The Fabric of Autism by Judith Bluestone

Author:Judith Bluestone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapphire Enterprises LLC

It is exactly this kind of bravery that parents of autistic children must muster. They had built for themselves the expectation of a pattern or style of family life that did not include the challenges of raising an autistic child. By realizing that if your child is stuck in a pattern—truly stuck because of some irregular neurophysiological irregularity—then you must break out of your old pattern of behavior and negotiate with your child.

You must find what works.

Why could Maria "come out" while so many others remain "stuck"? Maria's parents diligently and playfully implemented their full integrated HANDLE program with Maria, strengthening her weak systems, enhancing the connections among systems, incorporating many activities to differentiate one body side from the other in movement and to reintegrate the two sides with rhythmic synchronicity. Others do not buy the premise that working on seemingly unrelated developmental activities and changing nutrition could help their child make the behavioral changes they desired so she would fit the pattern they had for her.

Although patterns can help give order to our world, they can be distracting if we need to find order and they give us none. But it is pattern and congruity and constancy that we each seek. That is probably one of the reasons those of us who fall outside the pattern of society are tweaked and teased until we fit the pattern better. The only problem is that we lose our sense of ourselves in the process, because our processing is not understood.

As a child, I spun the wheel of my tricycle around and around, feeling and seeing how the movement of my arms and the resistance of the pedals affect the rhythmic or dysrhythmic movement of the wheel. I began to build a unity of sensory experience. If I was interrupted before this unity occurred, I needed to revisit the experience. Sometimes, just because so many other things in my day had jumbled my senses, I needed to return (to re-treat) to the activity that unified them.

Someone decides that these are perseverative, obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Most assuredly. As I have an obsession to live and a compulsion to do whatever I must to make sense of my world through my sensory systems. And I was allowed to create my patterns and play them through.

Frequently today, however, in attempts to find externally imposed solutions, someone decides if the doctors can't stop the behaviors, not even with psychotropic medication, then maybe a therapist can incorporate them into an activity with some redeeming social value. One problem with this is that the amount of feedback this activity gives is not "right," and this activity has not been generated by the intention of the child who is asked to perform it. If he does not get enough feedback when he performs the constructed activity, he will seek more feedback, and then be admonished for using too much force, for being destructive.

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