Progress with the Therapist
I met with A.'s new therapist on Monday, in order to tell her a little more about A. before she meets her. I really do like the woman, not only because she seems to know what she's talking about and understands important things to focus on, but also because she has a very calm, gentle, and laid-back demeanor. The woman has the sort of voice that could be used in healing meditation scripts -- it's a soothing and melodic voice that puts a person immediately at ease, and she phrases all of her sentences with a clarity that makes it almost impossible to misunderstand. I think all of these factors are going to help A. work very well with her, especially in one-on-one sessions.
One of the more interesting facts about A. is how she relates to people who have certain traits. There are certain personalities that cause her to socially shut-down, certain personalities that don't engage her at all, and certain ones that she seems to best "hit it off" with. A. seems to have difficulty getting along with personalities that are loud and exuberant, full of jokes and sarcasms. She often misunderstands these individuals, and she will pull away from overly-excited demonstrations of affection. On the other hand, if an individual shows absolutely no interest in her activities and never tries to engage her, A. simply ignores them -- if the other individual makes no effort to try to engage A. in conversation, games, or interests, it takes a very long time for A. to "warm up" to them, or to simply take any interest in their presence. In order to win her over, an individual has to walk a very thin line between being overly-interested and uninterested in A.'s behavior, needs to know when to demand interaction and when to "fall back." The people who have grown closest to A. over the years have demonstrated incredible intuitive understanding of the "parallel play" that A. enjoys, especially at first -- sit in the same room, watching A. quietly, occasionally commenting on something she is doing, or playing quietly alone with an activity until A. becomes interested. Moreover, the people A. seems to "hit it off" with the best always have very calm, laid-back personalities, and soft, unassuming voices. I think it's easier for A. to feel more at ease with people such as this, and I think more boisterous individuals tend to overwhelm her. I think this therapist will definitely be someone who fits into the type of personality that A. does especially well with, so I'm interested to see how their sessions progress.
My own conversation with the therapist this Monday was centered mainly around schoolwork -- what subjects A. liked the best, and which ones caused her the most grief. We got off on this topic because I'd mentioned the fact that A. absolutely hated going to school, and how difficult it was at times for me to completely empathize because I'd always loved school going to school, doing homework, and learning things. It was interesting, because as I had this conversation with her therapist, I found myself better understanding A.'s problems with schoolwork -- why she liked what she did, why she had trouble with others. For example, A. loves science, because it's often centered around the things she finds most interesting -- her obsessions with space and animals, her interest in gathering facts about subjects such as those. A. has a difficult time with math, however, because she doesn't enjoy solving mysteries or puzzles or trying to "figure things out." She does great with anything that plays off of pattern recognition, which is why she does so great in language arts and why she used to really enjoy math when she was younger. I'd always wondered what changed -- how it was she used to love math and be really strong in the subject when she first started school, and how now she had so much trouble with the subject. Talking with the therapist, I realized that as she grows older, math relies less and less on pattern recognition, and more and more on problem solving skills. A. is brilliant with the former, and struggles with the latter. I hadn't really made that connection until this particular conversation, and it makes perfect sense -- solving a mystery demands a great deal of abstract thinking, and is often counter-intuitive to many basic patterns. It would make sense that she would struggle more with this subject as she advances.
I think that understanding this particular issue helped equip me with tools to assist her in homework later in the week. Being able to "see" and "understand" A.'s perspective of math problems, instead of trying to push her to "understand" the abstraction behind the basic concepts -- to really "get" what she was doing with each problem -- I instead focused on helping her memorize the patterned steps for "solving" a problem. I would also try to rely on visuals to better "explain" the problem whenever possible -- like illustrating her word problems, for example -- but I was more focused on utilizing her strengths in memorization and pattern-recognition to help her gain confidence in her ability to do the math work. Of course, this week we were working with fractions, which I've personally always felt more confident with, so that may have something to do with how well our homework sessions went. That being said, it still helped for me to keep in mind the way A. thinks about things, and how difficult it is for her to work beyond her realm of memorization and pattern-recognition.
A big question I have, now -- is it possible for autistic individuals to ever truly grasp abstract thinking, or do they simply get to the point where they memorize enough patterns to be able to sort of "simulate" that sort of thinking? I know that I always had the impression that A. learned language by memorizing all of the different possible patterns of speech and memorizing the various situations each pattern was generally used. When she first started speaking in complete sentences, it was almost entirely made up of functional echolalia for several, several years -- and even now, when she tells stories or jokes, I notice that she falls back into those basic tendencies -- she'll repeat a joke she's heard several times verbatim before she seems to actually "get" it. As an outside observer, it just seems to me that A. has a brain that's wired differently, and that her learning process is always going to work from the patterns onward. So I wonder -- is abstract thinking at all like a muscle we can exercise? Should I continue to push her to understand the greater concepts behind the patterns, or should I place even more emphasis on the memorization of the patterns itself, and push off abstract thinking in general as something she simply can't do? Considering I'm not autistic myself, I feel pretty unequipped to answer that question. Still, something to ponder as we move forward.