A Narrative Guide to Communication...

I have a student I’ll call Susan. Recently, I had some great success communicating effectively with her.  She is on the autistic spectrum and is, therefore, challenged by social norms.  Let me get this straight from the get go, Susan does NOT have diminished mental capacities!  She is one of the sharpest tacks in the box.  Nor is she completely in left field when it comes to social situations.  Susan doesn’t run around covering her ears nor does she exhibit extreme stemming behaviors. Her self-medicating tendencies are more subtle, though they can be a little strange.

She often feels certain complex emotions or reactions and doesn’t have the language the rest of us do to express them.  When she is really excited, she reacts physically by flapping her hands together or running.  Sometimes she’ll even get aggressive toward other students and it seems like she is angry.  She will also hyper-focus on topics that either interest her or are bothering her and will not move on until she has somehow expressed her focus.  Susan also lies.  She doesn’t connect her words to the idea of dishonesty because they are simply a way to couch her feelings in terms she can deal with.

Here’s an example: one day during class, Susan was very lethargic and kept putting her head on her desk.  After repeated reminders to sit up straight (sometimes when she is feeling grumpy or unmotivated, she’ll put her head down and I have to be firm with her—just as I am with all my students), I realized that we would get nowhere with that course of action that particular day.  So, when I had a moment to devote to her individually, I pulled her out into the hallway to speak to her in private. 

“Susan, what’s up? You seem like you are having a bad day. Did something happen today to make you feel this way?”

“I saw a rattlesnake yesterday and I have an extreme phobia of rattlesnakes.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you.  However, there are no rattlesnakes here right now and that was yesterday.”

We continued down a fruitless path because I was not reading her signals.  She was not upset about a rattlesnake the day before, in fact, she LOVES snakes and was in the midst of writing a report about rattlesnakes for our science class.  I was confused and frustrated by such “excuses.”  I thought she was just grumpy because someone made her mad or she didn’t feel like participating (both are occurrences I’ve dealt with before and not just with Susan!).  It wasn’t until the next day that I found out the full story.

Susan went home that day not feeling well.  She had a fever and other complications related to being sick (probably a virus—we are a happy little community of disease vectors in fifth grade).  I received an email from her mom the following morning telling me that Susan would not be in school because she was sick.  I was annoyed that she didn’t just tell me she was sick!  I was also a little frustrated that she spent so much time and energy concocting a story about rattlesnakes.

Weeks pased (just a couple) and another lying incident with Susan helped me to see things more clearly.  She receives speech services and either physical therapy or occupational therapy services at school (I think it is the latter because they seem to be working on fine motor skills and not gross).  One day, the specialist who was working with her (I think it was the OT, not the speech specialist—I’m still getting to know everyone at the school, don’t judge), approached me before she picked up Susan from the specialist class (either art, music, or gym) for the weekly OT services.  She introduced herself and let me know she was a semi-permanent sub (or something—too many particulars).  I told her that Susan was having an unusually unfocused day at school (she is often unfocused, but we’ve learned some routines that help her refocus.  That day, she would have none of it) and I wondered if she (the OT) could do some objective probing and questioning.  She agreed.

After the OT session, the woman came to my room (I was eating lunch) to report her findings.  With a little questioning, Susan opened up and told a long story about how her mom was pregnant and going to have a baby in a week.  Susan said she felt nervous because she would not be the only kid anymore and she wouldn’t get all the attention she likes.  After the OT finished, I looked at her and said, “Oh dear.  That’s all a lie.  I JUST talked to her mom in person two days ago and she is, I can assure you, NOT pregnant.”  We sat and chatted for a little bit and came to an interesting conclusion: Susan creates these elaborate stories because she doesn’t have the language to express what is REALLY going on.

After lunch, while my TA was teaching, I pulled Susan aside and said, “I spoke to the OT today and she told me an interesting story.”  Susan immediately ducked her head and smiled.  I continued, “Why did you tell her that story?”  She responded by telling me she felt upset and if she told a story then it made her feel better; it gave her a reason to feel upset. 

How insightful is that?  Susan is not a bald-face liar (though she does exaggerate like any other fifth-grader who tries to one-up his/her friends), but she does invent these elaborate explanations for what others may see as common-place feelings (physical sickness, feeling left-out), which are actually pretty complicated. Once I had a glimpse of this coping strategy, it helped me to more effectively communicate with Susan.  I have to listen with my eyes and intuition as well as my ears. I also have to frame the questions in an attainable manner.

