ARE YOU BEING SECRETLY MANIPULATED?

Are you being secretly manipulated?

Does your self-esteem change according to approval or disapproval from others? Always end up apologising simply to keep the peace? If so, you may well have been 'gaslighted'. Psychologist Dr Robin Stern, author of The Gaslight Effect, spoke about spotting and stopping this type of manipulation.

Does your self-esteem change according to approval or disapproval from your partner? Do you feel elated when your boss praises you, but at rock bottom when your work is criticised? Or perhaps you always end up apologising simply to keep the peace at home?

If you can answer yes to any of the above you may well have been 'gaslighted', warns psychologist Dr Robin Stern, author of The Gaslight Effect.

Taking its name from the classic 1944 film, Gaslight, in which Ingrid Bergman plays a woman who suffers at the hands of her manipulative and scheming husband, Stern believes that this particular form of insidious bullying is startlingly common - and can be emotionally devastating.

"The Gaslight Effect results from a relationship between two people; a gaslighter - who needs to be right in order to preserve his own sense of self and his sense of having power in the world - and a gaslightee, who allows him to define her sense of reality, because she idealises him and seeks his approval," Stern explains.

"Gaslighters and gaslightees can be of either gender, and gaslighting can happen in any type of relationship including with your boss as well as your partner, but I refer to gaslighters as 'he' and gaslightees as 'she' since that's the pairing I most often see in my practice.

"What is remarkable is that most people who experience this kind of manipulation are actually very successful in every other area of their lives and could never imagine themselves in an abusive relationship, but this is such a gradual process that it tends to creep up on them - and by the time they realise it the damage is usually already done," she adds.

She believes women are generally very good at empathising - having been socialised to be people-pleasers - and that it comes naturally for us to put ourselves in other people's shoes.

"The problem," she says, "is that women often fall into the empathy trap, which tends to occur when we become so good at trying to understand where someone else is coming from and how they're feeling that, almost imperceptibly, we start to see things from their perspective.

"Suddenly one's own feelings and sense of reality take a second seat and you will often end up apologising for someone else's behaviour, feeling unsure of yourself and your opinions, losing the courage of your convictions and, over time, essentially forgetting who you are," she cautions.

A similar thing can often happen at the office, she argues, and to an even greater degree - because we convince ourselves that we need the relationship with our boss to work to keep a roof over our heads.

"What if you know that your boss or colleague doesn't like or respect your work, but every time you confront them about an issue they make it into your fault, such as telling you that you are paranoid, or too emotionally sensitive, or not as hard working as you used to be?"

"This type of constant undermining can make office life unbearable and needs to be dealt with quickly and effectively."

The warning signs

The Gaslight Effect may not involve all of the experiences or feelings Stern has identified below, but if you recognise any of them in your own relationships, there's a good chance that you may be a victim.

1. You are constantly second-guessing yourself and ask yourself, 'Am I too sensitive?' a dozen times a day.

2. You are always apologising to your mother, father, boyfriend or boss and wonder frequently if you are a "good enough" girlfriend/wife/employee/friend/daughter.

3. You can't understand why, with so many apparently good things in your life, you aren't happier.

4. You frequently make excuses for your partner's behaviour to friends and family.

5. You find yourself withholding information from friends and family so you don't have to explain or make excuses.

6. You start lying to avoid the put-downs and have trouble making simple decisions.

7. You think twice before bringing up certain seemingly innocent topics of conversation.

8. You have a sense that you used to be a very different person.

9. You feel as though you can't do anything right.

10. You find yourself furious with people you've always got along with before.

How to fight back

"The most important thing is to identify what is going on because once you understand what is really happening in your life then that in turn is very empowering," says Stern.

"Once you realise that you have your own part to play in the situation then you automatically have control over stopping it."

The next step is to immediately recognise the Gaslight Effect when it comes up, and to tackle it head on, according to Stern.

"It's a time to opt out of the conversation and to say that, although you respect that person, you are going to have to agree to differ, and thus remove yourself from a potentially volatile situation," she advises.

"Remember, you always have the power to set that boundary and you have the right to be in a relationship where people show respect to you - and if this is not the case then you can simply say, without being belittling or aggressive, that you don't like the way you are being spoken to at the moment or, in the long-term, work out whether or not you really want to stay with that person or in that job, or to leave.

"The ultimate power that we have in any relationship is the power to withdraw. We don't have the power to change somebody's mind or to make them think differently - although we can try!"

THE GIFT OF DYSLEXIA

"If he is not learning the way you teach him, can you not teach him the way he learns?" ~ H. Chasty

I had a telephone conversation with a friend of mine last Wednesday who happen to work in a primary school as a teaching assistant. We got onto the subject of dyslexia and it occurred to me that she did not have much awareness around the issue which I feel is pivotal for children that age ( Primary school age is 5years old to 10years olds for those reading this blog overseas ).Is your school dyslexia-friendly? In understanding dyslexia, the Dyslexia-Friendly Primary School involve an entire school to achieve a dyslexia-friendly environment leading to a whole-school environment that supports students with dyslexia.

