Solutions and Compensations

Solutions and Compensations

When a person struggles with learning, whether it is a child or an adult, the choices offered for assistance are often very limited and limiting. People can find the process of finding the right support daunting and discouraging. Often even if given a diagnosis, families are told that the problem is life-long. The options for support are compensations. These can be in the form of providing extra time to accomplish tasks, an aide, focusing on strengths and working around the weaknesses, providing a quiet space, and assisted or adaptive technologies.

Compensatory strategies can provide temporary relief but are not methods that work to resolve the problems. Rarely is a family told that learning difficulties can be remediated or greatly improved because of the fact that brains can be strengthened. The consistent reply that Alexandra has had when she asks people what their goals and hopes are for the person who is struggling is to find long term solutions that help that person be able to live a life of independence and ease.

Alexandra understands that difficulties with attention, reasoning, other cognitive processes and poor academic performance, are a result of underlying weak, unregulated or dysregulated brain areas and that the solutions are not to offer compensations but to focus on the problems and strengthen the brain. This can be done through neuroplastic techniques that work to improve the way the brain is functioning. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change, structurally and functionally, throughout life, in response to experience. She has worked successfully with very young children through to older adults; from people who have a number of difficulties to those who only have a few areas of difficulty standing in their way; to those who have more severe difficulties and to those whose difficulties are minimal but who feel they still impact their progress. Her experience and insight, due to this broad-spectrum experience, is invaluable.