What feelings look like

I have never had a great handle on feelings. It is very difficult to articulate and I may have mentioned this earlier but I find emotions very confusing. Extreme emotions just feel like extreme emotions - I seem not to be able to separate them. And this means I am open to suggestion when it comes to these emotions. For example if I had a partner who said 'i love you' all the time. I would think 'ok, this is what love is'. My concept of love would be based on their words (the way they have labelled it) not on their behaviour. They could be quite mean or behave quite inappropriately and I would not read these situations as something other than love because they are saying 'I love you'.

I see this same confusion in kids and older people on the spectrum all the time. Just as I wouldn't necessarily know when I am being made fun of or when I am not, young children on the spectrum don't always understand these same concepts. Especially those that involve reciprocal social arrangements. When you combine this confusion with our innate capacity to tell the truth and live in the moment we can be quite hurtful to and hurt by those around us.

Once I had a mother ask me if I had any ideas how she could teach her son about love. "He says awful things to me... Like don't worry Mummy I won't let you get old I will throw you over a cliff and make you die first... or he tells me he hates me and wishes I wasn't his mother just because I want him to clean up his room, or because I won't buy him something he wants."

The advice I gave this mother is probably the only thing that has really ever worked for me. I told her to give up trying to teach him what love feels like because those feelings may never really make sense. Instead, try to teach him what love looks like and what it doesn't look like. For example love feels like a lot of different things, maybe to everyone, not just us aspies. However it doesn't look like someone hitting you and it doesn't look like you hitting someone. Likewise you can also learn about what feelings sound like. Love doesn't sound like shouting.

Now I guess some people would say that it is not that simple but you have to make it that simple for my people. We like rules and we like pictures. At least I do. Something I have learn't more recently (thanks to Jo Zeitz!) is how to take this idea of what feelings look like even further by drawing pictures. For example, when my people are dealing with an emotional situation that is overwhelming we do not always recognise the emotions at the time and we often find it difficult to articulate the emotions later. You can help us to work through difficult situations by literally drawing the situation thus allowing us to recognise these situations by how they look rather than how they feel. I think these drawings are often called social stories but they make more sense to me if I label them 'what feelings look like'.

I will use another example of a mother who asked some advice about how to help her son recognise when he is being teased and when he needs to remove himself from the situation. I told her to teach him what the feelings look like. At first she was confused... Then I led her to the white board and started drawing pictures... 'Here's max, what's he doing? he's crying. Why is crying? He's all by himself. Where are his best friend David (or) what happened before Max started crying by himself? His friend is over here. What is his friend doing? Laughing at Max. Where are max's other friends? They are with David, laughing at Max. So when it looks like this (ie max by himself crying while a group of so called friends are laughing / teasing him) what can Max do? Max can go to the library and read a book. (or whatever). If you draw this story out as you or max is telling it it will help max recognise this situation next time. If the aspie you are working with is very literal then you made need to draw provide a number of options (ie max could be crying, frowning, banging his head etc, David could be laughing, taunting, taking max's toy etc, Max could go to the library, play a computer game, pat the dog.) You will need to adjust the story for the situation.

That's all for now. I will write more about this stuff at some stage.