Drowning Dreams (or, Why I choose to work with parents)

A symbiotic relationship

When you remove puppies from the mother dog, her heart breaks, she becomes ill and she can even bleed to death. If you replace her babies she becomes physically well again.

When my relationship with my son was not going well I felt broken. I was incapable of happiness or of getting on with my own life. I had recurring nightmares of him drowning and of me not being able to reach or save him. In other nightmares I would lose him in a maze of tunnels. I could always hear him just out of my reach but never managed to find him. Such literal manifestations of my feelings! And I know other autism-parents have similar dreams.

“It is called symbiotic, that early relationship, the mother giving her baby security along with the stimulus to nourishment while the baby serves her as a therapeutic agent speeding her recovery from her recent tiring labours in bringing her baby forth.” (Montagu: Touching, 1986)

I don‘t know how exactly the inadequate relationship with my son affected me physically but I imagine it did.

Crisis

My initial response to my child‘s ‘disappearance‘ into autism was crisis mode: I wanted to do as much as was humanly possible to help him. Running full-time behavioural programmes with their complex curricula and targets, ploughing in all my emotions, energy, money and time. Sacrificing everything to run those programmes (income, friends, hobbies, career, interests, my whole life!) would surely benefit him enormously. Yet neither of us healed or even felt better. I would go so far as to say that these therapies made the whole family feel an awful lot worse.

We know from research that Intensive Interaction helps our children (even when they are no longer infants) to access the type of learning that happens very early on for typically developing babies and toddlers - in other words, the type of learning that individuals with autism need so desperately (see here for a list of this type of learning). What I believe is that Intensive Interaction can heal the parent-infant relationship, simultaneously helping the parent (or any other heart-broken family member) and their child to heal.

In tune with one another

I wonder also if parents do not make the very best Intensive Interaction practitioners:

Evidence suggests that mothers are so in tune with their babies that they feel what their child feels and show a faster response to their child‘s distress than an adult who responds to somebody else‘s child‘s distress. (Manini et al, 2013) Naturally, we can't do it all on our own - we need support and help but it's so important that parents are involved.

“In relationships between parents and children, this “openness“ and “faith in the now“ gives rise to a sense of wonder in each other, which defies rational justification but may be vital for development.“ (Reddy: How infants know minds, 2010)

More Happy Families!!!

The relationship with my son is wonderful now. He is happy and so am I. Ours is a happy family. My son's developmental progress has been phenomenal. I feel very strongly that all autism-families have the right to this healing, happiness and developmental progress for their child and will do everything in my power to help families access the benefits of this wonderful therapy.

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