Skipping Steps The Untoward Consequences of Cross-Dominance (Part 1/4)

Below you will find a 4-piece story of Frank. He has had a horrific history, which he explains very well and it shows the primal process clearly. My discovery of what was wrong in his brain goes again to reinforce the necessity for a rounded education for all psychologists. We need to understand so much of the human system, its biology and neurology apart from how to do the therapy. It took 72 years of his life for this diagnosis, which has radically changed his life in every respect. You will now read how that happened. 
 Dr. Janov

This might be the most difficult essay I have ever done. What I’m attempting to present here is all but ineffable for me. I suffer from cross-dominance, and I’m in the process of trying to ameliorate its effects on my life. I find it difficult to describe a dialectic process when I’m in the middle of it. So far this has fallen out to be a very difficult blessing. I am going through so many, and such rapid changes that at times I feel like I’m living in a cement mixer. Fortunately, the changes are for the good, even though being in a face-off with myself is somewhat excruciating. My life is currently the best it has ever been. Throughout, however, it has been the curse of Sisyphus, rolling that big rock up the hill only to have it come crashing down again, leaving me broken. And, I still must say, at this young and tender age of 72, should I croak tomorrow, my epitaph would read: It Wasn’t Worth It!

But since I’m here, the rest of my life is worth it. I continue to relive the pain of my life in order to reap the resulting benefits, relief, and relaxation. I’ve been at the Primal Center for over 6 years, and in countless ways it has changed my life. I came to the Center expecting to die soon. Primal Therapy was the last thing on my bucket list. But after a year or so, I realized that my life had just begun. And it’s a new life, a good life full of zest. I decided to apply to graduate school and on my 69th birthday I began. Now graduated, I’m an intern at the Center.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! Primal training opens up a whole new realm with demands that require a new depth of integration. And I soon found out something was really wrong with me. It is very clear to see from the outside, but I am on the inside. It interferes with my capacity to do good therapy. Watching me in the videos of our trainings is a shock. Art said, “You know, this guy’s brilliant but you’d never know it to talk with him.” Then one day at staff meeting, Art said to me, “Aim at me as though you have a rifle in your hands. I did, and Art responded, “I knew it. You are cross-dominant!

What the hell is that? I’d never heard of it (and I have an MS in clinical psych). Simply put it means, that I’m right handed and left eyed. I’m also left eared and right legged. Art told me to start researching it. It turns out that there are a lot of people quite concerned with this seemingly minor anomaly. So I read on.

Curiouser and curiouser. They were describing me. One researcher wrote this:

“When my inattentive son had his vision therapy evaluation the optometrist found that he was left eyed and left eared but right footed and right handed. The optometrist reported that this explained the following symptoms:

* A tendency to misplace objects in his personal space

* A tendency to rotate his papers strangely when writing

* A tendency to tip his head 40 degrees when writing

* Difficulty with left and right side of letters ("Mommy is this the way the letter 'P' goes??")

* Difficulty making decisions

* Poor handwriting

* Difficulty with Organization

* Difficulty with gross and fine motor movements

* Learning difficulties

* Difficulties performing task that cross the body midline”

I have the same dominance problem as the boy and all those things apply to me along with a host of others that I’ll address along the way. I found out they have treatments for it – exercises to reverse the dominance of the eyes. Boom! That sinking feeling in my stomach grabbed me. I’m left eye dominant because it’s the only one I have. My right eye is plastic. Just before my 11th birthday, my brother shot me in the eye with a bow and arrow. So I must remain left eye dominant, and I certainly don’t have any interest in switching the dominance of my hands.

Unfortunately, cross-dominance is not quite as simple as my description. It is really a case of neurological disorganization that causes both input and output to come and go through a maze of pathways that can get mixed up. It probably goes all the way back to the womb. Testing for it best begins with the infant and the way he crawls (cross-crawl or homolateral crawl). If the crawl is homolateral, it indicates disorganization in the Pons. ( The Pons primary function seems to be one of integrating signals from the cerebrum to the cerebellum and sending them to the proper parts of the body. It is the first level at which cross or mixed dominance occurs. The Pons are also involved in breathing and sleep regulation. ) Then when the child is creeping on his hands and knees, the same test can be used to test for disorganization in the Limbic System. Of course none of that is of use to me here. No test back then and I had parents that made it very clear to me that all my weirdness was of my own making and completely my fault. Another important factor is that it can go unnoticed until the person is under stress.