I think that all teachers, teaching assistants and learning mentors who work in schools should have awareness level training to enable them to identify children with dyslexic difficulties, to develop an understanding of the potential frustration and emotional response that accompany such difficulties, and to develop appropriate practices to help them access the curriculum.For starters, how about viewing dyslexia as a gift.

In his book, " The gift of dyslexia", Ronald D. Davis describes the basic abilities all dyslexics share as this:-

1) They can utilise the brain's ability to alter and create perceptions (the primary ability).

2) They are highly aware of the environment.

3) They are more curious than average.

4) They think mainly in pictures instead of words.

5) They are highly intuitive and perceptive.

6) They think and perceive multidimensional ( using all the senses).

7) They can experience thought a reality.

8) They have vivid imaginations.

I'm lucky in the sense that I had the opportunity to use the more positive side of dyslexia in my career as a firefighter, athletics and even manage to achieve a university degree which is where I found out about my gift. Ronald D. Davis goes on to say " These eight basic abilities, if not suppressed, invalidated or destroyed by parents or the educational process, will result in two characteristics: higher than normal intelligence, and extraordinary creative abilities. From these true gift of dyslexia can emerge - the gift of mastery."

I order to develop these gifts, we need to understand the cognitive mechanism, phonological and orthographic issues surrounding dyslexia. Also, the social emotional responses e.g. The child's self perception and self esteem maybe playing a part in contributing to the learning difficulty.

I manage to find this very useful article that explains it all:-

Sunday January 14, 2007
The Observer

More than 100 years after 'word blindness' was first discovered, thousands of children with great potential are still marginalised by an education system unable to cope with a common but silent disorder. Simon Garfield investigates the symptoms, treatment and prognosis of dyslexia

In a small room at the physiology department of the University of Oxford a man is being tested for dyslexia. This is an elaborate, detailed and standardised process, and the tests get harder as the session unfolds. There are words to read: box, water, babies, cough, curiosity, tyrannical and catastrophe. There are words to spell, read aloud by the assessor: light, advice, anxiety, camouflage and acquiesce. There are red and white plastic cubes to be arranged in the same pattern as a diagram. There are dancing dots on a computer screen to be distinguished from dots that move in a different pattern. And then there is the Verbal Similarities test, which also begins simply. What do the following three things have in common? Shirt, socks, coat. Then this: clock, thermometer, ruler. And finally: uncertainly, hesitantly, irregularly.

I did OK on the tests, although I had a lot of problems with the last three words. They are, in fact, a fair reflection of the state of dyslexia in this country - how it is perceived, how it is treated, and how seriously it is taken by those with influence in education and science. The tests are only a guide: they don't explain whether I have dyslexia or not. And had I got everything wrong and muddled, there isn't necessarily a clear way forward with treatment. For, even 120 years after dyslexia was first defined, we are still finding our way with a disorder that affects between 5 and 10 per cent of our adult population and an estimated 1.2m children.
The Oxford clinic is home to the Dyslexia Research Trust, a charity led by John Stein, professor of neurophysiology at Magdalen College. Beyond his prowess in the fields of auditory and perceptual impairments, Stein has another claim to fame: he is the brother of chef and television presenter Rick Stein, who is the DRT's most visible and vocal supporter, not least through his fundraising dinners at the Ivy restaurant in London.

Like many research charities concerned with controversial conditions, the DRT must rely on celebrities to boost its budgets. And like all organisations concerned with dyslexia, it has been greatly helped in recent years by the emergence in the celebrity interview of a stock observation: 'I was useless at school and all the teachers thought I was just stupid. These days, of course, they would have known I was dyslexic.' Some celebrities probably were just stupid, but the majority were not: Eddie Izzard, Richard Rogers, Keira Knightley, Zoe Wanamaker, Richard Branson, Anita Roddick, Steve Redgrave, Orlando Bloom, Keanu Reeves, Jamie Oliver, Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse. But this willingness to be associated with dyslexia is a fairly new trend, and when John Stein began at Oxford in the Seventies it was still a shameful word.

Stein, 65, began his training as a neurologist. His speciality was the visual guidance of movement - how information from our eyes gets to our arms and legs - and as such he was concerned with the cerebellum, the walnut-shaped area towards the lower back of the brain known to control balancing and motor output. His research at Oxford three decades ago brought him into contact with Dr Sue Fowler, and together they began working on a theory that dyslexia may have something to do with the problem of controlling one's eyes.

