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AUTISM INFORMATION: MAP OF OUR CULTURAL REALITIES
Experiencing Impact of Able-Loss on The Social Identity of People with Autism
The purpose of this Autism Information Orientation page is to share answers to the frequently asked "Why" questions about the nature our unique individual, shared collective experiences, and providership implications of living, working and coping with an atypical able loss like Autism.
Why does the term "Cultural Realities" relate to Autism?
Much of the scholarship and practice related to Autism has always emphasized the highly individual presentation of this condition and the universal need for individualized asessments and services for people with Autism. However, even within a very individualist society, there are collective forces that come into play when such a clearly atypical able-loss condition is a factor. Autism represents both a significantly atypical and, most often, a life span able-loss experience for many of our group members. Therefore, our individual condition creates a collective situation in the typical most-to-more able world, where we must all face many complex challenges.
Why would Autism impact our family's experience over all our life spans?
From the moment a parent first hears the word "Autism" we begin to wonder how having a child with this condition will impact our selves, our child, and our family in relation to the world of people without Autism and all communities of which we are not members. We may also fear we will be rejected, even by members of the social groups we may belong to by racial identifications, ethnicity, nationality, belief systems, economic class, and certainly education levels and what our society believes are deemed "optimum" life span achievements and "normal" life styles.
We may experience this fear of able-loss very consciously, or it may just begin to nag at us from the background of our consciousness. Because at first we must work to get reoriented to the diagnosis and just figure out the lay of the provider landscape for our child with Autism, while trying to keep our selves and our families afloat. However, over our life spans we may find our fears of overt social rejection or covert barriers to full social acceptance are sometimes very justified.
Yet, we may also experience remarkable levels of support from within and outside our own local communities and global social groups. However, families report the common experience of never being able to predict which experience we may have across people and settings. This is a source of significant stress in itself, which is similiar to the constant vigilence that other "minority" groups have long reported coping with across "majority" social settings. In the end, what we learn most clearly is that we can never just assume that either of these outcomes will happen as automatically as in our previous life experience as being ourselves, our families, and our community groups without Autism. So we must cope with the unknowns of our young child's outcomes until adulthood and the social factors of inclusion over our whole life spans. It will be all people's individual choices to put in time and out effort to understand Autism and our support of the collective structures that may serve to afford or deny us access to resources which can meet our needs will create our positive and negative experiences and inclusive or exclusive outcomes. This is why Autism creates a mutual able-loss condition and a shared biosocial situation for us all.
Why can't people with Autism and our family and service providers work together?
Conflicts usually arise when we do not/cannot openly share and listen to each other's thoughts and feelings. We also tend to get into conflict with people who have a different model of reality than ourselves. Another way we experience great conflict is when another person misjudges, denies, ignores, excludes our needs. Therefore, it helps if parents and teachers take the time, and put out the effort, to: share our needs, clarify our expectations; choose family-centered Autism methods that we all can benefit from; and, understand everyone's true biosocial situations as we must all live, work, and cope with Autism together. This maps out our true common ground.
Why am I having trouble meeting the special needs of my child/student with Autism?
Threshold's model of person-focused, family centered, and community-based developmental systems intervention helps us all work to first notice our atypical group’s needs. They are most often, the same as those of our typical group's needs: to have understandable and motivational learning, work, and recreational activities across home, school, and community; to have fully and mutually understandable exchanges of useful communication forms used between family, teachers, and students; to have safe and comfortable sensory input and motor access across settings and materials, and; to experience authentic social and functional belonging in meaningful relation to other people. In addition, we all need our needs to be provided for in specific connection to who we are as both individuals AND as groups, if we are to live, work, cope, and survive together in a culturally and able diverse world. Therefore, access to the educational materials and methods that equitably match every individual’s and group’s diverse developmental profiles must be specifically adapted to all our more common needs.
This is whyThreshold suggests that members of the Autism and other able-loss community do not have any “special” needs, as much as we have similar needs to typical people, including the universal need for access to appropriately adaptive educational methods, materials, and modes. Current research and meta-analysis of the last twenty years of intervention research findings confirm and support this “meta-need” to have our individual providers and collective systems meet the social, communication, and sensory needs of people with Autism, as individuals and as a group, with specific and effective developmental and behavioral interventions. Best practice Autism intervention approaches are shown to meet our MUTUAL needs for effective adaptations and solutions to problems we may or may not be able to fully resolve. They can save everyone a great deal of time in reaching optimum outcomes and money in providing life span services across home, school and community. Therefore, it is critical that we all become flexible in how we adapt to this reality of the mutual impacts of Autism and the shared nature of all our human needs to survive, be secure, belong, develop, and realize our fullest potentials as who we are as individuals and as members of diverse social and able groups.
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