One last example…

We had a fire drill at school recently.  When this happens, all students are hyped up by it, but Susan has an especially difficult time dealing with the excitement and change of routine.  Again, ALL students are affected, but they have more subtle ways of coping.  Not Susan.  She responded by kicking someone (not out of anger, but out of a need to express her excitement).  Both kids got detention from a neighboring teacher (I didn’t see how the whole incident played out, but apparently the other student retaliated in an inappropriate manner).  I targeted Susan for my questioning (as she was the instigator—once I found out the situation, I gave the other kid a stern look and a reminder that retaliation with physical violence of any kind is inappropriate on school grounds.  I kinda wish he wouldn’t have received detention from the other teacher and that we would be more willing to let natural consequences occur.  I mean, if Susan gets pushed back for kicking someone out of the blue, or perhaps if she even gets punched in the nose once or twice, she may be able to more quickly devise better ways to react to stimulation. Much faster than when I spend time lecturing her on a level she doesn’t have the social understandings to grasp.  But, alas!) and then let the other kid go. 

Having learned from experience with other students, I framed my question as such:

“Susan, kicking _______ was wrong.  Why was it wrong?”

Susan was able to respond to this question.  Had I asked, “Why did you kick _____?”, I would have received either an unsatisfactory answer (“I don’t know”) or sullen silence.  Either way, no self-reflection would take place (besides, do ANY of us know why we do dumb things at times?  It’s the temporary loss of logic and reasoning that make it do them, so of COURSE we don’t know WHY).  But, by labeling her behavior in a manner consistent with the context (kicking is wrong on school campus) and providing her with a relatable platform (it is wrong because it breaks the rules), we could converse.  I could even push her further to explain to me why we have a rule against kicking (because it can hurt people) which led to a self-reflective moment for Susan.  She was able to connect her behavior to a negative consequence that adversely affected another person. It took very specific questions and an understanding of her social awareness to bring Susan to a point of empathy.  It is not natural for humans to be empathetic and Susan is just like the rest of us in that regard.  She has the added layer of intense, raw reactions to even the most subtle feelings or changes because her filter is minimal (you and I can filter through the ambient stimuli automatically, not Susan). 

So, once we established that her reaction was inappropriate, we could get down to what made her react.  Knowing Susan as I already did, I was able to intuit that the stimulation of the fire drill (and even my startled reaction to it—I wasn’t expecting it, either) was too much for her to contain in her mind.  She needed an outlet to express that energy.  And kicking was a great release!  She had no animosity toward the kid she kicked nor even a reason for choosing him beyond his proximity.  He wasn’t special or “chosen” (getting him to understand that is difficult, but that relates to another point later on).  Now, I will not go into all the details of the conversation at this point because, frankly, I STILL didn’t pursue the right course of questioning—at least not initially.  Eventually, I figured it out and was able to help her vocalize the fact that she felt disrupted and grumpy about things (it wasn’t just the fire drill—something made her mad at her parents that morning and it had to do with math homework).  This ended up being a day-long discussion because her grumpiness and inappropriate reactions to the environs continued throughout the day (which is how I figured out that it was more than the fire drill) and she got into trouble during gym (a very stimulating place for any kid!).

Now, that was a long introduction for what I REALLY want to talk about.

I am Susan.  No, not in a literal sense or an allegorical sense (I changed the child’s identity to protect an actual child, not to disguise myself as the child).  I mean, I have some pretty striking commonalities with this kid.  I am more sophisticated in my responses and my filter works much more efficiently than does hers, but there are some applicable tenets of this narrative in my own life. 

Just as Susan didn’t know how to label her feelings and so made up elaborate stories to help her cope, there are many feelings I do not know how to label and therefore, I have developed my own coping systems to make them less scary and unknown.  Just as Susan reacted in a way that helped her feel more in control of a chaotic situation, I sometimes react in seemingly inappropriate ways that allow me to feel in control of a chaotic situation (I don’t generally kick people, but I did once throw a cup of water at a roommate).  The last word in all of these reactions is control.  I need to feel secure and safe and I feel those things by being in control. 

Sometimes, I react in ways that hurt other people (like throwing water at a roommate).  There is no real animosity toward the other person, that person just happens to be the one who is around.  People I love and am comfortable with get the brunt of these overreactions.  Unlike Susan, I can hold onto a feeling long enough to get home before lashing out.  So, those I care about are the ones who get to suffer.  Lucky them.

I am not so different from Susan.

Neither are you.