While having dinner with a friend recently, he shared advice he gave one of his grandchildren, let's call it a boy who was having a difficult time coping with the variety of stresses that can affect a child in the early elementary years. The difficulties he was having are a bit besides the point for this discussion.
He told his grandson 3 simple rules of life:
1. Smile and the whole world smiles with you. Cry and you cry alone.
2. If you look for trouble, there will always be people around willing to help you find it.
3. When you are happy, you win, when you are sad, you lose.
I see a great deal of wisdom in these rules:
1. Smile and the whole world smiles with you. Cry and you cry alone. Having a positive attitude is a critical skill to child development (and not too shabby a skill for the rest of us to work on either.) My friend's grandchild often would cry as a way of getting attention. At some point, if you cry a lot (or complain a lot for the adults who need translation), people will begin to tune you out, or at least discount the veracity of your concerns. Ultimately we can find ourselves pretty isolated, wondering why we no longer have the attention to our concerns that we believe they merit. It can easily lead to the lesson learned in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" fable.
Loneliness is a horrible place to be. Crying alone all the more so. Most of us have experienced times of loneliness and know about its isolation and sadness. It can create its own whirlpool of stagnation, with loneliness leading to tears that are ultimately shed alone, which is sad, depressing, and leads back to more loneliness.
Learning how to smile and, as a result, creating a positive attitude is always a win. We all know people who are amazingly bright and cheerful (you may even be lucky enough to be one of them!) We all can cite examples of how much the success of a smile brings success in relationships, business and life. We see the proof of this daily.
2. If you look for trouble, there will always be people around willing to help you find it. My friend's grandson had a habit of getting attention by instigating conflict with siblings - a trick as old as the hills. Provocation breeds conflict, and then the opportunity for attention. The boy was repeatedly provoking his siblings in a fashion that left him the victim (see #1) and he couldn't find a way out of it. Learning that trouble will find you much more easily if you are looking for it can assist in teaching the child to cease from looking for trouble.
My friend notes that these first two points are behavioral. Smiling is a behavior, as is "behaving badly" (a phrase often used by Ross Greene - see other posts on his work) is also a behavior The next one, he cites is emotional, drawing on our natural draw towards competition.
3. When you are happy you win. When you are sad, you lose. The "win - lose" paradigm is simple, yet elegant, to borrow a phrase. Its simplicity is in its view of causality. Happiness causes winning, sadness causes losing (so to speak.) The elegance is that what we win is so variable depending on ones' station in life. For children it might mean getting the positive attention that is a normal craving. For adults its often much more subtle, more varied, as the things that make us feel good are so often less tangible. But success, no matter its shape for form, no matter the age is a win.
I'm planning on using this and will let you know how it works. So far, for my friend's grandson, its working quite well - after his mom remarked about what a lovely sparkle he had in his eye at the playground, he explained to her in his own words, that when he's happy, he wins.
Monday, May 23, 2016
Monday, May 16, 2016
High School Social Rule Confusion for High Schoolers With High Functioning Autism
As with all posts, materiel changes have been made to protect confidentiality.
Jim is a pretty typical high school junior. He's quite smart, particularly in science and math and is quite socially awkward, not in small part due to his longstanding diagnosis of Asperger's (now categorized as "high functioning autism" (HFA) but let's not get too stuck on labels here.)
Though Jim's never dated, he has a couple of geeky friends who are boys with whom he gets together to play video games and discuss their books replete with complex development of other worldly characters. Fantasy and science fiction have an almost Biblical status for Jim and his friends, to the point that they sometimes forego their school work while engaging in reading or playing video games consistent with their passions.
So Jim was caught off guard recently when one of the girls in school inserted herself into the mix of Jim and his friends. She continued what adolescents have been doing with one another since the dawn of, well, since the dawn of adolescent life; she began to "split" Jim and his friends for no clear reason. (I theorize that the girl may have been exhibiting her own brand of flirting with either Jim or his friends, but didn't have the sophistication to do it kindly.)
She began by engaging Jim in a discussion about his close friend. Jim, naively fell into the trap of saying something negative about his closest friend that the girl immediately brought to his friend's attention. Thus the split; Jim and his good friend were now fighting, the girl is able to create a connection with the friend. A play that's as readable as a sacrifice bunt moving the runner to second base, and often as effective.
