From diary of a mom: Autism is not cancer. Autism is not something that we are working to excise from her body. Autism is part of the framework of who she is. I’ve said this too many times to count, but I’ll say it again: Autism is pervasive. It’s right there in the definition – Pervasive Developmental Disorder. That means that it pervades EVERYTHING she sees and tastes and hears and smells and feels and processes and, yes, thinks. Everything that she interacts with, everything she experiences passes through the filter of a brain wired by autism. As such, kicking its ass means kicking HER ass. It doesn’t make sense. I heard a story at a conference I attended a couple of years ago about an autistic young man who put a gun to his head. A therapist had thought that some off-the-cuff CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy) might help him understand his challenges, so she told him that his autism was a ‘bad guy’ in his head who wasn’t letting the ‘good guy’ (presumably his nonexistent “non-autistic” brain) do the things it needed to do. So he put a gun to his head. Because as a literal thinker, he thought it would be a good way to “kill” the bad guy who wasn’t letting the good guy do his work. The ‘bad guy’ was his brain. His brain was him. Killing the bad guy would mean killing himself. You can’t tell someone to separate how they exist from who they are. It doesn’t work. It’s not real. He put a gun to his head to kill the autism. So telling my kid that she’s kicking autism’s ass because she’s doing well? No. Just no.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 22:47:05 +0000
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