Wednesday 26 March 2014

Frazzled and Minus Coffee

The word for this morning is 'Frazzled'.

With Bobby in a heightened state of tension, the only thing I can do to improve matters is to absorb it. I think that's what most of us do.

Unfortunately it leaves me needing a double espresso at 9am and there's no coffee in the house.

I've been thinking about Bobby's temper a lot lately, as it's central to many of his problems. Although he has great insight when he's calm, he flies off the handle so quickly that this isn't much good when it comes to a challenging situation.

And unfortunately for Bobby, situations that the rest of us wouldn't find challenging are extremely troublesome to him.

We are experiencing what Dr Heather MacKenzie describes as a 'disconnect'. Bobby knows the right thing to do, he just can't do it when it comes to the crunch. He has difficulties with self-regulation as a result of his autism. As a result, so do I. But at least I have strong coffee to fall back on.


Yesterday, Bobby hit a teacher. He did this because she was shouting at a group of other kids. When general tensions are raised and there's a lot of noise, Bobby cannot think of himself as separate from the stress that's going on. He becomes part of it, even if anger isn't aimed at him. He finds shouting very threatening. Well, we all do, but I guess we can see it in context. To Bobby, it's just rather unpredictable behaviour.

Most of the teachers know to remove Bobby if they are about to shout at someone else. This one didn't, and got walloped. I can understand why. It was the only way to stop her. We need to do some work with Bobby on how he controls his inner moods so that they don't translate into outer aggression. He needs to develop that inner dialogue that we all use when we want to hit someone, but we can't. Sometimes autistic kids can't develop this for themselves, and need a bit of help.

So, I wrote him this Social Story, which I am sharing with you in the hope that if you experience something similar, you may be able to adapt it for your own uses.




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