What Jim's struggling with his that he was the sacrifice, or to put it in group dynamic terms: he was "triangulated out" of the group. By aligning with Jim's friend against Jim, the girl was able to create a close(r) relationship to his friend and create animosity from the friend to Jim. The friend believes that Jim betrayed him, all this at the hands of the girl. It's pretty easy to understand, unless you're Jim.
Jim's thinking is fairly concrete, not unusual for someone with HFA. Jim is forlorn, he misses his friend, and just doesn't understand what happened. These are emotions with which he's unfamiliar. They were tight, and now they are not. He was misunderstood, why can't his friend understand? Why is his friend taking so long to get over the fact that they were played against one another (the girl, apparently in this case, has moved on.)
This kind of social difficulty is quite common for kids on the spectrum. He's stuck on the betrayal he feels from the girl's distortion of his words. He's sad at the potential for having lost a friend. He doesn't know what to do. And I don't have a simple solution.
Tony Attwood explained the experience of this population well in one of his early books on Asperger's when he said (I believe in the name of one of his clients) that being here on earth feels like being a Martian who's arrived on a strange planet with strange rules. That is, the rules here are unknown, mysterious, random, and the learning curve to adapt to this civilization is long and complex. This is the dilemma Jim's going through. He's pained by not understanding the emotional gamesmanship that are the complexity of adolescents, and feels victimized. We discussed the "rules" of hurtful communication like this - indeed they are hard to understand, but Jim's smart, I think he'll do OK. Like the rest of us, he needs time to heal.
Jim is a pretty typical high school junior. He's quite smart, particularly in science and math and is quite socially awkward, not in small part due to his longstanding diagnosis of Asperger's (now categorized as "high functioning autism" (HFA) but let's not get too stuck on labels here.)
Though Jim's never dated, he has a couple of geeky friends who are boys with whom he gets together to play video games and discuss their books replete with complex development of other worldly characters. Fantasy and science fiction have an almost Biblical status for Jim and his friends, to the point that they sometimes forego their school work while engaging in reading or playing video games consistent with their passions.
So Jim was caught off guard recently when one of the girls in school inserted herself into the mix of Jim and his friends. She continued what adolescents have been doing with one another since the dawn of, well, since the dawn of adolescent life; she began to "split" Jim and his friends for no clear reason. (I theorize that the girl may have been exhibiting her own brand of flirting with either Jim or his friends, but didn't have the sophistication to do it kindly.)
She began by engaging Jim in a discussion about his close friend. Jim, naively fell into the trap of saying something negative about his closest friend that the girl immediately brought to his friend's attention. Thus the split; Jim and his good friend were now fighting, the girl is able to create a connection with the friend. A play that's as readable as a sacrifice bunt moving the runner to second base, and often as effective.
What Jim's struggling with his that he was the sacrifice, or to put it in group dynamic terms: he was "triangulated out" of the group. By aligning with Jim's friend against Jim, the girl was able to create a close(r) relationship to his friend and create animosity from the friend to Jim. The friend believes that Jim betrayed him, all this at the hands of the girl. It's pretty easy to understand, unless you're Jim.
Jim's thinking is fairly concrete, not unusual for someone with HFA. Jim is forlorn, he misses his friend, and just doesn't understand what happened. These are emotions with which he's unfamiliar. They were tight, and now they are not. He was misunderstood, why can't his friend understand? Why is his friend taking so long to get over the fact that they were played against one another (the girl, apparently in this case, has moved on.)
This kind of social difficulty is quite common for kids on the spectrum. He's stuck on the betrayal he feels from the girl's distortion of his words. He's sad at the potential for having lost a friend. He doesn't know what to do. And I don't have a simple solution.
Tony Attwood explained the experience of this population well in one of his early books on Asperger's when he said (I believe in the name of one of his clients) that being here on earth feels like being a Martian who's arrived on a strange planet with strange rules. That is, the rules here are unknown, mysterious, random, and the learning curve to adapt to this civilization is long and complex. This is the dilemma Jim's going through. He's pained by not understanding the emotional gamesmanship that are the complexity of adolescents, and feels victimized. We discussed the "rules" of hurtful communication like this - indeed they are hard to understand, but Jim's smart, I think he'll do OK. Like the rest of us, he needs time to heal.
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