No Boundries?

I was just watching a BBC programme concerning autism and how it affects development as well as the child and their family. The vast majority of the points raised were true and excellent, but there was one mother who was entirely ignorant of the way she should treat he sons' mild autism.

Being a mother of two autistic boys must be tough, no doubt about it, but there were a couple of things that this lady thought that cannot be excused by stress. Firstly, she seemed to feel that her son "feels no emotion" after he asked her a question. He asked what would happen to him if she died. She cleverly replied with "we have a wonderful family..." he said (in typical autistic tendency) "OK". She told this tale in an interview within the programme.

So far, so good, but it all went south from there. She went on to say that he felt no emotion about the plausible death of his mother. This, I know, is not true. She appears to think that autism is linked to feeling no emotion. She appears blind to the fact that autistic people feel emotions as well as the rest of the population, but they find it near impossible to express or portray emotion. Her son knew that all people die at one time or another, and he wasn't really asking who would take care of him, but rather, would they be able to do the job as well as a mother? I can give you this as a point of absolute truth: autistic people feel emotion, often more than 'neurologically typical' people (I shall discuss my reason for the quote marks in some other post). We often have outbursts of emotion. If something is wrong in our lives, we tend to get very angry, then break down and cry a lot. Only once these powerful and damaging emotions have been dealt with can we look at the problem with an eye to solve it as opposed to dealing with the effects it had emotionally. People who feel no emotion or compassion are not autistic, they're psychopathic.

The programme then showed the mother trying to deal with such an outburst. The child in question nearly ran from her grasp onto a road while a car was coming. She did not even tell him off. It may seem wrong for me to criticise her on not telling an autistic child off, but it is really quite daft that the boy nearly killed himself and was allowed to think that he was entitled to do so again if he felt the same as he did the first time. If an autistic child does wrong, you have to shout at them. One of the main things people notice about us is that we cannot pick up subtle hints about others' emotions. Therefore saying "don't do that again" in a voice near a whisper meant that "I'd really prefer it that you didn't" as opposed to "never do that again or the consequences will be massive". In this situation at least, the child needed - for their own safety - to be shouted at, to associate the road with bad behaviour. The child needed boundaries.

I could have forgiven the incident as a one-off, perhaps caused by the presence of the camera had a similar incident not happened again, and again. One of the boys had a meltdown after school, (stresses of the day) and kicked hit and pinched his mother. There is no warrant for this kind of behaviour in a child who is to be exposed to mainstream education. The mother did nothing save from quietly asking him to stop (while he screamed so loud you only heard her when he drew breath) and waving her arms to ward off his blows. That is ridiculous. She was well within her rights to yell over him and gently restrain him and stop him from attacking her. Even a slap on the bum to show that hitting others just because you are having a bad day is completely wrong and hitting your mother is inexcusable. The child would have cried, but then apologised and been better off because of the incident - they would understand that hitting was painful and would not do so again.

I understand as well as anyone that when you are autistic and you have a bad day, you have a really bad day. However, no matter how bad things have got over the last two years, I have never hit anybody in anger. I could even argue that it was longer than that as I was defending myself on the last occasion, but was doing so with hatred. In short, I was taught at a young age that violence towards others due to my anger was inexcusable and that helped shape me into a better person.
Let me know what you think of that lady and her methods of controlling her child's autism in the comments box. Other questions are more than welcome!

P.S: It is really worth noting that there was another mother of a more challenging autistic who was way better than the one I discussed here.

How to do the Impossible.

In this post I am going to try to help you archive the impossible - to change yourself. I am going to help you with the identification of a problem in your personality, (be it an autistic trait or not) and then explain the way I deal with such a problem.

How to choose the piece to focus on:

Trust me when I say that there will always be somebody who does not like a part/parts of your personality. Trust me when I say that there will always be somebody who will point your "flaw" out to you. Trust me when I say that you can never change enough to make them happy with you.

Trust me when I say that trying is a waste of time.

 Friends, family, schoolmates and enemies will see things in you that they think you should change. Listen to them. Absorb what they say, then ask yourself three key questions:

1. Has the person had a bad day and are picking out your flaws to make them feel better? (even the best of people are prone to this)
2. Do you think that they are worth changing for?
3. Do you think that you even want to change that piece of your personality?

In answer of the first question, everybody has rubbish days. It makes us feel sadistically better to point out others' flaws - in the short term - as it makes our day seem better as we can see that we are not the only flawed ones. On days like this, the best course of action is to remove yourself from humanity in general. If somebody else has one of those days and chooses you as their scapegoat, listen, absorb, consider, then later (the next day's a good time) question them as to whether they meant what they said, and if they still want you to change the thing. This is a good way to keep friends as they feel they have been able to avert your anger/sadness and help you improve yourself.

The second question is easy to answer. Change for the family you love. Change for the friends you will carry for the rest of your life/for many years. Ignore the classmates you neither like nor dislike. Ignore the temporary friends that are convenient (we all have them). Ignore the bullies and the enemies who wouldn't like you even if you were a saint. Sometimes, it pays to be careful of taking the advice of even the closest of friends because they really want you to be the best you can be, even if you sometimes don't want to go in the direction they want you to. Overall, do they matter enough to you to put a whole lot of energy into making them happy with you?

The third question is the most important by a huge margin, but it is the most difficult to answer. This is because it is two-fold in nature - its all very well deciding for yourself what you want to change to make yourself happy, but a huge part in happiness is the others in your life. Also remember, we may be highly dependant on others for joys in life, but we cannot be happy with others until we are happy with ourselves - its a bit of a vicious circle. My advice in this situation is listen to your heart. Your heart can tell you if you are happy. Always remember that even if your current friends do not appreciate you, there are others out there who will.

