- Speaker #0
But I just never accepted it. My parents never accepted it. And I fought back every step of the way.
- Speaker #1
Welcome to NeuroDivergent Spot. I'm your host, Sam Marion. My pronouns are he, him, and I am a Multi-NeuroDivergent Therapist, Speaker, and Creator. My work focuses on all things neurodiversity with particular interest in autism, ADHD, learning differences, and learning disabilities. Today's guest is Ellen Bush. Alan, please introduce yourself to the listeners.
- Speaker #0
Sure. Sam, thanks for having me on your podcast. I am dyslexic. I was diagnosed as dyslexic at a very early age. And I went on to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degree, despite being told, my parents were told, that that was just impossible. And I am an avid skier. And I live in Superior, Colorado, and I ski the Rockies on weekends all winter long.
- Speaker #1
Before we continue, I've got a quick disclaimer. This podcast is for information purposes only and should not be seen as a replacement for therapy, health care, or legal advice. Awesome. I'm so excited that you're here with us. I'll look forward to hearing more of your story as we go through this. And I think that the listeners are going to really benefit from hearing you share. Sure. Sure. Let's jump right in. Question number one, Ellen, is what has your journey with neurodivergence looked like?
- Speaker #0
It's been a pretty tough journey. You know, like I mentioned, I was diagnosed at a very early age, around six or seven. What's really interesting is I was originally diagnosed as ambidextrous. So I'm not sure what that all means, but that's where it started. And then at about six or seven, when I was diagnosed as dyslexic, my parents were sat down and in a parent-teacher conference, they were told that they should focus on finding me a husband because I wasn't going to be contributing to society. College was out of the question. And that's where the stigma and the, you know, really the emotional challenges really began. You know. With that statement, my potential and my future was actually taken away from me.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, that, wow, that's a powerful sentence right there. Your future was taken away from you because that's what your parents were told. I'm going to go straight to the next question because I think it's perfect here. How did the stigma around dyslexia and early experiences in the education system shape your self-perception?
- Speaker #0
Well, it destroyed my self-esteem. I used to joke and say I didn't have low self-esteem. I had no self-esteem. I was treated as a second-class citizen, and I was by the school system. Fortunately, my parents did not accept that, and they fought for me every step of the way and supported me every way possible. And they, you know... When you have a child and you take away their future and you destroy their self-esteem, that impacts and actually changes the trajectory of their life. And I believed I was brain damaged. And that's a terrible thing to impose on a child. And that has had lifelong consequences for me. But I just never accepted it. My parents never accepted it. And I fought back.
- Speaker #1
every step of the way. And I'm glad you fought back every step of the way.
- Speaker #0
I wouldn't be here if I didn't.
- Speaker #1
Right, right. You know, just, and I'm not going to go too long now, because we'll deep dive later on one of these. But, you know, there's a college that I did some graduate work in. It's a little college in New England, in Vermont called Landmark College.
- Speaker #0
Heard of it.
- Speaker #1
It started first, there was a school that somebody developed for dyslexic students. kids. And then at some point they said, oh, well, these kids need a college that knows how to support them. So they started Landmark College. And eventually, in the last couple of decades, other places, other schools have learned how to support dyslexic students as well. And so they've also branched out into other areas in their divergence. But to realize, again, how that's so recent history that people are learning, oh, wait, we should support dyslexic students at all levels. That was a revolutionary idea to carve out, you know, just a few decades ago. Not that long ago.
- Speaker #0
I actually looked at Landmark College when I was applying to schools.
- Speaker #1
I did some graduate work there. I've got a certificate in learning differences and neurodiversity from them. And I actually went and visited at one point as well, just to be on campus there for realizing there's a bunch of students there. I'll say a bunch is like 400 who are being supported as the learners that they are. And being a neurodivergent learner is what makes you a... sort of a mainstream learner there. It's very different. It's really neat.
- Speaker #0
Oh, I bet.
- Speaker #1
So I'm going to keep rolling here. Third question. Your website says that you view dyslexia as a super ability. Can you explain what you mean and how that perspective has influenced your life?
- Speaker #0
Sure. Well, you know, the first thing is learning to cope with it. And it became very obvious to me at a very early age that I had to figure out how to function in a classroom that wasn't designed for me. And so I learned, you know, that takes a lot of intelligence and creative thinking. And I learned how to do that and working hard and I learned how to work hard and persevere. But, you know, when we get into the really some of the things that have been measured. You know, and this is a very short answer, dyslexic people are really good at certain things. Things like creative problem solving, dynamic reasoning. We see patterns and gists that most people miss. And to us, they're obvious. So those are huge assets.
