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How to help teenager

NAS77015

Hello,

This is my first post on here.

I’m a mum to a brilliant 10 year old son who was diagnosed two years ago. The diagnosis has opened our eyes to so many things and our relationship with him is the best it has been. We know how to help him and we are able to teach him how to help himself.

In learning to understand autism we have come to suspect (well I’d say we are very very sure) that his older 13 year old sister is also autistic. In many ways we are finding it so much more challenging with her. She suffers from extreme anxiety and significant social communication challenges, stimming and trich. As is typical for girls she masks and her ‘public identity’ is massive for her. We can see that she is struggling to sustain this identify - she can be very detached and defensive so it feels so hard for her to understand what we want to help her. I’m so worried that if we let it go that something bad will happen, but when I try to speak to her she is defiant in her view that she doesn’t need help and that she will not see a professional. She threatens to leave home and worse. How do I get her to see that she needs help and that it can be a positive thing, as it was for her brother (she doesn’t have a good relationship with him so those comparisons we don’t make often)? Or do we just have to take the action on her behalf and force her into it? 

We’ve been recommended a therapist who works with autism (she practices EMDR which we felt might be better since our daughter would struggle to talk to a stranger). We’ve spoken to her and she agreed that there appeared to be some worrying signs, however she has said that our daughter needs to come to therapy willingly.

We would really appreciate you advice or experiences.

TIA 

  • in reply to NAS77015

    My child is 11 nearly 12 in a couple of months he received his diagnosis of PDA when he was 7. 

    I’d 100% recommend you Check out Harry Thomsons you tube videos and his tik tok or read his book (if haven’t read it already) 

    I didn’t understand my sons behaviour or his thinking or his points of view until I came across Harry Thomson. He explains it so well. 

    Also Spencer Scott’s book Understand me! 

    Do you as a parent have a tik tok account? You could ask her to set you an account up? It’s actually really fun! Maybe you could learn one of the dances that people are doing and then surprise your daughter? She will no doubt find you embarrassing as most teenagers do find their parents embarrassing but she will laugh! You don’t have to put your picture on or make videos if you don’t want to! You can just watch other people’s videos. My son laughs his head off at me when I do a dance. He will send videos to my phone and say watch this mum it’s so funny! 

    Humour works great with PDA, one thing I’ve learned is traditional parenting doesn’t work! 

  • I think that you need to work on her obviously very negative view of autism, or the need to see clinicians about non-physical health needs. There are some positive role models out there of autistic females, such as Daryl Hannah and Greta Thunberg. Admitting that you might be autistic does not equate with giving up on dreams and aspirations, it just enables the autistic child to receive targeted help. She is clearly very invested in her 'school persona', and you should try to convince her that being assessed, then diagnosed and receiving accommodations and help in and out of school, will not threaten this persona.

  • in reply to GuybrushThreepwood

    I’ve suspected PDA too as her actions can be so startlingly different to what I know she wants to do. For example she’s been so excited about Christmas but from Christmas Eve onwards she has been relentlessly sabotaging the smallest of attempts by family members to do something nice. She shows no remorse or gratitude. I sway from thinking it’s control or anxiety induced, but because she refuses to discuss things, and believes that everything she does is caused by someone else, it’s so hard to understand where it’s coming from. I feel we need that to support her. 

    She is obsessive about Tik Tok and in fact we’ve just taken it away because we felt that it made things worse (I know someone will tell me was absolutely the wrong thing to do, but we were desperate). I’ll perhaps have a look at some accounts myself and see if there are some that resonate. When she was 11 she read the book Can You See Me about an autistic girl and it was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders - she spoke for hours about the similarities. Yet the next morning when I raised the subject again she said she couldn’t remember anything of what I was saying, and refused to every discuss it again. 

  • Does she have a TikTok or Instagram account? If she does maybe you can find some young autistic creators for her to follow, she might identify with what they are posting and come to the realisation for herself. It is also possible though that she has a PDA (pathological demand avoidance) profile, if  so it will definitely be difficult to get her to engage with professionals if she doesn’t want to for herself