I was approached by a French psychologist, Dr Luc-Laurent Salvador, who asked me about bonding, coloured spots and reflection.  Here’s our discussion:

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

My name is Luc-Laurent Salvador, I am a psychologist from France and I would like to know if I may ask about some theoretical and practical aspects of autism. I am working on an hypothesis to which your book, “Nobody Nowhere” has been a great source of inspiration and particularly this passage :

” I remember my first dream —or at least, the first that I can recall. I was moving through white, with no objects, just white. Bright spots of fluffy color surrounded me everywhere. I passed through them, and they passed through me. It was the sort of thing that made me laugh. This dream came before any others with shit or people or monsters in them, and certainly before I noticed the difference between the three.”

May I ask you a few questions about this dream ? I think that what you said is of tremendous importance for the understanding of autism.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Has your picture with sparkles (in the front page of your website) any connection with this dream ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes 🙂

It’s me moving through the fluffy colored spots.

I do a musical called Footsteps of a Nobody.

The opening to it is:

“1963 and a faceblind kid had bonded with the colored wallpaper on the wall”.

That pretty much says what happened, that I got attached to patterns and textures and rythms because visuals had no meaning.  Had people joined me more through music, textures, movement, I’d have gained a stronger sense of being in the right world.  I had visual, verbal and body agnosias and people were trying to connect on channels that weren’t online.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I am glad that you gave me such an insight. I see here a confirmation of a very bizarre idea I got when I saw this picture with the fluffy colored spots. I immediately remembered your dream and I wondered if you had not been attached to these spots as if it was your first family.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, very much so.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I thought of some kind of imprinting phenomenon that occurs with the newborns of some species like, say, goose. Did you ever heard about that ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, but mine was with Noddy Wallpaper (indistinct fragmented rainbows against white)… see the picture… like this over and over on the whiteness but I didn’t see figures, just fragmented rainbows… later in a photo, I saw it was Noddy.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Concerning imprinting, I join the picture that came to my mind when I saw yours with the fluffy colored spots. It’s the ethologist Konrad Lorenz followed by the young geese that came to be attached to him because he was the first thing they saw at birth. The geese are following him like it seems, the fluffy colored spots are following you. In my perspective, both pictures are expressing the ‘bond’ dimension. The main difference is in the direction of bonding.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

I followed the spots.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

So, the imprinting metaphor seems quite sound.
It could be suggested that you first developed an attachment to fluffy colored spots and patterns because it’s only what your visual apparatus (eye + brain) made you sensitive to at this early stage of your life.
Their ‘stability’ or ‘presence’ was the only security you were able to find in the environment.
DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, that definitely makes sense.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Human shape was (not perceived or only as fragments and therefore) uncontrollable, hence scaring (can we say so ?).
DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes.

That’s why I felt the wallpaper had mothered me because we were one so I found comfort in getting back to that that it went to the ability to make it from rubbing my eyes, to bonding with wallpaper books, the wallpaper in the next house, to fabric… and that’s how I made patchwork and got taught to be a machinist in my teens.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Do you think that the time you spent gazing at yourself in a mirror helped somehow in this process of knowledge building?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

I was whole in the mirror and the reflected world was more whole.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

In your first book, you said you have been spending a lot of time gazing at yourself in the mirror.  Was it just the contemplative enjoyment of “self wholeness” that kept you watching at yourself ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

‘She’ was cohesive AND familiar

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I guess that you knew that ‘she’ was you, didn’t you ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

No, there was no conscious sense of ‘I’ for some time. Everything was other, my body, my feelings, my mind. By late childhood I began to understand ‘I’.  I was fascinated with ‘her’.  The world was full of other, but ‘she’ was familiar. I understood her, she looked at me with a look I could understand and which appeared to understand me.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Were you aware of the full contingency between your movements and hers ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

I thought she was copying me.  I thought it was part of a secret she was having.  Later I thought it was how she communicated, to mirror me.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Did you perceive any similarity between you and ‘her’, did you see ‘her’ as a ‘twin’ then or is it a concept that came later ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

