“Can you use NVR with autism?” …I was asked during some in-service training abroad “…because when we were first trained in NVR, we were told you cannot, that people on the autistic spectrum don’t have the social capacity.” I’m glad we missed out on that warning in the UK; many families with children on the autistic spectrum have benefitted from the introduction of nonviolence to their family life – families with young people who were showing aggressive, violent behaviour, and/or those families whose children were anxious and socially withdrawn, spending their nights on the internet and refusing school.
Recently, Beth and Roger Nichols, parents of a son with autism, and I presented a workshop at the National Autistic Society conference in Harrogate. Beth and Roger spoke movingly about the way they were able to come back together again as a family, on account of the changes in their relationships that were brought on by using NVR. In preparing my part of the presentation, it struck me how difficult it was to make it ‘autism specific’. Yet, without having developed a new, ‘autism-specific’ form of NVR we have been using its methods very successfully. Could this mean that young people on the autistic spectrum need nonviolence as much as anyone else, or even more? Perhaps bringing nonviolent principles to bear in work with families with an autistic member is simply good practice?
Roz Blackburn, a woman with autism, was a keynote speaker at the conference. She made a point with the greatest concision and utmost clarity, in the way some people with autism tend to be able to. She outlined how fear is the key experience in the life of an autistic person. Fear can feel omnipresent. Much of this fear is generated by the existential struggle for survival in a world dominated by the expectations and norms of the neuro-typical. Yet, when some of the young people on the spectrum have become habituated to behaving in controlling ways, their parents and other caregivers catch only rare glimpses of such fear, as it is very quickly superseded by expressed anger and aggression. Indeed, even the young people themselves seem to catch only the occasional glimpse of their own fear.
Fear and anger are closely ‘related’ emotions – fear motivates to take self-protective action, and anger can be associated with self-protective impulses, as well. Functionally however, they are very different. While fear motivates towards withdrawal from the immediate situation, anger motivates to control it – more precisely, to remove such triggers, that could potentially trigger fear. If a young person with autism experiences the social world around them – and often also their sensory-perceptive environment – as potentially far more threatening than another young person, it well behoves their significant others well to help reduce the threatening qualities in the contexts of their everyday lives. Nonviolent methods help them to achieve this: de-escalation in everyday life dramatically reduces the threat potential around a young person. However, de-escalation is enabled by parental strength. Parents or carers do not de-escalate when they are anxious, they submit. Anxious submissiveness is not emotionally containing, and the arousal level of the young person shoots up. Helpless parents often momentarily aim to achieve a sense of having power – by escalating. A raised voice is motivated by the illusion of control. Yet, that fleeting sense of power vanishes like a mirage, when the habitually angry young person experiences the parent as an even greater threat – and much more forcefully struggles to win the upper hand. By contrast, the parent who has acquired a position of strength does not submit; nor does she or he need to compensate for helplessness by escalating and becoming a threatening other to a young person, to whom the world may already seem very threatening. Positive direct action in NVR is a great asset in helping caregivers acquire the sense of strength they need. In taking positive action, they become able to practice better emotional self-regulation. Self-regulated parents are more emotionally containing of the young person.
Young people usually hate having to talk to their elders about themselves. Young people with autism tend to hate it even more. Yet, motivated by the norm to be child-centred, adults often insist of engaging young people in conversations about – them – , when there has been problematic behaviour. “Why do you feel you did this?”, even when uttered in a soft, gentle voice, quickly becomes a noxious stimulus, a move in an escalatory dance. Action, not words, a maxim in NVR, organises the way in which an adult engages in the relationship with the young person in a very different manner: rather than construing the young person as lacking in emotional acuity, as the often anxious attempt to improve their mentalizing capacity does, the clear and concise demand: “We would like to know how you will control yourself next time you’re upset, so you don’t hurt anyone…” communicates the speaker’s positive expectation, that the young person can and will do this. “No faffing around talking about feeeelings”, a young man told me one time.
There is a twist to this story. A diagnosis of an autistic spectrum disorder can be immensely helpful to the young person and to the family, facilitating the dispersion of educational and financial resources, and enabling a more caring environment by virtue of the re-frame: It’s autism, not naughtiness. Yet, in a care world dominated by a medical model, in which the person is often reduced to their diagnosable “condition”, parents run the risk of over-accommodating their child, when they learn to attribute any aggressive behaviour to “autism” in a mono-causal, linear way. When the plate becomes a flying saucer cutting through the dining room air with great velocity, and the baked beans coat the wall like the star-spangled night sky, there may have been a sensory sensitivity involved. Yet the mother who has learned to draw the conclusion, that a good parent of a child on the autistic spectrum must now demurely clean up the mess (having dodged the flying saucer) and start cooking all over again, may feel great muscular tension in her shoulders and at the back of her neck, not to speak of the migraine that would lay her flat for days, were it not for the need to look after her children. Haim Omer and Dan Dollberger have identified over-accommodation as a key factor in the entitled dependency on their parents of young adults with Aspergers.
