Newsgroups: bit.listserv.autism
Date:         Thu, 5 Nov 1992 10:37:44 EST
              <AUTISM@SJUVM.BITNET>
From:         DOC@VTVM1.BITNET
Subject:      Karl feeling "weird"

Tom,

I sympathize very much with you and Karl over this problem.  My son was
the same at that age, and high school was just torture for him and for
me because he felt that other kids all wanted to torment him.  Indeed,
it was an accurate perception on his part in that a few bad apples who
saw how easy it was to upset Steven took pleasure in doing so, but of
course it was his wild over-reaction that kept them doing it.  He truly
felt helpless not to respond, no matter how often he was advised to
pretend he didn't notice anything.  (Junior high would have been just as
rotten in public school, I'm sure, but he was in a private school until
high school.  Even there he managed to incur some teasing or what he
interpreted as teasing, which drove him wild, but nowhere near like what
he experienced in high school.)

The thing that helped Steven was cognitive therapy from a really skillful
psychologist.  He helped Steven to accept that he could respond in other
ways to unpleasant situations, and had him practice these responses over
and over.  Every week he would ask Steven and my husband (who usually
took him and sat in) to describe some terrible episode of the previous
week, then he and Steven would go into the same conversation.  "What else
could you have done beside cry?"; "I could have said... (these had to be
heavily coached at the beginning)"; "Let's do it now."  And he gave
Steven specific assignments for the next week in initiating and carrying
on little conversations with other people.

After one and a half years of this (during which Steven also finished
high school, so the painful environment was gone) Steven had no longer had
his fixed idea that practically everyone his age was out to torment him
AND he felt confident that he could handle any jerk who might come along
and pester him.  We would have continued, but the therapist moved away,
and those skills are not easy to find.

Steven has been a much happier, calmer person, MUCH more enjoyable to be
around, in the past 5 years.  (He's 22 now.)  Part of that is due to the
change from high school to college, and maybe he would have calmed down
some just by outgrowing adolescence which is a difficult period for plenty
of non-autistic young people, but I think the skills he learned during
the cognitive therapy were the most influential in his improvement.

Now about feeling "weird".  Alas, Karl is correctly reflecting reality.
You don't have to be extremely different from the norm to be "weird" in
high school.  I went through this painful treatment too during my adole-
scence, and Ray has alluded to his rough times.  The more HFA your child
is, sadly, the more aware he/she will be and the more unhappy about it.
I remember an article that appeared in ARRI a few years ago about some
vitamin or drug therapy that was tried on teenaged autistics, and the
heartbreaking result was that it worked -- they became aware enough of
other people's reactions to be hurt and unhappy because they also became
aware that they were intrinsically different in a way they couldn't change.
These differences may come to seem like pluses instead of minuses as they
mature, or at least, "this is how I am and I am quite happy to be so",
but during adolescence, the more "normal" you are, the more you long to
fit in and be accepted and NOT TO BE DIFFERENT.  I don't know any way
around this.  But if you can find a good therapist who can work with Karl
and help him learn some useful social-interaction strategies, he will both
feel and be less "different" and can feel a lot better about himself.

(I don't think a parent can do this-- we are too emotionally tied up in
our child's difficulties, and we generate automatic responses to their
behavior that are totally useless, like repeating "YOU CAN control
your behavior".  I did that for years and got absolutely nowhere.)

Good luck.

MK
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