This was a relatively new theory and the work was not hugely popular. 'A lot of people didn't believe dyslexia existed,' Stein says, sipping tea in his department's cafeteria. 'Most people thought it had to do with laziness. The big phrase was, "Middle-class children are dyslexic, working-class children are thick." We were regarded as pretty cranky working on it at all - equivalent to wearing shorts in winter.'

Professor Stein had another problem: even those who recognised dyslexia as a genuine condition believed its basis was purely psychological rather than biological. The classic symptoms - difficulty in reading, writing or spelling among those who otherwise possess an average or high level of intelligence - naturally led educators to believe it was solely a linguistic problem, and there was no reason to search for automatic correlation with impairments in the brain. The phonological theory, which states that reading problems are due to children not detecting the correct sound of written letters and words, is still pre-eminent, but the refinement of brain-scanning techniques and genetics has established beyond doubt that there are often significant differences in the brain between those who are dyslexic and those who are not. The core of John Stein's research has been devoted to showing what causes these differences, and in so doing suggest potential advances in early diagnosis and treatment.

Some of this research is at a primitive level due to limited funds, and cohort studies are small. Stein's clinic has had good results with the use of coloured lenses in reading glasses (about a third of the 500 children assessed by the DRT each year show improvements with blue or yellow lenses), and an increased intake of fish oils rich in omega-3 benefits another third (possibly because omega-3s can improve the function of the magnocellular systems in the brain that help to stabilise visual perception).

Some of the research being done at Oxford is backed up by large international studies in Europe and the United States, particularly the genetic work. It is now accepted that over half of the differences in children's reading is due to genetic factors inherited from their parents. Inevitably, the hunt is on for the specific gene that may identify this predisposition, and Stein's colleagues have identified a gene on chromosome 6, known as KIAA0319, a key factor in the way the brain develops. When this gene is removed in mice, cell growth in the brain is reduced; a similar, though milder, deficit is visible in dyslexic brains post-mortem.

'The key is early diagnosis,' Stein says. 'If you wait until children are failing, there is a lot of psychological damage being done, and the loss of self-esteem brought on by the misery of dyslexia is appalling. If you can diagnose at the age of four or five, you can get over a lot of the problems we see in children at the age of 10 or 11.'

As ever, such progress brings its own dangers. 'My fear is that if that extends to pre-natal diagnosis, people might be tempted to have an abortion to avoid dyslexia. I think that would be appalling. And I wouldn't like to get a diagnosis so early that we begin to fiddle around with the way the brain develops, because that could be very risky, and might lose us an Einstein.'

Dyslexia may appear to us a modern complaint, but its biological basis suggests a long history. Retrospective diagnosis is a popular pastime - in addition to Einstein, biographers have detected dyslexic traits in Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and Mozart - but the scientific story begins in 1878, when the German neurologist Adolph Kussmaul defined the concept of 'word blindness', describing patients with good intellect who used words in the wrong places and often distorted them, leaving 'on the minds of the observers the impression that they are crazed'. Nine years later Rudolf Berlin, another German physician, used the term 'dyslexia' (derived from the Greek words for the poor use of letters or language) to describe a boy who had great difficulty interpreting text. In 1896, a GP working in Sussex called Pringle Morgan wrote up the case of 14-year-old Percy F in the British Medical Journal. Percy, who often wrote his name as Precy, had developed what we now regard as classic symptoms, an ability to perform well in all areas bar reading. In fact, Morgan wrote, 'the schoolmaster who has taught him for some years says he would be the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral'. By the early years of the next century, dyslexia was recognised as hereditary in some families, and three times as common in boys than girls.

Because much of the medical literature remained anecdotal, diagnosis remained sporadic at best. In the mid-Sixties, a woman living in Surrey called Wendy Fisher found her bright six-year-old daughter Sophie was having an unhappy time at school due to her inability to read and write. 'I met a remedial teacher who said, "Don't tell anyone, but there's this thing called dyslexia,"' she remembers. 'It was a dirty word.' Fisher brought her daughter to an educational psychologist and Sophie was found to have an IQ of 155, which was 'genius' level. She then wrote to her local education department to ask how many other dyslexics there were in Surrey. 'I was told, "We have one."'

But clearly there were many others, and with the help of burgeoning dyslexia associations in Bath and London and a few supportive doctors in the United States and Britain, Fisher formed her own Dyslexia Society in north Surrey. She began with six mothers, and after some fundraising and publicity (not all of it good - one local paper described 'a creeping sickness' in their midst) they established a teacher awareness and training programme. Her daughter received special educational support and went on to become a BBC news correspondent, and the organisation she founded developed into the Dyslexia Institute (now Dyslexia Action), a national charity that trains about 1,500 teachers each year.

On their first day, trainees are given a sheet with the following bullet points:

· Dyslexia can occur at any level of intellectual ability.