- Speaker #1
I think I've seen statistics like that. the prison population is disproportionately dyslexic but so are entrepreneurs yes they like that and uh i don't qualify as being dyslexic but i do have a reading disability uh where my i have such trouble so it's just trouble with eye tracking my eyes jump out of the page so much and i've still have very low reading comprehension okay and so i realized how i have learned to adapt through life in you know in school i didn't read the passage I read the questions and then went looking for answers kind of thing because it was a waste of my time. And so, yeah, it's a very different approach and learning to solve problems in a different way because the way that you're taught doesn't work.
- Speaker #0
Right, right. And so much of the education system when I went through it was based on rote memory. And I'm just not good at that.
- Speaker #1
But that doesn't mean I should be condemned. Right, right. I'm with you. Part of why I'm not in a hard science in terms of my education background is for that reason. All right, question number four. You said that everything that happened to you happened for you. Can you share more about that and what changed in your life after that moment of realization?
- Speaker #0
My low self-esteem, I'm going to go back a little bit, my low self-esteem really made me the target of predators and bullies. And I ended up in a marriage to a narcissist and had to escape. Planned and executed an escape. And I was terrified. I was also severely traumatized. And when I got out, I knew I was in trouble and I needed help. And I made myself a promise that I wasn't going to ever go through that again and got to work with coaches and therapists and started the healing process. But it was through that healing process that I was able to shake the stigma that I believed that I was broken. And I worked with a coach who just said, you know, I said, oh, I can't do that. I'm incapable. You don't understand. I'm dyslexic. And he was like, Ellen, that is the biggest bunch of BS I have ever heard. You have been gaslighted into believing that. So I had to go through all of those things, hit my surrender point before I could actually just let that whole thing go and heal.
- Speaker #1
You know, right out of grad school, my first job was in recovery, substance abuse. kind of world and and that merged into it was i worked in a women's facility so it immediately merged into also trauma work and so you talk about these moments of surrender that we talk about in the recovery world. But I think there's a different layer of fear that I always saw when we talked about it, especially with women, because of so many shared experiences of disempowerment and not having agency in life. And so further surrender felt like a really, sort of almost an unfair ask in some ways until they've truly had feelings of safety. internally and externally around them. You know, so it's, I think it's always worth noting, we talk about these things that there's a lot of layers to it. There is,
- Speaker #0
there is. I agree with you.
- Speaker #1
I'm curious of the questions that I asked you, is there one you'd like to kind of go back to and let's talk a little bit more. Maybe you want to share a little more depth about.
- Speaker #0
I think about the impact. of these labels, whether you're dyslexic, ADHD, or even autistic. You know, if the belief system in education is so destructive and so traumatizing, and I don't think they understand how deep that is and the impact that they have. You know, like I said, I had such low self-esteem that I was vulnerable to predators and bullies. I even ended up with two stalkers who I never dated, but they honed in on that low self-esteem and low self-worth. I was a target. And it was that low self-esteem, low self-worth that came from the education system that created that.
- Speaker #1
I wrote a proposal for an educator's conference just a couple of days ago as we're recording this titled something to the effect of the trauma of being neurodivergent in a neuro normative education system.
- Speaker #0
You are right on the money, I can tell just by the title.
- Speaker #1
And it comes from talking to people. I'm a therapist in private practice, and I work with a lot of families, kids, adults. I tend to say I support a whole family, not just one person most often. But also, I do consult with some other organizations. So I sort of hear from different sides that it is, there's a lot of trauma. And Not meeting the sort of the normative expectations of how the materials can be delivered. You know, things like that. We can talk about universal design for learning and we can teach things in different ways. We can allow different ways of being assessed or doing an assignment. And we're moving in good direction, I think, in some places. But it's still really difficult and it still takes the buy-in. every person at the school that if I was going to bet, and I was curious about this, did you have times, maybe certain years or grades in school when there was that one person and a teacher, somebody that you did connect with, who you realized that person, they did believe in you. They saw potential that others said that wasn't there.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. And I would say I had several and I was fortunate for that. You know, I'll never forget her, Mrs. Gillis, my kindergarten, first and second grade teacher. You know, they didn't let me learn how to read until the end of second grade. They held me back from learning to read. Because of the ambidextrous diagnosis, they believed that I couldn't track across the page. And I didn't have a dominant eye. That was the theory at the time. But she never treated me that way. I never felt that second-class citizenship from her. It came mostly from the administration and from the special education teachers. I was never going to amount to anything, and I'd get that condescending pat on the head. And then through middle school, you know, I had some really great teachers. And through high school, I had one or two. You know, I was really fortunate in some ways of going to a school in Westchester County, New York, New York City suburb. So, you know, a very affluent community that had really good schools. I can't imagine if I didn't, if I wasn't in that school system, what would have happened.
- Speaker #1
You know, Ellen, it just dawned on me that we probably should have paused at the beginning to define dyslexia. Because I think it's... You're talking about stigma. I think dyslexia is highly misunderstood. I agree. So I'm curious. I can talk about it from an academic standpoint. Right. But I'm curious if you would share for a minute, like, what is your experience with dyslexia and how do you define it?