When I was 4, I thought she was another girl.  I don’t remember noticing we wore the same clothes or had the same hair.  When I was 9 I thought she was my twin.  By then I knew we wore the same clothes and had the same hair but I still thought she lived in a mirror world and I didn’t understand why other people didn’t talk to her, care about her.  They seemed to act almost as if she didn’t exist.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Were you able to think something like ” ‘she’ is moving exactly as ‘I’ do!” before you came in your 20s to the insight ” ‘she’ is me!” ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

I knew she was moving the same as me by  the age of 9, maybe earlier.  I was in dance classes with mirrors around age 10 and I was happy to do movements with her but I thought she had volition and presumed she was copying me or following the teacher.  Just because someone moves as you do doesn’t make them you.  Teachers teach movement and move your body through the same but they aren’t you.  If you have no sense of who has started, its easy to presume everyone is doing their own thing.

By my teens I could look at an outfit in the mirror, but I still thought it was ‘her’, that somehow everything I had, she was bring to the mirror and put on and show me how I looked, not because she was me, but because we were twins.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

If, for example, you had seen a spot of anything (food, painting, etc.) on ‘her’ face, you wouldn’t have made any connection with your real face (either mentally or, say, behaviorally, e.g., by moving the hand toward that spot), would you ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

I don’t remember ever having done such a thing until my teens.  I don’t remember taking her face to be mine but nor do I remember seeing anything on her face.  If I had I expect I’d have found it amusing to find something new about her and probably try and take it off the reflection then be confused as to why she wouldn’t ‘let me’ take it off her.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

The cohesion was satisfying because…:

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Because she felt like the only real, familiar human in the world.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

If it is not your cohesion that was satisfying, then, I understand that it was hers, i.e., the fact that you could look at her without fragmentation of the percept. Am I correc?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, but also I had a SENSE of her movements as familiar… I felt I could feel/predict what she was going to do.  Where with other people it would be a strain to keep up.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

It was your own cohesion you could see?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

No, because I’d processed my own movements already but didn’t know that until I saw them in the mirror and felt them as familiar, still I thought they were ‘hers’… we were ‘twinned’.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

It was new to you because you had no inward perception of such a cohesion?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

That is true.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

But the fact is that you also had no outward perception of a cohesion regarding the human shape, had you ?
As far as I understand, only looking at ‘her’ in the mirror offered you the cohesive perception of, at least, one particular human shape.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, but it fed a desire to know the shapes of others… a craving to feel a 3D human, but coupled with great fear of inviting a living human to interact.  I solved this with statues and later transferred that familiarity with touching human form eventually to living humans.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

The ‘familiar’ feeling was coming from the previous direct visual perception you had from your own body parts. You were able to recognize these body parts, but now in a very satisfying coherent whole.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

The familiarity but of a twin, not of self.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I understand this as the consequence of the new ‘control’ you had on your self image through the mirror.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Staring through her, engaging with her was the visual-emotional equivalent of eating a good cake

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I define control as the mere matching between anticipation (or expectation) and perception. All our satisfactions, i.e., positive feelings come from such matchings. First and foremost, it gives us security. And, as I understand, that’s precisely what you have been looking for in patterns.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, that is what familiarity is

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Or weren’t you at the same time actively exploring your own shape and somehow building a more coherent representation of the human body ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Of the shape of a living girl, yes, and then just as fascinated with statues and sitting on them, curving into them, same with trees, to know THEM by feeling their form but putting my body into their form, even the billiard balls, staring and staring until I could feel my body resonate with THEIR form, to KNOW their entity, what it was to feel like I was them, to be familiar. Most visuals alone left me utterly flat… it didn’t compute. Being shown things was off putting because unless they spun or were moved to and fro, I had to stare through them to FEEL them or they stopped computing. Otherwise put them in my mouth.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

It looks like you were profoundly  ’empathizing’ objects as if there were almost no difference between ‘you’ and them, as if at that time, they were your “others” (that you wanted to meet).

