Musicians with Dystonia Bulletin Board

Within the realm of focal dystonia, anticipation becomes our enemy as well as our friend. It starts to work against us.

A few months ago I noticed my fingers started to curl in involuntarily whenever I reached for things or tried to perform a simple manual task with my fingers - like grasping a cup, flicking on a light switch or doing up a zipper. Why was this, I wondered? First of all FD in musicians is usually (not always) task specific, and secondly my FD had been slowly improving for ages, I didn't have this problem of it 'spreading' when it was at its most severe.

I realised the answer was anticipation. I had been doing more work with my dystonic hand lately (ironically because I was encouraged by the improvements I was making) and so was more concious of my FD as I went about my daily tasks.

My brain 'knows' my hand doesnt work 100% and at some point my hand tensed a little when I was about to do something with it. That reaction of my hand quickly became established - any attempt to interrupt the clenching/curling once the movement began was of course futile and inevitably made it worse as the usual compensatory movements from other fingers kicked in to try and rectify the problem.

I noticed that the more concious I became of the problem in advance - Ie "here I am about to zip up my jumper, Uh-oh, that will give me problems" the more it became a problem. The dystonic reaction was stronger. However, if I was busy with my mind on other matters and maybe missed a few days of my FD retraining on my guitar, I couldn't recall this reaction in my hand actually happening when I went about daily tasks.

This was really a chance to observe onset of FD (well actually my condition spreading to a new realm, but you know what i mean.) I decided that this new unwanted behaviour needed to be nipped in the bud.

The trick was to interrupt that anticipatory reflex. However, and here's the crunch. The signal to tell the muscles to contract goes out before they actually contract. Once contraction initiates, it is too late to try and prevent it. The microsecond you have *intent* to do something, the signal is sent out, and for us with FD that means the signal is already sent out along the wrong pathway.

The solution was having no intention or will to do the action in the first place. So for example, instead of thinking about turning on the light then reaching for it, I told myself "I am going to to reach out and touch the light switch and thats all, I am not going to turn it on, I do not want to turn it on". This intent was true, I wasn't merely thinking it.

Once I could do that without the fingers curling, it was a simple matter to progress and actually turn the switch on. I would touch the switch intending to go no further, pause, then decide to turn the light on.

A few months later, this unwanted spreading has virtually gone. I can reach for cups and light switches with no FD movement whatsoever. Shirt buttons are a little more fiddly, but slowed down and relaxed its fine.

I started to apply this attitude to my retraining, just letting my fingers fall onto the strings and do what they want, but with a notion of a certain repeating arpeggio pattern in my head. It was an interesting sensation - I was playing faster than I had been for years, very quietly and lightly, and of course missing or crashing into strings, but with a LOT more freedom and independence. The trick was to keep any kind of intent at bay, if I tried to play with any more volume or play with a concious effort to pluck the strings more firmly, the dystonia was soon evident.
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That was several months ago and this experience taught me a lot about FD. It also supported the ideas of Farias and Fabras and as I have said here before, the ideas found in the 'inner game of music'.