Because your role has become the role of a compensator and not a guide, you start compensating for more and more things and sometimes children grow past the need for compensation.
I haven’t found one paper written, and I’ve read everything, that talks about the potential for remediation of these areas: of neural remediation, of psychosocial remediation. Not one. It’s all about can we teach people other ways of functioning, or just neglecting it completely and not even thinking about it.
They doubt their own inside voice and they doubt their own competence. They don’t doubt their competence with their other children, but autism is a wedge, it’s like a wedge with glue, and it drives families apart.
One of the things we do when we are forming experience representations are always doing enactments. We’re not using narrative words, we’re doing enactments.
What I liked about the conversation was that these six things show a self-reflection, they show the hard work he’s done, they actually kind of document the guiding relationship he had with his parents.
When we’re using our body, we tend to use that part of the brain that manages experiences. Many people with Autism have been taught to use language as a task. As a performance-based measure. They wind up losing the sense of experience. The sense of flow with other people.
The whole point of RDI is that we want our children to become independent in the way that they’re going to become independent is by learning to think and to use their brains in a way that they need to be used.
The main obstacle if you’re a parent is that your child is not coming to you with the excitement, the motivation to grow. But RDI can help.
In RDI we believe there is a parallel process between the consultant and the parent, and the parent and the child… We’re giving them the tools so they can begin to think of their own objectives, they can come up with them.
There’s still an implicit assumption that people with Autism have to fake it, or that if you just get them to behave a certain way, that that’s a sign of great progress. We have to change it.