DONNA WILLIAMS:

YES.  With nothing gelling visually and with only my hands as my eyes, I couldn’t feel the whole until I could merge with it.  So I would know it AS it.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

The fact that they don’t ‘blah’ or don’t ‘control’ seemed to be no obstacle (which should be logical since you had no clear representation of yourself).
In the process you also ’empathized’ the human shape, but like any other (interesting) shape (save for the fact that you could empathize it a lot more in the mirror, because of ‘her’ presence).
Is it correct ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

As well as I could know love, she seemed to love me.  In other words she would search my eyes, reach for my hands, whisper at me.  I didn’t know I was initiating because I tended to struggle to simultaneously process self and other.. this is like utterly empathising other but as the time being almost a recording device, then experiencing self and using other like a target, expression but at the cost of receptive processing… so a division of expressive and receptive and when receptive if still expressive not monitoring or processing one’s expressive stuff, so it all seems ‘her’.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Later, when my parents mirrored the whole bathroom, the whole living room wall, the whole bedroom wall – late childhood, age 9-11, I would move about with ‘her’, broaden how I interacted with ‘her’.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

How did your parents came to this idea of mirroring all your living space ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

I would only eat with ‘her’, pee with ‘her’, chatter to ‘her’, touch ‘her’ so they felt I’d move more in space if it was a whole wall… my whole life by then I’d tap reflection even walking down the street past shops, keep checking for ‘her’ and when I found her I felt WE existed and in that WE was I but only whilst twinned, as a twin.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

It seems as if you had first been sure that ‘she’ was real and then, because you were twinned, that you were real too.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, definitely, had I not so fully empathised with her, I would not have found what I was worth as her twin, friend and sister.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

And what did you do exactly when ‘actively exploring your own shape’ in front of these mirrors ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Touched faces, shared breathing, dared see each other’s souls, make noises, giggle, I started kissing her when I was about 10.

I loved her enormously, she was my twin, my sister, but my connection to her became a bridge not an obstacle. Without her I’d not have sought real life physical twins… one’s with warm, shaped bodies and smells, not cold flatness which made me crave to get her out of the mirror or me into it.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

‘She’ got you used to or familiar with the human body. And we love what is familiar to us. We want more of it. That’s what happened to you. You have been wanting more of ‘that’ on which you have been acquiring much control with the mirror’s help.
You just had a visual control on this ‘shape-subject-object’, you wanted to empathize it completely, with all the modalities of your senses.
You thus came to want the real presence of a human body, a human being (since there were no possibility to cross the mirror).
I understand this as a key aspect of your story.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

YES.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

In other words, weren’t you gaining control over what was first to you an incredibly weird form: the human shape ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

‘Hers’… in my 20s I explored the difference between a visual sense of body and a felt physical one and that’s when ‘she’ became ‘I’. I could also experience having a body through reflection as I couldn’t process it physically without movement.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I’m not sure to understand what you mean by “I couldn’t process it physically without movement”.  Do you mean you had to move in front of the mirror in order to experience “having a body” ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, because the body feedback didn’t register unless I could see it.  I loaned the visual to process the physical.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

So, in spite of the fact that you interpreted your movements as ‘hers’, you were able to understand as well that it was your body which was moving in front of the mirror, weren’t you ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Progressively.  The ability to process simultaneous sense of self and other were at first entirely missing, then fluctuating, dropping in and out like a bad connection.  After treatment for gut, immune, metabolic disorders and L-Glutamine 2000mg I mostly have some consistent experience of simultaneous self and other.  The connection does drop out but keeps coming back on line.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I would hypothesize that the matching between the two different modalities (visual and kinesthetic) validated the ‘physical’ (which could then be ‘registred’) and hence gave you that very feeling of enjoyable control and security.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

It looks like what I had in mind when suggesting that you could have been “actively exploring your own shape and somehow building a more coherent representation of the human body”.  It seems that it is exactly what you did, does it ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Eventually, but first I wanted to feel connected to another human, that was her… she was a step up from wallpaper and patterns.

The same with jumping, spinning, hanging, rocking were so important… I could process those.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I hear something different here.  Do you mean that jumping, spinning, hanging, rocking helped you to ‘process the physical’ anytime, that is, even in the absence of a mirror ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, because it was repetitive, rhythmic, more extreme, more about gravity and inertia.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Therefore an alternative explanation could be that you were simply gaining control over your body through repetition (rhythms, etc.) because repetition lets you expect the sensation to come and the fact that what is perceived is exactly what was expected is a very securing satisfaction (a control) that gives you motivation for a stronger satisfaction, hence the repetition and the search for an increasing intensity, because more control over a bigger intensity leads to more pleasure.
I’m not sure that I made this clear, I hope that you’ll see what I mean.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Partly.  But with connection dropping in and out what is sought is consistent sense of something and repetition can be as close as one gets if the connection continually drops out.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Thanks to ‘her’, in the mirror, you were able to become familiar with the human shape, you came to desire its (full) presence, you felt attracted to it, and thus, you tried to ‘meet’ human beings in real life.
As you said, ‘she’ has not been an obstacle but a bridge between the place you were then (among patterns) and the place you are now, among humans (even though patterns are still with you).
Is this meaningful for you ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Would you like to know the content of my working hypothesis regarding the origin of autism and its logical consequences regarding therapy ?
In other words, do you want to know why, in my perspective, you probably deserve a Nobel prize ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

