Frontiers Friday #16. Five Tips for Your Development: On the Spectrum
Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development
Frontiers Friday #16 Dispatch: ASD and the Specialist Minds.
From time to time, I'm pulled into spending several hours of "just-in-time" research, trying to learn more about what I know less, in order to help clients with particular clinical present. Today, I'd share with you five things I've found on the topic of ASD--especially what we misunderstand about being on the spectrum.
Read Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin
This is a powerfully written book. Both autobiographical and practical. The foreword by the late Oliver Sacks really helped to set the tone.
My Main Key Grafs:
There are 3 different minds in ASD:
- The Visual Thinker (Grandin is one on them)
- The Pattern Thinkers: music and math
- The Verbal Thinkers: facts
More...
"One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills."
"The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures."
"More severely impaired people, who can speak but are unable to explain how they think, have highly associational thought patterns. Charles Hart, the author of Without Reason, a book about his autistic son and brother, sums up his son's thinking in one sentence: “Ted's thought processes aren't logical, they're associational.” This explains Ted's statement “I'm not afraid of planes. That's why they fly so high.” In his mind, planes fly high because he is not afraid of them; he combines two pieces of information, that planes fly high and that he is not afraid of heights."
"Lower-functioning children often learn better by association, with the aid of word labels attached to objects in their environment. Some very impaired autistic children learn more easily if words are spelled out with plastic letters they can feel."
I just found out that there's a movie about Temple Grandin (starring Claire Danes). I've yet to watch it.
Listen: On Being Podcast with Krista Tippett – Paul Collins and Jennifer Elder — Autism and Humanity
In this podcast, two parents give voice to raising a child with autism, shedding light about our humanity, the disability of autism, creativity, intelligence, and accomplishment that comes from it.
Web-Read: Aspienwomen: Moving towards an adult female profile of Autism/Asperger Syndrome
I stumbled across this blog site that I found surprisingly useful, especially from the perspective of women with ASD, and how we often miss the signs.
Video: Temple Grandin TED Talk: The World Needs All Kinds of Minds
Mid-way through reading the book, I decided to look up Temple Grandin and found her lively and spirited TED talk. It's uncanny how she's able to recite facts that were similarly written in Thinking in Pictures, even though it was written awhile ago.
Video: My Inner Life with Asperger’s | Alix Generous | TED Talks
Part comedy and part visionary talk. Alix Generious shares her story — and her vision for tools to help more people communicate their big ideas.
Reflect
Think about the contributions of people who are on the spectrum to the world. How do we continue to design a more inclusive and less ex
WELCOME TO NEW FOLKS ON THE FRONTIERS!
If you've just joined us, feel free to check out the back catalogue of Frontiers of Psychotherapists Development (FPD).
Also, if you want to see the past newsletters, click here
For the latest revamped weekly Frontiers Friday, go to
My other blog is Full Circles: Reflections on Living