· Dyslexia is characterised by an inability to recognise and reproduce the sounds that letter combinations make, but there are many other symptoms: poor short-term memory; confusing left and right; mishearing simple requests; difficulties with learning things by heart.

· Dyslexia is a dimensional disorder, which means that it can affect an individual mildly, moderately or severely. The number and type of difficulties vary from one dyslexic person to another.

· Early intervention is critical. Children with the highest risk of dyslexia can be identified as early as five or six.

· Dyslexia often occurs with other disabilities such as dyspraxia (a neurological disorder of motor coordination, often defined most simply as clumsiness), dyscalculia (an impairment of mathematical abilities) and attention deficit disorder (ADD).

· The effects of dyslexia can be alleviated, but dyslexia cannot be cured.

Last November, several thousand teachers, parents and academics gathered at the Indiana Convention Center, Indianapolis, for the 57th annual conference of the International Dyslexia Association. If anything demonstrated what a growth industry dyslexia has become, and how complex its interpretation, this was it: among the many hundreds of lectures, symposia and keynote speeches, there were opportunities to learn how to keep dyslexic children from being bullied and excluded, possible tax benefits for families with learning disabilities, how best to tackle algebra, how to improve the lives of adult dyslexics with low self-esteem and 'The Contribution of Phonological and Morphological Processing Skills to Reading Development Amongst Dyslexic and Non-Dyslexic Speakers of Arabic'.

The most widely accepted method of teaching dyslexics - a modern derivation of the Orton-Gillingham system - was much in evidence. Established by the American neurologist Samuel Orton and the educator Anna Gillingham in the Twenties and Thirties, this rejected the standard 'look and say' method of reading by breaking down the learning process into its constituent parts, a 'multi-sensory, structured, sequential, cumulative' approach. Pupils are first taught sounds in isolation and these are then built into syllables and words (w/a/ter); the elements of consonants, vowels, prefixes, suffixes and sentence structure are then added by a mixture of auditory, visual and kinesthetic techniques, the latter using large tactile letters cut from sandpaper or felt.

The busy bookstalls in the conference exhibition area displayed many Orton-Gillingham workbooks, but they were matched by the amount of titles that took a relatively new view of dyslexia, a view that regarded it as a gift. There were books entitled Why Some of the Smartest Children Can't Read and Brilliant Idiot. One lecture was entitled 'What Brilliant Dyslexics Can Tell Us'. An entire afternoon session was devoted to epidemiological and behavioural profiles of gifted dyslexics, and on a subsequent morning a grey-haired dyslexic called Ned Hallowell, the founder of the Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health in Massachusetts, stood up to speak.

'When you diagnose a child or an adult, the parent and the child hear only bad news,' he explained. 'They're grateful, because it's all done with intelligence and skill and a lot of numbers, and they're glad to have some handle on what's going on, but as they're driving home they cry. And as they're falling asleep at night their heart sinks. They feel that they have just been taken down many notches. They feel that they can't dream the big dreams... and it just shouldn't be done that way.'

Hallowell was a skilled orator and there was a proselytising tinge to his voice. He gave an example of how he might diagnose a child with ADD. 'I say, "I have great news for you - you have an awesome brain." That's not what he's expecting to hear, or his parents. "You have an incredible gift: you have a race-car brain with a Ferrari engine. But there's one problem: you've got Chevrolet brakes. It's hard to slow down."'

He went on to describe what he saw as the biggest single problem with learning disabilities. 'The idea of normal/abnormal, talented/not talented, smart/stupid are bogus dichotomies that have plagued us for thousands of years,' he said, 'and have led a lot of people to think less of themselves than they might. And when you think less of yourself, hope goes down, and necessarily you do less and risk less. Fear and shame are the disabilities.'

It made perfect sense at the time, but elsewhere in the convention centre it was sometimes hard to appreciate what he was saying. One session attempted to place adults without dyslexia in the shoes of a child with severe dyslexia, and it was a disorientating experience. There were a number of tasks to perform: mirror writing, writing with one's non-dominant hand, reading a children's story with some words in code and others with the ds and bs reversed.

The session leaders treated the adult participants as 10-year-olds, talking down to us in a harried and condescending way. At the end of each exercise we were asked how we felt, and the answers were salutary: we were disheartened, frustrated, irritable, close to ripping up our worksheets, bitter towards those in the group who could perform the tasks best.

Two weeks later, a smaller symposium was held at Imperial College, London. At this, about 300 women and fewer than 20 men, almost all primary school teachers, packed a lecture hall to learn how best to extend their academic study of dyslexia into classroom practice. There were lectures on the most recent government strategies, on the dangers of relying too heavily on traditional methods of assessment, and on how literacy may be improved by optimum nutrition - the latter providing familiar messages that may benefit us all.

