It is quite known that kids in the spectrum have quite a bit of "rules" that governs their day to day life - that kind of shows up as inflexibility and lack of willingness to change and adherence to the sameness. Although DS has made great progress around flexibility over last year; however, there are some few places where he is still inflexible and would not want to change. That stems from a certain of set of rules that he has in his mind. So, we always think these kids are highly logical and analytical and are primarily left brained !
However, there was always an hole in this theory... Because we have seen DS to be highly perceptive; and we have seen that our emotional highs/lows do impact some of DS' thinking and his own moods. Particularly, that of his, DM's. And stepping back, we have found that most of his rules comes from situational incidents that happened at that time.
This was around in our thinking and more so, since we came back from Pace Place. And today morning, something happened that kind of made the light bulb go on for me. DS was typing an email to his grand-parents; and DW was behind him, guiding him. When DS made an error, instead of moving the cursor back to where the error was, he started hitting the back-space, that started erasing all that he had typed. DW who was behind him, seeing him hit back-space, reacted (as is wont with any one), with a bit in higher decibel, that he'd lose all that he had typed. DS who heard it (but wasn't seeing his mom), reacted to the voice (probably, a bit startled at the decibel) with an impromptu "rule" - said he'd start afresh and erased all that he had typed, even beyond the error... Post-that, DW did try and get to the mode in describing the mistake as "small-mistake" (vs medium vs large)... But by that time, DS had "rule" in place...
This actually made me think. In the incident above, it looks like an emotional response has led to the logical action. The first emotion (from his mom) was something he wasn't able to handle; His emotional regulation got him to the comfort zone; that was to have a "logical rule" to that emotion; discard/disown and put a distance between himself and the actions/surroundings that had led to that emotion. And there, birth of the rule.
So, is the spectrum primarily right brained (or inability to handle emotions stemming from right brain) or left brained ? [rhetorical question, btw :-) ]
So from our own perspective, it is clear that we need to do couple of things:
- Meet the eye when talking to the DS; and touch is very important for that emotional equilibrium.
- Get the positive emotion first, before explaining the logic behind
Easier said than done !! :-)