The first indication of my neurological disorganization is that I can never tell my left from my right without stopping to think. Usually, if I’m given information that something is on one side or the other, I write my name in the air. (I write with my right hand.) And speaking of writing: Most people’s handwriting slants forward, or backward, or straight up and down. My handwriting, which seems to abide many contrarian masters, does all of the above within the compass of any single word. The order of letters in each word is also constantly mixed up. I am likely to put the last syllable of a word in the middle. I also mix up the order of words in a sentence. As I write this, my backspace key is the most active key on my keyboard. Moving the mouse with any precision is also very difficult for me. I have little power over my finger’s clicking or double clicking. This same disorganization also affects my capacity to read. I made it through graduate school using audiobooks. And if Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic didn’t have the book, I would scan it into my computer with my OCR, then convert it into audio, and then listen to the computer voice read my books as I read along visually.

Worse for me than all of this, is my speech – worse because I don’t have a backspace key for my mouth. I can’t unsay what I’ve said. I can only look more foolish trying to recover and get it right. I have long referred to myself as being fumble-mouthed. I lose words in the middle of a sentence. I hesitate and search and use the wrong words, lose my place in the sentence, forget what I’m saying, and when people answer, I often realize that what I thought I said is not what they heard. Hence, I am constantly qualifying and requalifying and re-requalifying what I say. Frequently, my mind goes blank, when asked a question. I’m often so busy inside my head, trying to straighten things out, or scanning for the lost word, or distracted by something said that takes me down a whole different road, that I miss what is going on around me. When in college I would record my lectures so I could get what I missed when I got home. I should add that my cross-dominance problems arise or are exacerbated when I am even mildly stressed (which, of late, with training, is most of the time).

My dictionary defines the word bizarre as markedly unusual in appearance, style, or general character and often involving incongruous or unexpected elements; outrageously or whimsically strange or odd. That is a description of me. That’s how I write, think, and talk. It makes for a great sense of humor as well as creativity, but can be severely detrimental to the conduct of my daily life. The humor is my best defense and it has helped me out of many a fix, but then people have a hard time taking me seriously, when that is what I need.

Two books that I wrote paint a lucid picture (from different angles) of my hemispheric tragedy. You don’t have to read beyond the titles in order to see this. The first book is a group of satirical essays titled Swift Solutions! A Genteel and Ingenious Guide to Social Engineering Accrued from a Compilement of Newly Founded FRAGMENTS on Matters of Considerable Import, Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind by Carkan Moil, A Man of Moderate Spleen And a Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandvotery of Jonathan Swift. This book clearly exposes my cross-dominant pathology. Since humor, satire, and irony seem to be right brain progeny, you might call it my right brain reaction to my left brain world that makes no sense to me. However, I like to think of it as calling the bluff of the left brainers. A second book, a novel, titled Tales of Tainted Mother’s Milk, Volume I: BOILS should give you a cryptic glimpse into both hemispheres of my blighted brain.

Added to this is a constant first line intrusion that makes my life a perpetual string of crises. Those about me are continually telling me to slow down, take it easy, pay close attention to what you are doing. It’s like I’m falling off a skyscraper with people at the window on each floor, yelling at me, “Slow down and it won’t hurt so much when you hit the street below.” This brings with it the problem of impulse control. When you are fighting for your life, it is difficult to wait your turn. And my process is struggle and fail. I’ve learned from reliving my birth that I struggle until I can’t do it anymore, and then give in to sweet death. In the meantime I live in chaos. I’m always trying to catch up as my environment becomes more and more disorganized. I’ve constantly got a hundred projects going that I’ve got to finish right now.

Directly connected to this is akenisia. It is a rolling, wrenching, jerking, weakening, anxious, helpless feeling in my guts and down my arms and legs, forcing me to move. I used to call them my gwizhy-gwizhy feelings. These feelings keep me from being able to sit still. It has me chewing my tongue constantly. So my current diagnosis is ADD, stealth Dyslexia continually reinforced and held in place by Cross-Dominance. This after 6 years of the best therapy in the world – UNFAIR! Worse for me, I have been living my life oblivious to most of it until recently. If you have no memory of being any other way, it seems normal. It reminds me of a passage from Robert Klane’s book, Where’s Poppa? There Louise tells Hocheiser why she broke up with her last boyfriend: They had beautiful sex and afterward she looks over and sees a big pile of feces in the bed. She says to her boyfriend, “You took a dump in my bed!?” and her boyfriend answers, “Doesn’t everybody?”

Art writes about the intellectual therapist who does therapy like a one trick pony. Well, unfortunately, I am a too tricked pony with all the mechanics of my internal motions gone awry. Most people lost in their left brains have no idea what it’s like to have access to feelings. But I have access on all three levels. I have great Primals with solid connections on all levels. I’m flooded with insights that continue to change my life moving it forward. Over these past few years I’d come to assume that I know myself and my defense system. And now this! I found out that there is a whole world of pain that I’ve yet to feel to get to the bottom of this, without a clue about how to deal with it, how to get to it, how to free myself from the devastation it brings to my life.