Susan Senator

I love feeling like this, on top of my game, enjoying everything I have to do today.  Delighting in my coffee, my cheese, eggs, my workout.  Working on my new novel.

But I’m at the mercy of moods, and generally not circumstances.  There is not much reason why today feels so much better than yesterday — there’s even snow falling today.  I hate the fact that there is this unseen force within me that controls so much of how my day feels.

Mood issues run in my family.  What about Nat.  ?  How would I know?  I suspect that any of Nat’s neurological/emotional fragility comes from me, although many would point to Ned as the origin, because he is such a geek.  Someone just asked me the other day if more Jews have autism than other groups — huh?  I barely knew what to do with that one, any more than when someone tells me that autistic people are more beautiful than everyone else.

For a lot of Nat’s life, I suspected that he could benefit from therapy.  I mean traditional psychotherapy, once a week, connect-and-cry with a paid professional kind of therapy.  But anytime I’ve gone looking for such a person, the Behavioral Bias crops up.  As soon as the professional finds out that Nat is autistic, they want to do behavioral therapy on him.  They want to analyze his behavior. Only once did I find a psychotherapist who treated autistic guys like Nat, but he was put off by my honest admission that Nat sometimes, well, you know, sometimes he would become so upset that he could become aggressive.  Hmmm, said this well-thought-of professional.  Have you ever considered behavioral therapy for him?

But it’s the aggression and anger that made me want to get him psychotherapy!!!  Maybe he just needed to connect with someone who would help show him that he was okay, and that if he wanted to change, he could.

Blah.  Of course Nat has had behavioral therapy.  That’s been his primary mode of learning.  That, and one-to-one connection and persistence.  But I wanted him to have the other kind of therapy, talk therapy which has helped me and so many others so much.  Even though he does not talk much.  Surely that can’t be the issue:  don’t non-verbal people get psychotherapy sometimes?  If they don’t, why not?

Why can’t psychotherapy be considered for someone who is autistic and can’t really speak?  If one is human, and has outbursts or mood swings, then shouldn’t they be offered the same kind of treatment as anyone else, autistic or not?  It’s just like what happens with the autistic folks who have GI issues; so few people thought to check into tummy aches, etc.  Again, the first rule was always to treat anger, outbursts, etc., as behavior issues.

The assumptions we start with make all the difference.  You might be starting with the assumption that a person is autistic and that means 1) he doesn’t experience emotion the way we do; 2) he doesn’t care about others’ states of minds so he can lash out if he wants to; 3) he is working with an inferior/disordered neurology and so he needs us to wrench him into proper shape.  He needs a black-and-white way of dealing with things because he simply does not see gray areas.  Therefore, you must use behavior modification.

But if your assumptions are 1) He doesn’t appear to react the way we do; and 2) that might be because he does not understand enough about human interaction because of his language issues; and that 3) he feels the same things everyone else does, and probably wants the same things, then you might realize that there damned well should be a way that he could have psychotherapy for his outbursts/mood swings.

Basically, if you start from the standpoint that he is just a person, and as mysterious as any other person, with the added difficulty of language barriers, then your mission — to help support him, help him understand you and himself, and then, to connect with him — that task has just become a whole lot easier.

The problem may be as much with the biases of the professionals as with the autistic person himself.