If you like.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I understand that I could appear by far too enthusiastic about the three therapeutic strategies I noticed in your biography but I think I have good reasons for that, i.e., theoretical reasons.

In order to expose them, I will first try to tell (in a nutshell) your story the way I understand it. Of course, many aspects will be missing in this ‘fiction’, but it is mainly intended to help stress some particular moments of your life which are, in my perspective, of great importance since they open new path for some future therapies of autism.

Your story is the incredibly difficult odyssey of a human being dropped into the world without the one luggage of absolute necessity : the representation of the human body that should normally drive your attention towards ‘other’ human beings, so that you can learn from them by imitation and, hence, find security by adopting (imitating) their representations, feelings and desires about this world, at the center of which, these very human beings are supposed to stand.

For babies, at the very beginning, the whole world is only made of human beings. It’s warm, sweet, perfumed and a smile is like the sun, it brings joy.  You had nothing of that. You were alone, unable to recognize anything like a body, a gaze or a smile. You just had light, bright spots of fluffy colors and patterns.

You did your best to organize the world, that is, to get some control over it… :

o       when confronted to a person, you only saw what was bright, shiny, full of light, like jewelry.
o       All what was repetitive was good for you : patterns, collections, rhythms, etc.
o       You have been making every efforts to ‘empathize’ objects, their shapes and dynamics.

But the human shape was too complex as well as too fragmented to be empathized. So, you probably wouldn’t have been very far on such strategies.  Fortunately, one day, you met ‘her’ in a mirror.

You had seen ‘her’ before, but one day you discovered ‘her’ as familiar, attractive as well as attentive to you.  You started an incredible ‘love affair’ with ‘her’ and thanks to your parents who have been putting mirrors everywhere, you spend a huge amount of time in ‘her’ presence, interacting with ‘her’, empathizing ‘her’, enjoying ‘her’.

In the process you have been constantly building and improving an intermodal representation of the human body (‘her’ body) since you were in position to match the visual and kinesthetic feedbacks of your incessant movements in front of the mirror.  The more you spent time with ‘her’, the more enjoyable ‘her’ presence, the more secure you felt, the more real ‘she’ appeared to you, the more you came to existence, through ‘her’, because, no doubt, you were bonded to each other.

You loved ‘her’, you craved for ‘her’, you wanted to perceive ‘her’ with all your senses but you couldn’t cross the mirror.  So you came to pay attention to those around you who had the same shape as ‘her’, who had real human bodies.

You were now able to see them, and ready to try to meet them.  As you said, ‘she’ has been a bridge, not an obstacle. ‘She’ helped you cross the incredible distance between you attachment to patterns and you attachment to human beings.

I see here what I consider as a very meaningful therapy for autism since, in my theorizing, the lack of representation of the human shape IS the very origin of autism. Because if you lack such representation, you can’t see ‘others’, you can’t assimilate them, you can’t imitate them, you can’t learn and find your place in society, you are alone.

What happened to you corroborates the idea that an autist can gain control over the human shape thanks to the control s/he has over it when in the mirror.

Since it is then under full control, this human shape is not scaring any more. So it can be explored, empathized, understood and, later, recognized even when it’s not in a mirror.

I see here a big avenue for therapy that has not yet been explored…
DONNA WILLIAMS:

You have this 100% correct
I also see this body issue as central to Exposure Anxiety but I see the issue as 1. combined visual/verbal/body agnosias (resulting from a range of underlying causes including alcohol or other prenatal toxicity damage, brain injury, gut, immune, metabolic disorders) leading to 2. Exposure Anxiety (distress when treated as if one has a physical existance, can be seen, known, directly interacted with by others) and results in progressively hair trigger chronic involuntary avoidance, diversion, retaliation responses as the person becomes progressively torn between the opposing battles to join the world and keep it out.

