Imagine your child has just been diagnosed with autism. How would you help your child make sense of this? At Green Sparks we often work with families in this position, and we’ve started trying to think out loud about what autism means for us and how we talk about it. This is what we’ve come up with so far:
We all agree that autistic people make sense of the world differently. But what does that actually mean?
You have always been you, and you always will be. How are you supposed to know what it would be like to be anyone else, or to be different to the person you are right now?
If we had a magic way to look at the brains of everyone on the planet, then we would find that most of them follow a similar pattern when they are thinking and see the world in a similar way. Because more people follow that pattern, we call it ‘typical’. Typical doesn’t mean normal, it doesn’t mean right and it doesn’t mean better, it just means that there are more people who think that way than people that don’t.
The group of people that think differently, and don’t follow the same patterns or see the world in the same way as the typical people, we call divergent. This doesn’t mean wrong, it doesn’t mean abnormal, it doesn’t mean weird. It means there is a bigger group thinking one way, and the smaller group ‘diverge’ – they are different.
Autistic people see the world differently. They are neurodivergent (neuro is just a fancy medical word for brains and how we use them). This can show up in all sorts of different ways. If you are autistic;
Things that seem obvious to most people may not be obvious to you. Things that seem obvious to you may not be obvious to most people
Things that seem easy to most people may not seem easy to you
Meanwhile you may be able to make connections and see patterns that most people can’t
You may often end up feeling stuck waiting for people to catch up with you
You may get frustrated that it takes most people longer to understand you, what you think and how you feel
People may think they can tell what you are thinking and what you need and they may be getting that very wrong
What do you think? Does any of this sound familiar?