regularly that they are lazy or not paying attention, can be a gut punch. Combating these less visible injuries before they morph into false self-narratives or feelings of inadequacy is  of the utmost importance.

No doubt it can be confusing for the uninitiated teacher or parent; how is it that a dyslexic child may be able to read a word and then stumble when they see it again a paragraph later? One way to combat these types of errors is to “over-learn” information through repetition. This will lead to quicker recall in the classroom but requires real patience and time. 

When it comes to most subjects in school, I encourage parents to get creative in demonstrating a variety of ways to approach studying with their child. Mobilising their interests and special strengths can make studying more effective and fun. For example, if they are musical, incorporating  songs into their homework may help engage them and serve as a mnemonic device; if they are artistic or visual learners, cuing into colourful or pictorial stimuli may invite more creativity, etc.   

But if things don’t click as quickly as you hope, try removing the pressure by taking short breaks, introducing humour and infusing fun to lighten the mood. If a child learns to shift gears when things get especially tough and then come back to the task a bit later, they are building important resilience skills for learning. 

Through these practices, they can develop the discipline to work hard and eventually increase their attention span. If they see their efforts paying off, it can boost their confidence at a core level.

2. Encourage exploring a full range of activities to discover new talents

Beyond academics, children who may be deprived of positive feedback in the classroom can benefit exponentially by fostering areas of interest and latent talents. Sports, arts, dance, robotics, gardening, cooking–any hobby or interest can inspire a spark for your child, as well as provide an alternate social environment. This can be a life raft for a child struggling each day at school and a strategy I wish my own parents would have known to do. 

3. Use ‘failures’ as an opportunity to nurture resilience and strategic thinking

If they are confronting so-called “failure” in class, offering examples of when you have failed or were embarrassed or felt shame can allow them a much needed reality check. Life is filled with moments when we must lift ourselves up after facing disappointments. Learning to overcome these challenges with a sense of humour reminds us to try to go easy on ourselves. So more than a “perfect” parent, your child needs a parent who understands and can model the power of resilience in the face of vulnerability. 

At the same time, championing them, despite temporary “failures,” will help your child internalise a deep belief in themself for life’s difficult moments.  So if they receive an unsatisfactory grade, I recommend giving your child some time to move through their feelings, showing them empathy, and then helping them to  pivot and examine what they can learn from the experience. This underscores that a  “failure” is never an excuse to quit, but rather an indication to try a new tack. 

4. Celebrate the effort that they put in, less so their grades

The truth is that a dyslexic child may need to understand that they may put in more effort than their peers and still not get the same grade – but things will get easier as they advance in school. I recommend reminding them often about the significant  progress they have already made – and that they will need to play the “long game” during their school years. Looking online at the list of extraordinary and successful dyslexics as a further reminder, has always been a favourite for my patients, as it was for me.

So be sure you celebrate and emphasise the extra  effort your child puts in, regardless of their grade. As they strive to refine their unique skill set and hone their best ways to study, the challenges of learning will diminish.

your voice will encourage them to counter the shame that they may quietly and reflexively absorb in the classroom and beyond. Don’t be afraid to reward your child for their efforts and  to reinforce grounded optimism and hope. Over time experience will show them that they can and will learn–and that things can get easier. Continuing to identify and develop their innate abilities and strengths will also help balance out struggles.  With trust in themselves and belief in their own great capacities, they will find success in developing their extraordinary abilities and learn to sidestep the shame that many of us still fight.