But I can't tell you that.
Every day, there is more confirmation for me that I made the right choice for my son with regard to homeschooling. Intellectually, he's ahead of his sister and often helps her study her spelling words or understand a math problem. Emotionally, he's very, very young.
Knee-jerk reactions have to be avoided when you have an autistic child. It's easy to look at a kid who is beating the living hell out of a stuffed toy, growling hateful words about himself because he didn't meet his own perfectionistic criteria or because he heard the words "no" or "wait", and think to yourself, little dude needs a time-out. It's much more difficult to consider what he's actually feeling.
To most people, it looks like he just threw a screaming fit because I put his ketchup too close to his green beans. But Little G feels everything so deeply, every emotion and sensation in his sensory world. At all times, he's making a very effortful and conscious attempt to filter the sensory stimuli most of us don't even notice; our brains have excellent gatekeepers that tell us which sensory input is important and which is not. G does not have this feature, so his world is BRIGHT, LOUD, CLOSE, AND IN CONSTANT MOTION. It's like living life with the volume on everything turned up just to the point where it's really annoying and you can barely function unless it gets turned down. Only, he can't turn it down.
And not only is he dealing with the sensory overload aspect, but also the fact that he feels very deeply, very intensely, every emotion that he experiences. He feels emotion to the point of excess, basically, and it is overwhelming - especially when the emotion is anger or based on some injustice, either perceived or actual.
I get all of this, I do. But I also walk on eggshells somewhat. I love the moments where is personality shines through all the junk he has to cope with daily. Even though it looks like he has no patience, I will argue that he has more than most adults need to cope with daily life. But I find myself frustrated sometimes, and today was one of those days.
There are many books on autism, anger, autism and anger, and so forth. And I think I've read a library's worth of them. I've bought just about every children's book on the topic I could find. The results of trying to deal with this from an anger standpoint have basically yielded no results. Conceptually, he gets it; he just can't seem to implement it. So I'm trying a new approach now. I'm going to introduce my son to mindfulness and meditation. He can't change his feelings, but he can change how he responds. Acceptance, like riding the wave to shore instead of trying to fight through it to the other side, may be the path he needs to try now.
I know he struggles. He's my baby, and knowing how miserable he is so much of the time makes me hurt. I want to fix it. The right tools are out there, to empower him. I just need to find what works.
No comments:
Post a Comment