For over a year now whenever someone says something or makes a request my Son doesn’t like. He gently punches the corner of his eye. What is this, can anyone make any suggestions?
For over a year now whenever someone says something or makes a request my Son doesn’t like. He gently punches the corner of his eye. What is this, can anyone make any suggestions?
My Son is six. The tidying now I think about it was the trigger st least that time. He has speech and language delay so it’s difficult to know if he has trouble processing his feelings or feels them physically. He looks at his phonics and says them independently with us correcting or saying the letter if he looks to us for help. Thank you
OK. So, something is creating a conflict for him and it sounds like the only words he's figured out to use to attempt to communicate that are "don't like it". He may need some suggestions of alternate expressions so he can learn to be more precise with what is happening internally.
Most of us have degrees of difficulty accessing words to assign to a feeling or an experience. For me, expanding my vocabulary has helped incredibly, but if I'm interrupted during work, I may not be able to access the correct words. On top of which, many of us might have Alexithymia and also will have been assigned a misrepresentation of a feeling we're having difficulty identifying. So there's a lot of possibilities to explore.
The first issue is to ask how often do you do these kind of things together, with him. Often growth and creating an order is easily undertaken when there is a sense of togetherness. We aren't very good at competition or isolation (in fact, competition IS a type of isolation). But connectedness makes these things have purpose.
When we've been focused intently on something else and cannot quite recall how the next thing is done. I might need an hour to mentally envision how I'm cleaning a thing or how I'm engaging in the next task. When someone else can at least make practical directions, it can bring ease. So, second, creating order can be an extremely difficult process. Our heads are already a bit of chaos. Even if you cannot do a thing together, if you can help structure in a very precise detail How-To do things, it is incredibly helpful. Such as (I don't know how old he is): First put all trains into the red box, next the Lego bricks into the yellow box. Once youre done, I can come back and help with the rest, is that OK?
But third, and most important, what is he in the middle of doing when asked? Monotropism is something to mind and there are some new papers to back up how our hyper-hyper-focus flow-state operates and why interruptions can be like waking a sleepwalker. We need a berth of transition time, a good warning - all the time. This also means being reminded to focus on one thing at a time lest we become accident prone (like focusing on just walking down stairs). It works for us and it can work against us -there's 2 sides to every coin. Monotropism drives us to resolve and finish projects, but it also creates severe anxiety with anything unresolved especially if there is a vision already of the end result or how long a thing will have its form. If he's built something and is being asked to disassemble it before completion or has an idea for how long he'd like to enjoy the assemblage or even has plans to continue to add to it, being asked to put everything away can cause stress.
No one likes stress or anxiety or to despair a matter.
The phonics could add a whole other problem: sound quality. I'm guessing here. Maybe you do this together. But if not: There are a lot of recordings made for autistics that have terrible (piercing, grating) sounds. they're no longer on vinyl or tape and coming through a decent system. The tone of a voice could be stress making, he could be dealing with Auditory Processing issues and the system might not give him the time he needs, which means he's rushed and not really learning. I don't know - this can present a wealth of issues...
Do you have an example?
I don't like doing cleaning when I have a list of other things to do. Being old enough to have to sort my own life out I can moderate things which can wait a bit better.
But being requested something I mentally cannot do or something I cannot understand causes a different type of disruption. Further, being interrupted or being forced to have to quit intensely studying a thing, thinking about a thing, can be absolutely jarring. I've described it like being hit from the back of the head. A little less intense is trying to hold a conversation with someone who cannot stay on the point but constantly shifts into several other tangents never coming back to the first issue. It's a bit maddening.
We're wired for and work better in uninterrupted tasks, with set time limits. This page is great to explain this: https://monotropism.org
I'm cautious with not confusing "not liking" a thing vs feeling suffocated by or not understanding or being demanded I shift gears without a proper period for transition. Obviously there are exceptions, like an emergency, but that's not every day life.
The word 'gently' is probably the key there. Self-soothing behaviour. There are little pressure points around the eye that probably just feel grounding to touch or gently stimulate. The Behaviour Panel on YouTube sometimes point out 'facial denting' of various types that they see in footage of people under stress - eg. in court. Subtle chemical shifts occur in the body when we do that. It calms. It probably falls into that kind of area, and additionally could be said to be a stim, which is a not uncommon phenomenon in autistic people of all ages.
