Engage My Brain

Imagine if every time you wanted to say something, you had to carve it out of a block of stone.

Communication is sometimes compared with playing tennis – volleying the ball back and forth. But imagine playing tennis – in a hailstorm of tennis balls. Where the thing you're trying to focus on is just overwhelmed by countless other things coming at you, with equal weight. And even though you know what you want to do; what you want to say; what you want to accomplish; there's enormous interference between your best shot, and what actually comes across the other side of that net.

That's how people with autism experience their world. And we know that because that's what they consistently tell us when they have any ability to communicate. It's also what we're starting to piece together from the clues we get from genetic and neurological research.

See, autism isn't a lack of intelligence. It isn't a lack of ability to think. Autism is a difference in the pathway – between the outside world, and what a person experiences; between what a person intends, and what they're able to demonstrate.

For most of us, that pathway is fairly short. I speak, you hear. You intend, you do. But for a person with autism, that distance might be the journey of a thousand miles, in completely unpredictable weather.

I used to have something I called my “shoelace indicator.” When my son was in grade school, he used to love to kick off his shoes. And you could always tell whether the person who was working with him that day “got it.” Because if they didn't get it, they would immediately try to fix the behavior. So he would come home and his shoes would be tied in triple knots and sailor's hitches. They would have fixed the behavior – missed the child entirely – but those shoes would be on (and it would be hard to get them off without a boy scout manual).

But if a teacher got it, they must have thought “I know that kids with autism sometimes have sensory issues – maybe even wearing shoes is uncomfortable for him.” And so his shoes would come home tied safely, but loosely enough that he could slip them off during class and slip them on when he went out to the hallway for the next class. Because that teacher wasn't interested in fixing a behavior. The teacher was interested in making sure that every one of the kids in that class was accepted, understood, and successful, and was willing to make the adaptations to make that happen.


 

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