"Turning Point in My Life History..."

Rosie proudly says that today's been a turning point in her life history... her hair has been 'rescued from the clutches of brown.'

Yep. My kid has purple hair, courtesy of her older sister.

What I think is rather wonderful about it is how deeply overjoyed she is - she really, really hates being thought of as ordinary in any way and is in ecstacy over such a reaffirmation of her self-image. I'm seeing this upsurge of pride and confidence that I hadn't expected.

"If she'd been a rabbit," said her sister, "she'd have been doing 'helicopters' on the lawn." For anyone without a pet rabbit, that's when they're so overjoyed about something that they jump vertically and spin in the air with their ears whipping 'round like helicopter rotors.

I just asked her to do two pages of handwriting practice, which usually results in a good deal of carrying-on and moaning... she didn't bat an eyelash. Grabbed the pages and found a place to work. LOL!

Still Sorting It Out Sometimes

I've had one of those dismaying realizations about myself - the kind where the idea is not new, but the implications suddenly become much more clear. A friend of mine, who works in the same field as I do, was talking to me about a deep insult delivered to her in the workplace by the management. As she's telling the story and pauses for my comment, I latch onto the part that would insult me - that the perpetrator is making an error and is forcing a stupid and wrong business process on my friend for which she will then be responsible. "No," she shouts, "don't you see what an insult this is to me in my position? How could they do this to me? They don't respect me at all." It turns out she's much more upset about their treatment of her in forcing something on her at all, rather than the fact that it's a flawed process with damaging consequences.

I realize that the timbre of my response, and her reaction, is connected to a couple of other times when a (female) friend has been annoyed or angry with me. Situations where I've focused on the problem rather than on the emotional response of my friend. I did realize (slowly) after the incidents I remember in the past, that my friends had NOT wanted me to help solve the problem, but just to listen. Or so I thought. Apparently it's taken me another twenty years to realize that I have to also be sure to respond to the emotional content that drove them to need to talk in the first place. My husband does this very well. Why am I only figuring this out now, and what am I supposed to do about it? How the hell do I know when the emotional content is more important? And, more importantly for the relationship, how am I supposed to show this? I do feel for my friends when they're upset, but I guess I'm not showing it correctly.

In response to this, my husband pointed out: "There are two parts to a problem like that. (1) the thrown stone, the cause of the problem. and (2) the broken window, the emotional effect. The latter can be addressed by saying to your friend, "And you feel.... fill in the blank with the emotion she is describing. Or usually your friend will do it herself."

Ah, I see how he has better command of this. It's that he's more analytical in his approach. So maybe in the argument we had yesterday morning, where I told him, infuriated, that he sounded exactly like a psychology textbook, the accusation was (a) perfectly true and also (b) not a valid criticism since it obviously works well.

It's as I pointed out to my friend yesterday. I'm really, really good at analyzing a situation or interaction and seeing motivations and reactions and implications - behaviors. I am not so good at acting appropriately within one. Or, I suppose, it's what another friend told me, that I shouldn't be a field anthropologist because I analyze people like they're bugs, and nobody's going to like that. Well, thank god I never intended to do ethnography in the field, which always struck me as a damned uncomfortable position to put everyone into. I was always more interested in the biological basis of behavior and social network analysis.

Character insight, theory of mind

One of the researchers on ASDs I had read said something about social skills, communication, and theory of mind having a swiss-cheese quality for aspies. Here are a couple of exchanges over the last day or so that I think might illustrate this. I post this because it was helpful to me to read accounts like this when I was first trying to figure out what was going on with Rosie's AS diagnosis.

Yesterday, I was reading The Princess Bride to Rosie. It was a section about the character of Prince Humperdinck; how he loved to hunt and kill things, and how he called his sweet, loving stepmother "E.S." for "Evil Stepmother" because the only stepmothers he knew were the evil ones in fairy tales.

"Huh." said Rose about the stepmother. "He sees her through, he calls her E.S. because he can only... he can see her through his..."

"Experience?" I said.

"Yes," said Rosie.

"Wouldn't his experience tell him that she was really nice?" I asked.

"No, no, not experience then, I mean... he only sees her through himself. He judges her by his own evil."

I was a bit speechless.

"What?" she asked. "You have the expression on your face of being surprised because I said something unexpected."

"Well," I said slowly, "that's an... um... unusually sophisticated insight into his character."

She made the noise that ends up being written "Pshaw!" and said "He's just an evil man, that's all. Come on, keep reading!"

For nine, that's a pretty damn complex analysis. So yeah, I was surprised.

