Susan Senator

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountain
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There’s more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line.
–Indigo Girls

There are three major components to understanding another human being: close observation of his behavior and drives; recognizing what is similar in ourselves; and then feeling what the truth is. I truly believe that if we understand what we ourselves do, our motivations, agendas, drives, and needs, then we can start to understand the people in our life, on the same meaningful level.

I’m still trying to understand why Nat has these disturbing fits. Often they are around the dinner hour; last night, for example, he worked himself up to terrifying screaming because he wanted Ned to use the chili powder, but Ned did not want to. We had to let him scream it out, pretending it wasn’t happening. Do not reward the negative behavior; reinforce and reward the desirable behavior. You think I like that? A behavioral solution? No, I don’t. But what else can others suggest? Particularly the ASD readers. Give me real advice I can use, if you can. I try keeping things very regulated and regimented; I tell him “first — then;” I talk him through the upsetting thing by repeating what he wants to hear. I hug him when he asks for a hug, which he often does. But I just found out today that these tantrums also have been occurring on the bus as he sits in the line waiting to be brought into school. He pinched his driver today, too. She told me how she responds to his screaming, and it sounded like what I do. We calmly and gently reassure him many, many times that the thing he is waiting for will happen in so many minutes. He likes the certainty of exact time, even though we are not sure that he can actually tell time by looking at a clock. He nevertheless has a real feel for the passage of minutes, hours, days, and weeks. And Denise, the driver, is now going to try to reduce the waiting time by arriving later in the afternoon and earlier in the morning.

With all that in the back of my mind, I discussed some of my own issues with my therapist today. How sometimes continual success and peace raise my anxiety levels, counterintuitive though that may seem. It’s like when things are going too well, I find myself thinking, “Wait, wasn’t there something that was bothering me, though?” And I feel the flicker of anxiety, worry without a name or shape. Then I search for that thing, plumbing the dimmer regions of my brain like a tongue hunting for a cold sore.

We talked about how this anxiety probably arose long ago, when there was some kind of disconnect between something I did and how it was received by my family. Such anxiety, I think, goes way back to childhood feelings of rage and impotence, the most primal fears of abandonment and death that we experience while very young. But we learn over time that we will survive this or that disappointment, betrayal, anguish. But I may not have learned it so well.

I flashed to Nat, suddenly, rather than any association with my own childhood. I thought of how much he is achieving in school lately; his last progress report had 17 goals achieved and only a few progressing. He is successfully employed by Meals on Wheels, he is mastering his community purchasing, his telephoning, his typing, his reading comprehension, his sports, his conversations, his interactive leisure time. All day long, from 8:30-3, he has teachers asking him to try this or do that, and when he does, they praise him. We see it here, too. So much great language, willingness to do his chores, his routines.

So then I wondered, does Nat, like me, feel a heightened anxiety that accompanies his own success, strengthened by his tiredness from all the hard work he does? Does he feel afraid of all the change he himself has wrought, through his determination during the school day? Does he feel, irrationally perhaps, that he will be cast into a scary, unknown, place if he allows change to occur? Because those are my feelings, so I wondered if this kind of anxiety for the next step — literally, the next phase, the transition — causes him to flip out.

Sure, we are not the same person, and perhaps he is actually blessed, like his father and brothers, with a stronger core. But I suspect he and I share a fragility that is shaped by our neurology and our childhoods, somehow. Anyway, I feel it, more than know it but sometimes that is closer to the truth than anything the data can show me.