One of the confusions is that there are those like me with significant agnosias as the primary issue then deeply complicated by the just as significant secondary problem of Exposure Anxiety, and then there are those nothing like this who have very different roads to ‘autism’

ie there are also these patterns deemed ‘autism’

* depression leading to loss of skills, social anxiety, Avoidant Personality Disorder and Selective Mutism

* Oral Dyspraxia and Sensory Integration Dysfunction were a person finds their world sensorily overwhelming and self protects to limit input

* those with Obsessive Personalities and Social Emotional Agnosia who can see bodies and faces and objects as whole, will come to think visually and internally but can’t intuitively perceive facial expression, body language, intonation (but not because they see in pieces)

* those with Sensitive-Avoidant plus Devoted-Dependant personality traits who suffer over care, even Emotional Incest where a carer takes over all functions and the person confuses this with love and together with fear of failure and fear of independance progressively gives up their abilities

* those with disintegrative disorders akin to dementia setting in in early childhood who lose their skills and experience autistic withdrawal.

* those who develop such a range of mood, anxiety, compulsive disorders that development becomes derailed and neurological and identity integration doesn’t occur as it otherwise might.

And people with autism can have combinations of any of these ‘autisms’.  So the answer is to specify that where a child displays signs of significant visual, verbal and body agnosias with significant secondary Exposure Anxiety, mirror therapy is an essential part of tackling one of the most fundamental social-emotional blocks in their ‘autism’.

I did in fact write this in all four of my text books.

Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage

Autism and Sensing; The Unlost Instinct

Autism; An Inside Out Approach

The Jumbled Jigsaw: An Insiders approach to the treatment of Autism Spectrum Fruit Salads

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

The second therapeutic strategy you enacted is exposed in your book “Nobody nowhere” through the little episode with Perry.
Let’s call it the imitation strategy since you approach Perry by engaging in the same type of activity, with the same supports, in the same place, at the same time.   You thus originate a reciprocal imitation dynamics in the context of which you then propose a simple innovation regarding an object, something that Perry will surely be able to perceive, “assimilate” and hence, reproduce.
That’s what he does.  After some repetitions, you introduce more novelties till Perry becomes innovative too.
This reciprocal imitation process will then be expanded by recruiting more and more body parts and the intensified physical activity will bring more and more attention on bodies rather than objects, so much so that the animated aspect of these bodies becomes more salient, more visible and gives you that marvelous impression that two persons have now come to presence.

In this beautiful sequence, you have somehow applied the same principle as in the mirror strategy since imitating an autist is just mirroring her/his behavior.   The same benefits can be expected : the imitation process will give control to the autist on the (at first) scaring human shape.  Fear will fade away and a readiness to explore will appear.  The reciprocal imitation process brings to the autist a bounty of opportunities to perceive similarities between her/his own body and “this” shape ; and the more s/he does so, the more this “shape” will appear as some “body”, as an  “other”.

The only serious difference I perceive in the mirror vs the imitation strategies is contingency.  The mirror affords a perfect contingency, hence a full control when imitation is necessarily part of a turn-taking dynamics which gives slightly less control but is also a better context for the mimetic construction of self and agency (still a different story!).

Is this a plausible account of what happened between you and Perry ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes.  But what non-autistic people generally failed to get from it was that it wasn’t just the imitation/mirroring of actions but the most important part was that my SOCIAL STYLE was a mirror of his.  Think of it this way… two identical trucks deliver a play set to the same child.  In each case the drivers set up the play set, one on each side of the garden.  But in one case the driver is bolshy and chatty and overly sociable.  In the other case the driver is quiet, focused purely on the activity and puts up the play set without fixating on whether or not he is liked, whether or not the person getting the play set is happy.  The child goes to the one set up in the least socially intrusive way… that one just feels more ‘HIS’.  So with Perry, I could have delivered any objects but no matter how familiar the objects, if my social style was not familiar to him, a mirror of his own, he’d have rejected the objects no matter how familiar…. they’d have felt ‘not worth the threat’.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I agree.
Because what you call your “social style” is precisely what, I think, falls into the category of  ‘mimetic approach’.
To state it the other way, I would say that the mimetic strategy garantees that one will adopt a convenient social style since it’ll be modeled upon the person to which it is aimed at.
And that’s what you did…