Today, though, she had a meltdown in her writing class because she had not understood the teacher's expectations or instructions, and had been unable to realize that she could or should ask for clarification and help. I was massaging her back to relax her while she told me about it. "Can you scratch my shoulder?" she asked. I skritched at it. "Scratch where it itches!" she exclaimed.

I paused. "Rosie," I said.

"Mm?"

"Rosie, how do I know where it itches? How do I know that?"

She turned her face to me, a complete blank of puzzlement.

"Rosie, I don't know where it itches, because I'm not you. I don't know unless you tell me."

"Oh!" she said in a slightly embarassed tone. "Right. I forgot."

Which tells me that while she usually does remember that another person has a different perspective - and usually I see this play out in very insightful ways - it is definitely something that she has to work to remember.

I do recall that Rosie's older sister did not think this way, but I wish I could remember my own thinking at this age. Or read other examples like this of kids both NT and AS.

IEP Redux!

We received a phone call half an hour ago from Rosie's old school - it seems that since we're homeschooling through a county program ("technically" still public school) that the district requires an IEP every year. Wow. It was like my head exploded and flew around the room. My tension level just about hit the 36,000 foot mark, like a thermometer stretched up to clear the Himalayas. After spending the last half hour raging at everything that provides the remotest sense of tension or unpleasantness in my life, I think I've brought myself back down to a hover... oh, say about ten thousand feet maybe.

Gosh, it would be great to take a stack of cream pies to the IEP and pitch one into the face of every district clown that's going to show up.

Got Through the Holidays!

Well! The usual blend for Christmas - stressful, happy, peaceful, contentious. No great miseries and a good amount of fun, so I call it successful. Hopefully I'll find a day to take down the decorations this week!

Today was the kicker, though - I had a panic attack on the freeway, the first one I'd had in a while. I had commuted long distances daily on crowded freeways for several years, a few years ago, and after a while I just could not cope. In my disbelief over this "weakness" I continued commuting until I manifested all kinds of physical and psychological symptoms, and really have not ever gotten over this. I gather that this was just about literally my neuroreceptors burning out from the stress hormones. It took this period in my life to recognize that the tendency to anxiety issues on both sides of my family actually applied to me, too. I've avoided freeway driving since, especially into the city.

But this panic attack today caught me by surprise. I'd driven into the city twice last week as well as yesterday, and I was fine, though it was a little tiring. Today, I started to notice a stressed state of mind before I left - mostly manifesting as anger leaking out onto available issues, but I could tell that it was related to the anticipation of driving. While driving I had a short burst of despair/depression that I was able to connect to the freeway trigger, but it was brief. I was just telling myself a few minutes after that, that because I could observe these things, I should be OK as long as I didn't drive this distance more than two days a week, when the traffic started to slow and close in, and that's when I just completely lost my hat and freaked right the hell out. Wow.

I got home in fits and starts and a long stop in a bookstore. I took a 'nice cup of tea' there because I know that black tea reduces the cortisol levels in the bloodstream. Got home eventually, but was still feeling pretty clenched up (could not swallow!) until I downed that old standby, the .25 mg of xanax. I have extraordinarily conflicted feelings about the xanax. On one hand, it has been a godsend the last couple of years once I got over my initial reluctance to take anything, because I have not found relaxation techniques I have used in the past to be at all effective. It would have helped me through the Bad Commuting period of my life if I had been willing, though it also might have prolonged it. But I hate - hate! HATE! the idea that I go running for a chemical remedy, even in tiny controlled doses. I'm not even sure it's the chemical I object to - because it does stop the cycle of stress damage; in that sense it's not much different than taking a 'nice cup of tea.' (More effective though!) It's the idea that I am, in any sense whatsoever, dependent on a "drug" to control my state of mind. (Though xanax is addictive, I'm not worried about that kind of dependency. I've hoarded forty .5 mg pills over the last year and a half without making much of a dent in them; physical dependency is clearly not a problem I have.) Maybe I'm making too big a deal, but OK, let me just register my opinion on this thing: I don't like it, damn it.

One Year Later

It’s been about a year since the school and pediatrician determined that Rosie’s autistic, and I at least seem to have gone through the process I expected. I knew there would be a wave of assimilation and identification with the new reality to go through, perhaps some anger… stages in the process. And so there has been, but I feel lately as though I’ve come through it and am looking at it in a more matter-of-fact way, so I conclude that this initial period is over.

At first, there was the initial surprise and rejection that I know Rosie’s dad and I both went through – the whole family, in fact. How could her character traits and behavior possibly be labeled autistic? She was just like her dad and I, just a little more so. Following an intense period of research, we realized that of course the traits we shared were actually characteristic in their pattern, and Rosie and her autism became the lens through which we scrutinized our family. Rosie’s dad acknowledged that for some time, he had recognized that she was exactly like he had been as a child, but without identifying it as autism. Since his childhood had been traumatic, he had been trying to protect her, and most of all, not treat her like his parents had treated him. (In this, he has been profoundly successful.) It took me longer to realize that my own childhood traits followed a similar pattern.

