Life with Aspergers

Autism and the extended family is a book with an unusual feel to it. In fact, it's opening chapters felt so different that I was initially wondering if I would like the book. As it turns out, the language is completely appropriate and it is a good book. It's just that being as close to autism as I am, I'm not in the target audience. Where most autism books jump right in and talk about the details of autism from the inside, this book remains firmly outside the circle, keeping the outsider’s viewpoint. To be honest, the opening chapters reminded me a lot of “Autism speaks” literature but don't worry, it gets a lot better from there. The book is trying to speak to outsiders and it needs to use concepts that they can understand. This book talks about high functioning individuals but it feels much more like a book for families with more difficult and more "hands on" forms of autism. The book starts with a "welcome to my world" chapter,  I can'...

Long time readers of this blog will know that it's a myth that people with Asperger's syndrome can't empathize and that if a situation is explained to them, they can certainly feel emotion and put themselves "into the shoes of another". The question is, can a person with Asperger's learn to empathize automatically and without the need for explanation. Empathy is a tricky thing to define but one thing is for sure; it isn't about feeling sorry for someone. It's about either feeling as they do, understanding how they feel or having a reciprocal feeling. Some of the biggest challenges for people with Asperger's syndrome lie around the interpretation of gestures, tone and expression in both directions, sending and receiving. Gestures, tone and expression are the primary means of communicating the human emotional state with talking and writing being used far less.  In fact, quite often spoken expression confusingly communicates the exact opposite of...

This last weekend has been a really tough one for our family. We had to have our dog of nearly twelve years, Panda, put down last Saturday. To make matters worse, nobody was expecting it. One day, she was "chirpy" and seemed to be in perfectly good health and the next she was gone. She was in our family for longer than our kids and she has left a huge hole in our family heart. I was going to talk about emotional reciprocity today anyway but last weekend's events have put a whole new spin on things. Dealing with Strong Emotions We all deal with strong emotions, such as love, anger and grief in our own ways. My wife tends to cry things out but I often internalise them and take them on board as stress and at times, self-harmful behaviour. In the kids, these emotions can manifest as meltdowns or as general destructive behaviour. Sometimes there's nothing to see on the surface at all. The point is that although we each feel these emotions and we feel them at similar str...