3:17am April 30, 2015

“There are no miracles. It would be nice if a nonverbal kid suddenly started talking in sentences, if a self-injurious girl suddenly decided she preferred playing the piano to hitting herself in the head, if a withdrawn boy suddenly realized that it’s fun to play with other kids. But none of that’s simply going to happen. Well, not suddenly, anyway. The good news, though, is that if you remove “suddenly” from the previous paragraph, it’s a completely different story, because we have seen all these things happen. They just didn’t happen suddenly or out of the blue— they were the result of hard work, a well-planned schedule of interventions, and a consistency of approach stretching from the family to the school to all therapies and clinical work.”

Lynn Koegel , Overcoming Autism

I actually find myself agreeing with the gist of this: that change in things like self injury takes a lot of effort and rarely just vanishes. Although sometimes it does – when I got adrenal insufficiency I lost a lot of self destructive behavior. But mostly such things take work.

What bothers me about this passage though… it gives no credit to the autistic person’s hard work. When all such changes require more work from the autistic person than from anyone else involved, combined. I need to see if I can find a wonderful story by an autistic woman about that. Time to go search Usenet. I’ve got nothing better to do.

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