Looking at my wider family, for a long time, I had already been aware that the men in my father’s family had something a little odd going on that usually landed them in a great deal of trouble around adolescence. I had actually looked at the autism criteria several times over the years with my brother in mind, but kept dismissing it since his traits weren’t strong enough to be classic autism. Plus, my brother is athletic and I thought at the time that all autistics had motor control difficulty. I found autistic traits in so many of my relatives that I started to worry that I was overapplying the criteria and seeing everything as relating to autism. However, even with a cooler perspective, I can see that the pattern of traits is still there. It’s as much a part of my family’s genetic heritage as our shared bone structure or blood type.

In seeing autistic traits as part of a continuum of human behavior, I went through a period of anger at the way the rest of the world viewed autism that told me that I was identifying pretty strongly with it. I’ve always had this me vs. them resentment; in some ways, this was just another way to fuel it. I don’t think that this anger is over, to be honest, only that this week I’m not feeling it.

This week, this is what I feel: so what? Autism explains my eccentric family. Some of the family members have a diagnosis, some are not about to go get one, some are misdiagnosed, some are subclinical for Asperger’s and are only missing a trait or missing a matter of degree. To my knowledge, no one has a diagnosis of classical autism. Same for my husband’s family, and same for several other families I know where one or more members have an Asperger’s diagnosis, though classical autism pops up in other families with this pattern. To me, that is really a strong indication that the autistic pattern, in humans, is effing normal. It’s part of the range of possible characteristics, and once enough genetic research is done, we’ll likely find that there are other patterns of characteristics other than autism that are triggered by strong genetic combinations or by external factors, too. So… so what? Let’s just get on with being brilliant, and weird, and obsessive, and cranky, and antisocial.

3 Things to Think About

I am surprised, again. (By so many things, LOL, but here are the 3 for today.)

The other day, my older daughter failed to recognize her uncle, an aspie, in a public place even though she actually interacted with him. This was distressing to him, of course, but hardly less distressing to her! I related to her a couple of similar instances of my own; one where a programmer friend and I missed each other when we planned to meet, though we apparently sat next to one another while waiting; and reminded her of another frequent happening where my family members don't see me moving around the house, if I'm doing it when zoned out and intensely preoccupied. So today, in clicking through the links of a psych researcher in Wisconsin who is championing neurodiversity, I found a blog with a link reading "Autistic Superpowers: Invisibility." I clicked, and assumed it was referring to social invisibility or invisibility with regard to healthcare - something more political. But no, it was about exactly this phenomenon of being not present, or being overlooked...

http://aspergersquare8.blogspot.com/2007/08/autistic-superpowers-invisibility.html

The second surprise stemmed from an excited call from my father about a newspaper article that referred to measurable auditory processing delays being absolutely correlated with autism. He related it to his ability to take a continuous string of auditory input and process it accurately with a long delay period. I ran across a different article today that probably refers to the same research:
http://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=20307

Dr. Roberts and his colleagues have found a slightly different pattern in the magnetic activity from the brain in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) than normally developing children. “Children with autism respond a fraction of a second more slowly than healthy [sic] children to vowel sounds and tones,” Dr. Roberts was quoted as saying.

No comment on that "healthy children" business. No, wait, I am commenting.

The third surprise was another article, reporting on an upcoming publication from researchers who claim that a low frequency magnetic field around the brain can relieve hyperactivity and sensory overload in autistic people. (Interestingly, reported in a business journal first. A marketable therapy, of course.)

http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2008/12/01/daily12.html

“Our results are preliminary, but they show a great deal of promise in reducing the severity of symptoms that people with autism find most distressing without affecting areas in which many autistic patients are gifted,” Casanova said in the release.

While I'm relieved to some extent to see this researcher's sensitivity, I have to still consider symptomatic treatment with some trepidation. There are areas where people who are hyperactive and hypersensitive have powerful advantages - read any of the business research on hyperactive entrepreneurs, for example. I worry that overzealous parents will rush to desensitize children who could learn to manage and benefit from their gifts.

Not that I've achieved anything appreciably beneficial with my own sensory sensitivities. (Unless you count being able to smell rattlesnakes, which I think has been a definite evolutionary advantage for my genetic line...) I wouldn't want to desensitize even my hearing, though, which is what gives me the most trouble. It makes a lot more sense to carry earplugs and avoid painful stimuli.