When In Doubt, Call on the Little People

ARRGGGH, a bomb's about to explode! What to do, what to do? I know, I'll call in the bomb diffusal expert, Mr Diffuser. He takes my temper and works calmly to diffuse it. Then he covers it in ice with his special gadget, the Ice Shooter.

After that, Mr Huff Puff will come in and blow lots of cool air through his vapour cloud so that I can calm down.

Meanwhile, Mrs Translator's Silver Spoon gadget will take the nasty words that I want to say and convert them into a less angry tone that explains my feelings.

Have I gone mad? Quite possibly. But this idea isn't my own. It comes from a rather impressive book I've just read called The Homunculi Approach to Social and Emotional Wellbeing, by Anne Greig and Tommy Mackay.

The Homunculi are little characters that you invent yourself. Their strengths are your weaknesses, their purpose to fly in when you're losing control, take control using their gadgets and soothe the situation.

It's a clever technique using meta-cognition, the ability to analyse our own thoughts,  see them from afar and change our own ways of thinking.

Tommy MacKay is the Director of Psychology Counsultancy Services and Visiting Professor of Autism Studies at the University of Strathclyde. Rather refreshingly, he admits in Chapter One that when faced with a difficult task he used to call on a number of imaginary people to help motivate or organise him. From this arose the idea of Homunculi, the Latin term for little people.

The book shows how an entire programme for children with autism can be based around the Homuncili, but the minute I came across it, it occurred to me that I could immediately begin using it at its most basic level to Bobby's benefit.

At AuKids we're great believers in any technique that helps self-regulation in autistic people, and this approach made perfect sense to me. It's a way of getting an abstract way of thinking - the sort of approach we may use without realising it - and making it very concrete so that autistic kids can develop their own coping strategies.

I got straight onto Jessica Kingsley Publishers and asked the authors to write something on this approach for AuKids, which happily they agreed to do. It'll be published later this year.

The next step was to show Bobby the Homunculi approach. Bobby loves Pokemon and I reckoned all I had to do was compare the two and we'd be laughing. I showed him the free poster that I received with the book (a really clever drawing of the inside of a skull, showing it as a kind of control room where the Homunucli team work and rest) and then I beamed. Great idea, huh? What d'ya think, son?

Amazingly, he wasn't impressed. "I've already got my own ways of doing things," he declared.

"Yes and they're very good Bobby, but they're ways of coping AFTER an explosion. These little people can help you cope before you get to that point."

Still not impressed. And the thing is, the keener I get on an idea the more suspicious Bobby tends to become. I have to be a bit more clever than that.

I was so convinced that this approach was tailor made for the likes of Bobby, that I adopted my usual back door approach. I made some of my own Homunculi - hence the characters who started this blog entry - and I told him he could call on any of them if he liked, at any time. He doesn't want to call on them, he says, 'they're yours'.

Tori suggested that my Homunculi could arrive at the scene of a bomb scare chez Bobby's brain without being invited, which I think is a top idea although not exactly what the authors had in mind.

Bobby was interested enough to help me with my own problems though and made me an extra character - Mr Replacer, who works with Mrs Translator. He carries cards which have polite words to use instead of nasty ones. Sometimes I wonder just who is parenting who.

I raised my voice last week (I'm sure more than once) and promptly got told that I needed Mr Huff Puff.

Then today I had the unwelcome result of my car's MOT. When I expected a glowing report, my car came bottom of its year - and the result was not at all cheap.

I was positively fuming, especially at the somewhat smug way in which the news was delivered by the garage receptionist. I was stomping about the house and the smoke had started to come out of my ears when I suddenly realised that I needed to call on my little friends. Suddenly there was ice around my temper bomb and it had been diffused by a Cyberman-style character who was highly efficient.

And yes - they helped! I will make more of them! They can be my inner management team, my little life coaches.

I'm hoping that before long, Homunculi will become a part of family life, so much so that Bobby may even start to borrow or invent one once in a while.

Until then, it's not a bad idea to have some help with self-regulation when you've got two young kids on the spectrum.

So I'm pretty pleased that my little friends are here. As far as I'm concerned, they can gatecrash the party any time there's trouble in the attic!