This story has another twist. The adolescent force behind the flying saucer is, according to his mother, “obsessed” with “World of Warcraft” (my goodness, aren’t they all….). Remember the muscular tension at the back of her neck, in her shoulders? What does that tension represent? Perhaps an inhibited, self-protective response, the not-acted-upon impulse to flee or to fight, or in the language of trauma theory, a frozen action tendency. While she must be there in body, to care for her child, is she able to be there mentally, in the way she would like to be, in the way her son needs her to be, attentive and attuned to him? Actually, the Internet has become her enemy, and Internet + son has become one of the threatening cues in her life. When he has attempted to talk to her about World of Warcraft – albeit in a manner she finds tedious and ‘obsessive’ – she has found her body stiffen, in a similar manner to the way it does, when the flying saucer cuts through the dining room. His “rambling on” about his game seems to fall on deaf ears; she is present in body, but feels unable to attune to her son in mind. Her enemy is his world, and unknowingly, she has declined his invitation to it. Whilst the weight of the family world seems to rest on her shoulders alone, and she has taken her fair share of blame or even more, this mother has learned not to expect the father to support her cause – her self-protection, and her helpless attempt to preserve harmony in the home. However, it becomes the therapist’s responsibility to facilitate the father’s learning to support the mother in resisting. He may learn to scrape the baked bean mess off the wall, rather than engaging in a shouting match with his son; he may tell the son to help himself to fruit from the fruit bowl if he’s hungry rather than insisting the son clear it up; he may re-assure the mother, that it’s ok dinner is over – tomorrow is another day; he may accompany the mother to the boy’s room the next day for a sit-in, to make it clear that the parents no longer accept this behaviour, and that from now on they are together in this. As this juncture, the parents can grow in strength. As she feels stronger, the mother may feel less threatened by the Internet enemy. With less survival reactivity, she may become more able to appreciate her son’s invitation to join her in his “obsessive” world – and her reconciliation gesture becomes listening to what she has previously experienced as a “ramble”, thus re-connecting with her son. Kids on the autistic spectrum do “do social”, just in different ways. That is why they need nonviolence in their lives.
Article By Dr Peter Jakob
“Can you use NVR with autism?” …I was asked during some in-service training abroad “…because when we were first trained in NVR, we were told you cannot, that people on the autistic spectrum don’t have the social capacity.” I’m glad we missed out on that warning in the UK; many families with children on the autistic spectrum have benefitted from the introduction of nonviolence to their family life – families with young people who were showing aggressive, violent behaviour, and/or those families whose children were anxious and socially withdrawn, spending their nights on the internet and refusing school.
Recently, Beth and Roger Nichols, parents of a son with autism, and I presented a workshop at the National Autistic Society conference in Harrogate. Beth and Roger spoke movingly about the way they were able to come back together again as a family, on account of the changes in their relationships that were brought on by using NVR. In preparing my part of the presentation, it struck me how difficult it was to make it ‘autism specific’. Yet, without having developed a new, ‘autism-specific’ form of NVR we have been using its methods very successfully. Could this mean that young people on the autistic spectrum need nonviolence as much as anyone else, or even more? Perhaps bringing nonviolent principles to bear in work with families with an autistic member is simply good practice?
Roz Blackburn, a woman with autism, was a keynote speaker at the conference. She made a point with the greatest concision and utmost clarity, in the way some people with autism tend to be able to. She outlined how fear is the key experience in the life of an autistic person. Fear can feel omnipresent. Much of this fear is generated by the existential struggle for survival in a world dominated by the expectations and norms of the neuro-typical. Yet, when some of the young people on the spectrum have become habituated to behaving in controlling ways, their parents and other caregivers catch only rare glimpses of such fear, as it is very quickly superseded by expressed anger and aggression. Indeed, even the young people themselves seem to catch only the occasional glimpse of their own fear.