DONNA WILLIAMS:

That’s where mirroring, in books like Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage, is only recommended when done in an Indirectly Confrontational manner.  Otherwise it can heighten foreignness not reduce it.   It’s about ‘herding cats’.  What I did with Perry was not only mirroring that I had in my own development but I combined it with the Indirectly Confrontational social style my father had used to get me interested in objects.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I understand that you are willing to draw a clear distinction between mirroring and indirectly confrontational social style.
But I have problem imagining how a mirroring or mimetic strategy could be confrontational in the first place.
Do you have an example ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

For example, there are people who will go to a person with Exposure Anxiety who is with themselves in the mirror and be so socially invasive in their style they cause the person to reject their own reflection and the mirror just to escape the social invasion.    For example, instead of approaching their own reflection and exploring/addressing it they’ll bolsh over to the other person’s reflection, tap at it like they might a fish in a fish tanks and say “that’s you Mary, see, that’s you in the mirror” and then look stupidly, invasively in Mary’s face etc as though this is ‘autism friendly’ and Mary may turn an eye in, avert her gaze from the mirror, make warning or blocking or self comforting noises but the invader will presume ‘that’s just the autism’ until Mary has either exited or threatened self injury and progressively if they keep invading this way, Mary learns that approaching a mirror in the proximity of other humans leads to social invasion.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Your book on Exposure Anxiety made my day.
I just ordered it (unfortunately, it’ll take 3 weeks before I get it in my mailbox!) but I could browse it on the web.
I had quite a good overview on your Mechanics chapter and I have now a better understanding of what is at stake.
I would be very interested to have some exchanges with you on this topic.
But if you don’t mind, I will first finish my reviewing of the therapeutic strategies I saw in your biography.

DONNA WILLIAMS:

ok.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

The third strategy I noticed in your book “nobody nowhere” is exemplified by the scene with Ann who was in crisis, being given hell by an educational worker who, in addition, wanted her to keep a doll by her side when she was obviously afraid of it.
You took the place of the worker, discarded the doll and gave Ann your hairbrush.
She ran and rang again her fingers on the brush while listening the soft noise it made.
You don’t mention a particular result but I guess it goes without saying that it had already a calming effect on her.
You then hummed a repetitive tune while gently tapping her arm in step with the tune and, beautiful invention of yours, you then made her tap her own arm by “putting (her) through the act” as psychologists call it.
This is the most elementary form of teaching imitation, a completely forgotten but, yet, efficient one.
She spontaneously started imitating you by humming the tune in her throat. You invited her to a full “role-taking” (another label for imitation) by simply omitting more and more notes, so that, in the end, she was able to sing the tune alone while tapping her harm, i.e., she enacted a perfect reproduction of what you did for yourself in the past.
The very significant effect of this approach has been underlined by the fact that, eventually, Ann uncrossed her eyes and has been looking directly at you for a while.

In spite of the omnipresence of mimetic aspects, this strategy is based on something quite different since your attempt was to give Ann something “consistent”.  Where does consistency lies here ?
I perceive it in something which is the same as the matching of your kinesthetic sensations by the visual feedback you got when moving in front of a mirror.  We already agreed that this matching has been very satisfying because it has been giving you a form of control on your body that helped you “register the physical”.

With your help Ann found herself in a situation of matching between your repetitive (hence controllable) tune and the gentle sensation produced by your tapping (repetitive by essence).
In her ocean of distress, you created a small island of stability or consistency, i.e., a matching between sensations that could then be “registered”, that is, appeared as “real”, and were then reassuring.
You gave her comfort, since comfort is the mere matching between what is expected and what is perceived, that is, control, again.
By teaching her (with a “putting through the act” method) how to produce at will this control, you gave her such a precious tool of emotion regulation — since we can see our emotions are the affective expression of the control we have or have not on our environment, body included.