Beginning a change:

It never happens overnight. It takes time, perseverance, patience from you and your friends and family. To take an example, I was once accused of having a very poor sense of humour - even nasty. Friends told me this, I considered it, then I acted. The way I did so was to split the problem up into little pieces, then tackle them one after another.

The first piece was my tendency to latch on to one person and make jokes about/concerning them for an hour. I did not even realise I was doing so, until I looked into the matter. When I did notice that, I began a system - I would joke about one person, then move on to another, then the next, etc. I was very careful not to make fun of one person too heavily.

Once that was dealt with, my next bitesize piece was to reduce the overall number of jokes. I did this by saying one in three of the jokes I would see. This meant that other people in my group of friends would have more of a chance to make their own jokes, levelling the playing field.

The last thing I did was to diversify my jokes. Before, I made sarcastic jokes or classic teenage boy sexual innuendos. Now, I recite written jokes, dabble in irony and use jokes based on over-exaggeration. I even bridge into surreal humour, as I never have before. Even as I write this, the alien on my shoulder squibbles his appreciation!

The most important thing about starting a change is to plan the change. I changed my humour through a check-list, if that works, great. If it doesn't, mind-map what you want to do, spider diagram or even bullet-point the changes you want to implement.

Keep at It:

At times, it will feel impossible, implausible, insane. The thing that separates the best people from the worst is a dogged determination to make ourselves the best we can be. To make us happy with ourselves. Lesser people simply shrug things off when the going gets tough, or neglect to try at all. Others simply retreat within themselves and become shadows of their potential. It does not have to be that way. Everyone has something about themselves that they don't like. Change it. Step by step. Let me help you, together we can achieve the impossible - we can be happy with ourselves.

If you have decided to change a bit of yourself but you don't know how, ask me for help in the comments box or contact me on Google or private message me. Also feel free to question me about autism or other things in the comments box. If you would prefer anonymity or not to appear on the blog at all but still want me to answer questions, use one of the above methods to get in touch. Thanks a lot for reading this, hope it has helped!

Dealing with the Diagnosis

I have had a long break from this blog, partly due to the fact that I was getting no feedback as to my blog, partly because of other things happening in my life, but mostly because I did not know how to begin to tackle the issue which I intend to focus on most - dealing with the diagnosis. I shall now make an attempt to begin to do so.

One of the many interesting ironies of the condition is that quite often, though not always, people with autism see things as either right or wrong, good or bad, black or white. However, autism itself falls into a grey area. It is wholly impossible to separate the bits that are autism and the bits that are not. You cannot simply draw an imaginary line down the middle of your mind and say, all that is on this side is bad, and all that is on the other is good. The same is true of autism. Because autism is a condition of the mind, it blurs together with the mind and is impossible to see and quantify.

This can often lead to great confusion in understanding it and how to deal with it, particularly to the logical minds that often characterise autistic people. Very often I have found that confusion and anger go hand in hand and that is what happened to me.

I struggled desperately to come to terms with what autism was. I could not. There was no-one to tell me, 'That's autism and you cannot help it, that's autism and you can help it, that's not autism and you have to change it'. It drove me wild. I needed someone to understand. Not be understanding, to understand. To have been through it and to tell me what's what. there was no such person. The anger that was born of this confusion built up inside me and bubbled over the top. I pushed my friends away and I had regular shouting matches with my parents.

At last, everything reached a head when I was walking home from school. For months now, my friends had been pointing out things I did wrong socially. At last they hit a nerve, and I broke. I yelled myself hoarse, I laughed hysterically, I opened my arms to the world and spat in its face. Finally, I collapsed, weeping on the grass. I cried for a half an hour. I felt like nothing, but once I was done, I saw everything more clearly, no longer clouded by anger and self-pity. I was given a window of clarity, and I used it.

I wrote down everything I felt, and I can see no better way of explaining how it felt than to simply write out those words anew.

"Every day is still a battle. Every day. Every night I lie awake, I cannot sleep. I feel  cannot do anything right. I have lost my way. I have no idea how to find it again. I feel I am adrift in a sea of expectations. Now that I have been diagnosed, it feels like everybody has more expectations of me. I have more expectations of me. I think everyone expects me to fight this, and win. I do not know how. I am an expert at seeing the strengths of others" (here I went on to write a list of people around me whose redeeming traits I saw) "However, I seem unable to find my own redeeming traits. I can see only pessimism, an argumentative streak and a sense of humour most people hate. I know I should get rid of those darker traits, but I cannot."

Here I reached a turning point: "But I WILL keep strong, whatever happens, I will not allow myself to fade into the background. I will learn from my mistakes and grow. If I should lose friends because of it then so be it. I have been alone before, I can survive it again. I WILL keep on fighting this autism thing, until I am happy that I have gotten it beaten, until I feel that I am who I want to be, not who I am told to be".

That was the point that I began to understand autism. You cannot learn it, you can only learn to deal with it. When a trait you do not like crops up, you smash it. You keep on smashing traits until you are happy with yourself. At that point, the anger dropped away, replaced by a determination. The strongest in my life. I may be unble to understand autism, but I can and will combat the bits of me I do not like, autistic traits or not.

That is the best advice I can give to anyone who finds out they are autistic - do not try to understand it, it is part of you, but instead, improve you whole self. That way you can not only fight the elusive autism, but you can also improve youself.

There will be days where it will feel impossible. There will be days when you think that you haven't the strength to continue. But there will also be days where you win. Those days are worth the bad ones.

As always, question me in the comments, I will help in any way I can. If you would like help nuetralising a particular trait, I'll try and give you tips if I can. If I cannot, I will talk you through the situation. Do not feel alone like I did, let me be the person who understands.