11 Oct Advancing With Asperger’s

Laura O’Connell’s son has come a long way in his social relationships.

Some years ago, our son Aidan had difficulty settling into school. At first, we put this down to moving interstate too frequently. By the time he was in Year 4, he’d been to five different schools. But we soon realised his behavioural problems were more deeply rooted than this.

A diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome set our heads spinning. Life for us as a family had to change, dramatically. My first reaction was to read everything I could about the syndrome, in order to understand what was happening in Aidan’s mind.

Following this research, I changed the way I ‘did’ life. Some of the changes I made brought about instant changes to Aidan’s behaviour, and some brought more stress to me than I needed. To reduce this stress, I came up with a scoring system. I evaluated the importance of the change that needed to take place on the basis of how significantly it would affect Aidan’s future. I gave the issue a score on a scale of one to 10 – 10 being most important. Any change that rated a score under eight I ignored, but I pushed the eights, nines and 10s, and didn’t back down under any circumstance, no matter how much stress and anxiety it caused Aidan.

The system worked!

We consulted with a leading expert in Asperger’s syndrome, and discovered that anxiety and anger controlled Aidan’s life, and were a major cause of his behavioural problems at school. The school asked us to give him medication to lessen his anxiety. However, on consulting Aidan’s paediatrician, we were advised to find the cause of his anxiety rather than use a band-aid treatment to calm him down.

When we explained this to the school, we were told there was no place for Aidan unless he was on medication. After many discussions with the Asperger’s expert and our paediatrician, we decided to home-school Aidan. We enrolled Aidan in a school of distance education and then began the journey of reducing his anxiety. We discovered that his self-esteem had hit rock bottom and we had to ‘rebuild’ him as a person. That first year we home-schooled, Aidan was 12, and it was the hardest year I’ve ever lived through.

I worked from home during this time, and apart from work commitments outside of the home office for a couple of hours at a time, I was with Aidan 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When I was out of the office, he was able to contact me by mobile phone. He phoned me often, because he was anxious about my safety. He needed to know that I would always be available, that I was safe and that he could call on me at any moment. I realised that Aidan was incredibly insecure. The most important part of home-schooling was making him feel secure.

His physical surroundings came next. He has acute hearing, so he didn’t like too much noise. When he was stressed, he needed something to keep him occupied, to keep his mind off himself. Computers became an integral part of his life. After completing his schoolwork, Aidan was allowed as much time on the computer as he wanted. He put on his headphones and listened to music and started teaching himself computer programming. He also entered a world that reduced his anxiety because he was away from people, but able to communicate with them online.

Communicating online built his self-confidence in ways we’d never thought possible. Aidan started making friends on the internet, and he didn’t look back.

By Year 11, on the recommendation of our Asperger’s expert, Aidan returned to school. That was difficult, because some of his peers thought he was a ‘psycho’, but Aidan’s self-esteem had been rebuilt and he had a strong sense of who he was. He took no nonsense from his peers and was able to survive the last two years of school intact, with lots of support from us.

“If only I’d known how to interpret my peers’ body language and sarcastic communication during my primary-school years, perhaps my early life could have been different,” Aidan said at 18 years old. “But the problem was I didn’t understand the reason why I needed to interpret the non-verbal cues.”

During his primary-school years, Aidan had thought that the other children at school didn’t like him, and that they were giving him a hard time. Now that he knows about the process of communication, he has looked back on those years and discovered he had no idea of how to interpret what his peers were saying because he couldn’t bring the body cues and the verbal communication together to get the correct meaning. His brain wasn’t equipped to do this task.

Communication was difficult when he was in a group because there was so much talking and movement going on that his mind couldn’t keep up with what was happening around him. Receiving too many signals and mixed up messages resulted in confusion for him, because his brain was overloaded with too many messages he didn’t know how to process.

It wasn’t until he entered his first year of tertiary education and studied Communication Design that he realised he needed to understand body language in a way that was meaningful for him. The positioning of all parts of the body, including stance, were important in the process of putting the communication together as a whole. The Communication Design subject helped Aidan learn to process a person’s message by hearing what they said, and combining it with their body language assisted the interpretation of the message so that he could give an intelligent answer to the question he was asked.

The next step was to be part of a small group and to try to understand the social dynamics but, frustratingly, he was usually two conversation topics behind his peers, causing him to be isolated again. Being more aware by then of his difficulties in group situations, he decided he would speak to the person who sat next to him. He tuned out the voices of the other people in the group and focused on one person, but sometimes that person was also engaged in conversation with the other group members. This again created stress in Aidan while he tried to speak with that person knowing he didn’t have their full attention.

The other way Aidan tries to deal with social situations now is to tell the people he’s with that he has Asperger’s syndrome. This approach brings one of three reactions from people: prejudice about his condition, which often results in his being ignored; fear; or acceptance of his honesty, and the asking of questions about the condition. The third reaction usually ends up with him making a friend, because once a person is sympathetic to the condition, Aidan relaxes and is ready to communicate, using his process of communication.

Aidan believes he will need to use his process of communication, or some form of it, for the rest of his life. Despite his difficulties in communicating socially, Aidan believes he has a future. He has excellent problem-solving skills; give him a problem and he will find a solution, no matter how difficult the task is. He sees his future in computer programming and hopes he can make a difference in people’s lives.

All names have been changed.

More Info: Empower Autism

Illustrations by Cheri Scholten