The symposium, which had an upbeat air suggestive of significant progress, was organised by Dyslexia Action, the organisation that has grown from Wendy Fisher's pioneering work in north Surrey to 27 training centres in the UK. Its present chief executive, Shirley Cramer, had recently appeared before the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education and Skills, and her evidence pointed to a great opportunity. She quoted official figures from June 2005 showing that 9,290 pupils were permanently excluded from school in England, and 64 per cent were classified as having special needs. Of these, about 80 per cent were dyslexic. As the cost of exclusion is almost £10,000 per child per year, Cramer was confident this funding would have been better used to provide appropriate early support in school.

She went on to suggest that people with undiagnosed dyslexia are over-represented in prisons. A study conducted in 2004 showed 20 per cent of prisoners had dyslexia and related learning problems - some 13,660 individuals, at least double the amount of dyslexics in the general population. With a total cost of each inmate calculated at £27,320 in 2004, Cramer argued that £186m per annum could have been saved if prisoners had been diagnosed early in their lives, not to mention the immeasurable human misery.

Cramer also highlighted many problems with the existing provision for teaching dyslexic children within schools. It was the familiar postcode lottery: funding for special education needs is not 'ring-fenced', and while some local education authorities provided a reliable method of specialist training and funding, many others chose to divert their budgets elsewhere. The 1981 Education Act led many parents to believe that once they had battled to obtain a statement of special educational needs from their local authority, their child would have a legal entitlement to additional support. But with little statutory funding, many schools were unable to offer a specialist service. And without specialist training, many primary school teachers remained unaware of the early warning signs that would otherwise enable them to provide early intervention. In this way, a great many children are classified at the beginning of their lives as average or below-average, and if their parents were themselves dyslexic they may expect nothing else. This may be the greatest tragedy: many young people with great potential marginalised by an education system unable to detect or cope with their demands.

A fortnight after the Dyslexia Action symposium I met Shirley Cramer for tea in Leicester Square, and when she arrived she seemed distracted. She said she was expecting a call from her solicitor. The next day she was to appear on Woman's Hour on Radio 4, alongside a man called Wynford Dore, and Cramer wanted to reassure her legal people that everything would be well. Dore was the originator of the Dore Programme, a relatively new method of improving pathways in the cerebellum that has some dyslexics claiming an astonishing effect on their literacy and confidence, and many detractors dismissing the programme as scientifically unproven and motivated by financial gain. Cramer is in the latter camp.

There are 11 Dore Achievement Centres in the UK, and branches in Australia, the US and South Africa. Each offers an exercise regime designed to improve balance, coordination and repetitive movement, and on the Dore website a typical routine is described as 'standing on a cushion on one leg and throwing a beanbag from one hand to another for one minute'.

In his book, Dyslexia: The Miracle Cure, Dore explains how the suicide attempts of his dyslexic daughter Susie inspired him to find a new way forward, and there are luminous testimonies from the singer Toyah Willcox and Scottish rugby player Kenny Logan. Until he began his neurological researches in the Nineties, Dore ran a company selling fire-protection products.

Shirley Cramer takes a more traditional approach to the treatment of dyslexia, favouring structured multi-sensory classroom teaching. 'The weight of evidence is so heavy,' she says. 'We know loads about this - there is so much international research over 30 years. But the problem is when someone with a big marketing budget comes out and says, "I'm curing it."' (The following day on Woman's Hour, Dore said he had encountered nothing but opposition from vested interests; he proposed a paradigm shift, and it was no wonder the traditionalists were keen to dismiss him. Towards the end of last year, several board members of the journal Dyslexia resigned in protest at what they saw as an unfairly favourable and inadequately peer-reviewed report on Dore's programme.)

'The problem is, parents are desperate,' Cramer says. 'But what they should know is that the key is having good specialised teachers who understand how one learns.'

Cramer has specialised in learning disabilities since 1992. Before joining the Dyslexia Institute in 2000, she worked in social policy in the United States, where she saw great advances in both medical research and funding. 'The great thing there was that they put the problem in the hands of the NIH [National Institutes of Health] rather than the department for education, which meant you got the sort of well-funded vigorous research that would go on with cancer or other health issues. They asked, "Why is it that these kids can't read?" They looked at it cognitively, they looked at the neuroscience.'

The best thing about this, Cramer says, was that the discovery of the genetic components to dyslexia meant an end to people she calls 'the dyslexia deniers', or at least this was her experience in the US. In the UK she says she still meets head teachers 'who say it doesn't exist, that children are just being lazy'. She still hears it referred to as 'the middle-class disease', 'because middle-class parents have the wherewithal to complain until something is done. If you have something wrong, it's quite right you try to correct it, and they certainly shouldn't be pilloried for that. That's why you need a systematic method of picking up all the kids.'