- Speaker #0
My experience, I don't know if I would know how to define it, but my experience is Language is my second language. I'm a visual thinker. So I think in pictures. And I think what happens with children as we're learning language, if we're naturally visual thinkers, we have to learn to convert that into language. Does that make sense?
- Speaker #1
Yes, it makes a lot of sense to me.
- Speaker #0
Even Einstein was a late talker.
- Speaker #1
You know, I think that the sort of the common understanding of dyslexia is that you look at the page and letters scramble on the page and they turn backwards, things like that. And some people sort of have a similar feeling to that experience, but almost at its core. So the academic description of dyslexia is it's a challenge with the phonemes, meaning the sounds. And. Keeping them consistent or the brain connecting them, meaning that if you see the word that's spelled C-A-T, cat, and you've learned what each letter sounds like, then you see, if you saw it for the first time, the word, you know, B-A-T, bat. But because of phonemes, those individual sounds don't project across. It's not like you just switch out the first sound from a k sound to a b sound. It's a... all new sounding out B-A-T to see what does it sound like and you know and so every word is truly a new word to learn and there's not the same level of projection for the dyslexic student as there is for for most other students and that's so much of the core challenge of learning to read takes much longer exactly because it's you're learning every single word sounding out every single word you and there's not kind of the shortcuts that most people are able to take um in terms of projection there and so that's the you know so the the pictures the the visual learning some of that that makes perfect sense because those do project much more consistently for people and i'm very much a visual person a visual learner um that you know that was some of the early ways i started understanding my brain before i understood uh that i'm that i'm autistic before i had language For me to learn about my reading disability, I was sitting with an adolescent client who had a diagnosis, who was describing his reading, and I'm sitting as a professional, and I never heard of this. My mind was just blown. I'm trying to stay grounded, thinking that's exactly the struggle that I have. And I stayed up till midnight or later that night reading about it. You know, what is this? I never heard the language before because the system didn't pick up on it. My grades were good enough, things like that. So, yeah, I just want to go back and define that. I appreciate you kind of sharing your experience with it as well, realizing that some people may have been listening to all this with an incorrect assumption in their mind.
- Speaker #0
I took one study in the UK that, and the UK seems to be the most advanced with the research that I've done in understanding dyslexia. And in one... public survey that they did like something like 80 of the people of the public felt that it was just due to laziness that hurts that's a gut punch yeah because anybody who knows me or
- Speaker #1
has read my book i am anything but lazy so and yeah that goes back to speaking the problem solving you know you were talking about earlier um the different ways of finding solutions and what the super abilities that you found through this path real quick before we wrap up, would you mind sharing a little bit about what, about your book?
- Speaker #0
Sure. So the name of my book is Disempowered, but the D-I-S is crossed out. And it's essentially my story of how I moved from being completely disempowered by the education system to healing and becoming empowered. And the reason for writing the book is to help other people. You know, I'm passionate about helping people who are dyslexic understand that they're not broken. You're actually pretty extraordinary. You just haven't figured it out yet. And then also, you know, because of my situation with my ex-husband, you know, dealing with psychologically or physically abusive marriages, they usually go hand in hand, and helping women. Because I didn't understand what was happening to me, because it's so subtle, and over such a long period of time. And, you know, the reason for writing it is just wanting to help. And a lot of my learning about life came through learning through challenges like Outward Bound, learning how to, you know, going heli skiing, getting certified to scuba dive at 17. My father sent me on all those adventures because he understood. that the really important learning happens outside the classroom. So there's a lot of stories woven in with that and what I got from those adventures. And I continue to take on challenges and adventures.
- Speaker #1
Awesome. I'm with you. I have learned a lot about this world outside the classroom. I took myself on a lot of adventures as well. So where can people find the book?
- Speaker #0
Sure. It's on Amazon. Barnesandnoble.com. It's also available on Audible because it's not narrated by me, but it is on Audible for folks who, and I know a lot of people who are dyslexic are uncomfortable with reading, which is one of the reasons why I did the audiobook. And I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram. If you just Google me, Ellen Bush, but don't forget the C. In Bush, it's like the beer, not the president. You'll find me pretty easily.
- Speaker #1
Got it. And we will definitely link the book and the contact info in the show notes. So I appreciate you sharing that as well. So Ella, thank you so much for being here, for letting me pick your brain a little bit about your experiences.
- Speaker #0
Thank you for having me as a guest. I appreciate it.
- Speaker #1
Thanks for listening to Nerd A Virgin Spot. I'm your host, Sam Marion. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope that you'll subscribe. And if you know somebody who could benefit from hearing Ellen share, please share this episode with them as well. And if you're looking for a speaker or trainer, reach out and see how we can work together. You can find me on Instagram at Nerd A Virgin Spot. And from there, you can find all my other places online.
