RE: How to manage autism for your adult child?
That was an intense, honest and personal read. I have so much to say but I'm afraid it's not what you'd like to hear. In my work with autism (with actual people, young adults, with autism) we fought against the notion of seeing it as a handicap in which the person could not develop. The people with autisme didn't want, like, or agree with this stigma and it's still a fight we're fighting, although it's getting better. The idea that a person can always develop must be the one we start to believe. But on the other hand I know it is not for me to act like I know anything about your son and how he acts - I just hope he will grow as an adult person who indeed has a lifelong challenge, and gets the right mentoring he needs to step by step become a person coping with the autism, instead of being ruled by it.
Lots of strength to you, this must be eating you up from inside :-(
We live in hope. Thank you so much for your kind and sensitive words. We stand on the same line, don't be mistaken in that. So I was fine with hearing all you had to say. However, my son is indeed far from prototypically managed in his autism, considering my background in spiritual holistic science. For better, or worse.... time will tell.
Needless to say, all individuals can and do develop given half a helping hand... and yet I am concerned that we are not doing enough for (all) people who find it hard to know what help they exactly need. We then have to do a bit of cold reading of them... and then we really all need to work together and stop thinking about our little egos. You are so right about emphasising what people can do in your work!
It's the headstrong ones who want to but "can't" that become the problem cases and end up unrecognised as mentally impaired and must suffer our punishments for their incompetence (a vast number of prisoners are actually suffering from a mental handicap which went undiagnosed: they therefore never got the right treatment and above all never the protection and restriction they needed).
Love your support in seeing me as a mere mortal (and being personally devestated by much of what is autism). Such support helps lift me out of my self-pity and makes me understand that also autism is very relative!
<3 Glad you read my comment they way I intended. It's always a bit more 'raw' when it's written words rather than spoken words.
I'm sympathising a lot with your search for what is 'right' regarding to helping, supporting your son. I can imagine that this 'N' person makes life really unbalanced for him and you'd rather see her out of his life so there's more calm and structure to work with.
I wish you lots of wisdom.
Unfortunately - this is true. Diagnosing, but even before that, signaling mental disorders is our biggest 'gain' to work on. If we can signal and then diagnose and then treat disorders from an early age we could prevent a lot of 'unwanted' behaviour.