But Cramer is not downcast. She says there is much good medical and psychological work being done here - she mentions, in particular, the work of Margaret Snowling, professor of psychology at the University of York, who has written the classic text on the subject - and she believes the Labour government has at least made some progress, albeit conceivably for cynical reasons. 'When I gave oral evidence [to the Education and Skills Committee] last year, the bits they were most interested in was my cost-benefit analysis: how much it would cost to treat a dyslexic child and the possible advantages that would bring to the economy and possible tax revenue - that was a big deal for them.

'People see that you can no longer use a wait-and-fail policy,' she says. 'Unfortunately a lot of the increase in awareness is very thin, which is why people are prey to all these strange theories.' She cites performance figures from August that show reading ability at Key Stage 1 (ages five-seven) going down, and Key Stage 3 (11-14) remaining the same. She fears the arrival of a disturbing trend from the US. 'Students are beginning to realise that they can sue their local education authority for not teaching them properly. It is not a good situation for LEAs to be putting away money for legal cases.'

At the Dyslexia Research Trust in Oxford, John Stein is also ruminating on this middle-class disease. 'I find it frightening how many schools don't seem to recognise dyslexia, or choose to ignore it. Too many of them are saying, "Oh, he's a bit backward, but he'll catch up." But that misses the fact that this kid might have a huge IQ, and ought to be reading three years above his class members. Then we see that child at our clinic at the age of 10 because they've become unmanageable, and they're the ones who often end up in jail.'

Again, the issue is inadequate funding. 'It's a hard sell. Dyslexia has never been sexy, and it's hidden. The other side of my work, also concerned with movement disorders, is Parkinson's disease, and I can get money for Parkinson's almost like that,' Stein says, snapping his fingers. 'But I have perpetual problems raising money for the dyslexia clinic. I pull in my famous brother as often as I can, but there is a limit. Parkinson's disease afflicts 1 per cent of people over 50 and dyslexia is as high as 10 per cent, and it can afflict people for their whole lives. And yet it's 100 times easier to get money for Parkinson's. Makes no sense. Parkinson's so obviously makes people miserable - it's visible. The problem with dyslexia, of course, is that people who have it don't tend to shake.'

· The Dyslexia Research Trust: dyslexic.org.uk
Dyslexia Action: dyslexiaaction.org.uk
British Dyslexia Association: bdadyslexia.org.uk

HUMANITARIAN CRISIS IN KENYA...BUT MY DEAR FRIEND'S FATHER IS SAFE!!

Sweeden has been one of those european destinations that I have always wanted to visit as well as other scandiavian destinations such as Demark. I have a dear freind from Sweden, Lois, whom I have known since 1996. How we met was that I was competing in an international athletics competition and Lois was playing in an international hockey match for Sweeden. We was staying at the same hotel that weekend in Wales (UK). This year, I promised I would go visit her in Sweeden for a weekend break but this had to be postponed for a very good reason. You see Lois father is from Kenya and after spending the new year celebrations in Sweeden,he has decided to stay due to the post election violence in Kenya. There is a great humanitarian crisis in kenya due to the ongoing violence in the wake of the recent contested election; many people are left without income and food. So far, 500 people are dead and thousands have been displaced. Like Lois's father, some have fled the country and say they "will go back but only when the war is finished".

Madeleine Bunting reports in the Guardian today:-

The violence in Kenya may be awful, but it is not senseless 'savagery' The west's exotic fantasy of Africa means we fail to understand the real reasons for conflict in developing countries.

It will be Kofi Annan's turn tomorrow to arrive in a tense Nairobi, following in the steps of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and John Kufuor, the Ghanian president and head of the African Union, last week, and US diplomats and the former Sierra Leonean president the week before. As the tourists abandon Kenya's beaches, the country has tragically become the premier destination for a new type of visitor - the international mediator. But so far, all of them have managed no more than what could be described as a minibreak, hastily repacking their overnight bags with nothing to show for their efforts.

Kenya is stuck in a dangerous stalemate, with no point of agreement between Mwai Kibaki, who has claimed presidency in the recent contested election, and his opponent, Raila Odinga, from which to start negotiations on power-sharing. The country is bracing itself this week, when the newly elected MPs are due to take their seats, and there are fears fisticuffs could break out in parliament. Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement is poised to rally its supporters back on to the streets in protest at what they believe was a rigged election by Kibaki.
In London and Washington, not to mention Kampala and Kigali, there is close to panic. London needs Kenya to be an African success story; it gives the country £175m in aid a year. The US badly needs Kenya as a stable ally for its post 9/11 strategy - it is a vital intelligence base for the Horn, Yemen, the Gulf and east Africa. Meanwhile, Africa's landlocked neighbours need Kenya as their link to the world economy; already fuel supplies are running short in Uganda and trade through the port of Mombasa has ground to a halt. No one is underestimating the scale of this crisis.