Fear and anger are closely ‘related’ emotions – fear motivates to take self-protective action, and anger can be associated with self-protective impulses, as well. Functionally however, they are very different. While fear motivates towards withdrawal from the immediate situation, anger motivates to control it – more precisely, to remove such triggers, that could potentially trigger fear. If a young person with autism experiences the social world around them – and often also their sensory-perceptive environment – as potentially far more threatening than another young person, it well behoves their significant others well to help reduce the threatening qualities in the contexts of their everyday lives. Nonviolent methods help them to achieve this: de-escalation in everyday life dramatically reduces the threat potential around a young person. However, de-escalation is enabled by parental strength. Parents or carers do not de-escalate when they are anxious, they submit. Anxious submissiveness is not emotionally containing, and the arousal level of the young person shoots up. Helpless parents often momentarily aim to achieve a sense of having power – by escalating. A raised voice is motivated by the illusion of control. Yet, that fleeting sense of power vanishes like a mirage, when the habitually angry young person experiences the parent as an even greater threat – and much more forcefully struggles to win the upper hand. By contrast, the parent who has acquired a position of strength does not submit; nor does she or he need to compensate for helplessness by escalating and becoming a threatening other to a young person, to whom the world may already seem very threatening. Positive direct action in NVR is a great asset in helping caregivers acquire the sense of strength they need. In taking positive action, they become able to practice better emotional self-regulation. Self-regulated parents are more emotionally containing of the young person.
Young people usually hate having to talk to their elders about themselves. Young people with autism tend to hate it even more. Yet, motivated by the norm to be child-centred, adults often insist of engaging young people in conversations about – them – , when there has been problematic behaviour. “Why do you feel you did this?”, even when uttered in a soft, gentle voice, quickly becomes a noxious stimulus, a move in an escalatory dance. Action, not words, a maxim in NVR, organises the way in which an adult engages in the relationship with the young person in a very different manner: rather than construing the young person as lacking in emotional acuity, as the often anxious attempt to improve their mentalizing capacity does, the clear and concise demand: “We would like to know how you will control yourself next time you’re upset, so you don’t hurt anyone…” communicates the speaker’s positive expectation, that the young person can and will do this. “No faffing around talking about feeeelings”, a young man told me one time.
There is a twist to this story. A diagnosis of an autistic spectrum disorder can be immensely helpful to the young person and to the family, facilitating the dispersion of educational and financial resources, and enabling a more caring environment by virtue of the re-frame: It’s autism, not naughtiness. Yet, in a care world dominated by a medical model, in which the person is often reduced to their diagnosable “condition”, parents run the risk of over-accommodating their child, when they learn to attribute any aggressive behaviour to “autism” in a mono-causal, linear way. When the plate becomes a flying saucer cutting through the dining room air with great velocity, and the baked beans coat the wall like the star-spangled night sky, there may have been a sensory sensitivity involved. Yet the mother who has learned to draw the conclusion, that a good parent of a child on the autistic spectrum must now demurely clean up the mess (having dodged the flying saucer) and start cooking all over again, may feel great muscular tension in her shoulders and at the back of her neck, not to speak of the migraine that would lay her flat for days, were it not for the need to look after her children. Haim Omer and Dan Dollberger have identified over-accommodation as a key factor in the entitled dependency on their parents of young adults with Aspergers.
This story has another twist. The adolescent force behind the flying saucer is, according to his mother, “obsessed” with “World of Warcraft” (my goodness, aren’t they all….). Remember the muscular tension at the back of her neck, in her shoulders? What does that tension represent? Perhaps an inhibited, self-protective response, the not-acted-upon impulse to flee or to fight, or in the language of trauma theory, a frozen action tendency. While she must be there in body, to care for her child, is she able to be there mentally, in the way she would like to be, in the way her son needs her to be, attentive and attuned to him? Actually, the Internet has become her enemy, and Internet + son has become one of the threatening cues in her life. When he has attempted to talk to her about World of Warcraft – albeit in a manner she finds tedious and ‘obsessive’ – she has found her body stiffen, in a similar manner to the way it does, when the flying saucer cuts through the dining room. His “rambling on” about his game seems to fall on deaf ears; she is present in body, but feels unable to attune to her son in mind. Her enemy is his world, and unknowingly, she has declined his invitation to it. Whilst the weight of the family world seems to rest on her shoulders alone, and she has taken her fair share of blame or even more, this mother has learned not to expect the father to support her cause – her self-protection, and her helpless attempt to preserve harmony in the home. However, it becomes the therapist’s responsibility to facilitate the father’s learning to support the mother in resisting. He may learn to scrape the baked bean mess off the wall, rather than engaging in a shouting match with his son; he may tell the son to help himself to fruit from the fruit bowl if he’s hungry rather than insisting the son clear it up; he may re-assure the mother, that it’s ok dinner is over – tomorrow is another day; he may accompany the mother to the boy’s room the next day for a sit-in, to make it clear that the parents no longer accept this behaviour, and that from now on they are together in this. As this juncture, the parents can grow in strength. As she feels stronger, the mother may feel less threatened by the Internet enemy. With less survival reactivity, she may become more able to appreciate her son’s invitation to join her in his “obsessive” world – and her reconciliation gesture becomes listening to what she has previously experienced as a “ramble”, thus re-connecting with her son. Kids on the autistic spectrum do “do social”, just in different ways. That is why they need nonviolence in their lives.
Article By Dr Peter Jakob