Lately, I have given a lot of thought on how we expect those with severe autism to meet us more than half way. I have worked with children with severe autism and have a unique perspective on what I speculate might be occurring, based on my experience with many nonverbal children with autism with severe communication, movement and sensory problems. Unlike both of you, I do not have a first person perspective, but I would be honored if you took a few moments to peruse some of my ezine articles related to facilitated communication and relationship.

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Ann_Harrington

Warm regards,
Mary Ann

I am often delighted to find another person who speaks/understands it, it is way more comfortable for me to sit around responding to my surroundings while another person responds to theirs with me in it and them in it, than to sit there and type at them, although I can type up a storm sometimes when I put my mind to it.

It’s one thing that’s always missing to me about online interaction, everything gets condensed down to wordwordword stuff, all the surroundings that enter into the conversation are disappeared. People often forget that while I’ve become a good writer by conventional standards, writing isn’t my homeland and I always feel like a foreigner in it. I don’t regret having learned the language but I’m glad I haven’t lost mine either.

One thing I liked about the New Hampshire conference was that I could say autie-hello to people by varying my responses around them instead of typing words at them, and they could say it back in their own responses.

I saw a lot of your gestures on your blahblahblah video (which I loved) and they made it easier to follow the words, where normally I’m lost on lecture videos. So I’m glad you’re not ashamed of those now.

Loved the pic with the cat
You both look very cute in that.
Have you seen my painting called ‘The Wall’?
I think you’d like it.

I still have my old sensing-based language (of pattern theme feel language which I wrote of in Autism and Sensing; The Unlost Instinct) which is from jingles, adverts, songs.

It sometimes fires first, sometimes it fires but I manage to suppress it to stick to interpretive language (the one word one meaning language system most people use). Sometimes we get combos.

Going out we get anything from ‘I like the nightlife baby’ (means ‘lets go’), ‘to market, to market’ (to the village), ’shed’s are us’ (goodbye), ‘jiggity jig’ (then I’ll come back home), ’swing on a star’ (I know what I want to do), ‘would you rather be a pig’ (don’t know what I want to do). So this morning we got a combo on the way out ‘coming with you, jiggity jig’ (I’m coming with you, then coming home).

It’s tiring to try and suppress a natural system all the time just because other people don’t understand it in their language. Chris learned to ask ‘what does that mean’ and eventually over 2-3 years I could tell him their rough meanings. Then he’d hear a tic and say ‘what does that one mean’ and I’d say, ‘that one is rubbish, its a tic’

I don’t stay long in verbal conversations because its hard not to slide into Donna speak. When I’m with those who accept it or even better understand its system or even better can tell Donna speak from verbal tics… then I’m so much more relaxed and really like the person. I have a friend who understands the system of sensing based language and Chris understands a lot of it and now sometimes speaks in it when he doesn’t get a response from interpretive language statements. This is fab.

I spent my first 9-11 years developing Donna-speak so why just throw a language away just because other people use a different system and think yours makes you ‘nuts’? But once I got interpretive language that’s all people wanted. But they expected mine would just disappear to make my interpretive speech more ‘functional’. That’s much harder, and also hard emotionally, psychologically. I also have a system of gestural signing. I’ve stopped being ashamed of that too.

Imagine how much social anxiety people could have reduced by learning my systems? How much easier they could have made it. They took the hard way and took me that way too. I think much of my success was in spite of them more than because of them. Learning their system is not the end of the battle because if in the process one has been taught to hate oneself and hate their system and fear their world, then they have defeated themselves in the process.

This is where we need to distinguish good teaching from bad. Good teaching builds bridges, builds respect, empowers people and those who come away as teachers feeling they themselves learned nothing, then didn’t empower the student to teach them too. Teaching should be an exchange of systems, not an experience in war and domination.

… Donna *)
http://www.donnawilliams.net

I spoke in New Hampshire last year — in a presentation where there were four people, one using FC and speaking some of his words after typing, one(me) using mostly independent typing and a little FC when I got exhausted, and two speaking with varying degrees of fluency. I agree that people with very unusual language histories (whatever those may be) really need to be heard.

(Short versions of some of our presentations are in this newsletter which is a PDF file. There’s a picture of me with my cat in it too. Some cats can do FC and other facilitation besides communication too, and she’s one of them.)