While western diplomats and aid officials are quietly gritting their teeth with a combination of frustration and anxiety, the media story - with a few exceptions such as Peter Kimani, a Kenyan journalist on openDemocracy.net - has been simple: utter bewilderment. Here is how the story has been framed: the peaceful Kenya we know and love from our holiday snaps has suddenly erupted in senseless, tribal barbarism.

There are two old elements underlying this perspective. There is the persistent western fantasy of the exotic that we project on to Africa, but the peaceful, palm-fringed beaches of our holiday albums (I have them too) are the creation of our tourist imagination, which strips out what we can't or don't want to understand. They have nothing to do with the tumultuous, violent, rapidly changing reality of Kenya in recent years.

Secondly, the coverage shows how quickly the west reverts to racism. Why is the word "tribal" only used to refer to Africa? Why don't we talk of Belgian tribes or Middle Eastern tribes? No, only in Africa is inter-ethnic violence cast as "ancient", immutable tribalism, associated in the European mindset with barbarism and irrationality. It's a language of self-congratulation - we are civilised, Africans are not. How else could the ludicrous analogies with Rwanda have popped up? Kenya and Rwanda have completely different histories, ethnic relations and political economies. But that is swept aside as irrelevant, and the implication is that African violence is all basically the same. It's as if someone had claimed the blazing Paris suburbs of 2005 were the new Bosnia.

The bewilderment is born from ignorance. In Britain, a glamorous melange of White Mischief, Elspeth Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika and a safari trip has passed for "knowing" the country. But Kenya is a complex society with 48 different ethnic groups and the highest internally displaced population in Africa, largely consisting of Somalis and Sudanese. It has some of the biggest shanty towns in Africa and its burgeoning, largely unemployed, population struggles to secure some of the gains of the recent economic boom. It's hard to imagine any country negotiating such chronic insecurity and rapid social and economic dislocation without conflicts of interest flaring up. It's why a close Kenya watcher like David Anderson, professor of African politics at Oxford University, is not particularly surprised by the violence of recent weeks.

Anderson's most important work recently has been the analysis of how violence has become a part of Kenyan economic and political life. In poorer suburbs where crime is endemic and the police ineffectual and corrupt, gangs have proliferated. They demand bribes from local businesses and how they work is not much different from the police or private security companies.

Just as the success of your business depends on paying off such gangs, so in politics your success depends on your ability to mobilise the support of "youth wingers". Unemployed young men are used to protect supporters and intimidate opponents. Their tasks can run from ripping down posters of an opponent to torching a neighbourhood. As the price of Kenyan politics has soared, politicians literally can't afford to lose and gangs are part of the strategy to ensure they don't. Always, there is the possibility the gangs will use the screen of politics to settle their own scores.

This "economy of violence", as Anderson describes it, can mobilise deep resentments along ethnic lines. Eldoret, the scene of the horrific church massacre earlier this month, is famous as a flashpoint. This is the region where Kikuyu, the biggest ethnic group who have done the best since independence, acquired land in the 60s dispossessing the Kalenjin - a grievance that has festered unresolved ever since.

What you end up with in Kenyan politics is a combination of the local and the global - Odinga was already planning to copy Ukrainian-style mass demonstrations in the case of electoral defeat back in November. But calling his supporters (and his gangs) on to the streets unleashes its own momentum of frustration and anger, some of which goes back to generations-old land disputes, while some is much more recent, provoked by the Kikuyu middle class who have done so well under Kibaki.

The violence that results is certainly barbaric - children were reported to have been thrown back into the burning church in Eldoret - but it is not about a primordial African capacity for savagery. In a study of the appalling violence in Africa in recent years, Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing, the author, Professor Christopher Cramer, argues that, on a continent that has seen more wars since 1990 than in the whole of the previous century, violence can be a form of communication of last resort. When all other channels of seeking justice for embittered grievances in a corrupt regime appear to have been exhausted, some will see violence as the only way to protect their interests. That doesn't make the violence right, but neither does it make it necessarily senseless. It can have its own awful rationality.

What we are seeing in Kenya - and in other unstable developing countries - is how human beings behave when faced with the kind of chronic insecurity that globalisation is incubating the world over. Dislocation breeds fear in which old, buried identities become an insurance policy - who looks out for you? - or make you a victim. The outcome is always tragic, and that is what is making so many Kenyans so anxious.

