Teaching Our Autistic Child to Speak
At an
Enneagram conference shortly after our book was published,
Clarence and I conducted a mini-version of our telephone coach
training. One skill we taught was how to look for exceptions to
problems and encourage more of what works. This is a great way
to encourage transformational change in clients. You can also
use this yourself when you feel stuck. Instead of getting mired
down in the problem, ask yourself to think of a time when you
were able to solve the same or a similar problem. Then explore:
“What did I do? How did I get unstuck that time? How could I do
more of that?”
We also
demonstrated how right brain tactics can alter the way people
think. Typically, clients' internal filters bounce back any
information that doesn’t fit with their nice, comfortable
worldview. By packaging ideas as metaphors the coach can slip by
the guardians at the gate. Here’s an excerpt from an interaction
I had with a Seven who
felt unable to get past her discomfort when dealing with the
details of her work. I combined solution focus with a
right-brain tactic, searching for an exception to her problem
and eliciting a metaphor that allowed us to reframe her
experience:
Seven:
“All my life I’ve had the tendency to move away from
anything uncomfortable.”
Coach:
“So when you haven’t bolted, when you’re able to stay with
being uncomfortable, how do you do that?”
Seven: “I
tell myself to hold it in place until my sense of resistance
isn’t so strong. But talking to myself about it is a real
struggle.”
Coach:
“We have three channels to communicate with our resistances:
auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. You seem to use an
auditory process.”
Seven:
“Yes, I think in words and paragraphs; I don’t see
pictures.”
Coach:
“That
is
good
to know, because it means when we shift to a kinesthetic
channel we’ll reach your right brain processes in ways we
can’t with words. So hold the awareness of the sense that
you want to move away from something. Where in your body do
you experience that sensation?”
Seven:
“In my gut.”
Coach:
“Expand that sensation and tell me what it’s like.”
Seven:
“It’s a kind of frenetic energy. ‘Butterflies’ is too gentle
a word. It’s wobbly, frenetic.”
Coach:
“Now try that on. Does that feel exactly right, that sense
that it’s wobbly, frenetic?”
Seven:
“Not quite. An image comes to me from a college program in
special education when I worked with autistic children. One
of the things an autistic child will do when feeling
overwhelmed is what's called flapping."
Coach:
“Is that a fit?”
Seven:
“That’s exactly it.”
Coach:
“Good. So there’s a child in you who hasn’t been able to
communicate except through flapping. This week,
whenever you feel the presence of that child, listen for
what she’s trying to communicate.”
Notice I
didn’t accept the client’s belief that she never thought in
images. Instead, I embedded a possibility in my response and
brought her almost immediately to an experience that countered
her view of herself – suddenly she was seeing in images. Another
useful skill illustrated in the above interaction is possibility
language (“That
is
good to
know because it means when we shift… we’ll reach your right
brain processes…”).
In short
order this client shifted from an internal verbal struggle –
trying to force herself to continue doing something
uncomfortable (and reinforcing her Enneagram Seven worldview) –
into a playful, imaginary interaction with a child-like part of
herself who’d been “autistic,” unable to communicate except
through frenetic physical movement. Another aspect of
possibility language I used was a presupposition – that the
autistic child
will be
trying to communicate in a different way.
