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Located in Albuquerque, NM, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)

A couple of years ago I worked with two young boys who were diagnosed with dysgraphia. Dysgraphia is a medical diagnosis of a person’s inability to control a pen or as they write, because of a neurological disorder. But what if these two boys, around 14-years-old, were suffering from holding onto the pens too tightly and that their hands were exhausted and in low grade spasming?

That is how I worked with them as an Alexander Technique teacher. What I saw was that as each boy wrote, they held onto the pen for dear life trying to stay in control of their writing. I don’t know which came first – feeling out of control in their writing and then holding onto the pen even tighter to stay in control, or squeezing the pen too tightly to try to control the pen and then losing control of their writing.

It didn’t matter, but what did matter is what I did. With each boy, I had them focus on how little it took to hold onto the pen and then write a word, with no concern for how out of control they felt or how the penmanship looked. In both cases, it really caused each boy to feel out of control, as if they couldn’t write. But they already couldn’t write! If they weren’t willing to risk doing something radically different in their writing, they were going to feel crippled for the rest of their lives.

I saw it as a matter of control. What I mean, is that by diagnosing what was a postural and poor writing habits issue as a pathological problem, it made these boys a victim of circumstances, which meant they had no choice as to whether they could write with ease or not.

I didn’t buy this, and I didn’t want them to buy this. In both cases their postures were so collapsed, and their hands were so tense as they wrote (death grips on the pens), that it had to be about how they were approaching writing – with fear and trepidation.

I gently made each boy aware that it was possible for them to learn to write effortlessly, but that they had to be open to the possibility that it was about how they used the pen, and that they weren’t damaged goods. Both boys were open to this, and as I worked with each boy sitting fully upright at ease and with barely holding the pens, they both began to see that it truly was about very bad habits. In other words, each had flashes of how easy writing could be, and how well they could write.

There was another factor in all of this that made me see their dysgraphia as reversible, they both were very driven and very intense kids, wanting to excel at everything they did. At 14, they were both already thinking about college.
The results were that they both let go of their fear and tension as they wrote, and both gained a gentle control over their hands and writing, if not their bodies. Remember, I said they were driven to excel, and they weren’t quite ready to excel being gentle to themselves.

What I just described in this article is what I write about and teach in all of my ebooks, from violin, to piano, to running. In all of my ebooks on this website, I describe in detail how to change the things you do that interfere with your ability to run effortlessly or play a musical instrument effortlessly.