TEDDY AFRO, THE NEW REGGAE GOD OF ETHIOPIA

Around Easter 2007, I found a new friend via my friends myspace page http://www.myspace/ukfridays Her name is Rahel and is from Ethiopia. On the 22nd of December 2007 I had the pleasure of meeting this fine woman whom took me to an "Ethiopian Concert" for that evening. Little did I know that Rahel took me to see none other than " Tewodros Kassahun " ~ A.K.A ~ " Teddy Afro, the new reggae god of Ethiopia!! He is Ethiopia's most successful contemporary music star and has been compared to Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley. My friend, Kamau Crawford, Club Promoter of Progressive Entertainment dubs him the " Micheal Jackson of Ethiopia". One of his tunes - " Halieselassie" is a tribute to the late Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, and a hit in honour of Olympic long distance champion and national hero Haile Gebrselassie.

Here is a video of his track " Halieselassie ":-

DON'T YOU EVER QUIT...

"It's when things seem worst, that you must not quit" ~ Quinton Howell

In our continuous efforts to create a better life for ourselves and loved ones, we at times come up against obstacles and hurdles that seem insurmountable. At first glance we may see no way ahead, especially when our debts are high and the funds are low. And it's at this point of the year, today, when most people who celebrates Christmas start to feel the - " post Christmas blues!" Experts say that the 9th of January is the day estimated that the average person has no money in the bank so to speak. From here on people are finding it hard to keep afloat after splashing out on Christmas shopping and the January sales, and struggling to pay the bills after Christmas is a situation that many people find themselves in.

Don't you ever quit... It is at these testing times that shape you. And trust me, I have had many a testing times in my life ever since a young child up to my present adult life to know what I'm talking about. Throughout my personal and professional life, as an athlete, firefighter and in academia, I have certainly had some testing times that has shaped me into who I am today; and one thing for sure is that I never ran out of hope. My employers call me " Mr. resilient". You can run out of money, friends and resources but don't you ever run out of hope.

I want to share with you an inspirational poem that was given to me by someone very special in my life, and she gave it to me at a time when I really needed it. ( Sorry guys but bear with me and read it - trust me!!) It helped me through some tough times and in sharing it, I hope you may find some inspiration and strength in it too.


When things go wrong, as they sometimes will. When the road you're trudging seems all uphill. When the funds are low and the debts are high and you want to smile, but you have to sigh. When care is pressing you down a bit, rest you must - but don't you quit. Life is queer with its twists and turns, as everyone of us sometimes learns.

Many a failure turns about, when he might have won he stuck it out. Don't give up, though the pace seems slow, you might succeed with another blow. Success is failure turned inside out, the silver tint of the clouds of doubt, and you never can tell, how close you are, it may be near when it seems so far, so stick to the fight when you're hardest hit.

It's when things seem worst, That you MUST NOT QUIT!...

FINDING THE RIGHT LEVER FOR CHANGE...

"Hope is the bedrock of this nation, the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." ~ Barack Obama.

Barrack Obama's language sounds like a real driver for change as opposed to a polititian in his head start for the race to presedency in the white house. Carl Jung, one of the twentieth century's leading thinkers in psychology, once famously said, ' we cannot change anththing until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.' And he was right becuase the first step to coping with change is to accept that it is happening. Then you are in a position to proactively work with it and give yourself choices rather than wait to be on the receiving end of whatever happens to you.

Three requirements need to be in place for change to happen. You must:

1) Want to change

2) Know how to change

3) Get or create the opportunity to change

Ask yourself the question: ' How can you make change easy for yourself?

Apply this to yourself as an individual and your organisation.

Here is Barack Obama's victory speech in Iowa conveying the message of change......

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Happy new year!!

This is my first blog and I'm really excited about reaching the blogging community and the global community as a whole. You will have to bear with the poor writing quality initially as I use a speech to text software which can make mistakes from time to time. This is a great opportunity to put my own voice on the web and organise the worlds information from the personal perspective.

So how was the christmas festivities and new year celebration then? Did you make any resolutions? A lot of people I have spoken to recently just dont believe in resolutions and I can understand why. If it's to stop smoking or drinking the resolution may well have been broken within seconds into the new year!! Better to have progressive goals which you can start at any stage of the year. I now base my goals around my core values and beliefs. I have so many of them but the best way to find your core values is to look at your habbits. So for me, the top five core values would be:-

1) Good health
2) Making a difference
3) Happiness
4) Loving kindness
5) Finacial security

So for instance one of my goals is to holisticly get fit for life. So I would intiate this by looking at my core value of good health and look at where I am now and where I want to be in the futre goal. In other words, take a look at my present habits, then set an objective around my core value of good health en route towards my desired goal to "get fit for life". Well, may sound like a long way around making a resolution but hey, new years eve wouldn't be new years eve without at least talking about them.

That just about wraps up my very first blog on the web but I promise to bring you much more exciting blogs in the future using all the multimedia technology there is out there (You tube, MP3, podcasts, digital photos etc.). Some will be very topical and some light hearted just like this one.It may be a while for my next but WATCH THIS SPACE!!