A fascinating thing here is the impact such a teaching had on Ann. Because she somehow felt understood and “seen” exactly where she was standing  (since you matched her needs), she dared have a look at you.
I perceive here a moment a pure grace that signal the coming of Ann to the social mirror, i.e., her readiness to take account of you as some-body having a relevant image of her, an image she can accept, since it makes her feel good. As far as I understand it, I see this moment as a small but significant victory over the exposure anxiety you mentioned.

In your perspective, is this a sound reading of your exchange with Ann ?

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes.  But I knew about the brush because one of my most valued objects at age 3 was combs.  I’d run my fingers over them by my ear over and over.  Later I found I could get this from running my fingers over wire or a stick over a fence or running my fingers up and down venetian blinds, then I heard the cat purr which sounded like the ‘rih-rih’ noise of the comb so liked to listen to the cat. I’d also lay over the car differential in the back seat for the vibration and the purring sound.  So I instinctually knew what would work to a meaning deaf, meaning blind girl… a consistent, controllable, low tone sound she could operate herself (and ultimately not require social invaders to help).  My parents went along with these things with me.  I was playing with combs until I was about ten and I would lay my face on the washing machine.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

Before moving toward the Exposure Anxiety topic, I would like to underline the fact that your many examples explaining why you gave your hairbrush to Ann in order to calm her down all belong to the category of repetitive AND bimodal stimuli. Some were actively produced when others were simply engramed, but all of them entail a repetitive auditory stimulus in perfect synchrony with a tactile and/or kinesthetic stimulus (even the cat and the washing machine were producing repetitive sounds AND some corresponding mechanical vibrations).

DONNA WILLIAMS

Yes, beaded curtains would fit this too, and rubbing vinyl surfaces for the noise.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

As suggested before, this synchrony is a kind of tiny consensus among senses that allows for the same “registration” which occured when you have been matching your physical movements (kinesthetic perception) with your image in the mirror (visual perception).
Again, in my perspective, the essence of this “registration” process lies in the control which occurs when one sensory information channel is the source of anticipations which are matched by a different sensory channel. This agreement among senses is indeed a sure sign that something independant from the observer is confronted and should be “registred” as a “real thing”.

DONNA WILLIAMS

Makes sense.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

At the end of the day we understand that matching, that is, control, is everywhere in your therapeutic strategies since the mirror and imitation strategies are both based on behavior and, hence, body matching. Of course, in spite of its efficiency, the localized interaction with a comb or any particular object source of multimodal stimuli doesn’t compare with the powerful  sense of security and the satisfactions one can get when able to match her/his own body with some “other body”, whether in a mirror or in a real setting.

As already agreed, your self-taught apprenticeship of the human shape in front of a mirror is probably what gave you the ability to match or to assimilate other bodies to yours. The understanding, the control and the growing security that followed this acquisition eventually led you to a definite attraction towards these shapes that you first hardly distinguished from shit or monsters.

DONNA WILLIAMS

Yes, makes sense.  Good summary.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

It is my contention that everything should be done to help autists follow your path between the “no-body nowhere’s land” where you came from and the “some bodies somewhere’s land” you have progressively been able to access, thus confronting the so-called “social mirror” of human society which nurture the “looking-glass selves” of individuals as well as make them feel more or less Exposure Anxiety depending on the level of control they enjoy (more about that later on if you want).

What do you think of this tentative conclusion ? Do you see it as somehow correct ?

DONNA WILLIAMS

I think this is exactly why I despair when ABA and forced compliance based approaches aim to get those with autism to perform actions without giving them any of the emotional/perceptual foundations with which to IDENTIFY with the actions their being trained to do then these very expensive therapists blame the ensuing ‘prompt dependancy’ on ‘the autism’.  If they instead worked with the foundations of perception and identification they’d get not well trained ‘autistic monkeys’ but those who later felt intact as more emotionally whole humans.  This is why I favor approaches like RDI (Relationship Development Intervention) which has used many of my approaches and primarily meshes bonding with functioning.

LUC-LAURENT SALVADOR:

I think we had a beautiful exchange that I enjoyed very much.
Thanks

Luc-Laurent

DONNA WILLIAMS:

Yes, it was interesting.  Thank you for your passion for this field and caring holistically about autistic experience.

Warmly,

Donna Williams, Dip Ed, BA Hons.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.

http://www.myspace.com/nobodynowherethefilm
http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.aspinauts.com