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Date:         Sat, 7 Nov 1992 13:18:00 EST
              <AUTISM@SJUVM.BITNET>
From:         Speed Bump <DNWIEBE@OWUCOMCN.BITNET>
Subject:      Karl

Thomas Bennett writes:
>In response to your question about my son Karl's lack of social skills,
>yes, I am sad to say that he does feel a lot of pain at not having friends
>and being treated as weird by others. It is so very frustrating to deal
>with the situation that it is his behavior that separates him from the
>others, and yet no matter how hard we try to convince him that he is the
>only one who can change that, he still falls back into weird behaviors.

        It may very well take him a long time to learn how to act normal.
It did me, because in many cases the way normal people act doesn't make any
sense to me; this makes it very difficult to come up with a model that will
tell me how to act in a given situation.  Now that I'm 26, I can act a lot
more normal than I could when I was in elementary school, but I still don't
have it cold; if you watch me for more than half an hour or so, you can still
tell that there's something unusual about me, even though you might not be
able to put your finger on it yet.
        And no matter how good I am at it, it's still an act; it's not me.
When I'm alone at home, or in the car, or (to a lesser extent) in the presence
of people who know me well, I can relax the act and go back to being me.
Most of the people who think they know me would probably have kittens if they
saw me like this, or rush me to the psychiatric ward, or something.
        The fact is that Karl *isn't* normal, and while he may eventually
learn to *act* normal, that's not going to *make* him normal.  You may manage
to crowd him into the "normal" mold and slam it shut, but he's not going to
be comfortable in there, and when you open it he's going to spring back to
his peculiar shape.
        My suggestion?  I think it's useless to try to get him to "fit in"
socially with his peers; he's not going to be able to do that, and kids his
age are just too cruel by nature for him to get anywhere if he tries.  I think
he would do very well with just *one* friend.  (I did.)  Probably this person
should also be a little weird--weird enough to have also been rejected by his
peers, so that he knows what it feels like and is not as eager to do it to
others.  (My friend had a stressful situation in his life that had gotten
worse and worse until finally he snapped, did a lot of screaming, blew his
dog away with a 12-gauge shotgun, and ended up in the local psychiatric ward
for two weeks.  Otherwise he was fairly normal, and after his stay he went
back to being fairly normal, but a reputation like that doesn't make you lots
of friends in high school.)  If he can find one person who is willing to
throw away all the stereotypes and preformed templates people normally
use to get to know other people, and make a special case of getting to know
Karl, and allow Karl to get to know him, you'll probably see a surprisingly
deep and strong friendship develop; and although you're probably not going to
get normal kids to stop persecuting him, if he has one friend he can count on,
the persecution is liable to become much less important to him.
        Another advantage is that if this person is non-autistic, once the
friendship gets to be close, Karl will probably be able to closely question
the friend about why he reacts to certain situations in certain ways, and
he'll come away with a much better idea of how to go about acting normal
than he will just by observing normal people.
        A third advantage *I* saw from this (I've always thought it was an
advantage) is that largely because I had no chance of gaining peer acceptance,
but still had the acceptance I needed (from a single person, rather than an
army of peers) to develop a good self-image, the concept of peer pressure is
pretty much unknown to me.  It doesn't affect me.  I do what I think I should
do, regardless of whether or not everybody else is doing it, and if they don't
like it, it honestly doesn't bother me.

Shalom,
Dan
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