Tina's Question

Do you ever experience springtime as a challenging time of year?

Tina,

You make me very happy. I want to help small autists most because they are the most misunderstood and most susceptible to abuse. Understanding is the best form of therapy sometimes. Your question – I have never been asked it before. It is a good question.

For me, stress is a product of stimuli. Lights, sounds, smells, emotions, even bodily needs all put stress on my system. Summer is longer days. For me, I love the extra light, but it is also more time to work an overworked system. I isolate my senses and wait to process some things until a later time. I play back for myself a video in my head of my day taking time to experience what I may have missed. I learned not to use my emotion as it is the quickest way to overload for me.

When little, it was all about just being, to take in the senses as a sense. Connections do not come until much later for most. I was severe, I know, but I don’t think it unfair to say some stims are an act of “just being”. To a normal mind you might call it appreciating your surroundings.

Sometimes the stim is to say “It is all too much for me right now.”
That is a communication in itself, though one you seldom listen to. My system was so bad that to recognize the need to bathroom set me into a fit of extreme giddiness. When young what was springtime in comparison to my own body?

Spring is also allergies – to plants and food too. It is the fruits I love that I have to deal with. Strawberries get me silly. Now I can manage the sensations, but as a child I could not. Allergy medicine helps a lot. Zyrtec I take.

And do they have the same trouble holidays? Christmas is the worst. You would think it would be the added sights and sounds that would over stimulate, but for me it was the emotions. To not experience boundary binds you to the world in strange ways. I take on the emotions of those around me. To protect myself, I turn my emotions off most times. I have learned to save my emotion for important moments like hugs.

Isolating senses is not something you can teach, but you can monitor your input to the child. Helping them to calm their system is good too. Deep pressure is what Mom did for me. I still wear a heavy coat into stimulating environments sometimes as a help. Mom says it is too hot, but I don’t feel heat like you do so for me it feels ok. That is all I can think of for now. I hope it helps.